May 4, 2005

• It’s me, not Greyfox.  I’m at the library.  Miss my comfortable ergonomic chair, but am really enjoying the high-speed connection.  That’s something I never experienced before.  Wow!

  
  

  Doug and I have left a message for Rosabelle, telling her thanks for the offer of help replacing our computer.  Now I suppose we’ll just wait.  Doug is at another computer here now, looking over a PDF file on how to recover data off a defective hard drive.  If possible, we’re not going to call upon professional help.  What’s at stake, mostly, is my photo files on the old drive.  I was such an idiot not to back it all up as soon as we got the thing back last time.  At least Doug did back up his fiction files.  I was spending most of my time working on my unfinished cataloguing project on old entries here.  Too many top priorities all at once.  **rueful grin**

  
  

  Still in the camera’s memory are pics I took last Friday, of the spring floods in the neighborhood.  Recently, I posted a shot of a little puddle in the middle of the icy/snowy muskeg.  Then it rained some more, then the sun came out.  The thaw progressed so fast that the muskeg flooded right up to the edge of the road and over it in a few places.  It’ll be old news by the time we get the new machine and get back online at home, but I’ll probably post the pics then, anyway.

  
  

  The frogs over there in the swamp are noisy now.  Their chirps (little arctic wood frogs that spend the winters buried in the frozen mud) dominate all the other sounds for a week or two during breakup, while they’re mating.  Mating is on other wild minds around here, too.  The whooping cranes have been whooping and swooping over the muskeg, and the day I took the flood pics there was an American robin singing in the top of a tree near the one where I got the eagle pic last week.  Doug heard a duck in the muskeg a few nights ago, and inferred from the sounds that it was eating frogs.

  
  

  Here in Willow, 23 miles down the Valley from home, there’s a spring green haze of new leaves in the birch forest.  At home, the birches and poplars have flower catkins but no leaves yet, and down in Wasilla, another 20-some miles away from home, summer is a lot closer still.  At home, most of the snow is gone from open areas but the shady spots in the woods and near the buildings still have deep snow.

  
  

  I’m still taking my vitamins and other supplements like a good little girl, but I’m not enjoying it.  That first flush of energy and well-being brought on by the ephedra, NADH, etc., has passed.  True to form, I grabbed the energetic rush and ran with it, right into the wall.  Then Greyfox reminded me I need to pace myself.  That’s where I am now, having learned (once again) that just because it feels like a remission, it may not last more than a day, or a few hours.

  
  

  Was it screaminginmyhead  who asked where I got the ephedra?  I’ll bet some of you remember — I blogged about Greyfox’s stash when I found it while cleaning house.  When it was getting close to the beginning of the ban, he started buying up all he could find.  We’ve a hoard, enough to last us the rest of our lives, maybe, unless he gets money hungry and starts selling it off.  There has been some news suggesting it’s going to be available again, a court decision overruling the FDA’s ban.  How the holy hell, I wanna know, can they allow free, unrestricted access to SUGAR, and even let people buy it with food stamps, while outlawing medicinal herbs?

  
  

  I still haven’t decided which direction to go when I leave the library.  I could go down the valley and visit Greyfox or back home, “pace myself” and read yet another book.  I’ve been consuming high quality fiction at the rate of about a book a day.  Each trip to the library nets less of what I consider high-quality.  One part of me dreads when I finally run out of the recreational reading.  Another, more virtuous part says it will be good for me, forcing me to get into some non-fiction for a change. 

  
  

  I might even drag out the old laptop, see if it will still boot up and let me use notepad to get some writing done.  I might do it if I run out of reading material, but I’m far too self-indulgent to simply start writing for the fun of it, unless that wild urge happens to hit me out of the blue.  Stranger things have happened.  I’m determined and committed, anyhow, not to reawaken the PlayStation addiction.  Not that one waste of time is any more virtuous than another, but at least while I’m reading books there’s no repetitive stress injury. 

  
  

  If Doug and I both start feeling energetic and virtuous at the same time, and the weather cooperates, we will get some work done on the roof, fershure.  We agree that now, while we have no computer, is the best time to do that.  So far, our wake/sleep patterns, the weather, and our respective physical conditions have not coincided to get anything done.

  
  

  So, that’s what’s up with me, for now.  I’ve no idea when I’ll get to the library again, but when I do you’ll be the first to know.

  
  

  

  • 6:09 pm
  • 8 Comments