Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Penny-Less

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A few words about losing my best friend.

Penny and the Pumpkins
This is my favorite picture of Penny, mostly because it also represents our new life together after my crazy divorce. I shot it at my just-purchased property in Malaga where we were living in my old RV, the Mobile Mansion, before building our home. She was about a 1-1/2 years old here.

It was a January morning like any other when my friend Janet and I went for our morning “power walk.” We typically walked at least 2-1/2 miles, starting at our campsites/booths at Tyson Wells in Quartzsite, AZ, walking east on Kuehn Street, and cutting into the open desert on one of the many dirt tracks. As usual, Penny the Tiny Dog was with us. She was leashed for the first part, then let loose to run and explore when we got into the desert for the bulk of the walk. Later, before we got back onto the road, I’d leash her up again.

That morning, things didn’t go the same as they usually did. We were just coming out of the desert to our leash-up place when a man started yelling. The next thing I knew, a large dog was chasing Penny. Then she was crying and Janet was yelling and we were all running toward the place where the big dog had Penny in his mouth. The dog’s owner got control of them, but Penny was writhing on the ground, still crying, obviously in pain. She actually bit both Janet and I as we tried to calm her. I scooped her up, yelled at the man with the dog, and headed off to find a vet.

Penny on the Kayak
I went kayaking with Penny on December 17 in the Colorado River backwaters near where we were camped. She didn’t particularly like the kayak but she wanted to be anywhere I was.

I don’t want to go into details here. Honestly, I’m tired of thinking about it, tired of reliving those moments when I raced to a vet in Blythe, lifted her out of the car, and saw how much blood was on the blanket there and my tee-shirt. The vet whisked her away for x-rays and soon reported that nothing was broken but she wanted to keep Penny overnight for observation. “She’s in good hands,” I was told.

Janet and I walked without her the next morning. We walked the same route; the man with the big dog was nowhere to be found. We spoke to some folks near our exit to the desert and asked them to tell that man, if they saw him, that his dog had put mine into the hospital.

Oddly, I didn’t have my phone with me on that walk. But when I picked it up back at my camper, I saw that I had three calls from the vet. A message told me to call back. I was with Janet when I got the news: Penny had died during the night.

Now some people have dogs who are pets. And some people have dogs who are like their kids. And then some people have dogs who are their constant companions, best friends, life savers. I’m in that last group. Penny was all of those things to me.

And yes, as I type this two full months after losing her, I’m crying.

So Penny is gone. Forever.

Last Photo of Penny
This is my last photo of Penny and it isn’t even a good one. It was shot in Janet’s booth where we’d gather for dinner some evenings. January 6, 2020.

Penny was an amazing companion. In the seven and a half years we were together, we had learned each other’s habits and needs and worked together as a team. She went with me nearly everywhere whether we traveled by car, motorcycle, helicopter, bicycle, or airliner. She wasn’t needy like some dogs, but knew how to curl up on my lap for affection when we watched TV. She helped me through some of the toughest times of my life just by being there. I can’t say that about anyone else.

I needed to blog this. I needed people who knew about her and our relationship to know that she was gone. I needed to head off any questions about why I don’t talk about her anymore. Now you know. Now everyone knows.

The empty spot she left in my life will be impossible to fill, but I’m trying. Last month, I adopted a pair of puppies. I’ll be blogging about them soon.

But one thing I already know: neither of them can ever replace my best friend, Penny.

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Comments are closed. I don’t want condolences. Please respect my wishes and don’t comment elsewhere or email me about this. The best thing in the world that you can do is either choose adoption for your next pet or donate to organizations that rescue and find homes for dogs and cats.

The Darkness of a Foggy Morning

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A rare morning of darkness.

I woke up at 4:30 this morning, which isn’t all that unusual. What is unusual was how dark it was.

Yes, it’s true: the sun won’t rise this morning until 6:59 AM. Logic seems to dictate that it should be dark at 4:30. Yet is it seldom dark in my home.

While I live 2 miles down an unpaved (and unlighted) road that’s about 8 miles to the nearest town of any size — the City of Wenatchee, WA — and I’m surrounded by open land, orchards, and towering cliffs, the sad truth is that there’s enough light from Wenatchee and a handful of homes, orchards, and businesses within sight of my property to prevent it from ever getting really dark at my home. It’s not bright like Los Angeles or New York or even Phoenix, but it’s bright enough that my home, which has lots of curtain-free windows — who needs curtains when there’s no one around to look in? — has no need for night lights and nighttime sky viewing was disappointing enough for me to sell my telescope.

Light pollution is what I’d call it.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind all those lights. From my home, which is perched high above the city, all those lights can be quite beautiful at night. As I likely recounted elsewhere on my blog, they remind me of the view from the “rich people’s hill” my dad would occasionally take us for a drive up at night. My view is better than that was, of course, stretching 50 miles or more up to the North Cascades during the day. At night, I see most of Wenatchee and East Wenatchee, including the lights at the airport, which should be blinking right now (at 5:45 AM) in preparation for the airliner’s first departure of the day.

But I can’t see any of that right now. The lights are gone, blanketed by a thick fog that might, at this point, even surround me. I have no way of knowing because it is so dark.

It wasn’t that dark when I woke briefly at 1:45 AM. I knew immediately that it was foggy out, but the nearly full moon kept the sky bright. I went to my bedroom window for a look outside and saw the hillside behind my house and the top of the fog bank stretching as far as I could see.

When I rolled out of bed sometime after 5, I challenged myself to find my way to the kitchen without turning on a light. That’s something that I do every day, but it was a challenge this morning. What finally drew me in, like a moth to a porch light, was the light cast by numerous devices in my kitchen, great room, and loft: the clock on my microwave and stove and kitchen stereo. The blue status light on my Wink hub. The green status light on an Airport Express I use for music sharing. The blinking blue lights on my Internet router. A steady glowing red light on the power strip behind the television. Those lights were like beacons that brought out the dim details of an all-too-familiar space. I stood in the entrance to my kitchen area for a moment, taking inventory of all those tiny lights, and then flicked the light switch to officially start my day.

Now I’m sitting at the breakfast bar in my kitchen, typing away on my laptop with a hot cup of coffee beside me. Other than the tiny light I’ve already listed, four blown glass track light fixtures with halogen bulbs are illuminating the room. Out the window beside me that normally shows so many amazing views from my aerie is nothing but blackness.

Soon, it will get light enough for me see whether I’m in or over the fog bank. Eventually, the sunlight will poke its fingers through whatever clouds are above me to brighten the day. I’ll likely take some pictures and share them on Twitter, as I so often do.

But for now, I think I’ll turn off the lights, find a comfortable seat by the window, and sip my coffee in the darkness, enjoying this rare event while it lasts.

The Quiet Place

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Nothing is really as quiet as it seems.

“You live in a quiet place.”

Rooster
Future dinner guest of honor.

That’s the first thing the hispanic man said when he got out of his small four-door sedan in my driveway. He took a step back and opened the back door where his young son was sitting in a booster seat. He’d come to get the pair of two month old roosters I’d advertised on Craig’s List for free just the day before.

I was surprised by his observation. Most people commented on the view, which can be breathtaking if you’ve never seen it from my property’s perspective. I thought about his words and said, “Sometimes.”

We worked as a team to catch the two roosters, which were both white with gray patches on their backs. They’d been hatched by my broody hen who preferred sitting on eggs to laying them. Two months after playing mom to these boys and their four broodmates, she was sitting on eggs again and already had two chicks.

He put the two roosters in a small pet carrier just large enough for a 20-pound dog.

“There’s another one in there, but I’m not sure which one it is,” I told him.

“It’s the brown one,” he said. We walked back to the fenced in area and he pointed it out. I thought he might be right. I went in and caught it easily. He put it in the carrier with the other two.

“Are you going to eat them?” I asked.

“Yes. But I might wait a few weeks for the brown one. He’s small.” He showed the carrier’s cage door to his son, who had remained patiently in the car. “Pollo,” he said.

Then he put them in the trunk, shut the lid, and drove off.

I was glad he’d be eating them. Better that then setting them to fight.

– o –

Much later, after spending time at the local airport watching the rapelling crew practice and having lunch with a friend and looking at a trailer for sale and checking on an AirBnB house I manage I got back home. I listened to the radio as I did chores.

His observation came back to me a while later when I was out on the deck, fetching a bedspread I’d hung out over the rail out there.

Even though the radio was off — I’d grown tired of listening to voices talk about the same old thing — it wasn’t that quiet. Out in the distance, I could hear a dirt bike revving its engine as it sped around on a dirt track in someone’s back yard. I could hear a dog barking. I could hear a motor — maybe a lawn mower? — down in the valley below me. If I listened hard enough, I could hear the cars on the road across the river.

I put the bedspread in the dryer and turned it on, then went back outside to see what else I could hear. The dryer through the vent. Rover the cat’s nails as they dug into the 8-inch square posts holding up my deck roof while he climbs the twelve feet to my perch. A single cricket starting its night song early.

You live in a quiet place.

I wondered where he lived and how much louder it was. Did he live near an orchard where there was always the sound of sprayers or mowers or work crews pruning or picking or working on irrigation? Did he live near a major road where there was always the sound of traffic rushing by? Did he live in a densely packed neighborhood where you could always hear some man shouting, some woman yelling, some kid screaming, some dog barking, some car with a bad muffler growling?

I remembered what it was like in Manhattan, on the overnight stays on 57th Street near First Avenue where my college boyfriend’s parents lived. Fourteen floors up in a building with a doorman and a guy would would fetch your car from the garage when you called on the house phone. Out on the tiny balcony or inside with the windows open even a crack, the sound of the city was a constant quiet roar, punctuated with car horns and sirens. It was never quiet there, just as it was never dark.

Even here there were times when it wasn’t quiet at all. In the late winter and early spring, when the temperature dipped down to the low 30s, the wind machines — two bladed fans on tall poles — would come to life, spinning their blades on rotating heads that sounded just like helicopters coming and going over the orchards around them. Sometimes they’d start as early as 11 PM and run all night long, finally shutting down an hour or so after the sun finally began warming the air around them. But how often did that happen? Four or five times in a whole year?

The orchard sprayers were a different story. They ran almost daily, usually in the morning, sometimes starting before dawn. I’d wake at 4 and go out onto my deck and look out to see their headlights among the trees. Pesticides, herbicides, anti-fungal chemicals, and who knew what else? During the day I’d see the spray like a cloud around the sprayer as it moved through the orchard. The chemicals didn’t bother me; they never traveled far. But it was the sound — a steady whine — that you couldn’t avoid. Even that was seasonal, though, and when the trees were picked, the sprayers were mostly silent.

You live in a quiet place.

Back in the chicken yard, my remaining rooster, father of the three that had left in the car trunk, crowed. Another cricket took up the evening song. A larger, closer dog barked. My roof clicked as it always does when the sun sets and the metal panels start to contract in the cooling air. A train rumbled by two miles away and then tooted its horn at a distant crossing as I knew it would.

The dryer finished its short fluff cycle and the vent sound faded. Inside my laundry room, The Samsung dryer would play Bach in simple tones before shutting off.

Was this quiet? I guess that depended on what you knew. It was quieter than Manhattan, but it wasn’t nearly as quiet as the 40 acres I used to own with my wasband at the top of a mesa 30 miles south of the Grand Canyon. Five miles from pavement, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of a raven’s wings flapping as it flew by. It was so quiet that one morning, when I tried to turn the radio down because it seemed so loud, I discovered that the volume level was already set to 1. That was a quiet place.

I turned and went inside to finish making the bed, leaving the door to the deck open so the sounds of this quiet place could come inside.

Lights at Night

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Beautiful, but at a cost.

As the days are getting shorter, I’m finally rising and going to bed when it’s dark out again. This morning, I took a few moments to contemplate the predawn lights of Wenatchee from my home. And it really is beautiful.

Lights at Night
The view from my deck looking out towards Wenatchee at 4:51 AM this morning.

When I was a kid, my family would occasionally take a drive up to the east side of the town we lived in, Cresskill, NJ. Back in the 1960s and into the 1970s and beyond, developers had begun building luxury homes on a hillside that climbed away from the town toward the Palisades. We used to call it “the rich people’s hill” because the homes were huge and it was obvious that only rich people lived there. I remember one of those drives being in the evening, after the sun had set and the lights of Cresskill had come on. I remember seeing all those lights, like diamonds in the darkness.

That’s what my nighttime view here reminds me of sometimes.

I cannot begin to describe how wonderful it is to live in a place so removed from, yet within reach of, a small city like Wenatchee. I have all the conveniences that the little city offers — shopping, dining, theaters, nightlife, services, and even an airport with airline service to a real city (Seattle) and beyond. Yet I’m not down in it, crawling around in — or listening to — traffic. Even as I sit here now, typing out my thoughts as the sky brightens out my windows, the only sound is my wine fridge humming and my rooster crowing. Even when they’re spraying down in the orchards far below me, the sound seems more earthy, more natural, than the sounds of the city.

But the lights. Sigh.

I’ve begun to notice bright ones getting closer. When I returned from my winter travels in spring 2018, I noticed four new bright spotlights over some sort of maintenance yard down by the river. You can see them on the right side of this photo: three in one color and one in another. And last spring I noticed a new bright light across the river, likely shining down into someone’s yard. Why?

Here at my home, I have subdued lighting at night. There are solar accent lights along my driveway and the path to my tent and the posts tops on the uncovered side of my deck. There are motion-sensor lights that go on when someone — or something — walks near them. None of these lights shine up. And that’s it. I see no reason to pollute the sky with light at night.

And that’s what it is: light pollution. The only complaint I have about my home is the fact that it never gets truly dark here. (Well, it actually does, but only at night when it’s foggy.) And because I don’t have (or need) curtains on my windows, it never gets dark inside my home.

It was with a bit of sadness that I sold my old telescope last year. It was parked near the door to the deck for years and only used, with disappointing results, once or twice. Although I’m likely to pick up a more compact one with tracking that I can take on my winter travels — plenty of dark sky out in the desert! — I just have no use for one here.

It’s blue hour right now, light enough to see the empty sage land between my home and the orchards and lights beyond it. The city lights are starting to fade. It’ll be a hot sunny day today.

But at night, I’ll see those lights again, enjoying the view while lamenting my loss of dark night sky.

A(nother) Short Story about the State of US Healthcare

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Who wants a “pre-existing condition” these days?

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few recent thoughts related to the healthcare situation in the United States.

I’m in my late 50s now and have, for the first time, begun spending a lot of time doing close work with my hands. Making jewelry with fine wire and small tools doesn’t put a lot of strain on my hands, but it apparently does work the muscles and joints more than I’m accustomed to.

Arthritis runs in my family. I clearly remember my grandmother on my mother’s side, who lived to be about 90, complaining about it once in a while. She had typical “old lady hands,” that included thick knuckles and crooked joints under wrinkled skin. She’d spent nearly a lifetime doing close work with her hands in a garment factory, starting work when she was as young as 13 and working until many years later when my grandfather had a stroke and she had to stay home to care for him.

I’ve had knee problems on and off throughout my life. They always got worse when I was heavier and disappeared when I lost a lot of weight back in 2012. But before they disappeared — back when I had a lot of disposable income and a decent health care plan — I went to a doctor about it. Arthritis, he said, pointing at the x-rays.

Handxray
X-ray of a hand from Wikipedia. I’ve got my own x-rays around here somewhere.

More recently, a fall off the back of my truck that sprained an ankle apparently fractured some bones in my left wrist, which I’d landed on. While trying to diagnose the occasional swelling and severe pain (caused by “floating bodies,” we later discovered during arthroscopic surgery that removed most of them), the doctor took x-rays. He pointed out the early signs of arthritis in my wrists and hands.

So yeah. I have arthritis.

It’s gotten to the point that it’s starting to bother me enough to seek medical solutions that don’t necessarily include painkillers. (I can take Vitamin I (ibuprofen) without a doctor telling me to, and I’m not interested in anything stronger.) Would exercises help? CBD creams (as everyone keeps telling me)? Heat or ice therapy? Vitamin supplements? I’m not interested in querying Dr. Google because we all know that there’s enough bad advice there to drown out the good advice. I want to visit a doctor, have her take new x-rays, and tell me what I can do to slow the progression of this very common problem.

And here’s the rub.

If I go to an arthritis specialist — provided I can get an appointment with one — I’m making a very public (on my medical records) statement that I have a medical problem bad enough to seek medical help. In other words, I’m admitting I have a condition that, once admitted, becomes a “pre-existing” condition for future health care coverage.

Now, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, AKA “Obamacare”), as it was passed by the government and enacted into law, pre-existing conditions didn’t matter. But things are different now.

Let me tell you another story about pre-existing conditions prior to the ACA.

Years ago, when I was very heavy, I was having digestive issues that included GERD, heartburn, acid reflux, and vomiting. To this day, I think it was a hiatal hernia but at the time I was unable to find a doctor to offer any advice beyond “take Pepcid AC.” Back in those days, I made the fatal error of mentioning “chest pain” as a symptom. As you might imagine, that triggered a flurry of heart tests, all of which came back negative. I did not have a heart problem, I had a digestive problem. I blogged about this in detail way back in 2010.

This profit-driven nonsense established me in medical records with a “pre-existing heart condition” that didn’t exist. All of the tests came back negative! So when my idiot wasband lost his job (again), made a late COBRA payment, and got our health insurance canceled, the insurance company refused to cover me when they started the insurance back up. I had a “pre-existing heart condition,” they said.

For six of the scariest months of my life, I had no health insurance because a couple of greedy doctors put me through a battery of unnecessary heart tests and an idiot couldn’t manage his money properly. It wasn’t scary because of my health. It was scary because if, during the time I was uninsured, I got some kind of real negative health diagnosis (think cancer) or had an accident at home (think falling down the stairs) that put me into the hospital or long term treatment, I could lose everything I owned. Medical bankruptcy is a real thing here in the United States and I was set up to become a victim.

I got limited insurance coverage back and later got my own damn insurance again so I didn’t have to worry about an idiot screwing things up for me. The ACA really helped things; it was as if those old medical issues simply didn’t exist. And, so far, I haven’t had insurance denied because of these things — although the rate has gone up dramatically since Trump took office. Next year, who knows?

So here I am in 2019. I have arthritis in my hands and want help to prevent it from getting worse quickly. But I’m afraid to make an appointment with a specialist because I’m afraid to get the condition on my medical records. So instead, I’ll keep waiting, letting the condition likely get worse. All because I don’t want to be denied insurance coverage in the future.

Is it right? Does it makes sense? No and no. But there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it other than emigrate to a country with decent health care for all. And believe me, I’ve been thinking about it.

So that’s my situation as I type this.

At least the CBD cream smells nice.