Friends
Wall Flowers
The Purple Cowboy and I took these photos this morning while we were checking the trough in the horse pasture. The house is an old homestead.
My New Buddy
That’s the budding paleontologist in disguise. She’s only seven, but she’ll talk your ear off about dinosaurs and not just about the ones we all learned in school (it turns out brontosaurus wasn’t real?). She’s already figured out that I know very little and likes to test me with made-up dinosaurs. As in BegoniaSaurus, real or fake? We’ve also spent a lot of time chatting about time travel and whether she’d rather visit the Triacic or Cretaceous period. She says she wouldn’t be scared to go as long as she was riding a sauropod, had her jump rope, a kicking donkey, and some kung fu frogs.
Tadpole Science
I’ve been sleeping better at the trailer than I have in years. It’s so incredibly quiet! Today I didn’t get up until about 7:30, which is late for me. I woke up before that, but it was so nice to open my eyes and see blue sky through the leaves on the trees outside my window that I didn’t want to get up. I finally did, though, and hiked up the hill to get some water for coffee (I still have to install a part to get water running in the trailer). I had bacon and oatmeal for breakfast, and then went to work digging some steps up the hill to the outhouse. I am really tired of sliding down it on my ass when it’s raining.
The Copenhagen Girl dropped off the Purple Cowboy a couple hours later, and he hung out with me while I labored at the end of a shovel. I made it a little over half way up the hill before I hit rock. I was exhausted, so I hung it up for the day around 2 PM. Tomorrow, I’ll borrow a pick axe and see if I can make it through the rock a la John Henry. Well, OK. Not quite.
Later in the afternoon, the Purple Cowboy and I drove over to the Worm Lady’s place. After a couple rounds of Red Hot Chili Peppers with a jump rope, her granddaughter showed us the aquarium she was filling with tadpoles from a nearby ditch. The new habitat was looking downright livable until Stella the dog decided to come over and take a slurp of water. “This is why it’s important to have a lid,” the granddaughter told me.
A Modern Bunkhouse?
The guys who designed the house we plan to build next spring have gone pre-fab. I think I might need one of their Jot Houses to use as a bunkhouse on the back flat! Congratulations, Leigh and Bryant!
My Brush with Project Lameway
I’ve learned over the years to be leery when Frew asks for a favor, despite his innate ability to appeal to my sense of friendship and all its obligations. It’s not like he asks all that often, but when he does it is almost guaranteed that his “favor” will involve me embarrassing myself in some new and improved way. That’s why when he called last week to ask me to be his “model” for something called Project Lameway, I knew to ask for a little time to mull it over before I gave him my answer, which of course in the end was NO WAY! To lessen the blow, I offered to let him use my sewing machine. Then I heaped on the story about how I’d been emotionally scarred at age 11 during the Humboldt County 4-H Fashion Review when I was marked down for my slumpy shoulders and general lack of grace. No one told me I’d also entered a beauty contest. The year before I had won a medal for my snappy gabardine plaid slacks and accompanying belted terry cloth top (all the other 11-year-olds made Gunny Sax knock-offs with quilted jackets). I hadn’t sprouted boobs yet, though, so I guess no one expected me to carry myself in any particular way then. Everything changed once puberty set in. Neither my posture nor my ability to float like a lady was improved by having these problems with my appearance pointed out to me in a public forum by these well-meaning (or mean-spirited?) adults. In fact, for quite a while, things got much, much worse after that...OK, so I’m still a little bitter. Let’s move on…
Frew’s Project Lameway mission was to concoct an outfit from a paper sack filled with thrift store clothes and some other scraps. It was supposed to embody a made-up children’s book character (he figured I’d be the perfect Little Betsey Frankenstein). Relying on his own junior high sewing experience (denim apron), he got right to work hand-stitching half of a red t-shirt to half of another red t-shirt, which turned out pretty cute (I even secretly kind of wanted it). He paired this with a white satin skirt over the top of a black velvet skirt. A white 1970s polyester blazer with one silky arm completed the look (Frew felt a little uneasy about a certain Michael Jackson quality brought on by the latter, but it was too late to turn back). Using my sewing machine, he threw in some random seams to make the thing ride cock-eyed and voila! Fashion happened. Sort of.
I had no idea that when I turned Frew down and joked he should ask Luke to be his model that Luke would actually agree to it. And boy, look how tough he looks in that skirt! He would have had those 4-H ladies quaking in their barn boots.
The Taste of Yo-Yos (and Apples and Chili)
Over the weekend I traveled with Evany to Chico, California, for the National Yo-Yo Championships and later that afternoon to Manton, California, home of the world’s greatest bootmaking teacher, for the Apple Festival. The day started around 5am when I AIM’d Evany to see if she was awake and felt like leaving early (since both of us seem to only require about 47 minutes of sleep a night anymore, this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in our friendship). I soon learned, though, that she was way ahead of me and actually about to leave her house for mine.
After an uneventful but gorgeous early morning drive up the Sacramento Valley, where a nearly full moon in the west faced off against the rising sun in the east, we arrived in Chico early. We decided to stop by and pick up my aunt, who treated us to a morning meal at Sin of Cortez (terrible name, but super yummy breakfast menu, complete with an eggless savory dish, which, by the way, is a lot more elusive than it should be, in my opinion).
Then we were off to take a gander at the yo-yos. I confess my main memory of my own childhood toy is that sticking my tongue in it caused a tingling sensation. This, it turned out, was way more entertaining to me than actually playing with it--let alone learning “tricks.” When I told Evany this, she knowingly replied without any hesitation, “Yeah! Why did it make your tongue tingle? What was that stuff in there that did that?” And yet while attending the yo-yo happenings, we were both inexplicably compelled to purchase a series of self-published books about yo-yo physics by a superhero named Captain Yo--even though neither one of us knows anything about physics and our knowledge of yo-yos is limited to how they taste. I don’t think Captain Yo needed any special powers to discern this about us, but he happily sold us three full sets anyway.
We didn’t need these books, however, to figure out that attending a yo-yo competition isn’t for wussies. We meandered cautiously through the crowd of mostly boys and a handful of girls while projectiles on strings in every possible form imaginable whizzed in all directions. During the 4A String Unattached to Yo-Yo competition, several yo-yos even went flying right off the stage. After about two hours of deeply enthralling people- and yo-yo-watching, I was ready to move on to the Apple Festival in Manton. Evany, on the other hand, probably could have stayed all day. She has what seems to be an insatiable appetite for these sorts of things.
We didn’t arrive in Manton until about 2pm and there wasn’t an apple-related item left on the premises--save for an apple fritter I bought from some Jesus people. Lucky for us, my fellow bootmaking student and generous friend Glenn had been able to secure a dozen apple pies through Jack’s inside connections, pre-festival. Jack’s brother and friends were also in town and insisted Jack wear a “cattle buying hat” at his boot booth (he is prone to wearing berets and pink train engineer caps). After the festival, we went back to his place to drink some of that box o’ wine he likes so much (also pink) and listen to stories. While he made some delicious chili from a tri-tip he bought at the apple doin’s, Evany and I raided his garden and apple box.
Over the course of the night, I learned something about Evany Thomas that I didn’t know before. She accidentally let slip that not only does she know what a Ghillie suit is, but that she is also a regular reader of the Cabela’s catalog. If you don’t know what that is, let me explain: You are more likely to find a Cabela’s catalog in the homes of my people than a phone book or the Bible. It is filled with “3-D clothing” that comes in various odors, guns, knives, cute tops, giant fish pillows, and other miraculous objects. By the end of winter, many men I know (and apparently Evany) can recite the master catalog from front to back. Needless to say, Evany was a big hit in Manton.
My Projects
My Short Films
- What's a Nice Girl like You...
- Story Machines
- Boot Camp
- Moving Horses from Montana to Washington in 1903 (audio)
My Tweets
My Photos
The Blocksburg Book
My Favorites at the Moment
- Luke's remix of his Peter and the Wolf remix
- These hand-tooled shoes and purses
- Gossip Girl
- Red Rock Rondo