Hey, hey,

today is my “birthday.”

In twelve-step programs we refer to the anniversaries of our recovery as our “birthdays.”

Two years ago today I kicked the hardest addiction of all (for me) to quit: my lifelong addiction to sugar.

Sugar was just one part of what I quit that day.  I also quit
wheat, cow’s milk, and a bunch of other allergenic / addictive foods.

Since then, I’ve become about a hundred pounds lighter.   I
move more easily and breathe more freely.  It wasn’t a cure-all,
but it did help.

Since my tastes are no longer perverted by the constant exposure to
refined sweets, I can appreciate the sweetness in fruits and other
foods. 

The closest I will come to eating candy this Halloween will be a kuri squash. 

Mmmm, how sweet it is!

---

…aaaannd –

Twelve and a half years

of tears and fears –

then a year and a half

of smiles and hope…

what comes after this,


who knows?

Tabula Rasa, Sorta

I finally got the work table cleared off.  Of course, everything
that was on it (except for the trash, dirty dishes, and a few things
I’ve found places for) is now piled in places it doesn’t belong. 
It will all have to be moved back, but for now I have a clean slate, so
to speak.

I’m way too tired tonight to start doing readings, but tomorrow I
will.  That’s my #1 priority now.  My living room now holds
all the clutter that used to be cluttering up the table, and it can
stay that way until I’ve caught up on the backlog of readings. 

Then I will move all the jewelry tools and materials back in here,
organize them, and get to work making earrings.  When I’ve done
that long enough to be sick of earrings, I’ll do something more
interesting for a while.  Earrings sell fastest.  Greyfox is
willing to sell my earrings for me, and some of the necklaces I
make. 

He
won’t take my more complex or elaborate work, or the Rock Skins, which
are tumble polished freeform gemstones or crystals, laced into leather
neck pouches made around them, with cutouts that show off the
stones.  The leather isn’t suitable for his open-air venue, and
they become shopworn very quickly.  I will try selling them
online.

For right now, tonight, although it is early, I’m going to bed.  I
was up early.  I got things done today.  I am ready to
rest.  Maybe I’ll sleep all night.  That would be
refreshing.  It’s possible, now that Doug’s sleep schedule is back
around to night shift.  He got up about 7:00 PM, so he can tend
the woodstove tonight while I sleep.

Seeya.  Tomorrow is Halloween, and tonight the clocks go
back.  I took a pic today of my jack o’lantern and I’ll post it in
the morning.

It’s another morning.

I took a break yesterday when I broke down and cried from fatigue and
frustration.  Then I got back to work.  I did that twice more
– breaks then work again, not breakdowns — before I quit for the day
and crawled in bed.  Yesterday’s objective was to finish cleaning
the work table and get some of that kind of (possibly paying) work done
(as opposed to most of the work I do which is either volunteer work,
work in support of my family, or maintaining the household).

I didn’t do much to the worktable after the crying fit yesterday. 
I did get the storage tub into place under there, but it wasn’t as
simple as folding the gate leg as I’d supposed.  After I’d cleared
it off and attempted that, I realized that because the leg folded back
and the top folded down that if the tub was then placed back there I
wouldn’t be able to fold the top back up and the gate back out.  I
left the problem for a while and used the newly-cleared top of my
coffee table for a task that had been delayed a few weeks: 
repairing that end table Greyfox scrounged and sent home with me.

That entailed finding the hex key set, using it and a screwdriver to
remove one leg, then gluing the broken parts and reattaching the
leg.  I didn’t have to find the glue.  Since cleaning the
bathroom, I know right where it is.  Now that beautiful blonde
wood side table with a smoky glass insert in its top is parked in an
awkward place near the foot of my bed, waiting for me to finish
cleaning my worktable so I can move the stuff I piled onto the
footlocker beside Greyfox’s chair (since he’s decided he doesn’t live
here anymore, maybe I need a new name for that chair).  The
jewelry materials from the bookshelf at the end of my worktable went
onto that footlocker when Doug and I were winterizing the dining room
window and I needed to climb on the bookshelf.  It stayed there
because cleaning the worktable entails a full-scale reorganization of
those materials to incorporate new acquisitions that had been piling up
on the table.

When that is done, the newly-repaired blond wood table will replace the
battered old orange metal footlocker beside that chair.  Until
that’s done, that table will receive more of the impedimenta off the
work table while I clean it and rearrange the materials.  That’s
today’s project, just as it was yesterday’s and the daily objective for
I don’t remember how long.  How long before it’s really done,
nobody knows, least of all me.  I just set the goals.  I
evidently have no skill at all in discerning how long a job might take
from start to finish.  I never seem to reach the finish.

Awww… that’s just frustration talking.  I do expect to get this
job done someday.  I’m simply getting very weary of the way it
drags on and on and other things come up that need to be done
first.  I spent most of my summer reorganizing the storage space
in the back room and bathroom, to make room for Greyfox’s stock of
knives and swords because he was due to move back in here next
month.  That was all apparently unnecessary.  But it wasn’t
entirely without its rewards.  There are now some pockets of order
amid the chaos here, and I found some things I’d forgotten I had, plus
a few things I’d been wondering where they were.

Don’t worry about me, ladies.  Your expressions of concern after
yesterday’s break were touching.  When I’m venting, I’m
coping.  The time to start worrying about me is when you don’t
hear from me.  That might mean my computer is down (an eventuality
I hate to even consider), or I’m incapacitated or dead or, even worse,
too depressed to dredge up the gumption to write.

[LastUnicorn/NeverSafe: 
I read your recent entries Thursday night when I was too tired for a
coherent response.  I have thoughts and feelings about what you've
written, but am having a hard time putting them into words.  You
and Chelle are in my thoughts and prayers and I will be back there to
leave comments as soon as I have something more to say. ]

Ooops!
PS
I forgot to reveal how I finally got that tub under the table.  I
had to move the white enameled metal cabinet at the kitchen end of the
worktable.  We store buckets of water inside it and use the top of
it as a side-board in the kitchen.  I swung one end of it out a
few feet, cleaned the bit of floor that exposed, and worked the tub in
behind it to its new home against the wall behind my worktable. 
Then I put the cabinet back, moved it back a few inches until it was
flush up against the table, and added a few inches of clearance in the
kitchen passage between the fridge and the water buckets stacked in
front of the white cabinet, that won’t fit inside it.

break time –

or breakdown time

Lately I’m pushing the envelope, made radical changes in my lifestyle,
trying to gain some independence or at least see if that’s
possible.  Instead of following my body’s instincts and just
veging out after yesterday’s trip to town, I let a different part of me
call the shots and I got to work on cleaning the worktable so I can do
some readings, make some jewelry, maybe make some money.

I’m scattered.  Mind fog is one of the symptoms of chronic fatigue
and “fibromyalgia” or ME/CFIDS.  First thing I noticed was that
I’d put a basket of new squash in the area on the table that I’d
already cleared, so I had to move it.  Decided the coffee table
was the place for it, but first had to clear space there.  That
requires a complete cleaning and rearranging there, of course. 
Now there are three baskets of squash and one of apples on my bed, and
a mess of rocks, candles and the usual debris still on the coffee table.

After continually bumping into a big storage tub Greyfox scrounged and
gave me yesterday to bring home, I decided the place for it was under
the worktable.  That necessitated cleaning out the mess of empty
cardboard boxes, egg cartons, etc., under there.  The gate leg of
the table was in the way then.  The tub is too wide to go around
it or slip through the space in the middle of it.  I had to fold
the leg.  That meant I had to move everything off that end of the
table.  Some of it got dealt with:  either thrown away or put
away.  The rest, including the gooseneck high intensity light on
its lead-weighted base, got moved to the other end of the table.

Before I could put anything even semi-permanent under there, I had to
clean the floor (obsessive-compulsive Virgo here).  Thought about
getting the mop.  It’s an old string thing that is very efficient
with my industrial mop bucket with the foot-powered wringer. 
Without the bucket and wringer, my grip strength and my wrists are too
weak to wring out the mop.  I don’t know where the bucket is,
could be gone for all I know.  Last time I wanted to mop I asked
Doug to bring in the bucket.  He said, “there’s a hole in
it.”  End of discussion.  I didn’t bother to explain that the
hole was the most likely reason I have that bucket, probably the reason
the previous owner threw it into the dumpster I found it in.  That
time,  I used a “disposable” plastic hospital washbasin, scrounged
from a different dumpster, and wrung and stomped the mop as dry as I
could, and left the bathroom floor to dry out in its own time.

This time I grabbed some paper towels and spray cleaner and crawled
under the table.  Then Koji had to go out, was jumping up on the
door, frantic to get out there and bark at some disturbance in the
distance.  Thank the gods and goddesses that I’ve taught him to go
out there to bark.  I crawled out to let him out before the
training broke down — that’s part of our agreement.  I mean, the
dog has to bark, so I have to let him out or he’ll do it in here. 
My legs were trembling with fatigue and burning from the accumulated
lactic acid.  I slept only about four hours last night, par for
the course after a fatiguingly active day.  As I crawled back
under the table, my muscles were crying for relief.

Then Koji was crying to get back in.  By the time he was in and
was rewarded with his biscuit for coming back, I was crying.  Back
there under the table, blubbering and weeping, smearing dirt around on
the floor, trying to reach a clean paper towel without crawling back
out, I knew I had to take a break.  There were three or four
people at one time that I might have called to vent my frustration and
get a little sympathy.  They’re dead now and Xanga’s what I’ve got.

Now I’ve got to go eat something.  The Old Fart says to watch my
blood sugar.  That’s wise advice and I need to follow it.

went to town yesterday —

I wasn’t feeling well before I left.  My eyes had been bothering
me:  focusing difficulties, something that happens to me,
sometimes frequently. At other times I have long periods of time when
this damned disease picks on other neurological areas and muscle groups
and my eyes work okay.  As with much of the other sensorimotor
crap I can often override the weakness with extra concentration and
effort.  When it’s my eyes involved, the clearer vision usually
comes with a headache.  I had the headache before I got to town,
but at least I hadn’t run off the road.

Late last evening, while our favorite Mexican restaurant was closing as
we ate our dinners, I told Greyfox I have to remember what I get out of
these trips to town.  There is a big energy cost, a lengthy
downtime as I recover after I get back home, but that’s my tradeoff for
the mental health benefit from the trips.  Keeping them to
two-week intervals as I’ve been doing lately seems to give me a good
balance, with some time to get things done at home between trips.

My passengers from the rehab ranch for the NA meeting included a few
new people this time.  There was a sense of morale and camaradarie
that has largely been absent before.  There was a lot of joking
and laughter and friendly joshing with one man in particular who was
having a wild hair day.  The tension and animosity that often
finds expression in that group of diverse people in stressful personal
situations who are shut up together in a pressured environment, weren’t
there last night.

One of them picked relapse as a topic and there was some great sharing
of experience.  I talked about my recent violent conflicts with
Greyfox and how they might have led me to a relapse — I did think
about getting loaded — and how I resolved the conflicts and convinced
myself that getting loaded wouldn’t be worth the cost.  Greyfox
talked about our crisis, too, and said that twice during that time he
had thought about having a cigarette.  But he realized that one
cigarette today would be a pack and a half tomorrow, and then maybe
he’d smoke some dope and then if he went on and got drunk…. 
We’ve been down that road before.

It was a good meeting.  I probably hadn’t needed
it in the sense that my abstinence would be imperiled without it, but
it was good for my state of mind.  Greyfox and I spending the day
together was good for our relationship, too.  I think his recent
blowup might also be good for us if its effects on his honesty and
openness continue.  The aftermath of his blowup, during which I
did some introspection and saw how badly I’d lost my detachment and
been focusing my resistance on him rather than on his behavior, was
helpful. 

I also had some time to reflect on the precipitating factors. 
He’s been getting a lot of frustration and narcissistic injury at his
recent shows, along with the narcissistic supply he counts on from
them.  The day-to-day stand business just hasn’t been happening
due to weather and his preparations for and recovery after the
shows.  He has been feeling economic insecurity.

In addition to that, there have been some powerful astrological aspects
for him this month.  The New Moon / Solar Eclipse came near his
birthday, at the time of his Solar Return.  The conventional
wisdom is that the seeds sown at each new moon mature when the moon
reaches full.  That blowup came at the Full Moon / Lunar
Eclipse.  Despite that, and the stresses of living with a
[probably] pregnant cat who is not always content with her captivity,
and not getting the reinforcement, support, and narcissistic supply
from me that he wants, Greyfox has found the focus he needed to
followup on his reservations for some upcoming shows, resolve some
SNAFUs there, and chase the rumor of another show that was apparently
false.  In the process of that wild goose chase, though, he made
some contacts that will prove useful later on, for future shows.

Silky, Greyfox’s pretty little gray stray cat, is bulbous and to all
appearances massively pregnant.  But it seems that she has been
that way beyond a normal cat’s gestational period.  We’re in the
marginal area now.  She is active and usually apparently happy,
showing no pain, distress or abnormality, except for the big tight
belly.  She has exhibited the expected nesting behavior.  Now
if she’ll just deliver….

Yesterday as we moved things in and out of his cabin, she got out
twice.  None of us wants her finding a nesting spot somewhere in
the woods.  Much better, we think, to have the kittens
indoors.  The first time, she let Greyfox approach and pick her
up.  The second time we needed to bring out some smelly canned
food and lure her close enough to grab.  At one point, she climbed
the high bank at the railroad right of way behind the row of cabins and
looked off through the brush as if seeking something on the
horizon.  Then she came sniffing back, checking out smells under a
neighbor’s camper and under Greyfox’s cabin.  Finally, I got her
attention and aroused her curiosity by clanking around in a box of
discarded pots and pans and she came over and found the food dish I’d
set beside the box.

One of the things we did yesterday was get Greyfox a bigger, better
microwave oven, a great thrift shop find at ten dollars.  The one
he had been using was supplied by the landlord and chosen because it
had been light enough for Greyfox to carry.  He’s not supposed to
lift over 25 pounds.  With me to carry it to the car and then into
the cabin, he was finally able to get a more powerful one.  Even
better, it has digital controls so he can more accurately set the
timing.  Those little round dial-type timers are devilishly hard
to set.  I also found a shoe rack for the floor of my closet and
two big baskets.  One of them is now full of the squash I bought
yesterday (making a total of seven baskets of winter squash for our
enjoyment and nutrition), and the other holds the bananas and
grapefruit I bought. 

We had an interesting encounter in the produce department with a fellow
gourmet.  We were looking around for the asparagus advertised in
the newspaper, when he approached the store employee waving a
sad-looking bunch of wilted asparagus and asking if that was all he
had.  The produce man told him that the truck had been delayed,
and the ensuing conversation revealed that there’s a bridge out
somewhere and a lot of freight backed up.  I asked the guy if he
could tell us when it might be there.  He said maybe later and
maybe not until today, and suggested we get a rain check.  Then,
as the customer was walking away, he patted one of my squash, either
the blue kuri or one of the uchiki kuri, and said, “Someone has good
taste in squash.”  Uhm hmm!  They’re the best.

The drive home last night was freaky.  Someone right behind me a
lot of the way, with high beams in my mirrors.  Weirdly, through a
couple of areas with passing lanes, he dropped back, then came up and
tailgated me again when we got into no-passing zones.  Wind was
blowing leaves and other stuff too big to be leaves across the highway,
and when I got close to home the temperature got to below
freezing.  The long straight low stretch across the muskeg near
the spring a couple of miles from here was covered with black
ice.  When I was coming in through this subdivision, I encountered
an SUV driving without lights.  I crunched into the house on
crusty snow that had been the wet slush I’d slogged through on my way
out.  Right now, there’s a pink tinge to the dim light coming in
from this morning’s sunrise, and I see some fresh flakes falling. 
I have things to do.  Now if I only had the energy, strength and
coordination to do them….

For
you, the bubbles prove you’re deep in thought. Without even realizing
it, you treat your bubbles as works of art, built slowly, then
destroyed in a bang. There’s something intimidating about someone so
focused that a loud popping sound doesn’t break his or her
concentration. Keep messing with their minds!

Take the “How Do You Chew” Quiz to enter a sweepstakes for free Xanga Premium for you and ten of your friends!

Loose End

I’m preparing to go to town, but can’t leave for a few hours, must wait
for the mail to come to see if there’s a pickup notice to stop at the
post office and take Greyfox’s knives in to him.  Thursday, two
weeks since I drove the rehab van, my turn again and other reasons
still more compelling than that to make me feel I need to go. 
Greyfox needs things.  I have them.

This was yet another night of little sleep, interrupted often enough
that I know there was little if any real REM sleep.  No dreams, no
rest, just a bunch of times of rousing enough to wonder what time it
was, and then at one of those times to finally realize I wasn’t going
to doze off again, and then I got up.  That was interesting, since
as soon as I moved I realized that even though my brain was wakeful,
one arm was dead asleep.  It went from no sensation to intense
sensation in a microsecond.  I reflexively froze and the sensation
subsided.  A moment later, I experimentally moved again and the
arm answered me with just slightly less intense sensations.  We
went back and forth like that, my arm and I, six or seven times before
the sensations subsided enough that I could just go ahead and crawl out
of bed.

It is way too early to know what kind of day this will be.  For
now, sensorimotor stuff is working as well as usual.  Eyes focus,
fingers know where the right keys are, I didn’t bang into anything or
fall down on my way across the room from the bed.  So far, so good.

---

I’m still working on Sunday’s news, the second of the two stories I wanted to share from the Outdoors section of The Anchorage Daily News. 
This one is about someone who lived in this neighborhood for a
while.  In fact, until I read the story I hadn’t known that he had
moved nearer to Cantwell, up the highway a hundred miles or so. 
The last I’d heard about him before Greyfox told me in a Xanga-gram
that he’d been busted for animal cruelty, he’d been just a few blocks
away, involved in a feud with another neighbor over his dogs running
loose.  It’s the same author as the preceding bear story, Craig
Medred, the ADN’s Outdoors columnist.  Partially because he writes
on a topic of interest to me, but also because of his perspective,
Medred is one of my favorite writers.

I don’t think there’s much I could add to that.  I had thought I
would excerpt it, edit it down a bit for length, but I also could not
find anything to leave out.

Rough Day

The one necessary task I had for today was baking a new batch of
gluten-free muffins.  This was my third day in a row of vertigo
and sensorimotor weirdness.  I’m questioning whether I’ll be
functioning well enough tomorrow to drive the rehab van.   I got
through a water run a couple of days ago despite the uncooperative
body, and I got the muffins done today.  What I did not get done
was the rest of the cleanup of this worktable at my elbow here. 
It is almost done and maybe I’ll finish it tonight and get a reading or
three done.  Maybe.

As I was putting the muffins together, I bumped the honey jug over as I
reached to put the lid back on.  Caught it with minimal
losses.  I dropped the mixing bowl with liquid ingredients as I
was picking it up to pour into the dry ingredients.  Caught it
with no spill.  As I was sliding a pan of batter into the oven, I
brushed the back of my hand against the hot rack, but jerked back fast
enough to avoid blistering burn.  I’m glad, since I keep doing
those clumsy things, that I’ve got quick reflexes.

The vertigo feels as if I’m on the pitching deck of a ship in heavy
seas.  Why don’t things fall over?  I fall over, but stuff
stays on shelves for some reason.  I feel seasick.

---

So, does anyone know what Chris McCandless, Carl McCunn, and Bart Schleyer have in common? 

All three men left mysteries behind when they died in the Arctic wilderness.  Below are excerpts from Sunday’s Anchorage Daily News story by Craig Medred:

It continues:

I didn’t include Treadwell and Huguenard in my little
teaser-quiz, largely because the only mystery there was why the man
thought he could talk to bears and why the woman followed him to her
death.

The story continues:

It goes into a lot of detail about the discovery of some bloody
clothing and bone fragments, and about what people who knew Schleyer
had to say about him.  What interested me most in the story was
some info about bears I’d not known before:

The Reality Around Here

Comments to which I have wanted to respond have been piling up. 
It’s time for another of these comments-on-your-comments blogs. 
I’ve got so many windows open now, so I can copy and quote you, that
I’m inviting a crash.   Some of these are from new readers
who just are not quite up to speed on Susitna Sue’s lifestyle. 
Others are from old friends here who apparently missed some info along
the way.  Then there’s also some not-so-new news from the local
scene.  Well, here goes….

---

A new subscriber who says she has read some of my memoirs some time back, merrow_mistral, wanted to know, “is the snow in alaska clean enough to make a cool aid slushie just from what falls on top of a car?”

Fresh snow is clean enough to eat unless there’s volcanic ash mixed
with it.  When one of the nearby volcanoes is sending out ash
plumes, the snow can be gritty and gray.  If someone wanted to
**shudder** pollute it with Kool-Aid®, I suppose she could.

She also had an earlier cluster of questions about hobos:

I suppose that monikers are closer to gang tags than hobo signs
are.  They differ generally in being smaller, done in chalk or
charcoal rather than spray paint, and in often carrying a date and some
other information such as direction or destination.  The signs are
not at all like gang tags, because they do not identify the person who
wrote them but simply convey information about conditions in the area
such as polluted water, alert police, kind people who give handouts,
etc.  Most of that information was in that blog.  Didn’t you
read it?

There are still hobos riding freights.  That was implicit in that
blog as well.  Porters are on passenger trains.  Hobos ride
freight trains.  There are yard bulls (private police) in the
freight marshalling yards who will beat and/or arrest anyone they find
on railroad property.  Not only the yards and the trains
themselves, but the entire right-of-way along the tracks is private
property.  It has always been thus and snagging rides has never
been safe or easy.  Nothing much has changed.  Hobos have
been poisoned by handouts in towns where they were not appreciated, and
have been welcomed in other towns, especially the ones where residents
prefer paler skin on their migrant workers than they see on the ones
who come up from Mexico. 

The fact that illegal immigrants also ride freight trains adds another
dimension of danger for hobos.  In areas near the borders, INS
agents have trains stop out in the middle of nowhere and search
boxcars, checking for green cards.  On my trips, I was traveling
with a young man from the Netherlands whose student visa had run
out.  He was taken off a train in California by the INS. 
That was when I decided to get back out on the Interstates to travel.

If you were wondering whether the bulls treat women differently, the
answer is no, except that most of them wouldn’t rape a man.  If
your curiosity was about whether hobos treat women differently, the
answer is yes, in some ways.  Remember hobos are people, and
individuals differ.  Some men are courtly and others are
crude.  Nobody did me any special favors.  Some of them
expressed appreciation when I produced the materials and cooked up a
batch of reconstituted powdered scrambled eggs and shared them with all
five of the hobos in one of the boxcars I was riding.  One of them
had a duffel bag full of fifths of cheap tequila.  He shared with
everyone, too.  On a different day, traveling in a different
direction in a different boxcar with several Mexican illegals, my young
male companion sat up all night with a knife, guarding me, after he’d
caught one of them creeping toward us with his knife out.

---

 

That blog about hobos also brought this informative comment from Sandking:

I hadn’t known that.  I intend to find out more about it.

[UPDATE 12:35 PM -- If you want to learn more, start here.]

---

FaithHopeandTrick left this comment on that same snow blog where the breeze asked about edibility of our snow:

“You actually have to go out and get water? I’m impressed. You probably appreciate a lot of things most of us take for granted.”

Greyfox was here when I read it, and I read it aloud to him.  His
comment was, “Yeah, like breathing.”  You’ll have to imagine the
sarcastic tone.  I had been having several days of severe
dyspnea.  It goes with the ME/CFIDS, along with the “sensorimotor
deficits” such as the stumbling-and-fumbling shit and the
anosmia.  If you’ve never lost your sense of smell, you can’t
imagine how much I appreciate those times when I get a little remission
from the anosmia.  And those rare occasions when I can walk
straight, talk straight, and think straight… and even sometimes
dance, yes I do appreciate them.

There is profound truth in that quote from Thomas Paine in my
sidebar:  “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is
dearness only that gives everything its value.”  Still, I wonder
if I would fail to appreciate our clean air and pure water, and the
social climate of this neighborhood, if Alaska’s climate were any more
favorable to life.

---

…and that leads quite conveniently into this from fatgirlpink:

It is not a stupid question.  It is, however, one I’ve answered
before, in one form or another.  There is a well on this
property.  It was here when we moved in.  The water is not
fit to drink, but that’s not the main reason we shut it down and no
longer even use it in summer for watering the garden.  The man who
owns this land and who gave me this trailer we live in after we’d been
housesitting for him a couple of years, used to use the well water for
his laundry.  His whites all had a rusty tinge to them.  A
nearby laundromat had to install and continues to maintain a costly
filtration system.  There is a lot of iron and other minerals in
the water unless one goes down between 300 and 500 feet, through some
solid rock.

It may be of interest to some if I describe how that man, Mark, handled
his water system here.  When he had this trailer moved in, he put
a pressure tank in the little now-vacant cabin that was on the lot when he
bought it, piped water into the trailer, had an electric water heater
and flush toilet — but for some reason never got around to digging a
septic tank.  Did the people before us here just flush stuff out
onto the ground?  I don’t know.  I do know that before we
moved in here, Mark was using honey buckets and hauling his waste out
under cover of darkness and dumping it in the woods.  Sarah
and Jono, who housesat here briefly before going south again, dug a
latrine, which we use for the warmer parts of the year… but I digress.

An earlier set of housesitters kept the place while Mark spent a winter
in Mexico, a year or two before Sarah and Jono moved in to take care of
Mark’s cats and his wolf-hybrid dog Leroy while Mark went to
Florida.  During a cold snap, there was a power outage. 
Power outages often happen when it gets down to forty or fifty degrees
below zero Fahrenheit.   This place is also furnished with an
oil furnace, which for several reasons we also do not use.  It is
dependent on an electric igniter and blower.  When the power went
off, instead of stoking up the wood stove and staying here, the
housesitters fled to town.  Mark’s water heater froze and burst,
also the porcelain toilet in the bathroom, and some of the water
pipes.  The pressure tank survived, but the glass on the pressure
gauge didn’t.

Just before he left for the final time, when Sarah and Jono moved in,
Mark was still working on the plumbing, working toward getting it back
in working order.  His water system, meanwhile, was a summer-only
system.  He ran a garden hose from the pressure tank through a
kitchen window and used it to fill his washing machine with cold water,
or fill pans on the stove to heat dishwater, etc.  He hauled
drinking water from the spring just like the rest of this neighborhood.

We used Mark’s garden hose for a couple of summers after we moved in,
not for laundry or drinking, only for cleaning and garden irrigation,
but continuing to use it would have meant either getting a plumber in
to stop leaks around the pressure tank in the cabin or having the cabin
floor rot out from the water.  It wasn’t worth it.  I had
already spent fifteen years at my old place, Elvenhurst, hauling
drinking, bathing and dishwashing water from the spring or melting snow
if that wasn’t feasible, and catching rain water off the eaves for
irrigation in my garden.

I still have not gotten to the main reason we don’t make any effort to
get the well deepened, the plumbing fixed, etc.  We live on
permafrost here.  Winter cold goes deep.  People around here
who do have indoor plumbing have perennial freeze-up problems. 
They depend on electric “heat tape” wrapped around their pipes. 
When a power outage coincides with a cold snap, their pipes
freeze.  The best-case scenario then would be burst pipes and a
flood.  People use all sorts of things to thaw pipes:  big
industrial space heaters that run on propane or gasoline; blow torches;
pans of embers from their woodstoves, etc.  They burn their cabins
down in the attempt.  It happens every winter around here. 
The local general store usually has one or two jars on the counter
collecting donations for someone’s burnout fund.  That’s why so
much of the social life in this neighborhood goes on around that spring
– that and the quality of that water.  City people stop to fill
jugs or barrels when they’re traveling between Anchorage and
Fairbanks.  The spring at Mile 89 of the Parks Highway is
justifiably famous, and I’m fortunate enough to have landed within a
couple of miles of it.

This was also in that comment:

Greyfox usually does read my blogs.  I assumed he’d read that one,
and I knew it might trigger a narcissitic rage, or at the very least a
little snit.  That gives me opportunities to confront his
pathology.  He is either over it by now or he switched from rage
mode into ingratiation by nine o’clock last night, because he was sweet
as ever in our phone conversations last night.  He’s like that.

I’ve done that:  run away, dumped relationships when they weren’t
perfect.  I tried for years to get Greyfox to move out, and even
took a long (27,000-mile) trip eleven years ago because I just couldn’t
handle his bullshit.  But then I decided I wasn’t going to let the
asshole chase me out of my home, and I came back.  I have a strong
ego, so for the most part his bullshit doesn’t hurt me.  I’ve had
to put a lot of effort into keeping his abuse from warping Doug, and
haven’t been entirely successful.  The kid despises the old fart,
and that emotional baggage is bad for the kid, but if and when we can
work through it the experience and the lesson are going to be something
that will help him throughout his life.

“…reasons and convictions,” yes…  Greyfox has always been an
interesting person to know.  Even disregarding our long
reincarnational history together (including a life in Asia thousands of
years ago when we were both wandering masterless warrior monks, one
just a couple of thousand years ago when we were army buddies in the
Roman Legions, and a more recent one when we were a May/December pair
of lovers in Elizabethan England [I was the December one], he’s one of
the few men I’ve known who is even close to my level of
intelligence.  That there is an in-joke he may get, if he recalls
having once told me that I was one of the few women he’d known who was
close to his…. :-p

After he sobered up and diagnosed his own NPD, it became sorta obvious
to me why we came together this time.  There may not be another
person on this planet at this time who has both the skill and the
motivation to help Greyfox through this therapy.  There is
probably not another person around who could provide me with the mental
challenge I crave and need to keep going through my physical handicaps,
and who is willing to provide the material support for this strange duo
of Doug and me, the slacker and the gimp.  We’re a pair, a diverse
mismatched pair of misfits with a history that has only begun to be
told.  If I could get him to collaborate with me on a book of our
past-life recollections, we’d surely be rich and famous.  
But he’d rather not remember most of that stuff, and I don’t push it
because I don’t want to be famous.  Maybe after I’m dead he’ll use
what I’ve written about my recall and fill in his own part and write
that book.  Then he’ll have to deal with the fame and
fortune.  Would serve him right, the asshole!

Oh, by the way, in case it’s not blatantly obvious, I love the asshole
in my own bitchy way.  I love him enough not to cut him too much
slack.  And totally aside from loving, which is just something I
choose to do because being a loving person is important to me, and not
because of anything he is or does, he’s funny.  Doug has long said
that living here is like living in a sit-com.  And it’s a more
intelligent sit-com than any on TV.  A lot of our jokes would just
sail right over the heads of a general audience.

---

I did want to share with you the story about what Carl McCunn, Chris
McCandless and Bart Schleyer have in common, plus what columnist Craig
Medred had to say about one of our neighbors who, “did the best he
could for his dogs,” but this has run long and I want to get some work
done before I run out of this day’s ration of energy.  I may be
back later today with those bits of last week’s news, which I’ve
intended to post for several days now.

An NPD Day

Greyfox paid us a visit today. Technically, he lives here.  He has
been away for the summer, living in a little cabin alongside the flea
market strip at Felony Flats, where he runs his little roadside
stand.  This is his mailing address, and people who see us
together at meetings when I go to town often assume that we live
together.  He lives with a cat.  I live with two cats, a dog
and my son Doug.  When Greyfox blows in, it turns whatever peace
we may have here into turmoil.

Doug asked me after I’d told him today that Greyfox was coming out, so
the kid should shovel out “his” side of the driveway as well as get the
snow out from around my car, whether the Old Fart would be in
hustle-bustle mode today.  I said honestly that I didn’t
know.  I hadn’t asked him his plans or whether he would be on a
tight schedule.  I tend not to ask such questions, because NPD
(that’s narcissistic personality disorder, for the uninitiated)
explains everything in exhaustive, exhausting, time-consuming
detail.  After all these years, I figure that Greyfox will tell me
more than I need to know anyway, so I seldom ask unless there’s a
compelling need to know.

He called from the supermarket in town, left a message on the internet
answering machine saying he had some food related questions, and for me
to call him right back.  I did, and he asked if Doug would like
some of the cheap frozen pizza that’s on sale, and asked again about
whether he needs bread or not since the bread is on sale at a good
price.  I’d told him yesterday Doug has plenty of bread.  He
tries so hard to “sell” us whatever is on sale.   I forgot to tell
him that I’m out of bananas, low on goat milk and the wheat-free bread
I eat.  He, of course, didn’t ask about any of that because it’s
not on sale at a good price.  No big deal.  I have other
things to eat and will be in town again on Thursday to drive the rehab
van to the NA meeting.

He called again en route and left the message on the internet answering
machine that he wanted steak and squash to eat while he was here. 
Great!  I wished he had told me last night, or even earlier today,
so I could have taken some steak out of the freezer.  I took the
frozen steak out and put it on top of the big pot of water (named
Kermit) on top of the woodstove, to thaw.  Of course, it was still
frozen when he got here.  I asked when he came in how long he
planned to be here.  He said, “two hours and five minutes.” 
I said the steak probably wouldn’t be thawed by then.  He
reluctantly said he might be able to stay longer.

I had already started wondering what drugs he was on, and asked
him.  The second time I asked, more pointedly than the first, he
said, “nothing”.  So I rephrased the question:  “no
stimulants, no painkillers?”  Then he looked at his watch and
finally said the stimulants had already worn off and the painkillers
were probably worn off, too.  That was supposed, I suppose, to get
him off the hook for telling me he wasn’t on any drugs in the first
place.   It was evident that most of his disordered consciousness
was a combination of NPD and low blood sugar.  He wanted that
steak right now.  I suggested that he eat an apple to hold him a while.

Next, we had one of those quintessential NPD conversations.  He
asked if Doug and I would give him our permission to order some “free
introductory offer” thingies in our names as well as his own two names
(the legal one and Greyfox).  I’ll give him this much
credit:  he asked.  He has done that before, signed us up for
CD clubs, imported coffee, and such, without our knolwledge. 
After the bills started coming in, I gave him hell about it and told
him never to do that again.  So he asked.

Rather than just take my simple “no” for an answer, he took
narcissistic injury and had to know why.  My reasons were not good
enough for him, and he ended up in a huff.  Saying with a pout,
“Well, if you’re not willing to help me make a couple of
bucks….”  Then he grabbed the thawing steaks off the woodstove
and started for the kitchen, asking if it was okay to refreeze them.

I shouted after him something to the effect that he was letting his NPD
get out of hand and he needed to take a good look at his
behavior.  That’s what I’ve contracted to do for him, confront the
pathological behavior.  He came back from the kitchen and put the
steaks back on top of Kermit.  Then he went out and brought in the
shipment of rocks that he’d picked up at the post office.  As we
unpacked rocks, we discussed ethics.  I pointed out that I know
that ethics are not carved in stone, that everyone’s are different, and
his set is very different from mine.  I added that he has no right
to try and impose his ethics on me.

The meal went predictably.  After I had cleared off all the
impedimenta he had piled onto the kitchen range when he came in– all
the groceries, a newspaper, some videos and empty pill bottles from the
med packs that I make up for him– I got started cooking.  As I
was marshalling my forces, I asked him if he wanted baked potato with
that.  He said no.  Then when he found out I was doing one
for me, he wanted one, too.  The same thing happened with the
veg.  He didn’t want any, he said, so I asked Doug if he wanted
green beans or spinach.  He opted for the beans, and of course
Greyfox ate some of them.  Both of his “no” answers, I assume,
were either some residual part of his little NPD snit operating, or
were made on the theory that by saying no he’d get out of here
sooner.  Irrational sense of time pressure is an NPD trait… it’s
one he’s got in great severity.

After we ate, he brought in a tiny TV he’d scrounged from the dumpster
at Felony Flats.  He wants me to look through my collection of
electronic parts and see if I have an AC power adapter that will work
for it.  I tried to tell him on the phone when he first mentioned
it that it would be a big job, going through all my parts. It has been
a while since I’ve actually talked to Greyfox.  Lately, I’m just
talking to NPD.  I asked him what type of adapter it needed: 
how many volts, what sort
of terminal, postive or negative tip.  He said it was nine volts
(today I discovered it’s actually twelve volts), couldn’t describe the
terminal and hadn’t the vaguest idea what
“positive or negative tip” meant.  I tried then on the phone to
tell him that I’d just
got that stuff sorted out and packed away, and I’d look for it if I
knew what to look for, but none of that has any
significance to NPD. I started again here today, trying to tell him it
was a big project.  I said, “I have this big tub stuffed full
of…” and he said, “Where…?”

I cut in and told him I was not going to tell him where.  I would
rather look through it myself than try to put it back together again
after he has torn through it.  I’ve known him a long time, and
know him too well.  We talked about it a lot more than should have
been necessary.  We finally established that his urgent need for
the adapter was bullshit, that he doesn’t even know if the TV works,
and only wants the adapter so he can sell the TV — if it works. 
He was just rushing around, trying to get me caught up in his
hustle-bustle mode.  On this occasion, I was stronger than 
his psychopathology.

There was some more, a big box of stuff he doesn’t really want and has
no room for in his cabin, but wants me to find room for here. 
Right now it is still on my bed.  As Greyfox was leaving and Doug
was loading empty water jugs and buckets in my car for our trip to the
spring, I told Doug to send Greyfox back in.  We needed to
talk.  We spent maybe five or ten minutes confronting the
NPD.  He tried to get defensive, but had the consciousness to
realize that was what he was doing.  He pulled a lame excuse about
not being able to focus on his healing process because he is so focused
on “material shit.”  I had to point out that he wasn’t truly
taking care of business, that he was running on the NPD autopilot,
doing the hustle, looking really busy working harder not smarter. 

I restated something that really needed saying, about the way he makes
stupid plans and then lets the plans rule his life instead of keeping
flexible and living life on life’s terms.  His business is
weather-dependent and he has missed almost every single good weather
day for a couple of months because they did not conform to his
plans.  He admitted that the paper said today was supposed to be
the best day this entire week, but he’d planned to take off and come up
here so that’s what he did.  I pointed out once again that he
hasn’t the power to control the weather and would do better to try and
conform to it.  He nodded, looked serious, and left.  He
always does that.  Maybe he was listening this time.  Who
knows?

He was taking my outgoing mail with him.  As a parting shot he
pointed to the Elvis Presley stamp on the package of merchandise I’m
sending out, and asked me if I had any more of them around.  He
claimed that he had asked me before and I’d told him they were all
gone.  These were from a block of “old” (old-ish) stamps some
other boothie at Felony Flats had sold him for less than face
value.  He was mistaken about what I had said when he asked. 
What had happened was this:  he brought them home and gave them to
me.  I asked if they were to keep or to use as postage.  He
was noncommittal as he often is, saying they were probably “worth
something,” and so I didn’t use them right away.

 When I started running out of postage, I’d told him and rather
than buying more postage at the time he said to go ahead and use the
Elvises.  Then when he found out they were worth about a buck and
a half each, he had asked me if I still had them.  I told him then
that there were still a few left, but that on his instructions I’d been
using them for postage.  I asked if he wanted what was left, and
he said no, go ahead and use them.  Today, I asked again if he
wanted the one I still have.  Again, he said no.  I wonder
when he’ll decide he does want it, or if he’ll just let me use them all
up so he can have something else to blame me for.

After he left, I plopped on the bed.  I said to Doug, “That was
horrible.  In a few more weeks, he’ll move back in for the winter
and we’ll have to deal with him every day.”  He nodded and made
sympathetic noises, then he said, “Maybe… on weekends… we could
render him unconscious.”  Then we laughed and got the rest of our
gear together for the water run.  I think Greyfox left his gloves
here, because I found a strange pair of gloves when I was looking for
mine.  When we got in the car, Doug noticed that he had left the
NA briefcase, which holds our group’s collection of literature for
sale, plus the order forms, the lit fund, etc.  It was one of the
reasons he came up here today.  Impracticality is also an NPD
trait, but I still think some of this shit is from the drugs he’s on.

I
took the camera to the waterhole with us, but the only pic I took this
trip was this one in the driveway on the way out, with Granny
Mousebreath riding on Doug’s shoulders.  At least we got to the
spring and back before dark.  Other than that, it wasn’t such a
pleasant water run.

Mostly, anyway, I stayed warm.  I’d been wearing velour pants
around the house over long johns.  I put on a pair of jeans over
the two pairs of pants, and wore my parka.  I wore heat-reflective
glove liners and the mystery gloves (presumably Greyfox’s), but took
off the gloves for a better grip when I was filling the buckets.

We are not yet in winter mode.  We forgot to take the Mutt® ice
chipper with us, and could have used it to cut some steps in the icy
slope and chip the ice off the freight pallet we stand on to fill the
jugs.  I slipped as I bent to put the cap on a jug.  When I
went down I took the jug over with me and soaked one glove liner. 
I spent the rest of the time being thankful it isn’t really cold
yet.  It was in the twenties today.  That’s twenties above
zero Fahrenheit.  Not life-threatening, not a serious hazard with
wet gloves as it will be when it gets really cold.

My camera stayed in my pocket the whole time.  Two other trucks
pulled up while we were filling buckets, neighbors waiting their turn
at the spring.  That and the wet glove liner made something as
frivolous as photography seem unattractively foolish.  I just got
the job done and came home to blog.  I did say, up there in the
header, “this is where I spill my guts.”  I don’t know what I’d do
without this therapeutic outlet.  Thanks, guys.