May 17, 2003

• Things are looking UP.

  
  

  It really was quite a week around here.  One thing I deliberately neglected to mention before is that Wednesday night, after my long photo walk with the cats, I was hit by a big fibro-flare:  random pain like sledgehammer blows and pitchforks first here, then there, and me doing the Frankenshuffle, and walking bent over because waiting around until I could straighten out my back wouldn’t get me anywhere.  It even affected my eyes (I hate when that happens; it’s the absolute WORST of my symptoms yet.) and I couldn’t read or watch TV.  So, I slept.  Not a bad alternative, all things considered.

  
  

  I didn’t mention the flare-up at the clinic yesterday, though it was still hanging on a bit even then.  I just couldn’t stomach any more of my provider’s, “You poor thing,” sympathy.  The poor thing seems so distressed at my pain, I find myself hesitating to burden her with it. 

  
  

  **RATS!!  People like me, with a tendency to wear their food, should not eat at the keyboard.  I just had to stop typing and eating for a few minutes, to clean a glob of my hot cereal out of the keys.**

  
  

  Greyfox tends to go to extremes, double Libra that he is.  His emotional scales do wild, wide swings.  He’s very cute and bubbly when he’s up, and the most pathetic abject wretch you’ve ever seen when he is down.  When he is “on tenterhooks” anticipating some possibly harmful change, such as when we were waiting to find out how the new zoning would affect him, he’s just not-here, vague, abstracted, distracted, GONE.

  
  

  Yesterday, after having learned that nobody in Talkeetna wanted to buck the village powers-that-be and give him a legal space on private property, he went the other way, down the valley to Pittman, a cluster of businesses between Houston and Wasilla, at an intersection with the only traffic light for miles.  He had worked one day there before, at a roadside strip that’s like an open-air transient mall.  The owners charge $10 a day or $50 a week for a booth space.  It is a much longer commute, and the rent adds even more overhead, but he was running out of options.

  
  

  Last night he came in cautiously optimistic.  The owners of the strip have a few cabins along the rear of the property and one was vacant.  For $200 a month, he could have a place to stay over and avoid the long commute, plus that rent includes a booth space.  The problem was that he was a little short of cash.  He could have scraped up the month’s rent required to get the place, but it would leave him with no money for gas, making change, or anything else.  He knew that Doug has his savings account and would probably let him have some money on Monday when the credit union opened, but the owners wouldn’t agree to hold the cabin for Greyfox without that first month’s rent.

  
  

  I surprised him, with two crisp Ben Franklins out of my emergency stash.  He knew we had already spent the “secret stash” of holdout money I had put away last summer.  He didn’t know I had an emergency stash.  He was really pleased.  I love surprising him that way because it’s fun to watch his reaction.  He got into gear and loaded up some equipment and supplies last night.  Then he got up early this morning to get down there early, hoping no one had rented the cabin meanwhile.

  
  

  I just got a call from him, maybe even happier now than he was depressed earlier in the week.  He now has a second home, his little cabin by the highway.  He won’t have to commute to work every day that the weather is good enough for working.  Instead, he will be coming up here on off days, mid-week when business is slow, or whenever it is too wet or windy to open the stand.  Before this, when there were rain showers he either wouldn’t go to work at all or would close early and come home.  Now he can just cover things up until the rain shower passes, and then reopen.  He is ecstatic. 

  
  

  I had reminded him, after he got the boot in Talkeetna, that when the Highway Dept. had made him leave his original stand in the turnout across from the spring, the move to Talkeetna had been a big financial boon to him.  I remided him of that Yod, hand of God, pattern in his birth chart, that makes him benefit from all sorts of nasty things.  When I said that this move could also work to his advantage, he said that he had been telling himself the same thing.  Now he is convinced that it is true. 

  • 1:43 pm
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