Maybe everyone who loses a lot of weight has thoughts like this:  catching sight of myself in a mirror, I was struck by how baggy my clothes are.  I would look like a waif, if the concepts "waif" and "crone" were not mutually exclusive.

I have set myself up to need to get some work done before I crash tonight.  My bed is covered with icy, snowy, dripping spruce boughs, laid out on a sheet over a waterproof layer of flattened feed sacks.  I fervently hope they will be dry enough to work into wreaths long before bedtime.  Meanwhile, I'm working on ribbons, cones, frames, etc., while they dry, and also occasionally sopping up the puddles on my bed lest they find a gap in the waterproof cover.

Loose ends from Thursday's entry:  As I wrote and from time to time since then, I've reflected on my games-and-sports history.  One conclusion I reached is that I used to be a lot less interested in winning games than I was in pleasing people.  I got a lot of negative feedback for being a winner, and in my youth that really hurt.  Another insight involves the relative ease with which I could focus and apply myself to each of those new pursuits then.  It's not that easy any more.

...oh, and probably a hypothesis or two.  I haven't fully processed these memories and insights, haven't concluded whether there is any deeper meaning to find here.

Primarily, this involves chess, archery and pool (billiards, not swimming or any other "pool").  It has been years since I engaged in any of those activities.  Until recently, I hadn't even recognized or considered the similarities between them for me.

In my childhood, I was very good at chess.  I concentrated intently, put a lot of effort into it, and won most of the time.  This wasn't much different from other board games, or from card games, except in the amount of effort and concentration required to win.  At checkers, Chinese checkers, rummy, and other games, I won almost every time I played, but they didn't require the amount of concentrated effort that chess did.  Kids didn't like to play with me, and after one or two defeats, most adults refused ever to play with me again.  I was often accused of cheating.  That was ironic, because at the time I hadn't even the vaguest idea how to cheat.

In my early twenties, working as a day shift bartender, when the bar was nearly deserted, after several occasions on which a customer asked me to shoot a game of pool with him and I responded that I didn't know how to play, one of them offered to teach me.  Once I'd learned the fundamentals, I concentrated intently, put a lot of effort into it, and won most of the time -- very nearly all the time.  Soon, the men I'd played started calling me a pool hustler and stopped asking me to play.  I didn't mind.  Shooting pool was never fun for me:  too much effort and concentration involved.  It was more work than my job was, certainly.

In my early thirties, the man I was living with acquired a compound bow and taught me to shoot it.  After I'd mastered the fundamentals and developed the relevant muscles, I hit the mark almost every time, just as I had done when I learned to shoot a gun.  I enjoyed the activity of archery much more than firearms:  the quiet focus and seeing the flight of the arrows.    I never entered any archery competition.  I never went bowhunting.  I don't enjoy killing animals.  If I needed to live off the land, I'd probably opt to snare hares or something for the protein, but I'd forage for most of my calories.

As I was writing the above, I recalled another, similar activity I'd engaged in and enjoyed:  throwing knives and shuriken.  I learned to throw knives after the pool shooting and before the archery.  The shuriken came later still, in my forties.  That was solitary activity, often indulged late on a summer night after Doug was asleep, out in the mosquitoes under the midnight sun.  A big slab of salvaged foam insulation was my backstop, and I had shredded it by the time I gained enough accuracy to hit the mark every time and lost interest in the sport.

As I said, I don't know what conclusions to draw from all of this, if there are any.  I see connections, patterns, and I just realized that my craps shooting probably fits into these patterns somehow, too.  That's all, for now.

On the way up to Sunshine to vote, as my new old rustbucket climbed the grade out of the Montana Creek gully, I laughed aloud and Doug grunted a query.  I said I'd been thinking of how to word a sign to hang on the back of the car to explain that I can drive just fine but the car isn't capable of keeping up with traffic.  My first idea was just a simple banner saying, "rustbucket."  I told Doug I could shorten it to "heap," but that word is so old and obsolete almost nobody would get it.  We tried several ways of expressing the idea, eventually getting around to modifying some perennial bumper stickers.  I said, "My other car actually runs."  Doug came up with, "I'd rather be driving." 

Pretty lame in retrospect, but our little word game kept us laughing through the miles of slushy roadway and heavy snowfall.   We also got a few laughs out of the wipers, this being the first time in this car that we've needed to use them.  The knob on the dash has a setting for, "intermittent," but the car's idea of intermittent wipers is half a stroke and stop with the wiper in vertical position.  On the next bump, the wiper starts moving again, and doesn't stop. 

The rubber shuddered and dragged noisily after the first stroke or two, and the knob is in an inconvenient position for a driver to operate without taking eyes off the road, so I assigned Doug the job of turning the wipers on when snow built up on my side, off when they got noisy.  He got distracted - no surprise there, he is always getting distracted - but at least voice commands:  "WIPERS!" were less hazardous than feeling and fumbling about for that knob.

On the way up we met a sand truck.  A snowplow was just ahead of us in the road when we turned off at the polling place.  Poll workers were commenting about the healthy turnout.  It is rare to ever encounter lines or waits in the Upper Su Valley, especially in a snowstorm.  Often for past elections, our car has been the only one in the parking lot at the fire hall.  Today there were half a dozen vehicles there when we arrived and at least that many different ones there as we were leaving.  It makes me wonder whether the hot issue for most of them is the bond proposition for schools and libraries (unlikely to pass, if history is any indication) or the crazy race for U.S. Senate.

Unless Joe Miller or Scott McAdams achieves a stunning majority (unlikely, I think), we probably won't know until December, after all the write-in votes have been counted, whether we've got a new Senator, of if Lisa Murkowski has made history by winning a write-in vote.  The last I heard, legal types are still discussing whether Anchorage radio personality Dan Fagan's attempt to thwart Lisa by offering prizes to people (especially those whose names are similar to Murkowski's) for registering as write-in candidates, is a legal exercise of his First Amendment rights or some form of election tampering. 

It used to be that Alaska barely got a mention in national election news, what with our small population and the fact that often a presidential election had already been decided before our polls closed an hour after Californias.  Lately "little" Alaska has figured more largely in national politics than some of us appreciate.  Ah, well, at least we can provide the Lower 48 with a little comic relief.
 

I  had recognized our need for bunk beds several winters ago, after Doug started sleeping on the couch.  The sole source of heat in our home is the wood stove in our front room, a great room that comprises kitchen, office/workroom (formerly a dining area), and the living room, which is also a bedroom.  There was a bed in the front room when we moved in, and no bed in either of the two bedrooms. 

At first, Doug unrolled a sleeping bag in front of the fire.  After it became apparent that this house sitting gig had become a permanent residency, and a coffee table arrived to fill much of the floor space in here, we moved a futon from our old place at Elvenhurst across the highway, into the middle bedroom, and that became Doug's room, but he slept there only in summer.

There are two good reasons for both of us to sleep in the great room in winter:  it is warmer, and there is almost twice the likelihood that the fire won't go out.  I say "almost" twice because I am somewhat more likely than Doug is to wake up and tend the fire if it begins to cool off.  It's only a problem when our sleep cycles coincide, anyhow.  Most of the time, our cycles don't coincide, because he runs on a diurnal cycle of about 26 hours.

He is more than a foot taller than the couch is long, but he adjusted to it in various ways:  curling up, dangling off the edge, propping feet up on one arm, head on the other.  Eventually, after listening to his sleepy sounds of discomfort, I started waking him to move from the couch to the bed whenever I got up, or to move to the couch if he was in my bed when I was ready for sleep.  It was an awkward system, so I asked Greyfox to keep an eye out for a set of bunks.

Ideally, something would have shown up in a dumpster.  A thrift shop or yard sale would have been the second choice.  New furniture is simply beyond our budget.  He called me one day and said he'd found a pair of steel military style bunks for $160, but there were no mattresses.  He didn't think they'd work out, but he thought he'd run it by me anyway.  I agreed:  we need mattresses, really.

And there the matter stood until last summer when two men moved into the cabin beside Greyfox's at Felony Flats.  In warm weather, there is a flea market that materializes sometimes along the strip, up at the end in front of the old abandoned bar.  The first time these two guys loaded their disassembled bunkbed in and onto their compact car, hauled it to the corner and set it up to sell, Greyfox called me.  He said it looked pretty good to him, and had mattresses, but they wanted $550 for it.  We agreed that this was a bit steep for our means.

I don't know how many times they set it up and took it down before they started lowering the price.  I do recall several times when Greyfox related humorous stories about watching their tribulations transporting and assembling it.  When the price started going down, Greyfox and I started developing a proprietary attitude toward that bed.  Once, when they left it out in the rain, Greyfox helpfully went over and covered it with a tarp for them.

I think the price had gotten down as low as $175 the day that Greyfox went over to their place after they'd taken it apart and hauled it home, and negotiated it down to $100.  The guys moved the pieces of the bed frame onto Greyfox's porch, helped him stow the mattresses in his storage shed, and handed him a Minute Maid frozen concentrated orange juice can full of "hardware."  There it stood for days and daze (a couple of weeks, maybe), until my next town trip.

Doug went along to help me load things.  It was raining.  That almost goes without saying.  Throughout the summer of 2010, it rained.  I remember 3 sunny days all summer.  The bed apparently had been put together by an amateur (two amateurs, I later learned) in a home workshop, but I wasn't really worried until Greyfox handed me the can of "hardware."  It consisted of a handful of half-inch wood screws.  I imagined an earthquake, or maybe just a restless night on my top bunk, and my beloved Kid being squashed when the bed fell apart.

Anyhow, we got all the pieces of the frame into the hatch of my '87 Subaru wagon, Blur, and Greyfox gave us a big sheet of black poly to cover the part of it that stuck out the back.  Doug tied a red bandanna on the tail end of it, and we headed home.  That was the trip on which we lost our exhaust system going through the road construction area, or maybe it was the next trip.  We transferred the bed into the storage cabin and wrapped the black poly around it (Doug said it looked like the monolith from 2001) so that when our tomcats got into their inevitable pissing contest over whose territory it was, the bed would still be mine.  This was before I got that storage cabin cleared out enough so that we could shut the door.

Several weeks later, on our way home from the laundromat, we brought the mattresses with us, leaving them in the car to keep the cats away from them.  We had been working on clearing furniture out of the way of the new bed, and I'd made enough space on the floor of a back room to lay out a sleeping bag in case it took more than a day to put the new bunk together.  Finally, one day, we took the old bed apart, moved it out by the wood pile, covered it with a tarp (sold it later for $20), and started putting the bunk together.  We had thought we were going to need to do some drilling and bolting for security, but as we looked it over we discovered that there were some bolts in that can with the screws, and some sturdy brackets already bolted to the boards.

In the assembly process, we had to stop halfway through to make a quick trip up to Moore's Hardware for a missing bolt and two nuts.  It all went together in a few hours, but it was far from simple or easy.  Once again, as many times before, I had occasion to be glad of the high IQs in our family.  There was no diagram, the scrawled markings didn't match, and there were holes that did not match up, like a tab here that was supposed to go into a slot here, but the slot was way-the-hell over there. 

When I told Greyfox that Doug and I had finally concluded that there had once been two sets of bunks and we had gotten pieces of both sets, he said that the guys had once mentioned to him that they had originally had two bunkbeds.  Nobody mentioned what happened to the other one, and that's irrelevant, anyhow.  I appreciate my new bed.  It has a rustic look I like -- 3 drawers underneath have rope handles and the whole thing is glued together apparently out of scrap lumber.  If it was cloth, it would be patchwork; if stone, mosaic.  The mattresses are foam blocks resting on plywood platforms, good support and fine comfort.

No ladder came with it.  Access to my top bunk is from the top of my bedside table, which I reach by first climbing onto a milk crate.  The bedside table blocks access to one of the drawers, and that one is filled with quilts that are big enough for a queen-size bed, of no use to us in this house, but too good to get rid of.  Another side table, on which rests a rope-handled wooden chest containing much of my rock collection, blocks access to the drawer at the foot.  Those are my clothes in there, and when I want them, I move the rocks and the table -- no big deal.  Doug's clothes are in the accessible drawer in the middle.

This photo was taken months ago, before I had gotten my library sorted and shelved.  Books are piled everywhere, including on and around the rock chest.  Koji is partially visible in the sunbeams behind that chest, on Doug's bed.  Granny Mousebreath (still missing at this writing) snoozes on the windowsill.  The objects topped with large cushions in the right foreground are what we call, for want of a better term, the "mushrooms," because their tops are bigger than the supporting objects.  The far one is atop a bookcase that parallels the foot of the bed.  The near one rests on a stack of two suitcases full of my surplus clothing.  In the aggregate, the musrooms are simply cat furniture.  Our cats enjoy basking in the heat of the woodstove (which stands in the approximate POV of this shot), watching the flames.

Okay, that's the story of the bed.  Gotta go now and check the fire.  Doug has been asleep in the bottom bunk since about 10:00 AM.  He stayed awake as long as he could this morning so that we will have time to go up to Sunshine tomorrow after I get up, before he goes to sleep, to vote, and do a little shopping at Cubby's and Moore's. 

Sometimes, I  handle crises swiftly and well; sometimes not so well.  Yesterday, I was cleaning out a long-neglected, nasty, dank and dirty corner under the kitchen sink and countertop.  It had been used to store cleaning products, tools and hardware before I moved in.  I inherited some items under there from previous residents and added more of my own.  Finding anything under there was always a chore, and more and more so as the clutter grew.  It was a job of spelunking to get all the way back into the under-counter corner, and nobody had dared it for years, just pushing things farther back to make room for new stuff.

After I'd put on my headlamp, crawled in there, and pulled everything out, I noticed that I had 3 cans of WD40 aerosol penetrating oil.  One felt full, but had no spray nozzle on top (a good explanation for why it was so rusty on the outside but still full), of the other two, both of which were nearly empty, one had a nozzle that would fit the full can.  I pulled it off its empty can and stuck it down into the hole in the top of the full one.  It sprayed.  I took my finger off the nozzle and it kept on spraying, so I quickly removed the nozzle.  Before I could get my thumb over the hole to stop the spewing, I'd gotten a spray over my glasses and face.

By the time I'd located a small jar, taken it and the can outside, and let the can empty itself into the jar, I had WD40 on my hands, wrists, and shirt as well as my face.  I washed up and cleaned up the mess.  Then I started feeling nauseated, and read the cautions on the label:  avoid inhaling fumes and avoid contact with skin.  I could still smell the stuff on my hands, so I washed up again.  While I was cleaning my glasses, one of the nose pads came off and got lost.  Doug and I searched for it and failed to find it.  That's something that's going to need to be fixed, when I can get to town.

The nausea concerned me, so I went online to check out poison control, got the phone number for the poison control hotline, called and learned that the inhalation was more dangerous than the skin contact.  I was advised to go outside and get some fresh air, and to call 911 if I experienced any shortness of breath.  Amazingly, considering my chronic asthma and emphysema, I didn't.  It was too cold out there to just stand around breathing the air.  I asked Doug to wipe down the area of the spill while I put on Koji's head collar and leash, then I took him for a leisurely walk out to the mail box by the highway.

Along the way, reading tracks in the fresh snow, I made an interesting discovery.  I can recognize the distinctive tracks of three different neighborhood dogs.  Buddy, a beagle, and Rusty the chihuahua, always run together, and their tracks are unmistakable among those of bigger dogs.  One of the biggest dogs, Bear, always walks with his human, who uses a walking stick, making their tracks pretty easy to identify.  The thing that most distinguishes Koji's trail from the others is that everyone else's is relatively straight.  My dog likes to go from one side of the road to the other, checking his p-mail and smelling everything.

New snow last night, a couple of inches, and temps hanging right around freezing then and now, gray sky in all directions -- maybe it will rain, maybe snow some more.  We had about three days of summer this year.  Anchorage set an all-time record for consecutive days of rain: 29.  Up here in the valley, I don't know if anyone even keeps statistics like that.  It rained all the time, seemed like.  Doug and I found it convenient to catch rainwater for washing-up purposes, instead of hauling it from the spring.  Hauling only drinking water really cut down on the labor for us.  I used the same buckets we'd used last winter for melting snow and storing the meltwater, lined up under the eaves.

Last winter's abundant snow and this summer's unceasing rain had me all set up for snowfall.  But when fall came, we got windstorms (a rarity here until recently), bare trees, and days and days without any precip.  Now that there's snow on the ground, I suppose it is time to cover the big east-facing window with poly sheet, the Alaskan trailer trash answer to storm windows.  The kid and I have been covering the other windows one by one, but that one faces the road (and that swift, sweet, dog team-in-training that passes several times a day), the muskeg, the sunrise... and each year I put off putting that distorting covering on it until it gets too chilly in here for comfort.

Another thing I've been putting off is making yet another followup call to the firewood guy.  Scotty told me first time I called that he'd get to me in a week or so.  I waited almost a month, and called him again.  He said that time that he'd make the first delivery "Thursday" and have all four cords here "by the weekend."  That was supposed to be last Thursday, not today.  Gotta check in with Scotty, see if he's okay, find out what's up.

Seeya later.  Still have a lot of catching up to do after my lengthy blogging hiatus.  I haven't yet told the story of the complicated bunk bed, but here's a picture anyway:

My next photo upload will probably be the shots of the trailing climbing nasturtiums in hanging baskets on the porch last summer, unless something new and more appropriate to the current season comes up before I get that done. 

It might be accurate to say I "totaled" my car, since all 3 mechanics I have consulted declined even to look at it after I described its condition.  But "totaled" implies, to most people, a wreck, a collision, or something of that sort.  All I did to total my car was drive over a bump.

Blur, shown above at the spring, now up on blocks in my yard, is the successor to Streak, another silver 1987 Subaru wagon, identical except that Streak had a roof rack.  Streak was replaced by Blur when Greyfox learned that it would cost more to fix the drive axle than it would cost to buy another old rustbucket used car.  Streak had been okay before that axle went bad, a reasonably adequate, somewhat reliable set of wheels.  Blur turned out to be something special because his former owner was a mechanic.  He had installed a manual choke that made the car easy to start in cold weather, and had made some modifications to the engine that made me need to pay attention to my speed.  I'd be cruising along, glance down, and discover to my chagrin that I was going 85 MPH in a 65 zone.  One night, around 2 AM, I was passing through Willow when an oncoming State Trooper flashed his headlights at me.  That time I was doing 75 in a 45.  Nice trooper.

Anyhow, I loved driving Blur despite his tendency to overreact to my leadfootedness.  The only cars I've liked any better than him were my MGB and the X1/9.  Blur's advantage over either of them was his cargo capacity.  I could haul about 60 gallons of water in jugs and buckets in that hatch.  I wasn't hauling water when I hit the bump that killed Blur.  That time, the hatch was full of clean laundry in baskets, a bunch of groceries and other supplies, and some dumpster score that Greyfox had been accumulating for us since the last trip to town.

On the previous trip back from Wasilla, going over some rough road in a construction zone, my muffler had been knocked loose and had to be replaced.  A series of trips back and forth across those bumpy miles of gravel might have contributed to the damage that ultimately killed Blur.  There was a loud thud from the back when I went over a barely noticeable bump at a bridge approach, and a few miles later, concerned about continued thumps, bumps and dragging sounds, I pulled over and called AAA.  After the disabled wagon was deposited in my driveway and we started unloading the cargo, I noticed that a big, dirty, rusty coil spring was protruding into the cargo area through a huge jagged tear in the left rear wheel well. 

I distinctly remembered having loaded a bag of grapes and bananas on top of that wheel well.  When we couldn't find them, I assumed that they had fallen out the hole somewhere along the way.  Next day, in daylight, I found the bruised fruit about 5 feet away, on the other side of the car, where it had been flung by the spring.

I made some phone calls.  The consensus of my mechanically inclined friends was that Blur was a hopeless case.  I made a few more calls, hoping to find an old Subaru body into which I could have somebody bolt Blur's oh-so-special engine.  A couple of the guys actually laughed at me.  Ray said Subies just keep going until they fall apart, and Morg talked about something he called, "tin bugs," that like to eat Subaru bodies.

Greyfox got all stressed out over the necessity of (a) buying me a "new" vehicle, or (b) ferrying supplies the 50 miles up the valley every month or two.  I tried to reassure him that I didn't expect him to rush to the rescue.  I had been living out here without a vehicle for 5 years when he gave me his old X1/9 after it had been rear-ended while parked, the frame was bent, and his insurance company paid off on it as a total loss.  That was in Pennsylvania, and that (totally wrecked, uninsured) car got me (at the time, an unlicensed driver) back to Alaska, then on a 28,000-mile road trip around the Southwest one winter and back to Alaska again, but turned out not to be suited to the weather and road conditions here.  Greyfox and I shared a series of vehicles until he decided I needed one of my own and bought Streak for me.  As much as I enjoy having wheels, I can't afford to buy myself even the cheapest old rustbucket and I'd rather resign myself to hitchhiking, as I have done for most of my life, than stress out over car ownership.

Some weeks later, a friend of Greyfox's told him he knew a woman whose mother was giving her a newer car, leaving her with an old Subaru station wagon for sale.  She said it needed a new CV joint, but she had been driving it that way for a year or two.  She also said she'd had the car for ten years and had replaced the engine three times.  Greyfox saw it, was impressed by the condition of the interior and the relative absence of rust on the outside.  He said that someone had screwed and bolted bumpers and bits of trim on, and he took that as a sign that someone cared for the car.  I thought he was probably right about that and didn't mention my further surmise, that it was a sign the car was falling apart.

Greyfox paid $500 for it, a red 1985 Subaru wagon.  He kept it in Wasilla for a couple of weeks, got a friend with mechanical skills to look it over and grease the offending CV joint.  Meanwhile, he drove it several times and raved about what a sweet vehicle it was.  Right up until a day or two before he brought it to me, everything he told me about the car was positive:  it has a moon roof and a roof rack, clean upholstery, aftermarket fog lights (one of which is burned out), good heater... then he mentioned that it apparently needed an oil change because the oil was "awfully black," and that oil was leaking onto a hot part of the engine, smoking and stinking.  The "CV joint" problem, he assumed, was related to the shimmy that occurred at around 55 MPH.

One day, he drove up here, presumably at under 55 MPH, to deliver the car, then hitched back to Wasilla, since we had jointly decided that I should get the shimmy fixed immediately, before driving it further.  I started looking the car over and determined that the suspension was in bad shape - bouncy, bouncy all 'round.  I called Ray, made an appointment, then started making a list of things I wanted him to do, beginning with the oil change and putting my snow tires on.  The car was over at Ray's shop for a week or so before he finally got it in and looked it over.  He called one day and said he'd done the tire changeover, oil change, and installed a new oil filter.  The front drive axle was bad, the strut towers were so rusted out it would be futile to try and fix the suspension, and the oil leak was coming from the head gasket.  He said it wouldn't be cost-effective to try to fix it, he wouldn't even consider switching the engine out for Blur's, and called my new red car a "money pit."

I discussed with Ray the measures I could take to keep the rustbucket running as long as possible.  He recommended not loading it with more than 15 gallons of water at a time, keeping my speed down to avoid the shimmy, not driving on bumpy roads more than necessary to get from here to the highway and back, check the oil every time I go anywhere and keep it topped up.  I have made two little water runs to the spring, and one laundromat run to Wasilla.  I have no plans to go anywhere else until election day in a week, when I'll drive up to Sunshine to vote and buy 40 pounds of kitty litter at Cubby's so I can avoid overloading the car with it on my next trip home after the laundromat.

On the last laundry trip, I drove to Wasilla and back at about 40 MPH in third gear, to prevent the suspension-killing, axle-breaking shimmy.  I pulled over frequently to let cars get past.  I whimpered once, and Doug asked me what was wrong.  I moaned, "I'm driving like a little old lady."  He replied, "at least you're tall enough you don't have to peer out through the space between the dash and the steering wheel."  Ha ha.

Currently, sleet is falling noisily into the layer of dry leaves on the ground.  Leaves have been off the trees for weeks.  Snow is in the forecast.  These images are NOT showing current conditions, but those in my yard in July and August this year.

I am just now getting photos from last summer cropped, resized and uploaded because I am learning by baby steps to use our new photo processing software.  Doug downloaded this software because, he said, PhotoShop was too "bloated" in terms of system resources.  This, after he had originally sold me on PhotoShop because of its versatility ("bloat" in his current opinion).   At that time, I had been contentedly using the simple software that came with my old point-and-shoot Kodak, my first digital camera.  Ah, well, they say that learning new things will help keep Alzheimer's at bay.

The photos below were captured with my Fuji FinePix S602Zoom, whose multifarious multiplex features I am still learning.  I now have yet another digital camera, a little Nikon CoolPix that Greyfox acquired at a yard sale for $5.00.  It had corroded batteries stuck in it, a situation I was able quickly to correct with tweezers, Q-tips and white vinegar.  Very soon, Greyfox determined that learning to use it was too much trouble, and gave it to me.  However, it has minuscule internal memory and I keep neglecting to order a new memory card for it.  When I do, I'll have still more mental exercise for my anti-Alzheimer's efforts.

On the bear's first visit to my yard last July, it chomped into a storage tub (above) that is filled with wood chips and pieces that I had picked up around the chopping block and saved for dry kindling.  I noticed the bite mark in the tub only later, my attention having been captured at first by the water jug below, which had been moved from the far side of the porch and left where I almost stumbled over it coming out my front door.

I don't know whether the bear was a black or a grizzly.  A big sow griz with two or three cubs (or one with two and another with three) had been sighted in the area, and black bears had been seen around here as well.  By measuring the distance between fang holes in the purple tub, I estimated the width of the bear's lower jaw at about 5 inches.

Around this time, I became attuned to night sounds.  Neighborhood dogs were barking a lot, and there were gunshots going off in several directions, late into the night.  Some of my neighbors have motion sensors on their yard lights, and I can picture some guy being awakened by dogs barking, grabbing his rifle or shotgun and blasting away, either at shadows or at actual bears.

Each morning for a while, I would find new signs that a bear or bears had come through my yard.  I had been propagating Siberian wild strawberries, training runners into ten to twelve-inch containers after discovering accidentally that they grew much larger that way than in the ground, and that the berries were not only bigger and more numerous, but also dangled high enough off the ground to escape being nibbled by snails and small rodents.  I don't recall how many times -- at least 4 or 5 -- I righted overturned pots in the morning, tended flattened strawberry plants, and smoothed out paw prints in the pots (below).

The bear(s) apparently used my garden path at least some of the time.  It is entirely likely that the path, which existed before I moved in here, had been originally made by bears.  It meanders like a bear trail through the woods.  However, in some places the bear's new trail diverged from the old path, off through tall stands of fireweed.  All the weeds and wildflowers around the compost heap in my back yard had been beaten flat by the first of August.

Besides browsing through the compost, the bear(s) tasted some of my potted bunching onions, but apparently did not like the flavor.  None of the onions was dug or pulled up, nor were they bitten off near ground level -- just tasted and left.

I have no photos to show you the havoc and demolition of the bear's final visit last August.  That morning, I went out, watered and groomed the hanging baskets of nasturtiums on my front porch (photos another day, probably - they have not been saved from my camera yet) then went back in and rested before following the path out to the strawberries and beyond, to the rhubarb.  When I finally did get as far as the strawbs, all was chaos:  pots tumbled every which way, including my only potato plant, which had been in its own big (5 gallon) pot perched up on a fallen log off the trail in a supposedly safe place.

Not even thinking about documenting the damage, I just started picking things up, straightening bent-over plants, righting upturned pots, as I followed the path toward the rhubarb garden.  Then, about midway along the path, I found the first bear dropping.  A bit farther on, I found a scattering of bear scat, then more, extending over a distance of about thirty feet along the path.  This was weird, highly unusual, to see bear shit dropped as if the bear was running and going at the same time.  Usually, it is found in piles, looking much like human excrement.

More shocks were waiting for me in the rhubarb area.  My 'barb is in raised planters made of chicken wire lined with poly sheeting.  Every one of them had been dug into, roots exposed, wire bent down and soil scattered.  I had a small conifer in a big pot sitting atop one such raised planter, a huge spread of trailing nasturtium growing from another, and several potted clumps of Shasta daisies.  All those pots had been knocked about, scattered as if in a rage of destruction.

I had heard a lot of shooting and dogs barking the previous night, beginning somewhere southwest of here and ending up to the north.  The scenario I pieced together from the evidence was that the bear had been wounded and/or pursued by dogs, perhaps surprised in the act of digging up my rhubarb roots.  It was evidently fleeing through my yard.  Later on, talking to neighbors and reconstructing events, we more or less concluded that this had been the bear shot by Joe, who lives at the end of our block to the north.  Anyhow, that was the last evidence of bears in my yard this year.