Outlaws

One of those annoying news snippets on the front page when I go online with this dinosaur  computer which talks back and refuses to load my e-mail, stopping my muse in the middle of the river gets my boots wet and my bacon soggy was-wait for it,

"Men spend ten more minutes a day grooming than women." 

"Oh so what who gives a shit,?"

I'll have to ask Jorge if that's true for African-Americans. 

When we moved to the country, we inherited two sheds of junk.  I have a ton of my own junk and don't need no more.  Moving across the country, we loaded up everything we thought we'd need in sunny Arizona into two moving vans. Little did we know that one of the trucks was leaking transmission fluid.  It refused to go forward in Grants, NM.  I give Penske credit for customer service.  They towed that broken down van all the rest of the way to Sedona.  When we moved back, we needed two of the same size trucks.  We'd accumulated more stuff in the five years in AZ, so we had to make a second trip with my pick-up hauling a trailer.

Coyote here is getting a Doo from the hairdryer I found  in the barn.  It also can be used for frontal lobotomy. The gen-u-wine chrome and Naugahyde chair  adds a measure of comfort.  Farmers don't throw anything away.  Just look at their front yards.  If you drive north on our state highway, the serene natural beauty of the countryside will suddenly shock your sensibilities when you come to a salvage yard right on the highway.  Dawn says,

"I thought they had to put up fences around those eyesores," 

when we first passed by mountains of rusting junk.  The worst thing about the junk yard is that it's adjacent to a wild-life waterway formed by lowlands adjacent to the river.

Two old stoves, dead birds who crawled inside the stoves to get warm, a rusty trailer, chicken wire, 4X8 sheets of rubber backed plywood,  broken concrete, pine logs , 4,000 sheet metal screws in an old broiler pan,  a usable straw broom are only the top of the heap.  When we remodeled the upstairs bath, we had a local hauler deliver a huge, black dumpster  to get rid of all the detritus.  Since then, the town  has a spring and fall clean-up where we donate scrap previous residents left behind.  Thanks to Joe Childs we can tell a wonderful story of the Ford's brakes giving way on Freymiller's Hill as we began to carry a 500 gallon oil tank to the dump. I had intended to create a metal giraffe sculpture until I realized I didn't have a welding machine.

The sun's shining and Mandy hasn't been fed.  The cat is inside for a warm-up.  I've got big decisions on what to do today.  Inside or out?  The choices for inside are exciting.  Take all those dry pieces of bread, toss 'em in the blender and make bread crumbs.  Finish the drywall around the inside window in Dawn's studio or  paint behind the wood sconce installed over the kitchen sink when the kitchen was remodeled two years ago.
Outside, I have to figure out how to bury the compost after a particularly chilling overnight. The white crust on the gardens is a telling sight of frozen soil, but-hey.  Mark 12/5/2011 as a special day.  I had oregano alive and well in the garden.  I took it from under the cold frame and moved it to the summer kitchen.  At night there's a purple glow from the garage window from the grow light I hung over the herb.  A long term goal is to replant it in the greenhouse, once that's up.  That's another story for a different day.

Oh, the title? A case in point for dementia.  I originally intended to write about my formative years and the two schools I attended from kindergarten through high school.  The main thought would have been; My teacher's could have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me. I didn't write that, the late poet Brautigan did.  But it's true.