Survived a major typhoon last night with no damage. Very thankful! Today I got stung on the knee by an Asian Giant Hornet while clearing downed bamboo and branches from the driveways... Ouch! She must have been agitated by the intense storming, because even though they're known as Murder Hornets in the US, my interactions with them here are usually pretty calm and uneventful. I felt light-headed with elevated heart rate and was a little concerned about being alone in such an isolated place, so a very kind neighbor drove me to the nearest hospital to wait out any adverse reactions... Well, now I'm sitting in the lobby waiting for my wife to pick me up from having spent the typhoon helping at her family home. Thankfully the only adverse reaction is pain... it's considerable. it's bearable. and it's definitely nothing like the time my foot was run over by a forklift... I'll still have to hobble around and clear a few more big bamboo branches before we can drive up and park the car, but with a little reiki and a lot of gratitude for what didn't go for the worse, I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep safe and sound-- what Craiyon AI thinks a mad murder hornet looks like... yeah, pretty close...
Last night we woke suddenly in the middle of the night to the shrieking alarms of our mobile phones trying to warn us of an impending earthquake. That gave us about 30 seconds to jump out of bed and ask Alexa to turn on the lights as we took shelter in the few doorways in our house away from glass windows...
Our bedroom is on the second floor loft, and with the open-plan layout of the house we can see everything in what is basically a single huge room. The house proved itself to be surprisingly flexible, swaying widely in all directions like a drunken sailor without falling. I guess this motion added a kind of gentleness to the violence of the earthquake, because after it finally slowed down to stillness there was nothing broken, not even the one picture that flew off the wall and landed face down on the floor two meters away... We were very fortunate, because the earthquake was reported to be about 6.8 (on the US scale) centered just off the coast and probably around 5.5 by the time it reached us in these mountains a little inland. Anyway, we are totally fine and the house with its utility systems all check out fine by daylight. We are very thankful to be living in a time and place where we can almost magically be warned to seek shelter just in time, and with construction engineering that can handle such events... This spring my father peacefully left this world for greener mountains and brighter adventures on the way to his heaven. He wasn't much of a talker and rather preferred to experience this world through his hands and his tools. Well, I turned out to be quite the talker, but to my father I owe a keen sense of observation of the world and its nature without which I could not be the sensitive poet, artist, philosopher, and teacher that I am today. So today, a poem dedicated to exactly that... Thank you. Father’s Gift
A love of landscape of smooth deserts of broken mountains and lakes like flattened wads of tinfoil some with water some without but no oceans A sense of adventure in cars taking turns fast in jeeps not so fast but slow winding treks to abandoned mines on two wheels churning in the mud and chasing imaginary water irrigating the sage with desert in a boat churning a hard channel to ski in and mapping edges and hiking the top of Angel’s landing 1000’ wading the end of Whittier narrows miles between the cliffs scrambling into the rutted crater of an ancient volcano and stumbling in dark limestone caverns mostly shallow and dirty and pissed in Risking severe abrasions broken arms running out of gas always imminent flash floods one possible lava eruption and rattlesnakes But no sea-faring An eye for scavenging in red-brown desert dumpsites from the 50’s bits of old, dulled glass sun-colored blue and rusted tin cans in the shape of log cabins in mineshafts and leveled grey cabins from the 1850’s rags of stiff yellow newsprint shell casings, square head nails, and railroad spikes bed frames caves and sandstone cliffs for mineral rosettes, veins of gold, arrowheads, and fossils lakes and piers dredging with five-pound magnets And old TV’s, VCR’s, stereos, and cars for bits of colored wire, good transistors, diodes, switches, and condensers to make shocker grenades A taste for wild game venison rattlesnake rabbit shot with a revolver from a moving camper and wild boar never found bass, trout, catfish And how to gut it, skin it, and preserve it Fascination with artifacts wired circuit boards, copper wire, silver solder housed in metal and wood geared transmissions, brake systems, pulleys caked in dry, sticky dirt cast and machined engines and their parts pistons cylinders manifolds guns and their keys, pins, and stops bearings—balls, rollers, and their cages metal all wrapped in fine oil And how to dismantle them feel them and fit them A green army belt A nickel plated .357 A combat medic dress coat complete with shoulder braid I am particularly fond of that shoulder braid The smell of sage The smell of leather and light machine oil Cool dank castles of large appliance boxes that could be broken down into tank treads to roll away in down-hill, when too confining --Jeffrey Scott One of my recent "guilty" little pleasures... because I like Fantasy, I enjoy Adventure, I love Character, but I'm not fond of violence. This webseries is pretty nerdy, but it satisfies my fantasy adventure cravings and preference for character development with a tolerable level of violence, all in short, easy-to-watch clips that don't eat up my valuable time or test my patience... So if you've ever enjoyed fantasy RPGs and need a little distraction now and then, you might find this video webseries to be nicely balanced fare-- especially for being free! UPDATE: now that I've gone through Season 2... It gets even better as it goes along, and I'm happy to report that it has proven to be both racially diverse and LGBTQ friendly, so now I can wholeheartedly recommend this to any of my friends who enjoy fantasy adventure, role-playing, creative reenactment, or online gaming... It's the winter holidays and it has been cold of late, often dropping just below freezing overnight. Though the mornings start quite 'brisk', the passive solar well of light that is the heart of Sant-o-menel slowly collects the warmth of the sun's lovely rays throughout the day. And by 3pm, while it is only 12C (54F) outside, I am here on the couch 'glistening' in a pink t-shirt and loving it. It will eventually start cooling down as the sun sets around 5pm, and I will close the curtain at the top of the well to hold in the heat for the evening. Gradually we will layer up again into the usual winter-wear but hold off lighting a fire in the woodstove until we need its cheery warmth after dinner around 9pm.
I hope we can all take inspiration from collaboration with nature's abundance in our lives-- |
AuthorJeffrey Categories
All
Archives
April 2023
|