Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

The Sleeping Tiger Stirs

Posted on by
2

I get pretty fed up about what’s going on in Wickenburg…and start to do something about it.

Small town politics sucks. There’s no doubt about it. And it sucks even more when the politicians are fighting over a desert crossroads town with a weak economy and a part-time population.

When I moved to Wickenburg ten years ago, it was a small western town with a year-round population of about 4,000 people. Just enough shopping and services to make life convenient. Lots of space between the homes on the outskirts of town where I live. Privacy. Quiet. Clean air. Little crime. Slow pace of living. Just the thing a pair of New Yorkers needed to get a grip on their own lives.

One of the things we liked best about Wickenburg is that it didn’t have a lot of high density housing. Sure, it had some condos and apartments and the homes in the older downtown area were small and on small lots. But the rest of the town was zoned for one house per acre (or more) and the outskirts of town were zoned for one house per five acres. (We have 2-1/2.)

Fast forward to 2004. A developer proposes a high density housing development at the 9-hole golf course known as Wickenburg Country Club. He promises to expand the golf course to 18 holes. All the golfers want it. But the people who will soon have condo roofs in their back yards don’t. And neither do the people who see that one high-density development will open the floodgates to others.

Voters put together a referendum to get the issue on the ballot. Proposition 421 was the result. And the voters voted the development down.

Let me make sure you understand what I just wrote. The majority of voters who voted on Prop 421 voted against it. They were saying that they did not want the development to proceed.

Fast forward to 2006. The Mayor and Council voted in favor of allowing a virtually identical development on the same site by the same developer.

Huh?

Silly me. I thought we lived in a democracy.

But it gets worse.

Another group of voters put together another referendum to stop the development again. It was submitted the same way as the first one and should have been accepted. But they Mayor decided that because an attachment was made with a staple rather than a paper clip, it was not properly submitted. He directed the Town Clerk to reject it.

What?

I’ve been sitting back watching all this bullshit unfold for the past three years. Occasionally, I’d write an article or a letter to state my point of view. But I pretty much kept out of things — there were other people writing for my Web site, wickenburg-az.com who were saying pretty much what I would have said anyway.

But now I’m pissed. This little twerp who was voted in as Mayor — I couldn’t vote because I live outside of town limits, but I never would have voted for him — is making decisions that are not only beyond his authority, but they’re clearly against the will of the people.

This is wrong.

And I’m not going to sleep through this one. I’ve already made my first contribution to the voters efforts by writing an article about the paper clip rejection. More to come.

I promise.

Back from Surgery

Posted on by
1

What a pain!

Most folks didn’t know I had surgery scheduled for last Wednesday. Although you might think I write in this blog about every aspect of my life as it unfolds, I don’t.

I didn’t want to write about it. There were too many unknowns. The huge lump in my abdomen could have been anything from a fibrous growth to a nasty bit of cancer. Surgery could have required removal of just the growth or removal of some important stuff it might have been attached to, with all kinds of reconstruction within. I could have come out of surgery and been back to normal in a week or two or the surgery might have been the first awful step in a slow spiral down to a painful death.

So I guess you can see why I didn’t want to write about it.

Surgery was Wednesday and it was the best case scenario all around. The growth was a hefty six pounds in weight, but it wasn’t attached to anything important. They took it out and, while they were in there, they took out a bunch of female parts a 44-year-old woman doesn’t really need anymore.

I was in the hospital for two nights and three days. I shared a room with a woman who was going through pretty much the same thing I was — but worse. I think she lost more parts.

The worse thing about the experience was the pain. We’re talking pain that just won’t go away. Pain when you move. Pain when you think about moving. I was screaming when I regained consciousness in post-op. They asked me, on a scale of one to ten with ten being the worse, what was my pain? Ten! I screamed at them. It was a question I’d hear over and over during my hospital stay. The answer ranged from four to eight after that initial ten.

They had me on three different pain killers. One was a device literally stitched into my wound area. It leaked out a novacaine-like substance to deaden the pain on contact. The other was morphine attached to an IV going into the inside of my elbow. I had a pain button and when I was in pain, I’d push the button. A bit of morphine would go into the drip. Of course, this was limited to one little bit every six minutes. If I pressed it every minute, I’d still get it just every six minutes. It made a reassuring beep-beep-beep sound every time I pushed the button, whether morphine went in or not. The third painkiller was oral and although it had a different name, it was based on morphine, too.

So it’s no wonder I couldn’t keep my eyes open in the hospital. I was doped up with morphine for three days straight. I felt pretty stupid bringing an overnight bag with two books and notebook in it. I couldn’t focus my eyes on anything long enough to see it, let alone read it. I listened to podcasts for a while, but even those put me to sleep.

Days and nights blended into each other. The clock on the wall showed five minutes later every time I looked at it, no matter what time I looked at it. The night nurse must have been bored the first night because she came in to do a survey at 2 AM and tried taking me for a walk at 4 AM. (I was too nauseous for the walk.) To make matters worse, the pre-op nurse had screwed up my IV by putting it in my elbow instead of my hand and the IV machine required a reset every 2 to 45 minutes. All day and all night. Every time it needed the reset, it would emit a loud beep-beeeep. I quickly learned how to reset it myself so I wouldn’t have to wait for the nurse. Not only did it keep me up, but it kept the woman on the other side of the curtain awake, too. When the nurses caught me resetting it, they weren’t happy. But I wasn’t happy listening to that thing beep for ten minutes while I was waiting for one of them to show up. Besides, the pain button didn’t work unless the IV machine was working.

Anyway, I’m home now. I dosed up with some morphine before leaving the hospital (I’m not an idiot, you know) and spent most of the ride from Banner Good Samaritan Hospital to Wickenburg in a state of semi-consciousness where my only thought was, are we there yet? I managed to throw up nothing — it’s when you go through the motions but nothing comes out — after a nice hot shower. Safeway brand Tums and Sea-bands (which I’m still wearing) helped out there. Yesterday afternoon was a drug-induced confusion of watching television through out-of-focus eyes and drifting off to sleep. Finally, I could stand it no longer. At 8 PM, I took the heavy-duty pain killers and went to sleep. I was up again when those wore off at midnight and managed to stick it out until 2 AM before taking another dose. Then slumber until 6 AM, our normal wake up time.

This morning, my coffee wasn’t very good so I switched to tea with some lightly toasted and buttered bread. It’s my first piece of really solid food since Tuesday night. Now my job is to get into some kind of ritual that’ll let me get on with my life while I recover.

Got Eggs?

Posted on by
Comment

We [finally] do!

Well, those chickens finally started laying eggs. How nice of them to do it on Easter Sunday!

I found the first two eggs in the coop this evening when we went down to feed the horses. One, in the nest, was in perfect condition. The other, on the floor of the coop, was broken and had to be thrown away.

I’m not surprised about the one on the floor. After all, imagine that you’re a chicken, minding your own business day after day for the first four or five months of your life. One day, you feel a little weird. You squat down, have a nasty little pain in your rear end, and — voila! There’s an egg where you squatted! Well that looks almost just like the golf ball in the wooden thing with all the cosy wood shavings. Maybe that’s where you should go next time you start feeling like you need to drop one of these things. So they learn to lay their eggs in the nests.

EggsThese first two eggs were both small. In the photo, my chicken’s egg is on the right and a store-bought Grade A Extra Large egg is on the left. I expect them to get larger over time. In about a month, they should be full size, somewhere between Large and Extra Large.

They’re also green. Yes, green. I bought Araucana chickens, which lay colored eggs. They’re sometimes called the Easter Egg chickens and it just happens to be a coincidence that the first eggs they laid appeared on Easter Sunday.

I expect that all nine hens will be laying by the end of this week. The estimated production is 6-8 eggs per day. I’ve been saving egg cartons and will soon be giving out eggs to anyone who comes to the door.

After all, how many eggs do you think Mike, Jack the Dog, Alex the Bird, and I can eat?

Dusting Off the Horses

Posted on by
1

Mike and I take a ride in the desert.

Since I’ve begun flying, I’ve not only been neglecting my motorcycles, but I’ve been ignoring my horses.

Mike and I have two horses. While I know that might seem like a big deal to the folks living in cities who are reading this, it isn’t a big deal at all when you live in Wickenburg, AZ. Much of the property here is “horse property” — that means that property where you’re allowed to have horses. We have 2-1/2 acres of “horse property” and wonderful trails in the desert are only minutes away by horseback.

Our horses spend most of their time in a one-acre corral down in Cemetery Wash, where they have plenty of room to walk around or stretch out in the sun. But they spend most of their time standing by the water trough, napping. Except near dinner time when Cherokee, my Paint Quarter Horse, decides it’s important to pace in the same path over and over until we feed him and his buddy Jake.

Some of my neighbors have horses, too. It’s easy and not terribly expensive. Hay costs $8-$10/bale here and a bale can last a horse 4-5 days. The only other major expense when you board your horse at home is shoeing — figure $55 per horse every 6 to 8 weeks. Cherokee, because of all his pacing, needs new shoes every 6 weeks; Jake could go 8 weeks, but we get them shod together to save our farrier the bother of making two separate trips.

Our horses get fed twice a day. We feed them in the morning before we go to work and in the evening, usually right before dinner. They make horse poop (of course) and we use an ATV with a sort of drag trailer behind it to break up the poop. It dries up in this hot, dry air and doesn’t even really smell. When the wash flows, it takes all the broken up poop downstream where it probably makes a really good fertilizer.

They don’t need a barn. This is the Arizona desert. The coldest it ever gets is in the high 20s, and that’s only at night during the coldest months — December and sometimes January. They grow heavy winter coats that shed (like a dog’s) in the spring. They’re shedding now; every time we brush them a bunch of hair comes off. We let the hair fall to the ground where we brush them and birds come around and pick it up to use it for their nests.

The horses do need a shade to keep them out of the hot sun. And plenty of fresh water — about 15-25 gallons per day per horse, depending on how hot it is. We have a hose running down to their yard and attached to a water trough that automatically keeps the same water level all the time. Easy.

So it really isn’t much of an expense or a bother to have horses living at home with you.

We’re fortunate to have miles and miles of riding trails in the empty desert behind our house. Our house doesn’t border state land, but the house behind us does. To get to the trails, we either ride up the unpaved road from our house to our “next door” neighbor’s house and go through the gate there or just ride down Cemetery Wash. So we can saddle up at the tiny feed barn we have halfway up the driveway to our house and ride out from there. Easy.

Since I started flying, I have a lot less time to do things like go horseback riding. Still, every once in a while, Mike talks me into it or there’s a ride with the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association that I can participate in. And I’m always glad to be back in the saddle again.

Today, we had a nice, leisurely, Easter Sunday ride from our house, down the wash, through the slot canyon, and out into the state land adjoining Rancho de los Caballeros. Los Cab (as the locals call it) is our best “dude ranch” and it has miles and miles of maintained trails out in the State and BLM land. We were out for about 2 hours and took a bunch of different trails we hadn’t been on in a long time. I had my old GPS turned on and tracking the trail we rode — I’m making a map of the trails out there using the GPS — you can see our path on a topo map (courtesy of Terrabrowser software) below.

Trail Ride Topo

Our house is just below the W in Wash.

Oh, and if you want to see how it looks from a satellite in orbit around the planet, look at this:

Trail Ride Photo

The ride was 4.3 miles long and we were moving for about an hour and a half of that time. We ran into two other trail ride groups (from Los Cab) while we were out there.

Today was an incredible day. High 70s, light breeze, not a single cloud in the sky. What more could you ask for on Easter Sunday? The ride was just long enough to be enjoyable without being tiring for either us or the horses. I think we all enjoyed it.

When we got back, we hosed the horses off good. Jake took it like the ranch horse he is (or was) while Cherokee wiggled around, pretending he didn’t like it. They both rolled down in the sand, getting all dirty all over again, when we brought them down to their corral at the end of the ride.

A nice way to spend the morning. Makes me wish I could find time to do it more often.

Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

Posted on by
Comment

I catch up on one of my favorite NPR shows via podcast.

I’m a huge fan of National Public Radio (NPR), but some of my very favorite radio shows are on the air on Saturdays, when I’m not likely to be parked in front of a radio.

Enter NPR Podcasts. NPR started releasing podcasts of many of its shows about a year ago. My favorites are Business Story of the Day, Story of the Day, and Satire from the Unger Report. All are short — usually around 5 minutes — and are good bite-sized hunks of listening material good for listening to in the car.

Not long ago, NPR evidently decided to jump onto the podcasting bandwagon with both feet. The NPR podcast directory is full of downloadable episodes of shows. There are currently 293 shows to choose from and if you can’t find something there that interests you, you’d better go back to watching American Idol reruns.

Recently, I was quite pleased to see that they’d added Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! to their list of podcasts. This show, which is broadcast here on Saturday mornings, is “NPR’s weekly news quiz show.” It takes quotes and stories from the news and turns them into questions, fill in the blank limericks, and other fun tests of the contestant’s knowledge. Some of the stories are downright weird and the panel of celebrities is very funny. Each episode is full of spontaneous wit — the kind of comedy you don’t get on television these days.

Wait Wait is a 45-minute podcast, which is pushing the limits of my time availability. That’s one of the reasons I bought the i-Fusion speakers. I can set up my iPod and speakers in my kitchen or my hangar and listen in while I’m doing something else. I listened to three episodes yesterday while preparing for dinner guests. It put me in a good mood and helped me remember all the news stories from last month.

If you’re a podcast listener, I highly recommend checking out the NPR Podcasts. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.