Watch This Space!

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Today I have come to the conclusion that I will continue to live the ongoing half-life for some time to come so I will take a sabbatical from this blog to the end of October or longer. I wanted so badly to show you the photos of the new place but do not wish to impose on Gayle and her computer any more than I have to. The three of us are getting along remarkably well considering that we were bought together in the course of fate and an otherwise standard real estate transaction but we are all looking forward to the day when we can re-establish two separate nests once more. We are all living and working in the rug canyons between piles of full moving boxes, both theirs and mine. It sort of reminds me of once living in the Katlady's boarding house in a huge brick Victorian ... well, except that she had no intention of moving anywhere at the time.

Wayne is doing the classic frantic rush to get the heavy and nasty jobs done at their new place before his surgery next week and Gayle is doing the related fruitless fretting and damage control. The good news is that I have convinced Gayle to start a blog about their new start-from-bare-earth homestead. She writes very well and will have plenty of stories about their shoe-string adventures as they develop. All I have to do now is remind her to take her camera along, right Mushy?

As with our long down times at the ranch, my imagination has been in high idle with all the possibilities and potential here. All must be planned around the recent market tank and a new tight budget in mind now. Lots of bang-for-the-buck projects on the slate so watch this space come November! Red's uber-geek son promised to come through for me with something reliable in the way of a computer system and then I will be back in full blog force! Hopefully he will also be able to retrieve all the cool unpublished photos which I had taken previously on the ranch. .


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Still here ... Part 2

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Sigh, Babzy's right with her last comment; it's been a whole week without an update. I was doing pretty well for a while but the last two weeks have seen a rapid decline in my health and I have been getting very little done as a result. New moving rescue plans have come and gone like the passing of the sun out here. And I just can't write all I wish to when I am this down on all levels.

Mind you, the day started out with a pleasant surprise. Brou and Daisy got me up at dawn to let them out (which is not a pleasant event for a non-morning person) but when I opened the door, we startled two mule deer grazing 30 feet away. The dogs could not have been more pleased and spun themselves into a yapping, yiping torrent of blurred fur which soon disappeared in a fruitless pursuit. I briefly thought about all the hunters out here in the canyons this weekend for the mule deer hunt who just spent the night shivering in tents and I gleefully dove back into the still pleasantly warm bed.

The latest plan calls for moving help tomorrow but I am not really prepared for it in any way. I am just feeling gawd-awful physically sick right now. If we do get the latest kinks worked out, if they do arrive and if we do get the place finally packed up, I will be off-line until probably some time in October unless I make it over to Red's to borrow his computer for an update. We'll just have to play that by ear, I guess. It may take a while but I will be back as soon as I can.
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Getting Buzzed

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I won't be doing any new posts on the possible move of Rat Town to the mesa top until a couple of important exploratory phone call messages are returned. A curious superstition that I picked up from the boss at a bike shop was to never talk about a deal more than necessary. He'd rip by on a roll saying something like "Hey, we might have the Munch Mammoth sold to Leno" and be gone. Somewhere in there, I was supposed to start the computer and paper trail rolling. When I grabbed him by the scruff once and sat him down to explain his abrupt and cryptic messages, he confessed his obsessive superstition; "If you talk too much too soon about an exciting deal, you will jinx it. You-will-queer-the-deal!" That curious superstition stuck with me even after I moved on. So, right now, you know as much as we do about the possibility of a move. Mum's the word then, loose lips sink ships!
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Fine then, I will talk about the various man-birds flying over and say no further about the subject most on our minds this week.
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Above is an assortment of low-flying military birds (two B1s and a pair of F-18s - thanks, Buck and FHB) which flew over the Rat in the last couple of weeks. The photos might not be great but the boys don't exactly warn you ahead of time or allow for digital cameras to set themselves up for a shot. It is the sound which I wish I could share with you; for a couple of old farts out in the middle of nowhere, there is nothing more exciting than having the hair on the back of your necks stand straight up as you rush to catch a second-long glimpse of war birds on a mission.
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Above is a more low-key buzzing run. We had heard of the flying pipeline inspectors but had not seen any fly up our little canyon until this year. There is more than one gas field operator who has cursed these planes after slamming their heads into the steering wheels of their trucks when they thought the low flyer would rip the roof right off their cabs.

In this shot, the pilot is climbing up a little before sweeping into a wide curve and dropping down again to inspect another long straight run of pipe. You can clearly hear the throttling up and down as they approach and then disappear into the distance. Given the outspoken geology of the canyonlands, aerial pipeline inspection is a challenging and dangerous profession. I have been working on a blog friend to return to the southwest and do this job for a living, to no avail. It would appear that all ladies 'of a certain age' will eventually succumb to practicality and common sense (taunt, taunt, taunt!).

Meanwhile, I'm thinking it sure would be nice to know the pilots, maybe even have them land on the road out front and taxi in for lunch once in a while. We welcome friendly visitors in all conceivable forms of conveyance. The future Rat Town will have hitching posts and wheel chocks.

Hopefully, I will be back by Thursday with some good news and an update on the moving possibilities.
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Eroding the High Road

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While the photo above does not portray the erosion of the road which threatens to lock us into a very poor and sporadic alternative route, it does show the same severity of creek erosion at the very heart of this latest concern. You can see the wide and biting swing of the creek into the road bank above it. The creek has condemned as much as a half mile of road at a time with its ravenous appetite. Such stretches of road on our private lands were never restored for grazing by their principal users when they no longer served their immediate purposes. In other words, we were losing ground on both sides; to the wild and unpredictable creek and to those who sought to avoid it at the cost of our good and solid lands.
. I cautiously stepped a few feet closer to the edge to show you what happens when the creek takes another bite and the clay walls submit to the logical consequences. Sometimes you are warned of imminent collapse when you see a long stress crack three foot in from the bank's top, sometimes not. It might support a mega-ton rig as it did this morning or it might let loose under something as light as our pick-up truck.

In these latter days, lawyers are driving to limit their corporate liabilities and their bean-counters are pressing for foolish nickel and dime cost savings. They are trashing previous policies of helping landowners in other non-cash ways and I am wondering if we should close access to roads on our private land which they build but refuse to maintain to reasonable safety standards. To me, liabilities exist on both sides of the fence but I see mostly us on the giving side lately. Any advice and suggestions on this one?
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In the meantime, we made our trip up top to explore new home site options. In a future post, I will show the site which Mark, Slim and I selected during Thursday's drive around. It is still highly tentative and largely rests in the hands of the newest and very rude gas player out here as to its feasibility at all. This new outfit has even appalled and ruffled the usually unflappable Slim with its 'because we can' attitude of insufferable arrogance and its shameful under-handedness so far. The bad apple has arrived and the rest of the barrel will suffer from their greed and callousness.

Photos above and below show part of the new access road if we choose to relocate. It is uniformly wider than the road we have endured for two years now and has the advantage that it does not traverse the creeks and wide washes that our current road does. It winds down from the mesa top to the canyon bottom and crosses the killer wash with the help of a very respectable bridge which is open 24/7. This is the same bridge which we hope to reach after enduring the goat path.
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If the Rat can make it out on our own crumbling canyon roads, then these roads will be a snap to navigate with minimal damage. The question is, will it make it that far without serious damage or complete disaster?
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As the Road Turns

.We took a drive 'up top' last Sunday through our connecting canyon which is Mark's confessed favorite pure leisure drive. In this photo (if you click and enlarge it), you can almost see where we would previously drive straight ahead instead of taking a new curve off to the right. If you attempted that now, you would plunge over a cut a dozen feet deep, probably taking out a high pressure gas pipeline in the process. Ill-advised.

In case you missed the heads up, I am about to get metaphorically obnoxious here so return your tray to the upright position and extinguish all smoking guns.

Just like that road, we have found that what seemed like the clear and obvious path of our plans out here can change in a matter of months or even from hour to hour. The Rock of Damocles was a minor concern but what a gas field rep said yesterday was not. What he learned yesterday was that the five mile road to our Rat Town was not classified as a road used by several gas field operators. What that meant, ominously, was that if the creek gnawed further into the hard rock of the mesa walls in a few places and washed out this elevated road, it could be officially abandoned ... and not replaced. As you might imagine, this was not joyous news to these two people living at the very end of it. The alternative routes are just as seasonally affected (or more so) and would add at least an hour to our established and already prolonged access to civilization.

Now I am wondering if the delay in receiving our pre-fab new buildings was not but more benevolent works of ethereal allies. Having pragmatically ignored such synchronicity in the past to my detriment, I am inclined to have the new buildings delivered 'up top', far removed from these crumbling roads and the The Rock of Damocles . This is where the oddball and the engineer often clash with a brilliant display of sparks, where the unseen and intuitive collide with calculable hard data modeling.

Tomorrow, I would like for the two of us to journey up top once more, to revisit that area which we had both considered a good future home site last August and then compare it with the other possibilities Mark has come across since then. It may well help decide if we should change our time-line abruptly now or remain in the Rat under the Rock until further notice.

I will return in a few days with the results of our exploratory trip. Rat Town might well arise three hundred feet above my lofty dreams of just last month, then again, it might not. So many logistical, natural and human factors to weigh in so little time.
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Movie Trailer Milestone

First photo: The infamous moving trailer, 45' of past life memories. But we made new progress this week after a year's hiatus. What had stopped us from probing further was a harmless looking butcher block table. Back when, BamBam the pricey professional mover and his crew had managed to break not just one of its legs out but one entire corner off the block itself. Since it would no longer stand up on its own, they inverted it and placed it on top of a very long Eastlake dresser. Why that dresser didn't develop a swayback touching the floor defies physics. When we tried to move it last Spring, all that gave was my knee. I heard a sickening "s-h-r-i-c-c-c!!!" followed by seeing a nice field of yellow stars on gray which always tells me that something is going to hurt for a l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g time. I moaned and gimped around in a drugstore brace through that following winter. And that behemoth block table stayed right where it was, blocking any further unloading of our belongings entrapped beyond.

But enough was enough and it was time to start unloading furniture and boxes again. The lift gate batteries had died in the interim so Mark fired up the skid steer and ever-so-slowly lifted the tail gate into a lockable position level with the trailer floor. Then he dragged over a set of stairs which had been offering ascension to nowhere in particular back in the sage.

It had been a while since I had been inside the trailer. Previous visits only reminded me that so much of our past life was held hostage by that table and I would retreat into a bottomless funk. Today would be different - we now had a powerful ally in Mr. John Deere. I was able to tighten up the through bolts in the block enough to keep it together for the move, cinched the brace around my knee and we attacked. The monster fought back as viciously as it had the year before and we fell back. Before long, we had devised a ramp of book boxes to slide the block down into a waiting two wheeled dolly and Mark carefully trundled it out to the deck. Now came the real beauty of the plan; Mark relocated one of the fork lift arms (photo 2) until both would fit between the legs of the butcher block. Why relocate only one fork? Because it is a BEAR to reposition any of them on a good day! Everything worked as planned for a change and soon the block was gently placed down on the front porch.

I only wish the skid steer could have put the butcher block right into its place in the kitchen. It would be a while before we came up with some arrangement which wouldn't destroy what was left of my back or knee. I finally settled on wrapping old tie-down straps around the block and my upper arms and we gave it a try. Ohmigawd! I have never been on such a long walk in such a short space in my life! The straps burned furrows into my arms and I felt as though my heels were embedding themselves in the floor under the dead weight (strike up the Volga Boatman dirge here). There was a lot of "Oh ---!, put it down, put it down, put it down!!!", desperate panting, and a lot of "Okay, let's try it again." That eternal trudge was only up two short steps and about 25 feet across the Rat but it had felt like a forced march through Death Valley and back. Remind me to NEVER, EVER buy something that heavy again, okay? Ahhh ... but it sure looked great (photo 3), imposing itself back into our domestic life as it had so seemingly long ago. We will also sleep more confidently through the winter gales knowing that the butcher block is now pinning the Rat tenaciously to this planet Earth.

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More Important Rules of Life (from sis Ann)
I have tested each one of these personally (except that alibi thing - I don't believe in CYA lies) and found them all completely valid.

Law of Mechanical Repair
After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch or you'll have to pee.

Law of the Workshop
Any tool, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.

Law of Probability
The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.

Law of the Telephone
If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal.

Law of the Alibi
If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire.

Variation Law
If you change lanes, the one you were in will start to move faster than the one you are in now (works every time).

Law of the Bath
When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.

Law of Close Encounters
The probability of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you are with someone you don't want to be seen with.

Law of the Result
When you try to prove to someone that a machine won't work, it will.

Law of Biomechanics
The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

Law of the Theater
At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle arrive last.

Law of Coffee
As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.

Murphy's Law of Lockers
If there are only two people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers.

Law of Rugs/Carpets
The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor covering are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet/rug.

Brown's Law
If the shoe fits, it's ugly.

Wilson 's Law
As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it.

Doctors' Law
If you don't feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor, by the time you get there you'll feel better. Don't make an appointment and you'll stay sick.