March 24, 2004

• What a week I’ve had!

  
  

  Last Tuesday morning the first thing Doug said to me when I awoke was that the computer wouldn’t turn on.  Push the button, nothing happened.  We, being the “psychic fixers” we are, did the things we usually do, the stuff that Greyfox calls, “technological laying-on of hands.”  We fiddled and looked and touched and wiggled wire connections.  He crawled under the desk and moved some plugs from one outlet to another.  Then when he pushed the button, the computer came on.  We got the HP logo, and then it went to that awful black screen with the white error message:  operating system not found.

  
  

  I called the computer medic (Computer Medics of America is the company he founded) in Eagle River, about eighty miles away.  He replaced our hard drive about a year ago and recovered all our data, giving us back essentially the same computer, in the software department, as before.  He works out of his home outside town there, where his wife also runs a preschool.  I like the guy.  He has a sense of humor and a dog, which is about all one can ask for in any man.

  
  

  Since I was due in Wasilla that day anyway, to take one of my NA sponsees from the rehab center to a meeting and help her with her step work, I schlepped the CPU on into Eagle River first.  It is a bedroom community for Anchorage, primarily for Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base, which are between Eagle River and Anchorage.  By the time one gets to Eagle River, one can see and smell the air pollution from the city.  Too close, in other words, for my comfort.  It was a typical day for this time of year:  rain, sleet, snow and sunshine.  I drove out of one and into another several times on the way.

  
  

  But I try never to go through Eagle River without a stop at Garcia’s of Scottsdale.  I had my daily ration of capsaicin (that’s the “hot” stuff in hot peppers–it is addictive, stimulates the production of endorphins, and is in the pharmacopaeia as a treatment for asthma among other things) in an enchilada and a taco, and then went back and spent a little time at Greyfox’s stand at Felony Flats before the meeting.  Greyfox is back there, living in the same little glass-fronted cabin where he spent the latter portion of last summer, the one with the dog sled on the roof.  At the time, he was still moving in, sleeping in a sleeping bag with no bedding, curtains, or any amenities, and I didn’t even consider staying over.  I drove on home that night.

  
  

  The highway is a spiritual place for me after dark.  The part of my mind that I use to steer and to peer ahead in the headlights to look for moose in the road, etc., is apparently separate from the part I use to meditate and talk to Spirit.  In daylight there are too many things to see and I am distracted by the passing scenery, but at night it is just me and Spirit and the smooth jazz on the radio.  I get a lot of solitary “road work” done in those dark-time drives.  Soon the midnight sun will be back and I’ll get out my complex fair weather camera that won’t work at low temperatures, and I’ll have to make time for meditation some other way.

  
  

  One of the things that happened while I was away from Xanga was the end of the Iditarod.  Second-generation Iditarod musher Mitch Seavey won Iditarod 32.  His father, Dan, ran in Iditarod 1, finishing third.  This year, Mitch’s son finished third in the Kuskokwim 300 race.

  
  

  G.B. Jones did NOT win the Red Lantern for finishing last.  From Craig Medred’s column in yesterday’s Anchorage Daily News:

  
  

  
  

  The 2004 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race ended Monday with a show of sporstmanship that enabled duct-tape musher G.B. Jones of Wasilla to avoid the red lantern.
  
  Slowed by busted sleds, boots with holes and clothing with rips — most of which he stopped to repair with duct tape — Jones had been bringing up the rear of the race since McGrath on the north side of the Alaska Range.

  
  

  For 10 days and hundreds of miles, he tagged along at the end, sometimes hours behind the next nearest musher.
  
  By the Bering Sea Coast, however, he was closing in on the other also-rans. By Koyuk, 123 miles from Nome, he had caught Perry Solmonson, who splits his time between Whittier and Washington state, and Steve Madsen of Toutle, Wash.
  

  The three mushers held a powwow to discuss trying to beat the 2002 finishing time of David Straub, who set the fastest time for a red-lantern finisher when he got to Nome in 14 days, 5 hours and 38 minutes, a time that would have won every race prior to 1981. Madsen, Jones and Solmonson thought they could top it.
  

  Then, Solmonson added, they got off their schedule. Jones’ dog team started to slow down. And everyone realized it was not to be.
  

  Madsen sped ahead to finish in 14 days, 11 hours. Solmonson and Jones took their time along the coast, discussing who should take the honor, or dishonor, of collecting the lantern.
  

  “G.B didn’t want it,” Solmonson said, “and I did. I had to give G.B. a head start because he was going so slow.”

  
  

  I think Mr. Solmonson got a worthwhile trinket for his lagging behind.  I’ve seen that Red Lantern, just a simple thing like those that used to hang off the caboose of every train in the country, only with an engraved brass plate giving the musher’s name and the year of his “winning” race.  The one I saw sits in the living room of my neighbor Rhodi Carella, the “Mushing Grandmother.”

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

  Another event of that week was the arrival of spring.  There were signs of it indoors (my whiskey begonia blooming), and outdoors.

  
  

  

  
  

  The outdoor signs are not that blatantly obvious this far up the valley.  Lower down, things are melting and the pussywillows are in full bloom.  Here, as in this pic, only a few silvery glints of willow buds are showing on the bare twigs.

  
  

  We had a windy week.  The snow is packed and drifted in the lee of every object out there, and littered with twigs and bits of various other windblown debris.  Pollen and dust made us allergic ones anxious for the wind to die down, and the positive ions were affecting even the furry four-footed critters.

  
  

  .

  
  

  .

  
  

  .

  
  

  The big snow caps that had built up on the posts in the yard were eroded and sculpted down to nearly nothing.

  
  

  Near the end of the week, we were running out of firewood.  Doug had shoveled a lot of snow off the tarps over the woodpile and had gotten everything he could find.  I used the Mutt® to probe around the edges of the former pile for strays and stragglers that had bounced or rolled off, and he dug up everything I found.  

  
  

  Two of the pieces we found were four-foot lengths that had been here the whole five years since we first started housesitting this place.  They were skinny and had never been considered worth the work of cutting them down to stove length.  Cold windy nights made them suddenly worth a lot more to us.

  
  

  Here you see a comparison of Doug’s Swede saw technique before (left) and after a little bit of discreet coaching by his mother.  I am sooo good at such physical tasks as long as I don’t have to do the work myself.

  
  

  

  
  

  .

  
  

  .

  
  

  ………..

  
  

  .

  
  

  .

  
  

  

  
  

   Eventually, his digging in the woodmine proved to be too much for the aluminum scoop, but we didn’t despair.  It was a Craftsman, with a “lifetime guarantee,” and Sears would replace it for free.  More on that, later.

  
  

  I had been unable to find anyone selling firewood in this end of the valley.  Greyfox checked the newspapers and bulletin boards down in the lower end and found one man willing to haul wood this far (about fifty miles).  After hearing the distance, and the unusually short lengths it needed to be cut into because of our little stove, he ended up charging us sixty percent more than our neighbor had charged before he committed suicide.  Instead of the full generous “cords” (supposed to measure 4′X4′X8′) of pure seasoned birch we bought from Jason, this guy Mark advertized cords of seasoned birch and brought us an undersized load of mixed birch, poplar and spruce after three days of “tomorrows” on the phone.  I’m sure that Jason’s wife and kids miss him more than we do, but we miss him, too.

  
  

  The wood mining would have gotten done whether we had a computer or not.  Other activities of that week might never have been done if not for our being computerless.  Doug cleaned his room, shelved the books I’d piled on his desk when I cleaned out the family bookshelves after we redecorated his room last summer.  He went to the old place across the highway and brought back more books.  He read books.  I listened to public radio for entertainment and information.

  
  

  I finished the book I’d been reading, too, Water Touching Stone.  I found it completely absorbing and compelling.  It’s about Tibet and the nomadic peoples, Kazakhs and Uighurs mostly, who live in Tibetan border areas, and about the Han Chinese program of cultural and physical genocide against them.  One of the lamas in the book said that we never get away from our past incarnations, that we always carry a piece of every life we’ve ever lived.  I think that may be why this book meant so much to me.  I’ve been there.  I decided to quote one passage because it provides a perspective similar to my own on a part of this culture that makes no sense to me:

  
  

  
  

  The lama looked at a patch of the night sky visible through the open portal.  “I talked to a monk once who had spent years down below,” he said, meaning the world outside the high ranges of Tibet.  “He had gone away lighthearted and came back full of sad news.  He said to me that many people had lost the way, that they ignored what was in their hearts because it was the safe way.  He thought, incredible as it sounds, that there were millions of people down below who just wanted to be old, as if they were enslaved to their bodies.”

  
  

  Gendun lifted one of the sticks of incense and waved it slowly in the space over the table.  “So instead of human beings fighting the wrong, he told me, they just say it is for governments to do so.  And governments say we must have armies to be safe, so armies are raised.  And armies say we must have war to be safe, so wars are fought.  And wars kill children and devour souls that have not ripened.  All because people just want to be old, instead of being true.”

  
  

  By the way, Sephiroth, Doug’s childhood friend who is like a son to me, left Germany last month for Iraq and we have not heard from him.  I think of him often, and visualize white light, and send love.

  
  

  On Monday, Greyfox came home for his day off.  I could tell from his demeanor and vibes as he walked in that something was wrong.  He, like others with NPD, tends to exaggerate every little problem.  His car’s clutch was acting up.  I suggested checking the fluid reservoir, and it was full.  While he was here he phoned his favorite mechanic in Wasilla for a consult.  Mike told him to bring in the car and he’d replace the clutch and throw-out bearing for a hundred dollars or so more than Greyfox paid for the car, or, Mike suggested, he could go to an auction and find another beater.

  
  

  Doug and I walked out to where the car was parked on the street in front of our house and did our usual technological laying-on of hands routine.  We looked at as much of the linkage as we could see without lying on the ground.  I depressed the clutch pedal a few times and listened to an odd triple-click sound it made at the bottom of the stroke.  I had a feeling the problem had been in the linkage and might have been from an accumulation of ice or snow.

  
  

  Greyfox had no more trouble on the way back down the valley, and a mechanic he met at Felony Flats looked it over, checked it out and said the clutch was fine.  That “fixer” talent always has worked better on mechanical things than on electronics, but then again Greyfox could have been blowing the whole matter all out of proportion from the start.

  
  

  That reminds me, girlWolf asked if “NPD sufferers” are “hypochondriacs”.  First off, girl, they don’t suffer.  They make the rest of us suffer.  And, yes, one of the recognized diagnostic symptoms is a tendency to exaggerate every ailment or injury, and not just physical injuries but blows to the ego, disappointed expectations, etc.  Munchausen’s Syndrome, where the patient injures himself or pretends injury to get attention, is a prime outlet for malignant narcissim.  Munchausen’s by proxy, where a parent or caretaker injures one under his or her care to get attention, is common among NPD parents.  Now, after knowing Greyfox almost fourteen years, he could be actually dying and I’d have my doubts.  He can turn a stubbed toe into big deal.  When he says he’s hurt I ask him to show me the blood.  When he claims he’s sick, I start asking specific questions about symptoms, check for fever, really try to nail down what’s wrong.  Usually it is little or nothing at all.

  
  

  Well, to cut to the chase–yes I know, this is very long for a blog, but you probably know that I do long blogs and if you’ve been around a lot you know that although I may address these things TO you, I write them FOR me–yesterday the computer was ready to pick up.  It was a beautiful sunny day all the way to Eagle River and back to Wasilla.  I went with the flow of traffic most of the way, except when it flowed over 75 MPH, because above that I get a nasty shimmy in my front end–Streak Subaru’s front end, not mine, of course.  After I picked up the CPU, I had another lunch at Garcia’s.  Then I had a non-stop afternoon of errands in Wasilla, picked up my sponsee (Greyfox calls them “pigeons”, an old AA term I find slightly insulting although I don’t like “sponsee” either) and did the NA meeting.  It was a good one, but I’ve never been to a bad one.  I cleaned up afterward, washed coffee mugs, took my pigeon back to her roost at the ranch, stopped by Greyfox’s cabin to microwave the remains of my lunch and eat before heading home.

  
  

  I had the advantage on the early part of the drive of following a big double-trailer rig with powerful lights, the better to watch for moose ahead.  I saw one, and it was moving across the ditch, away from the road.  A yellow sliver of moon was setting, with a bright white star above it… beautiful.  As I turned the corner off the highway here at home, I startled a little bunny, an arctic varying hare in its winter white phase.  The only hares we usually see are that babies.  Adults are more shy, less apt to be surprised in the headlights.  I always feel a poignant sense of chagrin or dismay watching the little guys panic and bound away.  I’d never willingly or knowingly frighten a bunny, y’know?

  
  

  Well, I’m back.

  • 4:42 pm
  • 9 Comments