I went looking for a word.

Maybe the word I hoped to find doesn’t exist in English, or perhaps I was using the wrong search terms.

I started at Google with “aggressive ignorance.”  Of the 659
results returned, 301 concerned George Bush, so I knew that someone out
there understands the concept I was thinking of.  However, none of
them was able to condense that concept into a single succinct word for
me.

Next, I tried Onelook’s Reverse Dictionary. 
There I got over 200 results, but most of them were obviously related
only to aggressive, such as vicious and belligerence, or to ignorance,
such as benighted and unenlightened.  None of the words I found
encompassed both ideas, but they did give me a lot of new phrases:

pervicacious unknowing
truculent nescience
fierce agnosy
vicious unenlightenment
pushy inexperience

By now, I was really having fun with this.  To refine my search, I
expanded on the idea I had in mind.  In the reverse dictionary
search box, I entered, “premeditated or complicit innocence, willful or
aggressive ignorance.”

That was when I got completely off-track.  It was becoming evident
that I would not find the word I sought, so I just started exploring
some of the terms I had gotten.

There was more, much more.  There was somewhat more in the
first version of this blog, which vanished when the computer shut
itself off at the same time that I felt a sharp earthquake. shortly
before 9 PM.

Gaia and me

I’m an earthy person, earthy in speech, in tastes, and inclinations.

My natal chart is very heavily weighted in the Earth sign, Virgo. 
There, I have the Sun; the planets Mercury and Jupiter; asteroids Ceres
and Vesta, and the cometary planetoid Chiron, which New Age astrologers
have determined is Virgo’s true ruler (rather than Mercury, which Virgo
has traditionally shared with Gemini until Chiron’s discovery by
astronomers in 1977).  Another Earth sign, Capricorn, houses my
Eclipse Point, and Fortuna.

I don’t know what, if anything, all that has to do with my intimate
connection with the planet’s shifts and eruptions.  I mention it
merely because when I think of the relationship between Gaia and me, that’s one of the things
that comes to mind.

I have been studying geology and bringing home rocks for as long as I
can remember.  Also, as far back as I can remember I was
fascinated with earthquakes and volcanos.   I recall my
frustration in school when I sought information about these
phenomena.  I learned words such as “magma”, but I found either
acknowledged ignorance of the forces driving earthquakes and volcanos,
or conflicting and superficial theories that didn’t really make sense
in terms of explaining how mountains are thrust up or why magma flows
to the surface where it does.

Never during my school days did I find any mention of Alfred Wegener,
continental drift, or plate tectonics.  Wegener died before I was
born, but his theory was rejected by the entrenched “scientific”
authorities of his time.  Then, through the 1950s and sixties,
seafloor mapping and petroleum exploration revealed the presence of the
mid-oceanic ridge and confirmed the existence of “seafloor spreading”,
the creation of new crust where magma is brought up by convection and
cooled by seawater.

Finally, when I was an adult, the concept of plate tectonics became
accepted by the academics and spread into the popular media, and I had
that reasonable explanation I’d always wanted for the quakes and
volcanos, and also for that tantalizing jigsaw-puzzle fit I’d noticed
the first time I’d looked at a globe, between the Atlantic coastlines
of Africa and South America.

Long before then, however, I was attuned to the planet’s movements to
an uncanny degree.  I can’t remember the last time a big quake or
eruption caught me by surprise.  Some time in the 1970s, after
having become familiar with my propensity to “expect” earthquakes, I
noticed that the intuitive flashes that told me a big one was coming
usually occurred about ten days before the event.  Sometimes it is
just a thought.  That’s how it was with Mount St. Helens in
1980.  I got a general impression of the approximate location, and
that’s all.

Sometimes I get more than that.  I hadn’t been back from my
honeymoon very long in mid-1991 when I woke one morning with a strange
word echoing in my head:  pinatubo.  It was a new word to me,
so I looked it up.  My dictionary said it was a “mountain in the
Phillipines.”  Hmmmm, I wondered.  I asked Greyfox if Mt.
Pinatubo meant anything to him.  No.  About a week and a half
later anyone who paid attention to the news had heard of Pinatubo.

Other times, what I get is a physical sensation.  A few times I’ve been
jolted so hard I nearly fell down.  I’d say to the family, “Did
you FEEL that!?!” and they’d look blank and say, “What?”  And then
a week and a half later, there’d be a big one in the news. 

Those big, apparently “psychic” or prescient sensations of big temblors distant in both time and
space are one thing.  My hyperacute awareness of smaller shakes in
the near vicinity is something else.  I got the impulse to write this now because
this evening I felt two earthquakes.  I was at the computer both
times, and each time I went to the USGS website and checked the recenteqs
list.  One was magnitude 3.5 in the Fox Islands way out in the
Aleutian Chain.  The other was a 2.8 out in Cook Inlet.

I felt them.  I know I felt them.  I looked at the clock and
then went and looked up the time and location, checked the theoretical
P-wave travel time, and it fit.  I didn’t file a felt-it report,
though.  People are not supposed to feel such small quakes at such
distances.  If I were to file a felt-it report for every shake I
feel, they would either be ignored as the work of a crank or they’d
skew someone’s calculations of the magnitudes.  I have a rule of
thumb when it comes to filing felt-it reports.  Either someone
else in the family has to feel it too, or the house has to rattle and
creak or my plant hangers swing or something to indicate that it’s
strong enough to be felt by a normal human being.

What with “psychic” premonitions of earthquakes nearly knocking me out
of my chair sometimes, and all the ways I’ve found to investigate and
confirm the things I feel, or to get bulletins about ones I may or may
not have “felt” beforehand, it has become impossible for me to separate
the “psychic” part of my awareness from the intellectual.  I sorta
think that’s a healthy thing.  Much better, I suppose, to have my
whole mind in one place, so to speak.

(image from NOAA)
Since
the December 26 Indonesian event, I’ve been trying to remember how and
when I started expecting it.  For months I have been watching the
Pacific Ring of Fire, wondering when all those moderate events were
going to give way to a spectacular one.  Then the Macquarie Island
quake hit on December 23 and I had a feeling there would soon be
another big one, but no idea where.

I had no noticeable physical sensation of either of those quakes, but
neither of them caught me by surprise.   When I saw the first
news stories of the big one, I had gone looking for them.  That
was when the quake was being reported, before tsunami reports started
coming in.  While (to judge by what I read in the blogs where it
is mentioned) most people are focused on the human aspects of the
story, I have been searching out the geophysical reports.

When I ask myself why I’m more interested in things like this animation
of the forces released in the Indian Ocean the day after Christmas than
I am in the socio-economic aftermath of the coastal flooding, the only
explanation I find is that it is paying attention to such things as
this and the tables listing the subsequent seismic events that might
clue me to where and when the next one will hit.  That is what
interests me.

I’ve got a head full of bits and pieces, and I want to put them all together to see the whole picture.

Kaktovik update

A
frost-covered truck sat in a maintenance shed in Kaktovik as villagers
unloaded emergency supplies Wednesday from an Alaska National Guard
C-130 aircraft. Electricity was restored to most homes in the Arctic
village Wednesday, four days after the community lost power in a fierce
blizzard
(Photo by AL GRILLO / The Associated Press)

About half the village of Kaktovik had electric power
restored when today’s Anchorage Daily News went to press. 
Wherever houses were warming up and pipes were thawing, there were
water leaks and floods.  Now there are fears of electrical fires,
too.

We
live halfway between Willow and Talkeetna,  about 23 miles each
way to town.  Monday, they reported the temperature in Talkeetna
at -9°F, and in Willow at -4°F. 
Our thermometers were reading in the mid-twenties below zero.  The
weather-guessers predicted then that it would get slightly colder
through the day, down to double digits in Talkeetna and not quite that
cold in Willow, before it started warming up Tuesday night.  Here,
between the towns, it went to around thirty below and stayed there
until mid-day today, Thursday.

I’m so glad it warmed up!
P.S.  In case anyone’s wondering, I do take the electric heater out of the tub before I start my shower.

Okay, I don’t have it bad here at all.

A
Kaktovik family opened their door to find a thin layer of snow, driven
by high winds, had packed against the door, taking its shape. The hole
in the middle is the only clear spot.
(Photo by RICHARD HOLSCHEN)

Yesterday both Greyfox (down the valley in Wasilla where the temps are ten to twenty degrees warmer than here) and LuckyStars
(in Kansas where they’ve been having ice storms) called my attention to
the plight of the 300 people in the remote village of Kaktovik. 
Since Saturday, cold, snow and hurricane force winds have been making
life miserable and hazardous for them.

Blowing snow blew down power lines on Saturday.  Circuit breakers
tripped and transformers burned out.  Some of those who didn’t
have backup generators at home moved into the school.  Then the
wind and blowing snow killed the school’s generator.  Everyone in
the village is running low on fuel.  Sixty-five people moved into
the Borough maintenance shed, one of only two public buidings with
lights and heat.

The Air National Guard managed to land a Pave Hawk helicopter with two
electric linemen and 600 pounds of tools and supplies, but a C-130
cargo plane with nine more linemen and some spare transformers couldn’t
land because of zero visibility.  The equipment was dropped off in
Deadhorse, where it’s waiting for transport to Kaktovik.

Now, the village’s best hope is the “cat train”, a caravan of caterpillars:

Help on the way to Kaktovik–Anchorage Daily News

How cold is it?

Cold enough.  The thermometer says it’s -27°F/-33°C.  For
days it has been creeping ever closer to the mystical forty below zero
where the two scales converge.  For a while, the barometric
pressure was creeping downward, seeming to promise some warming, but
it’s on the way back up again now, at 30.2″.  Funny, I never used
to pay that much attention to the weather.  But that was when I
was younger, farther south, and not depending on a little woodstove and
some fairly unreliable rural electric power to prevent hypothermia.

The outdoor temps are relevant, but what really matters to me is the
temperature in here.  By continually feeding wood into the stove
and running up the electric bill, I’m keeping it in the mid fifties
Fahrenheit most of the time.  That tends to dip when I go to bed
and Doug takes over the fire watch.  Last night as he watched me
rearranging the coals, leveling the bed of embers to make room for more
fuel, he said, “fire building, or arranging, should be an Olympic
event.”  I guess he was complimenting my skill.  If it was an
Olympic event, I might be a contender.

I work at it, not just for my comfort but for the survival of my
houseplants.  Sometimes I think it’s absurd, setting myself up
this way to have to battle the subarctic cold to ensure the survival of
a collection of tropical plants.  But when the outdoors is white
seven months out of the year, all this green indoors is comforting,
good for my mental health such as that may be, if any.

I was kneeling in front of the stove a few minutes ago, using the
blackened old rock hammer that was the only firetool left behind by the
previous residents, and the antique silver-handled fireplace poker
that’s part of a set of firetools given to Greyfox by some people who
didn’t manage to sell them at their selling-out-and-going-south sale a
few years ago.  My purpose was to move some of the coals from the
back of the firebox where they pile up because there’s less airflow
back there to burn them.  The bed of coals needs to be somewhat
level to get as much wood in as possible and not have it slide back out
when the door is opened.

The coals are hot.  I was wearing insulated leather gloves, but
they’d get hot fast and I’d have to retreat and shut the door to cool
both the gloves and my face.  My face has felt sunburned for days,
since the beginning of this cold snap, from all that time exposed to
the glowing coals.  There tonight I started noticing a sweet,
meaty smell like barbecue roasting on a spit.  I guess Koji
noticed it too.  He jumped off the bed and came over and started
sniffing at my cheek.  Then he licked it.  I elbowed him away
before he started nibbling.  Just a moment ago, Granny cat jumped
up on the bookshelf next to me here and started sniffing my
cheek.  Darnit, I’ve cooked myself.

Some
parts of the house are warmer than others.  I’ve got the back room
closed off to conserve heat.  It’s probably below freezing in
there.  The temp in the fifties is on thermometers placed near eye
level in kitchen and living room, not attached to any exterior
walls.  There’s frost on the plastic sheeting over all the
windows, and on some of the walls.

This picture is of the frost on the drape over the window at the head
of my bed.  The light-colored upper part is the drape, and the
darker part below is the frost-speckled cushion that I place across the
head of my bed to insulate me from that north wall.  It’s a
Hollywood style bed without a headboard, and some insulation is needed
there.  I tend to turtle down under the covers to sleep.

How the Earthquake Affected Earth

There’s more in the story linked above.

Breakthrough, Breakdown, and Crackups

This one is about The Kid.  Doug and I have had a few interesting interactions lately.

This weekend the temperature hit double digits subzero (F), but early
last week it was raining here and the roof started leaking in a new
place.  I was on the phone talking to Greyfox when I noticed water
dripping off the bottom of the shade of the lamp on top of the big set
of shelves that holds our stereo and a bunch of other stuff.  Most
of the top of it is covered by our rock collection — lotsa rocks, and
a stereo speaker at one end.

While I wrapped up the conversation, I called Doug’s attention to the
new drip and sent him to get something to put under it.  While he
was doing that, he noticed two other places (besides right over the
lamp) where other drips were hitting things on that shelf.  One
was over the stereo speaker.

We both understand how water and electricity are a hazardous
combination, so we hustled to get a dishpan on top of the speaker to
catch those drips and to move the lamp out from under the other
drip.  As we worked there side-by-side, Doug said, “At least it’s
not snowing.”

I knew immediately what he meant.  It’s one of those things he and
Greyfox agree on (and there are precious few of THEM):  You don’t
have to shovel rain.  I indicated that I understood his sentiment
and went on to grumble about the leaky roof.  Mind you, I’ve no
cause to grumble.  It leaks this winter because no roof work got
done last summer and I’m the one who would have had to instigate and
supervise any roof work that might have gotten done.

But I grumbled anyway, and Doug responded, “I thought you liked the
great outdoors.”  Unable to resist that setup, I gave it the
proper pause before I said, “I do.”  Then Doug joined in, “…as
long as it stays outdoors.”  Maybe it wasn’t that funny all by
itself, but it broke the tension of our scurrying attempt to stem the
flood, and we cracked up together.

Later on in the week, Doug broke down and removed the noisy CPU cooling
fan from our computer, having been told by his techie friends online
that the heat sink in there would take care of the cooling as long as
it wasn’t a “high end” CPU.  No way does it even come close to
high end.  Then, with the old one in hand as reference for size,
model numbers and such, he set out to find a replacement for it online.

He shopped for several days and learned, I’m sure, more than he ever
wanted to know about cooling fans.  The first day of that process
was stressful, I could tell.  He was testy, and he made a few
comments about the vast multiplicity of available models and the total
absence anywhere of the exact model he was looking for.

On subsequent days, he became more distraught and irritable.  The
night when he finally placed his order, he explained to me two of the
things that were getting him down.  One was the main hazard
involved in installing the new fan.  There’s a chance that he
could inadvertently crush the CPU in the process. 

The other matter that frustrated him was that none of the suppliers is
willing to ship via U.S. Postal Service.  This means that we must
depend on the flaky Papa Do Run delivery service that is the contract
shipper handling those “second day air” shipments from the lower 48
that usually take a week or more to get here.  Priority Mail is
faster, and much cheaper.  Doug ended up paying $26.00 for
shipping a $10.00 part.  He consoled me (and himself) that this
was better than the $40.00 shipping charge that one of the sellers
wanted.

He explained that most of the sites that sell cooling fans assume that
people need them because they’re overclocking their computers. 
They also assume that their customers know what they’re doing. 
Doug is learning as he goes along, and we are both grateful that there
are some experienced computer builders among the gamers he consorts
with at randominsanity.  It was one of them who warned him to be
careful not to crush the CPU.

The next day after that climactic night in which he finally made his
choice and committed himself to it with credit card numbers, he wasn’t
testy or irritable.  He was downright surly.  After he had
yelled at me because I wasn’t playing my PS2 game as fast and
efficiently as he thought it could be played (and his kibbitzing on my
gaming is something we’ve hashed out between us before — it’s my game,
dammit, and I know I’m old and slow, but, dammit, it’s ONLY A GAME!), I
paused the game and confronted him.

I asked if I’d done something to piss him off, or if he was pissed off
at someone else and taking it out on me because I was handy. 
After a bit of thought, he said it was probably residual tension from
the cooling fan shopping experience.  He failed to see the humor
in the matter when I had to laugh at his getting so distraught over shopping.  Perhaps I was a tad insensitive, but it was pretty funny to me.

That covers one crackup and the breakdown.  The breakthrough came
last night after I reminded Doug that the trash needed to go out and he
needed to split some firewood and bring it in.  He was on the PS2
at the time, so it didn’t get done immediately.  Stuff seldom does
get done by him immedately when I tell him to do it.  I’m used to
that.  I’m even used to it not getting done for days and daze, and
sometimes not until I do it myself.  But that’s the non-essential
stuff.  When the wood box goes empty, he refills it promptly.

A bit later, as he was putting on his boots, I asked if he was getting
ready to take out the trash.  He said no, he was suiting up to
bring in firewood.  I said, “As long as you’re going out, why not
take the trash with you.”  I was amazed when he replied,
“Duh!”  He gave me this look with little lightbulbs in both eyes,
and I could only think, “Finally! He’s got it.”  He is 23 years
old.  Even if I only told him once a month through the years he’s
been doing chores that he could save some steps (and in winter could
save the heat loss of opening the door extra times, and in summer could
keep more mosquitoes out…) by taking out what needed to go out when
he was going out anyway, it amounts to hundreds of times I’ve given him
the efficiency mini-lecture.  Now he’s got it, apparently.

Last night as he was suiting up for that trip outside, I looked at him
and liked what I saw.  I said that his hair and beard were looking
good since the last trim.  It was preface to a pitch for keeping
them trimmed, but he’s not about to let me cut his hair in
winter.  The longer it gets the more insulation it provides. 
He glanced in the mirror and said he likes the way his beard grows out
forked.  “I keep thinking about waxing it…” he said.

I said, “Yeah, you could let the mustache grow out into handlebars, wax
them and twirl them up, too.  Let the beard grow out long and
braid each fork separately.  Look weird, let the inner weirdness
show.”   We both cracked up.

Spooky Music

According to fatgirlpink, everybody’s got a song running in their heads today.  Here’s mine:

Ghost Riders in the Sky

words and music by Stan Jones

(Lyrics and Chords)

An old cowboy went ridin’ out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way
When all at once a mighty herd of red-eyed cows he saw
Plowin’ through the ragged skies, and up a cloudy draw

/ Am – C – / / Am – - – / F – - – Am – - – /

Their brands were still on fire, and their hooves were made of steel
Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel
A bolt of fear went through him as they thundered through the sky
For he saw the riders comin’ hard, and he heard their mournful cry

Yipie i-oh, yipie i-ay! Ghost herd in the sky

/ C – - – Am – - – F – Dm – Am – - – /

Their faces gaunt, their eyes were blurred their shirts all soaked with sweat
They’re ridin’ hard to catch that herd, but they ain’t caught ‘em yet’
‘Cause they’ve got to ride forever on that range up in the sky
On horses snorting fire, as they ride on, hear their cry
  
Yipie i-oh, yipie i-ay!  Ghost riders in the sky

As the riders loped on by him, he heard one call his name
“If you want to save your soul from hell a riding on our range
Then cowboy change your ways today, or with us you will ride
Tryin’ to catch the devil’s herd, across these endless skies”

Yipie i-oh, yipie i-ay!  Ghost riders in the sky
Ghost riders in the sky
Ghost riders in the sky

I did it again.

I faced my fears, that mild case of agoraphobia, and/or inertia, and/or
my addictions to my books, puzzles, games, internet, crafts, arts and
the comforts of home.  All those things tend to keep me relatively
isolated here and content in my relative isolation, unless something
intervenes and forces me out among people. 

Having realized long ago that such isloation is hazardous to my mental
health, I have set up a set of circumstances designed to force me out
periodically for an activity that is quite beneficial to my mental
health.  Those circumstances involve my volunteering about a year
ago to drive a vanload of clients from the rehab center in Wasilla,
fifty miles away from home, to the Thursday night Narcotics Anonymous
meetings there in town every other week.

On the Thursdays when I don’t drive, another woman in our group does
the job.  Until I volunteered, she was the only person available
in our group with both the will and the qualifications for the
position, and she could not commit to doing it every week.  The
qualifications include a valid driver’s license, personal liability
insurance and a clean driving record for at least five years.

The rehab clients have opportunities to go to outside AA meetings every
day, but only one opportunity each week for outside NA meetings. 
Getting away from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the rehab center is
important to some of them.  A recovery group focused on all drugs,
not just a single one, is another important consideration.  To
some of the clients, the opportunity to get out someplace where they
have unlimited access to free coffee is also important.  The rehab
center serves decaf.

With so much hingeing on my being there to drive that van, and nobody
else to take over if I’m not there, I have a hard time letting myself
off the hook for that commitment.  Only serious illness or
extremely hazardous weather and road conditions have kept me from
going.  This does not keep me from spending days and daze leading
up to each appointed Thursday, trying to find excuses to stay
home.  Late Wednesday night this week, I was still trying to
weasel out, but I just couldn’t.  I’d need a valid reason, and I
simply didn’t have one.

What I had, in addition to the driving commitment, was a sheaf of
important mail for Greyfox, much of it time-sensitive and
work-related.  I also  had two pickup notices for parcels
that were being held at the post office because they were too big to
fit into our large rural mailbox.  And then there was the handful
of posters for the gun show next weekend that Greyfox wanted me to post
in half a dozen places that hadn’t been open when he went through on
Christmas, or that were farther up the highway and not on his route
between his cabin in Wasilla and “home” up here in the Upper Susitna
Valley.  Last, but not least, I had a shopping list that had been
growing for four weeks.  Two weeks ago, the weather was
legitimately so rotten that nobody, not even I, thought it was
reasonable for me to get out on the highway in it.

A few months ago, I recognized a pattern in my behavior.  I’d
stumble around here for three days or more after each trip to town,
recovering from the physical effects (the symptoms of chronic fatigue
syndrome) from those activities.  As soon as the brain fog cleared
enough for me to start thinking ahead to the next trip, I’d start
dreading the assault on my far-from-healthy physical machine.  I’d
try to think up a valid excuse not to go.  I’d argue with myself
and usually fail to let myself off the hook.  Then, when I got
myself all cleaned up and presentable and made my way to town I would
marvel at my reluctance as I enjoyed the spectacular scenery I pass
through for those fifty miles, and then reveled in the fellowship of the
NA group and took care of the household shopping that wouldn’t
otherwise get done.  Later on, home again, exhausted and debilitated
for the three days to a week that it takes to recover from such a trip,
I’d again start dreading the next one and seeking excuses to stay home.

That’s how it went today, too.  But this was far from a routine
trip.  First of all, I had to inflate that flat right front tire
again.  Then there was that leg of the journey farther up
the valley to take posters to the neighborhood bulletin boards around
Sunshine, where the Talkeetna Spur Road joins the Parks Highway. 
I made that right turn at the highway instead of the usual left that
takes me down the valley to Wasilla, and before I’d gone a mile, I saw
my neighbor Bill, a dog musher, checking his mail.  He saw me and
waved.  It pleases me to have neighbors I know and like, who
recognize my face and seem to be pleased to see me.   Then,
when I topped a hill and rounded a curve, there was Mount McKinley
shining in the sun.  I love our sacred mountain.

Since I was six years old, between 1950 and 1983, I had never lived
anywhere more than three years and seldom got to know my
neighbors.  I’ve been here for over 21 years and there are many
familiar faces.  At Sunshine, I saw Sarah, whose sons Tim and
Duane went through school with Doug.  I suppose for people with
normal social lives such little encounters might not mean much. 
For a recluse such as I, a recluse who loves people, they’re a
joy.  For someone who grew up in cities where neighbors tended to
ignore each other, this community on the edge of the wilderness is full
of wonders.

I headed back down the valley, past our road, made a quick stop at the
spring to fill a jug with water for Greyfox. Back on the road, I headed
on into Willow, posted
posters at the community center and post office, and picked up a
shipment of knives for Greyfox’s business and a box for me from Nova
Scotia that contained a beautiful pair of white (Arctic camo) mukluks
and (I assume this was unintentional, Ren ) a pair and a half of
sox.

Greyfox was worried about me by the time I got to his place at Felony
Flats.  I’d gotten a late start and had many stops and delays
along the way, had to rearrange most of the bulletin boards to make
room for our posters, paused here and there for conversation,
etc.  He had called home to find out if I’d decided not to go
today, and consequently Doug was worried about me, too.  Greyfox
had made up his mind that if I wasn’t there in fifteen minutes, he’d
call the post office to find out if I’d been there yet, and then he’d call
the state troopers to find out if they’d had any accidents reported.

It had been a long time since breakfast and I was starved. 
Greyfox made me a salad and a scrambled egg while I read the grocery
sale ads and watched the kittens play.  By the time I was done
eating the cats had worn themselves out and were napping.

In Greyfox’s chair, Dingus was keeping watch while Buckyball snoozed.

In a box on a bottom shelf, Fullerene slept while Honer sleepily tried to keep watch.

He couldn’t keep those eyes open, so Fullerene took the watch.

We still had a couple of hours before the meeting, so I shopped for new
gloves for Doug and we hit one of the two supermarkets, then Greyfox
dropped me at the rehab.

The meeting was wonderful.  They are commonly wonderful and this
one was uncommonly so.  Even the monthly business meeting
afterward was fun.  I delivered the van and passengers back to
rehab, had a low-carb burger at Carl’s Jr., and toured the other
supermarket.  After sorting our purchases back at Felony Flats
(only left one of my items there with Greyfox and made it home without
any of his stuff this time) we said goodnight and I headed home.

This side of Houston, I ran over a bunny.  An immature arctic
varying hare in its pure white winter phase, with big snowshoe feet and
the smallest ears of all rabbity things, bounded full-speed over the
snow berm at roadside, saw me and did a mid-air turn.  Then it
apparently saw whatever it was that had chased it over the berm in the
first place and bounded back out under my car.  I hate when that
happens.

Just before I got to Willow a state trooper stopped me.  After
asking me how I was doing today and getting a hesitant “okay” from me,
he asked if I knew why he stopped me.  I said, “not really,
no.”  He then asked if I knew that one of my headlights was
out.   I said I wasn’t surprised, that I’d replaced the bulb
several times, but because the lens has cracks and holes, water keeps
getting in and blowing the bulbs.  I explained that I’ve been
trying to find a new lens, but haven’t found one yet.  He went
back to his car and ran my name through his crime computer system and
found that I’m free of wants and warrants, and let me go without a
ticket.  Nice man, that, like every Alaska State Trooper I’ve ever
met.

But I didn’t get away from that roadside stop that easily.  I’d
gotten kinda flustered there as I dug the registration out of the glove
box, found my proof of insurance in one pocket of my wallet and
struggled to slip my license out of another one.  When he handed
everything back to me, I had some trouble getting it all put away
again.  First, I couldn’t find my wallet.  Not back in my
purse, nor on my lap, nor in the glove box, nor down by my feet under
the pedals.  Finally I found it on the floor in the back seat,
where it had slipped between the seats.  The registration kept
jumping back out of the glove box before I could get the door shut on
it.  When I finally did get it cornered in there, I realized that
I’d folded my insurance card inside it and had to get it out
again.  The insurance card wasn’t exactly cooperative at slipping
back into its slot, either.  One of my gloves was still missing by
the time I got home, when it turned up in the back seat

About ten miles short of home, I saw a spectacular meteor.  This
wasn’t any little white streak of a shooting star across the sky. 
It started that way, and then it exploded, and a shower of orange
glowing fragments burst in all directions then faded to black.

Other than all of that, it was an uneventful trip.  Now, as soon
as I wind down I’ll try to sleep.  Tomorrow — uhh, later today, I
mean — the recovery process begins again.  Thank God I don’t have to do it again for two weeks!

The Lightning and
the Lightning Bug

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the
almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the
lightning-bug.”  That quotation occurred to me as, during the past
few days, I have thought about the differences between similar words,
phrases and ideas.  I hope I get a chance tonight to write these
thoughts down, because ideas are perishable goods and I may not have
these particular ideas at a later time. 

My being able to complete these thoughts and post them tonight depends partly
on this computer.  The noise from the CPU cooling fan and another
noise that seems to be associated with the hard drive have been
impelling us to shut down the machine occasionally, when the grinding
becomes alarming.  It goes relatively noiselessly for hours at a
time, and other times grinds and whines on startup and on restart
several times, and then on the next startup it’s gone.  Right now,
it’s a hum of variable pitch and intensity and I’m going to try to
ignore it unless it becomes too insistent to be ingnored.

Other factors bearing on my completing and posting tonight’s blog have
to do with my breathing, the functioning of my hands and other body
parts, and the integrity of the roof over my head.  In a world
that’s uncertain at the best of times, I’m having an extraordinarily
uncertain time right now.

For the definitions with which I’m supporting my thoughts here, I’ve been using http://www.onelook.com.

LordPineapple, responded to my recent “nice” blog, and in particular to this paragraph:

 

This is what he wrote in response to it:

I see nothing wrong in sentiment though, it is a vice of love and not of hate.

Aside from the fact that I was criticizing “sentimentality” and not,
“sentiment,”  I was making no moral or moralistic judgement
concerning the “rightness” or “wrongness” of sentimentality.  I
wrote of its futility, of how it helps nothing and hurts those who
indulge in it.  Terry, on the other hand, by calling it a “vice,”
does appear to be placing a moral judgement on it, condemning it while
seeming to endorse it.

Quick definitions (Moral)

A more detailed definition, from Cambridge Dictionaries Online, is:

Is this ironic?  I disapprove of disapproval.  I
strongly approve of morality, of moral courage and moral behavior, and
just as strongly disapprove of moralism and moralistic behavior. 
I guess that relates to my alignment, “chaotic good.”

And since I’m on the subject of fine distinctions, there’s another
one:  behavior versus the person doing the behaving.  
I’m okay with judging behavior.  I do that all the time, both my
own behavior and that of other people.  I feel not the slightest
twinge or qualm of conscience when I do it.  The way I can manage
to let myself off the hook for being judgmental, for exercising
judgment, is by not judging the people, but only what they do. 
Smart people can do stupid things, ordinary people can do extraordinary
things, and worthwhile people do both worthwhile and totally pointless
things.

I certainly would be disturbed, both in the forefront of my logical
mind and deep down in my conscience if I were to resort to judging even
the behaviors as “right” or “wrong”.  I would consider myself to be totally off-base if I were to judge people that way, because that sort of behavior, to me, is simply wrong. 
Even when I’m being discriminatory where actions are concerned, I
endeavor always to use words with better, more meaningful, useful and
precise meanings than the dualistic “right” and “wrong.”

That’s because for me such extremist, absolutist dualistic judgments
have moralistic overtones as well as being unrealistic.  We live
in a relativistic universe here, in the finite observable part of our
Superuniverse.  Some thoughts, actions and things may be better or
worse than others in one context while being equal to or different from
those same other things in different contexts.  Only the
intellectually lazy or morally blind and heavily moralistically
programmed individual, it seems to me, is capable of seeing things in
rigid black and white terms.

Okay, I’ll have to get back to this again sometime, I think, if it
seems worth getting back to at the time.  The grinding and
growling coming from my computer is growing fierce.

Good night… erm… morning.

Last Water Run of the Year

For anyone so new around here that they don’t know:  we don’t have
running water in our house.  Like many of our neighbors, we get
water about two miles from here, at a clear and sparkling spring beside
the highway.  Our car’s capacity used to be sixty gallons per
trip, but since we started using  2-gallon kitty litter jugs,
putting them in the foot wells and between our old 5-gallon jugs and
buckets, we got seventy gallons today.

The profile pic I have up here now shows me at the spring earlier in
the year, filling a jug.  Today, the freight pallet we have to
stand on to reach the water outflow was so slippery, I had to sprinkle
kitty litter on it for traction.  I carry a can of kittly litter
in the car for traction — the car’s or mine, whoever needs it more.

There was one very welcome aspect of today’s trip:  the weather
had warmed up.  For the past two days, it has been sub-zero here,
in the teens and twenties below.  Today, it got up into the teens
above zero.  That’s Fahrenheit, folks, still below freezing, but
one helluva lot warmer than 20 below.

That’s all there was to the good side, I guess.  On the other
side, I’ve been experiencing a flareup of this damned disease and have
been fatigued, stiff, stumbling and fumbling for days and daze.  I
was counting down the buckets by the time I’d gotten half of them
filled.  Doug was hauling the full ones up the slope to the
parking area, and noticed my countdown when I’d gotten down to five
more buckets to go.  When I got down to three, he volunteered to
fill the rest and said I could go up and figure out how to arrange
things so we could get them all packed in.

The traffic at the spring was heavier than usual.  Two people
showed up while we were filling up, and before we got out of the
parking area a third one drove in.  I think that third guy might
have been starting his New Year’s Eve drinking a bit early.  He
almost got rear-ended because he stopped in traffic instead of pulling
off the highway.  There was room in the turnout, but he just
slowed down and stopped and gawked at the rest of us, the other two
cars behind me, me trying to get out onto the highway but unable to
because he was stopped there in front of me. 

Then he rolled forward and pulled in behind the other cars, sorta, only
with the bed of his truck hanging out into the traffic lane so that I
couldn’t see if there was any oncoming.

We finally made it home and got the water unloaded and into the house
so it won’t freeze.  In warmer weather, sometimes some of the
water gets left out overnight, but in winter it all has to come inside
immediately.

We hadn’t been back very long, and Doug had just gotten back into his
tournament, when Greyfox called and left a hostile message on the
machine.  He was having a bad day.   Earlier, he had
left me a Xanga-gram telling me he was coming up tomorrow, two days
earlier than previously planned, which means he hadn’t gotten my entire
grocery list yet, so I had left a little message on his voice mail
telling him another thing I needed.  HIs message said if I really
wanted it to call him “right now!”

Doug disconnected to free up the phone line and I called because I
really did want it, but of course I won’t be getting it.  It would
be refreshing if sometimes Greyfox would just say what he means, such
as (in this case) “Call me so I can tell you all the reasons I don’t
want to do any more shopping.”

I need to go eat something and find a warmer place to sit.  I
haven’t warmed up since we got back from the waterhole.  I spilled
water on my jeans, got my gloves soaked, and had a generally miserable
time of it down there and it’s only gotten marginally better since I
got home.  Lessseee… getting loaded isn’t an option, so what are
my options now?

I’ll go stir the beans — that’s a high priority task — then I’ll find
some quick food to fix, deal with my blood sugar which is tanking right
about now, then go try to read while my neighbors rush the new year
with their fireworks and gunfire for the next four hours.