Category: Life

For the past three years, a wood stove has been taking up an inordinate amount of room in our mudroom. Before that time, it had lived in our living room, where it was the backup source of heat for our house. Since a free standing wood stove that one never uses takes up a large amount of room, we had it uninstalled after complications failed to arise during the calendar change to 2000. Prior to that time, the stove worked fine: though it tended to render the living room uninhabitable due to excessive heat production.

A wood stove is not a very portable item. Despite this, I decided I would attempt to sell it at a garage sale my friend is holding this Friday. Yesterday, while I wrung my hands and kept out of the way, Jack managed to manhandle the stove onto the dolly, and moved it to the edge of the garage. On Thursday, we will load it into our stock trailer, and I will haul it to the garage sale. My friend thinks that if anyone buys the stove, it will be a good old boy with his own pickup truck and set of burly friends to manhandle it into its new home. However, since it will be in my stock trailer, I could possibly deliver it given the buyer has burly friends.

I keep wandering out to our mudroom to gloat over the newly liberated space. Anyone in Colorado Springs need a wood stove?

My trip to Albuquerque with Jack on the occasion of Bubonicon was marred by a head cold. I felt a suspicious scratchiness in my throat Thursday night, and had full bore symptoms by Friday morning. However, I had a relatively pleasant time despite the cold, though I did run out of steam by late afternoon each day.

The function space in the new hotel seemed to allow for a bigger dealer’s room as well as a larger art show. The con suite was up one level from the other rooms, and due to the way the elevators worked, it was hard to go between the con suite and the other functions. Tables, both for serving and sitting, filled the con suite room, and I found it a little too cramped. However, in total, the hotel was much nicer than the one last year. The air conditioning worked a lot better as well, which is important in New Mexico.

I enjoyed my visits to rubber stamp stores “The China Phoenix” and “The Stamper’s Pad.” However, I ran out of oomph before I got to the fabulous paper store on Nob Hill. I know I am feeling puny when I can’t find the energy to visit a good paper store.

In what has become a tradition of sorts, we listed to an audiobook by Ngaio Marsh on the trip: “Spinsters in Jeopardy.” Marsh has the facility of keeping us listening while simultaneously we critique the various reasons why we don’t think much of her plotting. In this book, there were just too many coincidences: I am willing to suspend disbelief, but not to the extent Marsh required. However, the setting was gorgeous, and there were a lot of comic bits. Most importantly, it lasted all the way to Albuquerque, and most of the way back.

A friend sent me a link to an account of the trip that he and his wife took around Australia. Jack and I visited with them on our trip to the Whitsundays in 1999. Another friend writes about touring South American in her aptly named weblog Connections.

I wondered why so many corvids, both magpies and ravens, had been hanging around the barn the past 24 hours. When I went out to feed the horses, I found the answer: an extensively cannibalized magpie. Following my accustomed procedure, I used a manure fork to pick it up, without looking at it anymore than necessary, and tossed it over the fence into the brushy area. I figured any risk of contagion had already taken place.

I know that when West Nile fever first moved into the area, the public health authorities were interested in collecting avian corpses, but I think everyone accepts that it is here now. One of my vets was quite ill from it last year, which she traced to one mosquito bite that she received in Pueblo county last year. I had been dilatory about getting the home horses vaccinated this year, but had scheduled an appointment a few days ago. I am glad he is coming this afternoon.

We are getting more rain today. You know you have been in a long drought when you keep hearing people in the store say something like “It’s been raining for days…isn’t it great!”