Gum Karma

You know you're Gettin Old when you start getting solicitations from the Trident Society, offering cremation, "the sensible choice", in the mail.  During a pandemic no less. 

I recollected to my lovely wife the other day a week or so ago that I have not stepped in any gum for quite a while, probably ever since I started practicing good gum karma.

What is good gum karma?  Not spitting it out any place where it might easily get stepped on.  Parking lots and sidewalks come to mind.  Theater floors aren't really good either.  Nor is your toilet seat.

The freeway or a highway are good places.  I mean, if someone is out there running around in the middle of the freeway gum will be the least of their concerns.  Hell, if enough people started tossing out their gum on the highways here in California it might help fill some of the potholes in the asphalt.

So just what is that nifty contraption I mentioned in my last post?

  Here's a sneak picture:

Anyone that has some experience with processing cannabis will have an idea of what's going on.  Or not.  No one's ever seen this thing.  Yeah howdy holy shit it's a motorized scissor cleaner!

If you've never trimmed or processed cannabis you won't understand, but if you have, hold on.  We hope to be on the market within six months.  Yeah, even in the middle of a pandemic.

We figure a couple things are certain.  Folks are going to want their diversions while being locked down, and cannabis is a pretty good diversion.  To get those pretty manicured flowers it takes a bit of scissor work, and that work typically gums up scissors something awful.  Enter the De-resinator, the very first automatic scissor cleaner.

I'm not going to go into the full sales schpiel here, but there's nothing on the market anywhere near this thing and we're pretty confident the demand will be strong.  Dirty scissors currently involve a messy and time consuming procedure to clean.  Our machine will do it in seconds.

That means the grower and processor can get more weed out to you in a more expeditious manner.  Your welcome. 

Look Out Joe, We're Getting Exotic

I hear tell Joe Exotic has a couple large predatory cats prowling around his property.  Big deal.  So do we.  This here is Frank Frankerson.

Don't let his laid back demeanor fool you.  He's a natural born killer.  Of ants, lizards, mice and things.  When he's not lounging of course, which does happen to be most of the time.

And the killer on the left below, Daisy, while she looks quite innocent in her baby pix, has turned into the ferocious beast you see in the second photo. 

She routinely brings us birds and voles and other, larger vermin than Frank does.  She has also ferociously defended her turf against a couple wanna be visiting cats.  Don't let her cute face fool you,  she really is a bad ass.

And of course we have a rooster and a number of hens, hence the name of the blog.  So we got us a fine little menagerie going on here on our little slice of heaven.

I know, I know.  A lot of folks have domestic and barnyard animals.  A couple cats, a couple dogs, a couple hundred chickens.  Cows.  Pigs.  Goats.  Hamsters..

But we accidentally acquired something here recently that I think will set us apart from being a plain old country menagerie.  Something that just about puts us on par with Joe Exotic.

Meet Liberace, Libby, or Mr. Lovely as he is called from time to time.

This is him on our front deck on the morning he arrived.

I took the picture through the screen door because I didn't know if he was an attack peacock or not.  We have since discovered he is not.

So who's missing a peacock?  What's going on?

My lovely wife got in touch with a neighbor across the street who always has a finger on our neighborhood's pulse.  And she said there's a flock of them that live by the creek way back behind her property.  You know, Yondersville.  But apparently there's been a mountain lion with her cub that have been prowling recently, and that could be why Liberace has migrated our way.

He's been here over two weeks now.  He overnight's up on the roof.  I can't think of a safer place to overnight if you're trying to stay out of a mountain lion's mouth.

We've fed him a bit of cat food and chicken food, but he's mainly foraging and eating bugs, which I'm totally OK with.  And apparently peacocks are really good at killing snakes, so in rattlesnake territory they're probably not a bad idea to have around.  If one doesn't adopt you (like Liberace did us) than you could expect to pay $50 to 75 for an India Blue chick.

He hasn't been hard on any of the plants either, like chickens can be.  He strolls gracefully through the planted areas, selectively hunting and pecking.  Chickens are excavators, they'll scratch and tear up small plants and ground covers to make sure they're getting every last morsel of any given square foot.

Or maybe they just excavate for fun.  Here's what they've done to Fantasia Land over the years.  The actual surface level of the dirt used to be at the top of the gravel in both pictures.  The concrete was poured into an eighteen inch deep trench securing the chicken wire so that no varmints could dig underneath.  The chickens have dropped the surface level by twelve to eighteen inches.

I had to shore up the pier there several years ago. They had completely unearthed the original post and concrete.  Framed a three bag square piling.  It'll hold up the Golden Gate Bridge now.

Liberace does poop on the deck, so I started pretending the house is a boat that has a poop deck. 

Just what is a poop deck on a boat, anyway, you might be thinking?  Cause, you know, it sounds like it as the potential to be really awful.

I'll save you the trouble, a poop deck is: "the after most and highest deck of a ship, especially in a sailing ship where it typically forms the roof of a cabin in the stern."

Why do they call it a poop deck?  The name originates from the French word for stern, la poupe.

I'm thinkin it's just a place to park your pooper.. 

Peacocks have a reputation for being loud and obnoxious, but Liberace really isn't a big talker.  The first time I heard him was when he decided he was going to try and get in the chicken coop.  He flapped up to the top of the fence but was immediately shocked by the hot electric wire.  He veered off quickly, and then walked around and squawked a bit.  I imagine he was swearing in peacock tongue.

And then he's been a little vocal from time to time during the night.  He has a couple different squawks, one of them sounds eerily like a large cat.  And the other is a "honk" that sounds like a goose.  But we're used to roosters crowing at all hours of the day and night, we hardly even hear Liberace.

We have done some reading, and there are mixed reviews about him hanging out with our chickens.  There is the potential he could introduce disease, and because of his size he could be a bit of a bully to them.  But he has managed to get in the coop four times now and has always been quite docile and polite.  The chickens are a little freaked out, but there has not been any sort of a scene.

He's a pretty smart bird.  I let him out of the coop twice, and then the other night I happened to see how he is entering. He goes around back, hops up on the hen house roof, hops over the electric wire, then finds a wide enough place between the clothesline hung to keep hawks out and hops right down.  I have no idea how he gets out, but he was out this morning.

I do think our flock is one of the reasons he ended up this way, that and high altitude roof safety.  He goes up around the coop a couple times a day, and so far had ended up inside the coop the last four days. But now that I know he can also get out I'm not as concerned.

He seems like he's been around humans.  We can usually get within a couple feet of him before he gets a little skittish, and he will also seek us out if he hears us outside.  And he's got a couple hang out spots, one on the front poop deck and one on the back poop deck.

We have no idea how long he's going to hang around, but we're certainly not going to chase him away.   It's kinda fun to look out in the yard and see a peacock wandering around, and he doesn't seem to be upsetting the balance and harmony around here.  Who knows, when mating season comes around this fall maybe he'll attract a mate and we'll start a flock of  peacocks. 

Then we'll really be exotic.  And loud, probably.

Skewered Spleen

I don't really have a bucket list to speak of.  I'm pretty much living it.  Family and friends, out in the country, breathing the air.  I would like to travel a bit more with my lovely wife, but who knows how that's gonna go in this new age.  That said, I espied a couple Canadian Geese in flight a month or so ago as I was driving on our lovely two lane country road.  I usually stop whatever I'm doing whenever I see or hear them to savor their wit and charm and allow my heart to sing.

I would have really pissed off the guy behind me though if I had stopped, opened the sun roof and began savoring.  And singing.  Nevertheless I did experience bucket list like bliss for a few scant seconds.

Apologies, apologies and one more apology for not posting sooner, especially in this time where some off the wall humor couldn't hurt.  I haven't posted here since my old buddy the Amazing Martin Q passed away last October. 

I still think of him quite often, sigh.  And so it goes. 

Poo tee weet old friend.

Believe it or not I have been incredibly busy, even in this time of isolation.  A forthcoming post or two will explain a lot.  A big part of my busi-ness has been an invention my son and I have been working on over the last couple years that is related to the cannabis industry.  We will ultimately have three patents on it and are just now doing the final prototype road tests before going public.

What is this wang-dang infernal contraption thingamajigger I'm referring to?  Next post, within a couple weeks.  I promise.

OK, now we're going to venture into territory that will certainly make my style points drop.  Why?  Because this old man did a really, really stupid thing that injured his poor old aging torso.  Again.  That's why.  So lemme cogitate that for a moment while I listen to some Khruangbin, one of my new favorite flavors.

I had a hundred titles for this blog post, and as the events unfolded they flowed almost as effortlessly as playing ping-pong in a canoe.  "Tangerine Spleens and Marmalade Skies" and "Pressed Spleen and Warthog" were a couple of my favorites, besides of course the chosen title. 

We don't throw a lot of food scraps out here in the country.  What doesn't go to the chickens goes to a spot on the other side of the house for vultures and raccoons.

So one evening a couple months back I was going out in the dark to give the scavengers some chicken skin and bones and a fair amount of warm, yummy, liquid, greasy chicken fat.

And now I am about to give you an insight as to just how my brain works.  It's not going to be pretty.  Or easy.  But just think, you don't have to deal with this all the time.  Like I do.

As I began my journey out of the kitchen, I also began ascertaining.  That's like cogitating, only sounds better here.

The garage door was already closed for the night.  Why initiate power and cause wear and tear on the motor just for a quick trip scrap toss?  Even though the scavenger smorgi is on that side of the house, because of the potential fifteen second wear and tear and wasting two and a half cents worth of power I opted for the utility door.  Which is on the opposite side of the house from where I was heading. 

Anybody got a compass?

Those estimates are for both the open and close operations.  I also realize that's not a lot of anything for just a single journey, but what if I did it more than once?   Like twice.  Or god forbid, more.

Since my brain was all lathered up with notions of  wear and tear and potential monetary loss which had the potential to be endless, like my thought process, I walked right past a very important bank of light switches.

As I approached the utility door, I turned on the outside light on that side of the house.  Then as I opened the door, I momentarily gazed back at the bank of lights I left in the lathered dust so long before.

That bank contained the switch for the front of the house by the garage door, which would have been really handy.  That bank also contained the switch that turns on flood lights on every side of the house, which would have been overkill. 

I was, after all, going to take a leak on the journey.  You know, kill two birds, get stoned.  No need to fire up a spot light for that.  Hell, the folks on the other side of the canyon, if they were star gazing with their telescope in my particular direction at that particular moment might get an obscured view of something I am sure they'd rather not see.

Both those switches were then a lengthy twelve feet away, or nine seconds worth of time (there and back). 

"Too much time," I must have thought, figuring I've traversed the same route I was going a thousand times.  Surely I must know it by now.  Piece of cake.  Can of corn.  Crust of pie.  No problemo.  I ventured forth, chicken scraps in hand, an intrepid adventurer out on a major moon-less mission.

As I turned the corner heading in front of the garage door, I left the light behind.  It was then I discovered it was a lot darker than I might have originally thought.  But I carried on, though I did slow my gait a little bit.

I could see the outline of the rose arbor in the faint starry light, knowing I had to move towards that illusion, keeping just a couple feet to the right.  That would put me on target for the brick walk, then trail, then scavenger smorgi bonanza.

I was moving slowly, feeling certain I was on track, when suddenly my forward momentum stopped, halted by some sort of barricade at my knees.  It tripped me up and I was going down.

Both my hands were involved with the chicken bowl, they were as useless as a feather in a bar room brawl.  I spun in slow motion towards the left as I fell, and the contents of the bowl spewed forth, up, onto my head and torso.  Chicken fat, skin and bones flew everywhere.

Ever have a chicken fat shampoo?

It's not bad, you certainly don't need any conditioner after.  Dogs may have a tendency to chase you  tho, so if you do try it I would stay away from the dog park for a couple days.

And definitely don't go for a walk in the woods.  There's a hundred different species that like poultry.  You could be a target from land, air or sea.  

I slowed the fall a little bit by jabbing the underside of my left rib cage on one of the pickets of the picket fence.  Then I continued downward until I was completely on my ass, which knocked the wind out of me.  As I lay there, staring up at the moonless starry sky, I began to chuckle.

"Thank God no one saw this.  I would have lost a shit ton howdy bunch of style points."

So instead I give up the points just to sell a humorous story.  Self-aggrandizement at its finest.

It took a couple minutes to take stock and regain my composure.   My left thigh hurt as did my left rib cage, which was howling.

I initially thought I had bruised a rib, but as I palpated I discovered the pain was underneath and behind the rib cage.  The picket just jammed up and under and in.  Yeow.

I thought it might be my spleen, and ended up in the ER in Auburn two days later.  We usually go to Sierra Nevada here in Grass Valley, hell, they saved my life a while back when my appendix went south.  You can read all about that right here:"Angels On My Barcalounger."

But I had my shoulder surgery at Auburn Faith a couple years ago and their ER wasn't usually  as packed as Grass Valley.  They did a cat scan, and the spleen was fine.  They figured it was diverticulitis.  And the cat scan showed something amiss with my pancreas and prostate and something else I think.  My entire insides were apparently going south all at once.

I have not been experiencing any kind of negative symptom from any of those things, I was mildly amused.  And confused, and still in pain.  At least they sent me home with a script for Vicoden.

I finally got in to see my regular doc the following week.  He said it was probably (something I can't remember) which is something about tearing the cartilage on the inside of the rib cage, which I guess is like a bruised rib in reverse.  A painful injury that can last from two to six weeks, he said.

He wasn't really concerned with the rib injury, but he was concerned about the cat scan findings.  He asked a bunch of questions about potential symptoms, all of which were negative.  We figured the radiologist was either looking at someone else's scan or drunk.  Nevertheless, he scheduled a follow-up scan here in Grass Valley a couple months out.

I just completed that scenario and the results are back.  I'm fine.  The first radiologist was drunk.  Or gave me the report of another man.  I do have a copy of the scan now, so next time I see my doc he can view it and try to see how much the radiologist had been drinking.

Breathing was tough for a couple days, but it slowly got better.  I was back in my usual decrepit shape after about three weeks.

What was the culprit that so effectively halted my forward progress, kinda like the front line of the Forty-Niners?  What was the antagonist that prompted this ridiculous episode of my life?  

Why the four foot and a half apparently very stout sticks of the recently pruned "Ketchup and Mustard" rose bush, of course!  I was about a foot off where I should have been, and yes, in the future I will spend the nine seconds and two cents and turn on the freaking lights.

I hope you are all doing OK with the current situation.  Life hasn't changed much for me.  I just go to the grocery store less.  And wear a mask.  Which is fine with me.  The fewer people that know who I am the better.  And now I have a valid reason to wear one and don't look like I'm robbing the place everywhere I go.

Here's one of the thousand piece things I've been up to:

Whatever side of the fence you are on, and there are a couple fence sides, I wish you well.  Keep in mind the economy has been in trouble for quite a while now, Covid has just been a catalyst to really help it go south. 

Here's a link to an article by an economist I've been following for years: 
 Roubini

Even though it looks like we are semi returning to normalcy, the stock market has no reason to be where it is.  It's a dead cat bounce folks.  Don't be fooled. 

Get some gold and silver if you can.  Physical metals and stocks. At least 20% of your assets.

And keep buying an extra can or two of food every time you go to the store. And TP.  And plant some extra tomatoes.

Hug your loved ones, keep them close.  And buckle up.  It's gonna be some kind of ride.