Well, THIS would suck, if it were unusual...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN [REDACTED] HAS ISSUED A WIND ADVISORY...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM TO 6 PM MST WEDNESDAY.

A COLD FRONT MOVING THROUGH ON WEDNESDAY WILL BRING VERY WINDY CONDITIONS TO PORTIONS OF [REDACTED}. WESTERLY WINDS OF 25 TO 40 MPH WITH GUSTS APPROACHING 45 TO 50 MPH WILL DEVELOP DURING THE EARLY AFTERNOON HOURS...LASTING THROUGH THE DAY. IN ADDITION TO THE STRONG WINDS...AREAS OF BLOWING DUST ARE ALSO POSSIBLE IN AND AROUND THE ADVISORY AREA. MOTORISTS SHOULD USE CAUTION WHEN DRIVING IN THESE AREAS AS VISIBILITIES MAY BE IMPACTED BY THE BLOWING DUST.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A WIND ADVISORY MEANS THAT SUSTAINED WINDS OF 30 TO 39 MPH...OR GUSTS FROM 40 TO 57 MPH...ARE EXPECTED. WINDS THIS STRONG CAN MAKE DRIVING DIFFICULT...ESPECIALLY FOR HIGH PROFILE VEHICLES. CONSIDER SECURING LOOSE BELONGINGS ON YOUR PROPERTY.

So, basically, tomorrow will be a spring day...

Nice of them to let me know, though.

Well, that was thoughtful! And so timely!

While I was working on the last post the dogs got all excited about somebody coming up the driveway. It was my friends D&L, who almost never come to visit. They'd just spent much of the day cleaning out a storage unit they've got in town. Wanted to know if I wanted a vacuum cleaner and a bunch of cookware they didn't need.

By coincidence, my landlady just told me last Sunday that the power head on her vacuum burned up while she was cleaning her old lair, and I'm gonna have some folks coming for extended stays in the next month or two and wasn't completely sure what we were going to do about cookware. How's that for timing? I really appreciate their thinking about me!

"When seconds count, the police are only minutes away..."

...and when they arrive, I wonder if they'll do something psychotic?

Girl, 5, loses fight for life after house fire which killed family as police held back neighbours desperate to help

The five-year-old girl left fighting for life in hospital after a house fire which killed her mother, father and baby brother has died.

Mark and Michelle Colley, along with three-year-old Louis, died in the blaze at the weekend - despite neighbours saying they could have been saved if police had not held back would-be rescuers.

Now daughter Sophie has also lost her fight for life.
...
'I thought the police were there to protect lives,' [said a neighbor.] 'Years ago they would have gone inside themselves to try a rescue. But all they seemed bothered about was health and safety rules.

'It's unbelievable that it could happen like that. Everybody wanted to try and help. You can't have respect for police if they have no respect for other people's lives. It might have been different if it was one of their own.'

No matter what anyone tells you, there very much is such a thing as too much respect for authority.

A death in the family, probably.

I'm afraid it's time to admit that Butch the cat has left the building, in all likelihood permanently.

I was warned, when I first mentioned to friends the thought of getting a pet cat, that I shouldn't grow too attached. Cats are only about halfway up the food chain here, and tend to end as food themselves. Since it's virtually impossible that the li'l fellow found a better place to live, I'm afraid the fact that he's been gone for over four days now makes it official.

It has been suggested - mostly jokingly - that Click took out a contract on him with the local coyotes. She's not talking, but she did seem to know immediately that he was gone and not coming back. I told her she could at least have the decency to lay off the happy-dance.

And I almost missed it!

No, I'm NOT making this up.

In the shadow of the nation's most recognizable phallic symbol, they gather and march. There are about 50 of them, all ages, both sexes, nearly all white, smiling, quiet, enjoying the sun as they make a slow loop in front of the White House with their signs of protest. Their mounted photos of pink squealing babies make the event look, at first glance, like an anti-abortion rally.
...
It's Genital Integrity Awareness Week, in case you didn't know, as well as National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

Just when I thought I'd run out of things to worry about.

I feel so...incomplete now.

Sheesh!

So yesterday morning it's heading toward beautiful weather. All afternoon it's overcast, windy and cold. Along about sundown the clouds all blow away.

I wake up around midnight, the stars are shining like lasers. I wake up around five, it's snowing. It keeps snowing. Snows some more. Tapers off around nine, and we've got 3-4 inches on the ground. By eleven the snow is gone anywhere the sun is shining (and the sun is shining.)

Tomorrow it's supposed to be sunny and mid-sixties.

Anybody who tries to predict the weather here in any detail at all has taken a sucker's bet.

The Book's Better.

They say that there’s a broken light for every heart on Broadway.
They say that life’s a game and then they take the board away
They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story
Then leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret
In no longer pretty cities there are fingers in the kitties
There are warrants, forms and chitties and a jackboot on the stair
There’s sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thin dime
And at least the trains all run on time but they don’t go anywhere
Facing their responsibilities either on their backs or on their knees,
There are ladies who just simply freeze and dare not turn away
And the widows who refuse to cry will be dressed in garter and bow-tie
And be taught to kick their legs up high in this vicious cabaret

At last the 1998 show!
The ballet on the burning stage!
The documentary seen upon the fractured screen
The dreadful poem scrawled upon the crumpled page!

There’s a policeman with an honest soul that has seen whose head is on the pole
And he grunts and fills his briar bowl with a feeling of unease
Then he briskly frisks the torn remains for a fingerprint or crimson stains
And endeavors to ignore the chains that he walks in to his knees
While his master in the dark nearby inspects the hands with brutal eye
That have never brushed a lover’s thigh but have squeezed a nation’s throat
And he hungers in his secret dreams for the harsh embrace of cruel machines
But his lover is not what she seems and she will not leave a note

At last the 1998 show!
The situation tragedy!
Grand opera slick with soap!
Cliff-hangers with no hope!
The water-color in the flooded gallery

There’s a girl who’ll push but will not shove and she’s desperate for her father’s love
She believes the hand beneath the glove may be one she needs to hold
Though she doubts her host’s moralities she decides that she is more at ease
In the land of doing-as-you-please than outside in the cold
But the backdrops peel and the sets give way and the cast gets eaten by the play
There’s a murderer at the matinee, there are dead men in the aisles
And the patrons and the actors too are uncertain if the show is through
And with sidelong looks await their cue, but the frozen mask just smiles

At last the 1998 show!
The torch-song no one ever sings!
The curfew chorus line!
The comedy divine!
The bulging eyes of puppets, strangled by their strings!

There’s thrills and chills and girls galore,
There’s sing-songs and surprises!
There’s something here for everyone,
Reserve your seat today!
There’s mischiefs and malarkies
But no queers
Or yids
Or darkies
Within this bastard’s carnival
This vicious cabaret!

I don't generally read "graphic novels." Gave up comic books in my teens. I confess I'd never heard of this one before the buzz about the movie. Didn't read it until I'd seen the flick.

The movie is good clean fun. The book is mind-blowing.

The movie is light entertainment. The book is incredibly dense; not at all light reading.

The movie's heroine starts out as Natalie Portman, who is transfigured into Natalie Portman with a buzz cut. The book's heroine starts out as an interchangeable and rather mindless little cipher, who is transfigured into something awe-inspiring.

The movie's cast is a standard collection of stock characters. The book's cast is dense with vivid characterization; hideous and beautiful and estimable and pitiable, often at the same time.

The movie's climax involves a whole bunch of people committing a single act of civil disobedience through the tactic of wearing silly masks while witnessing property damage. The book's climax destroys an old world, with no guarantee that its replacement will be an improvement: It's all up to you.

The movie is enjoyable. The book is way better. Neither will change your life in any meaningful way, but only one is great literature. Never thought I'd use that phrase to describe a graphic novel, but there it is.

Giddy policemen are not a good thing.

Via Wendy McElroy:

This headline from the Florida Sun-Sentinel (03/26): New cameras in police cruisers can analyze thousands of license tags a day. The article opens, The multi-camera and scanner system, mounted on the trunk, hood, or roof of a cruiser, takes pictures as the officer drives through the city looking for stolen vehicles and criminals. The camera is capable of snooping through as many as 10,000 license plates a shift, leaving officials a bit giddy about its effectiveness.
...
...quietly protect your privacy by making your plates more difficult to scan. Dirt is good but many areas have laws against driving with obscured plates. I cannot recommend the product because I have not used it but Phantom Plate promises to make your license plate unreadable by a scanner without obscuring it to the naked eye.

I haven't used it either - and of course have no use for it here - but it does sound like something you might want to check out if you live in a place where such things are a concern. Just FYI.

It's gonna be a busy weekend

But in the meantime, I loves me some Onion...


Experts Agree Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat

Suddenly it's winter...

Yesterday broke cloudy, windy and cold. The clouds blew off, but the wind stayed. Then in the early afternoon I saw really ugly low clouds roll in fast from the north. I was in the lair, and answered Magnus' call to come in just as an unearthly blast of wind shook the place. A lawn chair careened across the yard: Magnus himself staggered against it.

Then there was horizontal rain, which turned into horizontal snow. By Snacky Time it was still coming down hard and I took these pix, though it stopped shortly afterward.





This morning the sun rose in a cloudless sky, still as the grave: no breeze at all. Cold as a witch's cliche'.

Fortunately for me my landlady is due this weekend, so earlier this week I stocked up on kerosene for her heater and now the scriptorium is - well, not exactly toasty, but at least warm enough that I can feel my fingers. Winter has not yet quite left the land.

Quote of the Day

Yeah, I need to grab some lunch and get to work, but what the hell...

"the Democrats won't pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan..they are not organized enough. They couldn't even get Bill Clinton to pull out of Monica Lewinsky."

- Ron Hart

Another Wind Storm Last Night...

Not as bad as the first, but this time we did get some damage. That big plastic sail I taped to the fruit tree tried manfully to uproot the poor thing, not to mention knocking off most of the blossoms I was trying to save in the first place. Bother. A windbreak gate's hinges got torn right out of the wood, doing minor secondary damage as it traveled in a very purposeful windward direction.

In other news, Ghost seems on the mend. He's putting more weight on the paw, though he still goes three-legged when he wants to run. He's obviously in better spirits than yesterday.

It's still quite windy this morning, which is a bit unusual as the storms usually blow themselves out overnight and then resume in the afternoon. So it's possible we're gonna have an entertaining afternoon. Yay!

Ghost hurt himself yesterday afternoon

One thing I've never even come close to breaking Ghost of is chasing trucks. He just loves it so, he won't listen to me at all and I've always been terrified he was going to get hurt. Well, maybe this will teach him a lesson.

He came back on three legs, and my spine went cold. He's not one to milk an injury. But it appears he just snagged a hind claw. He's still not putting much weight on it, though. I loaded him into the Jeep this morning and took him to D&L's place for a second opinion, because L knows a lot more about animals than I do. She confirmed my opinion that it's nothing serious.

Maybe this will cause him to think twice next time. I doubt it, but maybe.

This Is Wonderful!

I don't know who this guy is. I don't know what his politics are. He's in the EU parliament, so I assume he's a scumbag. But this speech, spoken to the British Prime Minister while the PM is in the room, is both a marvelous deconstruction of Keynesian economics and the most erudite put-down I've ever witnessed. Spoken almost extemporaneously, just referring to notes; no teleprompter. Gad, if American pols spoke like this, I'd have retained my interest in politics.

If you haven't already seen this (I've seen it about five times today and wasn't even trying) click and ENJOY. Popcorn optional; this ain't no government blog.

Gotta show you this...

So yesterday evening I'm looking for the dogs' snacky dishes. I foolishly left two of them near the powerhouse before the wind storm, and the wind just sucks everything from there to the meadow. Found one; the other may be in Kansas. Or possibly Oz.

My landlady has a couple of 55-gallon water barrels which I don't use; since it's just me here it's easier to filter my drinking water than to haul it from town. So while I was cleaning up trash yesterday afternoon I didn't even notice that one was gone. And while I'm looking for dishes, I wonder "What's that blue thing, down in the middle of the meadow? Couldn't believe my eyes.






No damage, thankfully. But how it got out of the boughs of that tree I'd wedged it in for safekeeping, I don't even want to know.

I spent most of this morning...

...Cleaning up the mess from yesterday evening.

The wind came up yesterday afternoon as expected, but toward sunset it really started to howl. We've had outbuildings blown right over during spring windstorms - yesterday's was almost as bad as any I've seen, so I was interested to see what kind of damage I'd have to deal with this morning.

Not so bad, really; no structural damage. Lots of things flung down the leeward slope. The wind sucked a milk crate out from under my lair and smashed it to bits against a tree, flinging pieces everywhere. Dust drifted all over the place. An exposed workbench swept clean of lumber, toolboxes, power tools...

Where I grew up, we'd call it a hurricane. Here we just call it a spring wind, and use it to keep the Californians at bay.

Rather than take a whole bunch of pictures, here's a representative example. Yesterday these guys were neatly stacked and straight. I remember a visitor asking why we went to the trouble of tying them to a skid. If he's reading this blog, this is why...

You really can find anything on the internet!

My landlord had a couple of storebought sawhorses that weren't all that strongly built to begin with and have seen a lot of service. I got tired of having to stop what I was doing and screw them back together, so - since I have all these 2X4s stored - decided I should just build a new pair.

Simple, huh? Any carpenter could do it on a smoke break. Well, I'm not a carpenter. I sat around trying to decide how to build a set of homemade (and hopefully better) sawhorses, and finally just typed "sawhorse plans" into Google.

I got 46,800 hits. Okay, some people have too much time on their hands. But we knew that.

I went with the first one.



The sawhorses are different, because this way they can be braced at the bottom and still stack. One is 2 inches smaller and has its braces on the inside of the legs. Works pretty good!




Of course the plan says the project can be done in 30 minutes and it took me most of an afternoon, but still...

Magnus is fine

I had this great post planned which would have transformed your entire life in marvelous and transcendent ways, but the day got weird and busy in other directions today so I didn't write it. Sorry. I'll leave Sunday to mentioning that Magnus is fine. It looks like yesterday was just the worst old-dog day I'd seen him have. He didn't move overnight for damned near 14 hours (I mean he didn't move - I kept checking to see if he was still breathing) but for most of today he's been pretty much back to normal.

Old Dog, Young Dog

Magnus had a bad night and a bad morning. He woke me up a few times wanting company, something he never does without what he considers a good reason, and it's usually a reason I can at least detect even if I don't agree with it. This time he just seemed to want reassurance. When I left the lair at around 6:30 the others bounded out as usual but he was really moving slow. I mean he's usually the last to get moving, but he was really moving slow. I noticed that he was favoring his right front leg almost to the point of not being able to put weight on it at all, and that was completely new. Usually it's his rear legs that need some time to wake up in the morning.

I couldn't see anything wrong with the leg, and after working him back and forth for a bit he seemed to loosen up and feel better. Our morning walks are always a tonic for him, so once he was moving good we set off earlier than usual. Now I kinda wish we hadn't. I wanted to know if S&L had come in last night, and with the weather so nice I wasn't in a big hurry to get there. So we worked our way up the BLM road to the top of the big ridge, then around toward their property. I kept an eye on him, and though he was moving kind of slow he didn't seem in any special difficulty. But when we got to S&L's place and he was getting lovin' from L, we noticed that the muscle on that front leg was trembling. I watered and rested him before we set out on the shortest way home, and once home he drank again and just collapsed. When I went down to check on the apricot tree he got up, but wouldn't leave the ridge and that's really unusual for him. He always naps after a walk, but right now he's just inert. I'm kinda worried for him; he's pretty old and has good days and not so good days, but I don't think I've ever seen him like this.

In a nice ironic touch, the first thing S said when I showed up was, "Do you want a puppy?" Actually I've been thinking about maybe getting myself a puppy, so rather to their surprise I said so. It seems one of their friends has an Akita that mated with a German Shepherd and had a litter of 12. Three died, alas, but that leaves them with 9 mixed-breed pups to find homes for when they're old enough. Shepherds I'm familiar with, of course: Akitas not so much. Reading about them this morning, though, it seems like a Shepherd/Akita mix might be a pretty good fit out here.

Prior to my sojourn with my landlady's dogs I never seriously considered getting one for myself. I always used to joke that I liked other people's dogs, because they're nice to visit but needy to live with. But now I'm not sure I'd care to be without at least one, and this situation isn't going to last forever. Plus, (tee hee) Ghost needs a puppy. So I'm severely tempted to look into it more seriously, but really don't know if I should. Truth is, after living here alone with these three I've a feeling that I'd be really bereft if I found myself completely dog-less. They do kinda grow on you. And if it's going to live out here with some measure of safety, it needs to be a pretty big dog who's not afraid to show some aggression if it needs to. Shepherds fill that bill, and from what I read so do Akitas. And I've always found, though admittedly my direct experience is limited, that mutts are at least as smart and somewhat less quirky than pure-breds. So maybe I should, I don't know. It's a big step, a dog of my own. But I have had a pretty good education on the subject these past few years.

:-} I'm waffling, as you see.

BOTH tail lights??

Spent the day just puttering around today. There've been big, messy piles of scrap lumber laying around since I de-nailed that batch of 2X12s, and I hesitated to get rid of it because...well, it might come in handy, y'know? But I finally decided I was sick of looking at them, so I chopped them up and fed them to the burn barrel. Ended up with an astonishing coal bed I was half afraid was going to melt the barrel; it was hard to even go near it for a while. Washed some laundry, went for a couple of walks with the dogs, watered the trees.

Since it appears I'm gonna have to buy a bunch of round forms for concrete pilings under the cabin, I decided to see if the tail lights were working on the Jeep's little trailer. Last I looked they weren't, but then I discovered that the Jeep's tail lights weren't working either (yikes!) and after fixing those didn't give the trailer any more thought. That was months ago, and for most of that time the trailer was filled with trash from various demolition and clean-up projects. And sure enough, when I checked them this afternoon they didn't work. Neither of them. This suggested a general electrical problem, but when I checked for juice at one lamp it was fine; no light, but plenty of electricity. Checked the other one; same thing.

Turns out whoever built this trailer used the cheapest lamp housings I can imagine. There's so much corrosion in there I can't even get the bulbs out; it's like they're welded in place. So on my trip to town next week I need to visit the auto parts stores (2 in town) and hopefully one of them will stock replacement housings. No guarantees, of course: This is the same town that managed to completely run out of eggs one time.