Mid November

Time does keep slippin' (slippin' slippin' slippin') into the future.

I remember when my second-grade teacher (Mrs. Amundsen?) erased "1965" off the board, and wrote in "1966." I sat at my desk, left arm in a cast, towhead bangs on my forehead, and thought about time. I was 7.

Now I'm 56, sitting here having tea (the black British kind that comes in round teabags) and double-chocolate pecan brownies, thinking about time. I haven't come to any meaningful conclusions about the nature of time in all that time. I just think, "Whoa." Tommy Chong is doing my mental dialog. "That Steve Miller is sure right about time, man. Heavy."

It's dark and cold out. The wood stove is pumping out the heat, and C. is vacuuming. The dogs and I hate it when she vacuums.

Em and Richard were out twice this weekend, Friday to get wood and Saturday to bring up Richard's late mom's dryer. The heat element went out on ours this spring. We'd bought it new at Monkey Wards in Coeur d'Alene in 1987. Replaced the drum belt a couple of times and maybe the elements once? and it ran and ran. C. is good with appliances. She takes them apart periodically and vacuums everywhere and oils stuff. The furnace in our Ancestral Home was old when we bought the place in 1975, and she cleaned it and the ducts every fall. It's still running fine. Anyway, we were hanging our wash out on the line in the cold and thinking that we really should look at those elements when Em offered Diane's dryer. Bless their hearts, she and Richard brought it in and installed it and tested it. It's harvest gold and smells funny, and we're pleased to have it.

I blew my weekend on foolish things like redoing the netting over the chicken yard. It was sagging and C. worried the guineas would get tangled in it. I hate working with that nasty bird-netting crap. It catches on my shirt buttons, on my fingers, on my boots. If there were three of me, it might be funny. It's not so amusing with just one stooge, though. And I moved the big animal fencing so we can more easily haul water to them. Last year we used an electric stock-tank heater on a long extension cord to keep the water thawed. I was reading that it costs $3 a day to run one of those – and that last year 17,000 animals were hurt or killed by those heaters. So the new plan is to haul a three-gallon bucket of water to them twice a day. We'll see how that goes.