Sense of Adventure

I just got back from taking Emma on a walk on the ditch that leads along the eastern side of the RGNC wildfowl preserve. It was a beautiful Spring midday, mostly clear; the sun was hot and the breeze cool, a combination I really enjoy. Too bad we don’t get it too often.

As we were heading back to the car along the southern fence of the RGNC fields I saw a couple of ring-necked pheasant cocks (okay, get the giggles out of the way. It’s what they’re called. Deal.) Albuquerque’s North Valley down by the Río Grande is infested with pheasants. The males strut around, looking absurdly gorgeous with their shiny green heads, red-circled eyes, golden breasts, and long-feathered tails. And of course what they’re doing is trying to attract babes.

So these two cock pheasants came running toward the fence through green ground cover that was maybe chest-high on them, four or five inches on average. It looked as though they were racing. Their courses converged until they came within about eight feet of the fence, when they stopped ten feet apart. Then they turned around and walked back out into the field, again angling toward each other, until they were walking side by side.

Then they stopped and turned toward each other. They started doing this bobbing routine, one ducking low while the other rose up, like pistons in a two-stroke engine. It looked suspiciously like a courtship dance; I was wondering if we were going to see some serious gay pheasant action here. Right out in front of God and everybody. Think about the children! (Imagine that as said by Bill Clinton in his customary Berkshire hog-as-televangelist squealing grunt.)

More likely it was some kind of rivalry dance. As I watched this Emma and I started walking again. Before we’d gone more than a few steps this hen pheasant comes booming out of the low brush right by the fence. She flew off at an angle past the fancy-dancing males and out into the field. The nearer male turned right round and went running off in her direction, chuckling to himself in triumph. The other emitted a loud clack of dismay. “Dammit!”

As I explained to Ann in the comment to my last post, I intended yesterday’s “thought of the day” as essentially a positive observation. That might seem strange. Heck, it is strange. It might be a bit more accurate to say it was half of a positive observation.

Yesterday I spent some time at my best friend Joseph’s while he was doing home improvement things on his house. He told me the story of a former associate of his who was thoroughly unscrupulous and untrustworthy. Not only did he lack compassion for the misfortune of others, he actively mocked those who showed such compassion. Once when Joe stuffed $20 in the tip jar of a broken-down looking old guy who played piano in a bar in which they drank, this associate said, “Why’d you give money to that old loser? People like that should just die and get out of the way.”

Now I think people get to say things like that if they want to. Unlike liberals and conservatives, to pick two examples utterly out of air, I don’t believe people should be beat up, locked up, or killed, for saying things I don’t like or disagree with. I realize that there are plenty of conservatives and liberals who believe that I should be beat up, locked up, and killed for saying any such thing myself. Some have said so. (Beliefs such as mine were once demonized as “abusive tolerance,” a phrase which thankfully I’ve not read in a long time.)

That said, people behaving like assholes don’t endear themselves to me. When I catch myself doing it, I don’t much like me. And the associate I’m talking about did defraud people by inducing them to provide him services on the basis of promises he never intended to keep. That to me actually is a crime. But since he was a lawyer, he also did it in ways that were hard to prove.

So a few years later, as you’ve probably guessed, or offender hit the skids himself. And felt terribly aggrieved and hard done by when, basically, the sharks raced in to grab their mouthfuls of his flesh, and his own former associates - including the people he’d screwed - refused to help him.

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Maybe we can’t rely on gratitude, but vengeful hatred never fails.

Well, not exactly. But close. That much is literally true.

Around 7 AM here in Casa Milán several things tend to happen at once. I need to get up and go offload fluids. Emma Dog wants to go outside, for approximately the same reason. And Squeak, my deranged and adored black cat, decides she has to lie on my chest and be cuddled.

I may have mentioned this before: how she’ll come and stand with her front feet on my shoulder, by way of demanding that I roll onto my back so she can settle in. If that doesn’t work she’ll hop all the way up and perch there. Sometimes that won’t work either, and I’ll awaken later to find her lying asleep on my upper shoulder. Which I find sweet and amusing (if I wasn’t a Pet Mark Squeak would’ve met an awful end long since.)

So this morning I got a new wrinkle. I put out Emma, then came back in and lay down on my right side hoping to get a couple minutes’ sleep before Emma decides she has to come in. I find that the longer I stay awake under such circumstances the harder it is to get back to sleep, so every little bit helps.

Anyway, I’d hardly gotten settled in when here came Squeak. Who promptly reared back and planted her forepaws on my left ear.

“Squeak,” I said. “You’re standing on my head.”

(“Why, yes, Daddy. How nice of you to notice!”)

So I duly rolled over, picking her up and planting her on my sternum in the process. I put my hands over her and we both drifted off to sleep. At least until Emma barked outside the window shortly thereafter…

I hope the cat doesn’t make a habit of that. She’s heavy.

Well, they promised us awful winds today…

It’s been a good day, mostly. After the usual cocoa and mobilizing exercises I headed off to the office, which is to say Village Inn, where I had breakfast (yeah, at 1:30 in the afternoon. Sue.) and wrote plenty on Annja.

Fortuitously, the battery capacity on my Toshiba notebook and my bladder’s ability to contain all the water and coffee I suck down both tend to run out about the same time. As usual when those things happen I called it quits.

I packed up and headed out. Went to the grocery store, to get some necessities such as fresh garlic. Can’t do without that.

As I parked I saw a stocky, red-faced woman wandering the lot carrying a clipboard. Never a good sign. After I turned off the car I hauled out my Pilot to write in the date and time for a cool Baroque trumpet piece they were playing on KHFM, so I could look it up later on their website.

She came right up to my window and, despite the fact I was doing something, said, “Are you registered to vote?”

“No.”

“Would you like to register to vote?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a vile thing to do.”

She made a face and a dismissive gesture. Fortunately she didn’t argue. She turned and walked off toward Carlisle. I kind of hoped she’d wander into traffic but this didn’t happen, at least soon enough for me to see it.

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Or actually, just a pair of muskrats. They didn’t get up to anything … untoward during the short time I had them in view.

After writing some more on the new Rogue Angel yarn, I gathered up Emma Dog and took her off to the Nature Center for an afternoon walk. It’s a perfect Albuquerque Spring day: warm, clear, calm; the trees are getting green and the fruit trees and the lilacs fragrantly in bloom. A marked improvement over the gale we walked through a couple of days ago, and the Arctic day that followed it.

From the levee bike path I saw some big, soft-shelled spiny turtles sunning themselves down on the ditchbank. A guy cruised by us on a nifty recumbent tadpole trike, lower-slung and probably more expensive than my TriCruiser. Sometime this week I need to get my tricycle to a bike shop for an overhaul so I can start riding it before it gets brutally hot and I’ll snivel too much.

Not a lot of birdage about, though some of interest. Our usual Piper Cherokee-sized Canada geese kept flying low overhead, honking stertorously. As we walked north up the dirt path along the east side of the clear ditch, which is very pleasantly shaded by trees and brush, a bitty grey wren-like thing flew over with a whir that seemed to be a call, rather than the sound of its wings. It gave a little cheep as it lit in a tree to our left. Naturally it went promptly around the other side of a big branch where I couldn’t see. It seemed to have a very curved beak, almost like a thrasher. But they’re way bigger than this bird, which was so tiny I first thought it was a cicada - although we’re at the wrong end of the season to see them. It may’ve been a Canyon Wren.

There’s a notch in the ditchbank that leads right down from the trail to the water, perhaprs halfway between the footbridge that leads back to the east side and Montaño, where it’s convenient for Emma to go wade in the water and drink. As we approached it I heard a big woodpecker thudding away off in the bosque proper, across the ditch and the bike path.

And then when we got to the notch, right there swimming south and not eight feet from the bank I saw a muskrat. A beat later I saw a second toward the other side of the ditch. They both dove pretty promptly; one surfaced briefly under some brush overhanging the far side. I bet they have a burrow under there.

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Kids, don’t try this at home!

The purpose of this post is purely to show how utterly easy it is to compost kitchen wastes. If you want to do any kind of landscaping or gardening, or if you’re interested in recycling or self-sufficiency, now you’ll have no excuse not to just get started.

I do not recommend the technique I’m about to describe. I’ll go further: don’t do this. It does not constitute housekeeping best practice. Indeed, it wins the inaugural Bad Housekeeping Seal of Reproval, which I just made up. Just confessing to it’s totally going to blight any hope I’ve had of getting dates, at least until I get thin and rich. Which fortunately are on the agenda for summer.

So. Here’s the awful easy way to start kitchen-waste composting broken into simple steps.

Do Not Do These Things:

1) Toss fruit and vegetable detritus (no meat or fat; there’s controversy over egg shells, but for now I throw ‘em in) and coffee grounds in a plastic grocery bag in the kitchen.

2) When it gets full, starts leaking (ew!), or you just can’t stand it any longer, toss onto the back porch.

3) Begin in Fall, continue over winter.

4) Springtime: suck it up and examine all those containers o’ nastiness. Surprise!

5) You have (some) compost!

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Today started off very well.

Actually got up when I intended to - my sleep pattern, to give it more dignity than it deserves, got all out of whack when I was finishing off my recent Rogue Angel novel. I’ve had a terrible time trying to get either enough sleep or regular sleep. To one degree or another I’ve had trouble with that most of my life; I need, and intend, to get it squared away soon.

Did my mobilization exercises, then some kettlebell. To cool down I did the Long Form of Yang taijiquan. TJQ works great for that.

I drank my morning cocoa. Then I packed up the notebook PC and headed to the Village Inn over on Menaul near University, a regular haunt, for huevos rancheros and coffee. VI does surprisingly good huevos rancheros, at least here in Albuquerque. Never, never order them anywhere outside New Mexico. Trust me on this.

I wrote for a while, most productively. Well-pleased, I headed out into a cool but lovely day. By which I mostly mean, calm. We’ve had some cold, explosively windy days the last couple of days. I was glad to see the wind abate.

First I went to Costco and dropped 160 bucks and some on fripperies like food and necessities such as coffee. You understand the priority, yes? Sadly, I could probably live a Neptunian year off stored body fat, but evolution has cruelly and senselessly neglected to provide our bodies the ability to store caffeine. This constitutes the single best refutation of intelligent design I know of.

(Oh, and by all means, guys, feel free to drop the whole “Flying Spaghetti Monster” gag any time now. It was never that great to start with; it’s long since tipped over into pure boring asshattery. If your goal was to prove that people who claim to favor science can be just as annoying, irrational, and sometimes outright scary as the loopiest Fundie loonball … mission accomplished.)

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Almost everybody I’ve ever encountered who hasn’t run away fast enough has heard this tale. But these are the Interwebs (which, wise men tell us, are a series of tubes), and they open a whole world of people to me I’ve never met in person. Try to run away faster than light. Hah! Hah!

So now you’re stuck reading it. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of how my career began?

When I was a lad there was a TV show called Mannix, which starred Mike Connors, mainly because the network suits thought no one would watch a series starring some Armenian guy named Krekor Ohanian. Imdb (“I am Vic M., and I admit that I have no power over the Internet Movie Database”) calls it, “One of the most violent detective series in TV history.” Wow. I don’t remember it being that cool.

But there must’ve been some reason I kept watching it. And it sure wasn’t the smart, well-crafted action writing. Because each and every week, at least once, we would see our hero, on foot, pursued by bad guys in a car through a parking garage or lot. And he would run right down the middle of the open lanes.

Every frickin’ week. It was even in the opening credits, if I recall correctly.

Leave aside the question of why the car didn’t go faster than he did - granted, this was the heyday of heavy Detroit iron, but it was also the heyday of great big studly six and eight-cylinder engines that sucked gas like an elephant at a Sahara stock tank (yes, if the Sahara had stock tanks. And elephants. And if they drank gasoline. It’s a metaphor, dammit!) I always reckoned, stripling though I was, that what I would do if I found myself in that position was, like, hide behind something heavy.

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(First in an undoubtedly unending series.)

And, mirabile dictu, it doesn’t even involve guns!

First, mea maxima culpa for going dark here for so long. (Nothing like tossing in gratuitous Latin phrases to make you look smarter than you are. And if anybody’s smarter than I am, it sure isn’t me!) Things got on top of me. I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Anyway, one thing that bugs me in movies is when the elevator cable breaks, and the cage falls like an anvil toward Certain Doom. Oh, if only anyone had ever thought to invent an automatic safety brake!

Someone did. Elisha Otis. In 1853.

It’s a fairly simple system, which causes the rollers to lock up if the thing goes too fast. Because it’s mechanically simple it’s highly reliable. It’s not perfect, but what is?

Of course some people, even certain good friends of mine (who, granted, probably never read this blog) will rush in and say, Well, it’s for dramatic effect! Duh! Sorry, enablers; it’s sloppy writing. You can always bother to do it right. If by nothing more than a three-second scene of the rollers catching - and then failing. Even mysteriously. Oh my! Suspense! And without imbecility!

Perhaps oddly, one flick I know that got it right was Speed. Now, I like Speed. (Okay, I know that’s a risky statement to make in our happy police state. To belabor what’s obvious to all but informers and ambitious prosecutors, I mean the movie. As far as stimulants go, caffeine is just all right with me. And then some.)

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