Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Give Blood

Posted on by
2

I leave a pint of “Power Red” at the Wickenburg Community Center’s blood drive.

I started giving blood when I was 17. I was in college and there was a blood drive and I decided to do my part. I was pretty dopey about it, though. After school, I came home, had soup for dinner, and went out drinking with my friends. (No, the drinking age in New York wasn’t 17 back then.) I got unbelievably sick and learned a valuable lesson: no giving blood and drinking.

Now, of course, they tell you not to drink alcohol. Duh.

I gave blood pretty regularly for the next 10 years. It was always convenient: blood drives at school, blood drives at work. When I worked for the City of New York, if I gave blood at the office blood drive, I’d get a half day off. I was all over that.

By the time I was 25, I’d probably given about a gallon of the stuff, making me what they called (back then, anyway) a “galloneer.” Cool.

I give blood, in part, because when I was born my mother lost a lot of blood and needed transfusions. Someone else had given blood so she could live. I thought I should return the favor.

My mother, of course, was the same way about giving blood. She claimed it was like getting an oil change.

Nowadays, there seems to be more accuracy to that comparison than she’d believe. I’m talking about “power red.”

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here.

Wickenburg often has blood drives, but for one reason or another, it’s not always convenient for me to join in the fun. I usually just forget. “Oh yes,” my mind says when it reads the sign, “there’s a blood drive on Tuesday. I should go.” But on Tuesday, without the sign in front of my face, I simply forget about it.

Yesterday, however, was tougher to forget. The blood drive was in my face, so to speak. I first learned about it when I dropped my car off at Big O to get an oil change. (Ironic, no?) I saw them unloading the stuff from the blood drive truck at the Community Center. Later, while I was on the phone with a local silkscreening company, the person I was speaking to told me she was going to the blood drive later in the day. Then, when I had to go pick up my car from its oil change, I had to walk right past the Community Center. I walked in. Two elderly gentlemen at a table near the door were all ready to sign me up.

“I have to go pick up my car,” I told them. “It’s about a mile walk. I figure I’d walk better with all my blood in me than a pint short. Could I come back in a half hour?”

“Sure,” they said. “You’ll get right in.”

I walked to Big O to get my car. The walk would have been pleasant if it weren’t for the smell of the exhaust from the trucks zooming past me on East Wickenburg Way and the trash on the side of the road. The weather was nice — quite clear and sunny with a light wind — and I needed the exercise.

I stopped at KFC/Long John Silver on my way back to the Community Center. I know the guy who owns the place and he’s struggling hard to make it succeed. Sadly, his place is on the wrong side of the highway, opposite the Burger King, Pizza Hut/Taco Bell, Filibertos, Tastee-Freez, and McDonalds. He’s an island of fast food out there. He just added the Long John Silver and I wanted to check out the fish. I picked some up at the drive-up window and ate a piece on the way back to the Community Center. It wasn’t bad. It was fast food.

Back at the Community Center, I signed in. There was a column there that asked if I wanted to give Power Red. I asked the two gentlemen what that was. They told me that they pump blood out of you, separate the red blood cells from the plasma, and pump the plasma back into you. Sure, I thought. And I sat down, wondering briefly what it really was.

Three other people waited on the chairs set up for waiting. One was a woman of about 50 with a bright red sweater, a fancy multi-colored bow on the back of her head, and bud headphones. There was a man in front of me, who was the first to leave us. Then a young boy, about 12 years old, wearing suspenders — likely a Mennonite. We have a bunch of those folks living in town and you can pick them out from a crowd by the way they dress. He was waiting for his dad, who also wore suspenders, and was dropping off his pint on one of the lounges. As I waited, a man with a serious breathing problem took the chair behind me and began reading the paper, a woman in her sixties came in and promptly opened a book, and an elderly woman wearing a shiny gold jacket and a pink hat came in and began talking to herself.

Here’s a weird thing. One of the people who worked at the blood bank was a woman in her early thirties who was absolutely round. This is weird because yesterday’s entry dealt with obesity and I used the word round to describe really fat people. This woman was the roundest person I’ve ever seen. I imagined her knocked over on her side and rolling down a hill. But I think she could have rolled down a hill without being knocked over.

The whole time I sat there, I listened to the classic rock that was playing over the Community Center’s speakers, just loud enough to be noticeable.

I was processed by three people. The first, a young guy from Phoenix, really needs to get a different job. He obviously hates what he’s doing. He refused to chat. All business. A young guy working at a place that sucks blood out of you shouldn’t be like that. He should be friendly and responsive to the people he’s processing. He took my blood pressure (148/90), pulse (78), and temperature (97.3) and checked a drop of blood for iron. Everything was A-OK. He sent me back to my chair to wait.

The second person was also young, but the opposite in personality to the first person. He and I joked together as he asked me about a hundred questions that covered health, medication, and sexual activity (for AIDS screening). He was also from New Jersey — the Greenwood Lake area — and he said that my accent reminded him of home, which he missed sometimes. We made jokes about the lady in the gold jacket and I told him that he’d have to ask her whether she’d ever accepted drugs or money for sex. (Yes, that was one of the questions.) Things got a little iffy when I couldn’t remember a prescription muscle relaxer I’d been prescribed 2 weeks ago for a tension headache, but I solved that by calling the Safeway pharmacy, where I’d gotten the prescription filled, and was given the name of the drug.

He asked me if I wanted to give “power red.” I asked him to explain what that was and he repeated what the men at the desk had told me. He told me that it was better for the blood bank to get power red because it got 2 pints of red blood cells from each patient, making it easier to give transfusions. It took 20 minutes longer and I’d have to wait a few weeks longer before I could give blood again. He said I had to be 5’4″ or taller and weigh more than 150 pounds. I met the criteria. He took another blood sample from me in a narrow tube and stuck it into a centrifuge. He brought it back to me 60 seconds later and said, “This is good. You’re 42 percent red blood cells. We only need 40%.” He showed me the tube which showed half red and half yellowish. The red was the red blood cells and the yellowish was the plasma. Cool.

At the end of the screening, when he walked me over to where the blood sucking was done, he told me I’d been the most enjoyable person he’d worked with all day and thanked me.

The next person was very businesslike, probably because he spent his day sucking blood out of people. I’d been seated next to a machine that he set up with three blood bags. I asked questions and he filled me in. One bag would collect my blood. Then the machine would send the blood into a centrifuge that separated it into red blood cells and plasma. The red blood cells would go into the middle bag and the plasma would go into the bag closest to me. The machine had two cycles. One sucked blood, the other pumped plasma and saline back into me. When the process was complete, the machine would beep.

He poked me, started the machine, and gave me a ball to squeeze. I was told to squeeze when the blood pressure cuff was tight — that’s when the blood would be coming out — and stop squeezing when the cuff was loose — that’s when the plasma would be going back in. Then he left me to stick someone else.

One of the old guys from the door came over, grinning from ear-to-ear. “You’re giving power red,” he said happily.

“I thought you were kidding when you told me what it was,” I told him.

“You thought I was kidding?”

“Yeah. It sounded pretty weird.”

He told me that when the plasma went back in, it would be cool because the blood cools down while it’s being processed. Then he wandered off to chat with someone else.

He was right. When the cuff got loose, the tube running from my arm turned pink, then cloudy beige, then yellow. The plasma went in. It was noticeably cooler than the blood going out. But the weird part was seeing the tube turn red again, quite abruptly, when the cuff tightened. Cool.

I was in the middle of the third cycle when I started feeling light-headed. I told myself that I wasn’t really feeling light-headed, but the room was getting a bit darker and I was feeling a bit nauseous. The machine made a noise, which brought the poking guy over.

“I’m done?” I asked.

“No. Flow’s low. How do you feel?”

“Not good.”

He reached down to the foot of my metal-frame lounge and picked up my legs. I was reclining now. “Breathe deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth. It’ll pass.”

It did. About three minutes later, I felt fine again.

I was done a short while later. As the poking guy came over to disconnect me, the machine started pumping the red blood cells out of the middle bag and into two smaller bags down below, out of sight. The plasma bag and fresh blood bag were just about empty.

I opted to remain on the lounge for a short while. I’d seen people fall over after giving blood and I didn’t want to be one of them. If you pass out, they keep you there. I didn’t want to spend the night at the Community Center.

I had some orange juice and pumpkin cake with two elderly ladies who were providing refreshments. They’d seen the way I waited on the lounge and told me I had to wait the full fifteen minutes before I could leave. We chatted about Wal-Mart. (They brought it up, not me.) One woman said the last thing she ever wanted to see in Wickenburg was a Wal-Mart. The other woman, who was her sister visiting from Illinois, told me about how it had destroyed her town.

As I left, the old guy who’d spoken to me said, “See you again in August?”

“You bet,” I told him. That would be just about the right time for my next oil change.

How the Other Half Lives

Posted on by
Comment

Mike and I spend time down in Phoenix, chatting with “city folk.”

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a housewarming party down in Phoenix. The party was yesterday evening. After some minor discussion, Mike and I hopped into my city car (the Honda S2000), put the top down, and sped southeast.

We hit Home Depot and A.J.’s Fine Food along the way. At Home Depot, we needed to gather pricing information for a summer cabin I’d like to build on our property at Howard Mesa. The plan is to have a building shell put on the property, then fill the shell with the comforts of home — things like toilets, sinks, lights, a bed, a stove. You know. That stuff you have where you live that makes your home feel more like a home than a campsite. We bought our hostess a nice orchid plant with a decorative pot and a Home Depot gift card. Then we hit A.J.’s for some deli salads and a cake.

Our hostess was one of my editors. I write articles for a technology Web site called InformIt, which is somehow related to Peachpit Press, one of my publishers. I write about the kinds of things that can be found in my Peachpit books and InformIt adds links so readers can buy my books. They also pay me a few hundred bucks per article. That’s a good deal for me, since I can knock off two articles in a day and they seem interested in publishing anything I want to write about. When I’m done with my Tiger book, I plan on writing eight or ten articles for them before I dive into my QuickBooks book.

I’d never met Esther in person and the photos she uses as her iChat icon looks nothing like she does in real life. (I think it might be a glamour photo.) So when we arrived at her house, it took some guessing to figure out which one she was. I got a big hug before she hurried off to do other things. Mike and I grabbed a coke and tried to mingle with the other guests. We were not very successful. The other guests were gathered in groups and obviously knew each other. They pretty much ignored us newcomers. I guess they didn’t need to meet anyone new. We didn’t need to meet anyone new either, but you don’t normally go to a party with that attitude, so we’d left it at home. Since several of the conversations seemed to revolve around OS/2 (an ancient IBM-created operating system, if you recall), we didn’t feel as if we were missing much.

After a while, Esther showed us around the house. They’d been living there three months and had finished most of their unpacking. Both Esther and her husband, Bill, work out of the house and their offices were in the two front bedrooms, side by side. Lots of computer stuff. Mike says the house was probably built in the 70s, but I think it might be early 80s. It had an interesting layout, with a master bedroom suite tucked into one corner and a long, narrow kitchen with two giant refrigerators and a chest freezer. (Seriously into refrigeration, as Mike said.) Esther brought us back out into the back yard, which was completely surrounded by a 6-1/2 foot wall, and had a curvy-shaped pool with a fence around it. There were big trees that shaded the half of the yard without the pool. The next door neighbor had really, really tall palm trees. A third of an acre, Esther told us proudly. “Pretty big for this area.”

The area was just south of Thunderbird around 56th Street. All the houses were like Esther’s: single-story homes with walled-in back yards, and security company signs on their front lawns. Suburbia. Later, Mike commented about how odd it was to not be able to see the horizon from the backyard. I hadn’t thought about it. The backyard hadn’t seemed like the outdoors to me and I wasn’t really expecting to see the horizon.

We found some folks in one of the two living rooms who were more friendly and we settled down with them. One group was a family: mom, dad, and two kids. The son, who was probably about 11, had his head buried in a Game Boy the entire time we were at the party — about 2 and a half hours, as it turns out. He even managed to continue playing while he was eating dinner. The girl, who was 8, spent much of the time browsing through Esther’s impressive collection of books, which includes some compilations of comics and an odd book called “Why Cats Paint.” The dad told us about his flight training experiences, which were impressive but did not result in a pilot certificate. The mom talked with two other moms about the school systems where they lived.

Another guy who heard we’d driven down from Wickenburg was very impressed. “That’s a long drive,” he said. “And I was debating whether it was worth the drive for me.” He’d come from Thunderbird and 24th Street. Just over thirty city blocks away. Well, to be fair, blocks in Phoenix aren’t like blocks in New York. You can walk 30 blocks in New York and not break a sweat. Thirty blocks in Phoenix has to be at least three miles. That was some drive.

The conversation turned to neighborhoods and this is where it got weird. They all started comparing their neighborhoods. Apparently, it was a good thing that in one neighborhood, people liked to put their barbecue grills out on the driveway and hang out there. So everyone had their barbecues out in front of their houses, within shouting distance to their neighbors. Almost every house in that same neighborhood, which was on Wagon Wheel Road, had wagon wheels in front of their houses and they’d put colored lights on the wagon wheels for all the holidays. People would drive through the neighborhood on those holidays just to look at the lights on the wagon wheels. Another neighborhood got hundreds of kids for Halloween because people from South Phoenix would drop off their kids there to go trick or treating.

Esther’s real estate agent showed up late with a woman and a plate of cookies. They were dressed as if they were ready to hit some posh wine bar in Scottsdale after the festivities at Esther’s. They joined in the conversation. And that’s when Esther started talking about the convenience of living two houses off Thunderbird. When they lived in Taranto, they’d get in the car and have to drive 10 minutes before they got to any shopping. That gave them plenty of time in the car to decide where they were going out to eat. Now they have no time for discussion in the car. They get to shopping within minutes and there are so many choices. And sometimes, they even pass their house while they’re still out shopping!

Wow. I never really thought of convenience as a reason to live in one of the thousands of “compartmentalized” homes in the Valley. Sure, I bitch that there are no dining options here in Wickenburg and shopping is somewhat limited. But never in a million years would I consider moving down into the Phoenix area just to increase my dining and shopping options. That’s a quality of life change. Those folks get their privacy from 6-1/2 foot walls that block the views. I get my privacy from having neighbors that live too far away to see into my windows. Those folks make their neighbors an integral part of their lives with community barbecues and home lighting rituals. I make outdoor activities and recreation an integral part of my life with hiking, horseback riding, and Jeeping — all from my backyard. Those people live with the sound of traffic on Thunderbird or other major arteries a backdrop to their daily existence. The soundtrack for my life is the sound of the wind and the birds and the occasional howl of a coyote or hoot of an owl.

We left the party at 9 PM, using our long drive as an excuse for early departure. We were tired — Mike had done some serious yard work early in the day and I’d spent 3 hours that morning at the office. We drove up to I-17 and Carefree Highway with the top down. The sky was clear and the moon was full. As the ambient light around us faded, the stars emerged, one by one. I realized that the folks we’d spent the evening with probably couldn’t see the stars from their homes.

Would I trade my lifestyle for theirs? What do you think?

Gone to the Birds

Posted on by
Comment

A little bit about the birds in my life.

This morning, my rooster started crowing at 4:03 AM. I know this because I heard him. We’re getting on to the time of year when you can leave windows open all night. I think one of the bedroom windows must be open a crack because I heard him quite clearly this morning. I was already awake, of course, so it didn’t really bother me. It just reminded me that I have a rooster. And it made me wonder whether my new neighbors — the folks that moved into the pink house on 328th Avenue — could hear him. And whether he bothered them.

My closest neighbors must hear him pretty good. I asked them once if he bothered them and they assured me that he didn’t. They like the sound. That’s good to know. But when you consider that he does most of his crowing before sunrise, it makes you wonder how early they get up.

One of my other neighbors had a rooster for a while. I could tell because I’d hear crowing far off sometimes, when it wasn’t my rooster. Then the crowing stopped and I knew the coyotes had paid Mr. Rooster a visit.

The coyotes have paid my chickens numerous visits. The first time was way back with my first batch of 8 chickens, all hens, which I used to let out during the day. They’d come down the driveway to where the horses live and spend the morning scratching around in the sand for bugs and other chicken delicacies. One afternoon, when they all came back to roost, there were only five of them. Three had disappeared without a trace. You’d think the horses would protect them, but no. Horses have no interest in chickens.

A funny story here. Every night during the summer’s monsoon season, we have to move our horses out of their lower corral, because it’s in a flood zone, to spend the night in their much smaller upper corral. The upper corral has fence-hung feeders. I’d go to the upper corral in the evening and prepare it by adding hay and a grain mixture we call “bucket” to each feeder before bringing up the horses. The chickens were usually out and about and even though they don’t have enough brains to fill a shot glass, they figured out that there was grain in the feeders. So once in a while, they’d hop up there and scratch around a bit. One day, when I brought the horses up, Jake, our unflappable Quarter Horse, stuck his head in his feeder to get at the grain and immediately pulled it out. A chicken popped out, onto the ground, and ran away. Jake seemed to let out a deep sigh before he stuck his head back in for dinner.

I currently have three hens and a rooster. Over the years, I’ve lost lots of chickens to coyotes, which is why a coyote tail hangs from my Honda’s rearview mirror. More recently, however, the problem has been my neighbor’s dogs. I like my neighbors and I like their dogs. We live outside the town limits, at the end of a dead-end road. There are only three houses out here and we all have dogs. Although leashes are technically required — this is Maricopa County — none of us pay much attention to that. Instead, we’ve trained our dogs to stay nearby. Dogs don’t necessarily understand property lines, so our dogs occasionally stray onto each others’ property. No big deal there. My neighbor’s dogs, Bo and Trixie, often come up to my house to visit my dog, Jack. Sometimes they go down to the wash and play together. They play rough — too rough for my brother’s dog, who came to visit for Thanksgiving. But they have fun and they don’t really bother anyone.

That is, until Bo and Trixie discovered that if they dug under the fence, they could get at the chickens. The fence was my effort to contain the chickens so the coyotes would stop getting them. Coyotes are evidently lazy and are not interested in the hard labor of digging under a fence. Bo and Trixie, on the other hand, like to dig. The chickens gave them a reward for good digging. So one day, they dug under the fence, got in, and had a good chicken dinner, leaving only two live chickens behind as mute witnesses.

At first, I thought the coyotes had done the dirty deed. But then I realized that whoever had done it had left parts. Coyotes don’t leave parts. They take the whole chicken in their mouth and trot off with it. I’ve seen them do this. But I wasn’t putting two and two together yet so I figured it was the coyotes. So we reinforced the bottom of the fence with stakes and filled in the holes and got some more chickens, including the current rooster.

One day around Thanksgiving, I’m lounging around the house with my house guests and there’s a knock on the door. That in itself is amazing; no one ever knocks on our door. No one can ever find our house. If you know where our house is, it’s likely that you know us well enough to just open the door and holler “Hello?” I opened the door and found my neighbor’s three little kids standing there. They’re aged 4 to 8 or something like that. Two boys and their older sister. “Our dogs are eating your chickens,” they reported.

I threw on my shoes and ran down the driveway, followed closely by my brother and whoever else was around. Sure enough, the dogs were in the chicken yard. But these chickens had some survival skills — quite impressive for chickens — and had retreated into the upper part of the coop. The dogs were unable to catch them.

We got the dogs out and secured the chickens in the upper coop, where I knew they’d be safe. We patched up the hole Bo and Trixie had made. And a few weeks later, we installed an electric fence around the outside bottom edge of the fenced-in yard. I was there one day when Bo touched it. He went yelping back home and didn’t return for over a week. Needless to say, they don’t try getting into the chicken coop anymore.

The chickens, however, must be traumatized by all these close calls. Only one of the three hens lays eggs. I get about 5 eggs a week from her. The other two are freeloaders. They don’t know how lucky they are. My chicken-raising book advises you to eat the chickens that stop laying.

PhotoI also have a bird in the house. Alex the Bird is an African Grey parrot. As I type this at my kitchen table, Alex is practicing his vocabulary. “Jack, no! You’re bad! Are you cranky? Hello Mikey. Are you a duck? Gimme that thing. Jack, no! Alex! Hey goober. Fatso. Come on Jack. Wanna go upside down? Are you a chicken? Are you a cow? Are you a cranky bird? Ricky bird. Alex, are you cranky? Alex is a maniac. Okay, Alex the Bird. Hello. Hey, you goober. See you later alligator.” You get the idea. He’s 2-1/2 years old and he says a ton of stuff. In fact, he’s forgotten half of what he used to know. It’s pretty amazing considering that he’ll live to be about 50. By the time I’m dead and gone, he’ll be talking better than most people I know.

Alex also does sound effects, like the dog whining, my cell phone, and the squeal of the back screen door (which no longer squeals, but Alex squeals anyway every time we open it). He whistles pretty darn good, too. Right now, I’m teaching him the theme for the “Andy Griffith Show,” which I downloaded from the Internet. Every once in a while, I play it a few times for him. He practices in the morning — like right now — and I repeat back the part he’s trying to do to reinforce the correct stuff.

African Grey parrots are incredible companion pets. They thrive on attention and will learn to say whatever you take the time to teach them. Like all other birds, they’re messy, but if you have a dog that likes bird food, a lot of the mess is cleaned up as it happens. Every morning, in fact, when Alex has his breakfast (scrambled eggs), he drops half of it on the floor where Jack is waiting to gobble it up. Sometimes I think he drops the food on purpose just to watch Jack.

Unlike the typical African Grey (at least according to most books and articles I’ve read), Alex is extremely affectionate and likes to be cuddled. I hug him every morning before I put him back in his cage for the day and every night before I put him back in his cage for bed. He also likes to play rough. I hold him upside down by his feet and tickle his belly. Although he makes some fussy noises sometimes — his way of saying, “Cut that out!” — I know he likes it. It’s the attention, I think. He trusts me and knows I won’t hurt him. So although our rough play should be scary to him, it isn’t.

There are a lot of wild birds around Wickenburg, too. Hummingbirds abound. I used to keep feeders filled for them, but I’ve been slacking off. I don’t spend enough time at home to watch them. There are also quail, doves, Gila woodpeckers, thrushes, orioles, and more others than I know. When I had my office in the house, I recall looking up out the window one morning to see a Gambels quail dad leading his six or seven baby chicks to a shady spot in my flower garden. I watched them lounge for quite a while, transfixed. The babies were so cute! Then dad decided to move the troop on and they hopped out of sight.

We also have roadrunners here, although I don’t see them very often. Roadrunners are most often found in sandy washes and places where they can find lizards and snakes, which they eat. I was in Lake Havasu City the other day, chatting with some folks at the Nautical Inn when we spotted a roadrunner standing on the deck of a building less than 50 feet away. One of the men told us a story about an exchange between a roadrunner and a coyote that he had witnessed. The two animals faced off with a long chain-link fence between them. The roadrunner made cackling noises, and walked back and forth on his side of the fence, teasing the coyote. The coyote walked back and forth. Little by little, the roadrunner and coyote got closer and closer to the end of the fence. Finally, the coyote seized his chance. He took off, darting around the edge of the fence. But the roadrunner was quicker. He took off (they do know how to fly) and sailed over the fence, landing on the other side. Then they faced off again, on opposite sides of the fence, and the roadrunner started cackling all over again. It was quite clear who was smarter (in case those cartoons didn’t convince you) and the roadrunner was definitely having some fun at the coyote’s expense.

We don’t get many birds in the yard anymore, probably because of Jack the Dog. He chases all animals out of the yard. That’s okay, though. There are plenty of other places for them to go. I’m sure I could get some back if I put out seed for them, but Jack is actually quite good at catching doves and I really don’t want to see any more dead doves on my doorstep. (And they say cats are bad.)There are three red tailed hawks in the area. They live near the golf course on Steinway Road. I often see them together on the power lines there. The are also turkey vultures in town. They just got back from wherever it is that they go for the winter. They look wonderful in flight and many observers mistake them for hawks. But there’s no mistaking them when they’re on the ground around a dead cow. They’re downright ugly!We have owls, too. There was one that lived in the state land out behind my house. Every evening, just after sunset, he’d fly out for his nighttime hunt. He’d land on a tree behind our house and hoot for a bit, then soar past our house and land on the top of a power pole on 328th Avenue. We saw him nearly every day for weeks. And we often saw or heard him coming in early in the morning. But one day, he misjudged his landing on the power pole. His wings evidently touched the power lines in just the wrong way. Fried. We found him on the ground near the power pole. The next day, his body was gone.

That’s the way things are here in the desert. Every animal — dead or alive — is a meal for another animal. Nature keeps a delicate balance here that really isn’t a balance at all. For example, because of all the rain we’re having, there’s a lot of grass. That means there’s plenty of food for the rabbits. That means there will be plenty of rabbits this spring and summer. Rabbits are good food for coyotes. So next year, there will be lots of coyotes. It happened the last time we had an El Niño year, so I know what to expect.

That’s all for now; I need my second cup of coffee. And my rooster is crowing again.

Photos Taken Offline

Posted on by
Comment

I take my slideshows offline. Here’s why.

I got a rude awakening the other day when someone sent me an e-mail postcard that featured one of my photographs.

Now I know this person didn’t mean anything by it. He was writing to me about something in the photo and I guess he figured that the photo would help him communicate what he was trying to say.

But it got me thinking. And it made me realize that the .Mac slideshows I’ve created to show off the places I’ve been are a perfect format for theft. They’re a high enough resolution for the Web (obviously) and for printing at smaller sizes. These are usually photos of remote places in Arizona and I’d like to think some of them are interesting and artistic. I create and sell photo greeting cards with these photos. It would really piss me off if someone else was doing the same thing with my work.

My friend Laura, who is a local photographer, is stuck with a similar dilemma, and was asking me about it just the other day. She wants to show off her work on her Web site and make photos available for sale. But she’s worried that people will just download the photos off the Web and print them. People do it all the time. People mistakenly believe that if something is on the Web, it’s not protected by copyright law.

It’s happened to me with work I’ve written here. Someone liked one of my articles in these blogs so much, he printed it out, photocopied it, and distributed it all over town. He left my byline on it, but made no note of the context of where it had been found. His goal was to make me look evil — some people really do need to get a life — but he wound up providing entertainment for a lot of people who agreed with me. But that’s not the point. The point is, he broke the law in distributing my work without my permission. The next time it happens, I will prosecute. Heck, I’d love to get a copyright thief to pay for my helicopter.

So anyway, I pulled the high-res photos offline. And, from now on, photos will be limited to the small, low-resolution images you see here in these blogs.

Brie with Turkey

Posted on by
Comment

I amend one of my blog entries.

I was just reading through a few of the blog entries in this category. I didn’t realize that rain had formed such a big part of my life this winter. The sun is out now, but there are T-storms to the northwest. But that’s not what this blog is about.

It’s about a brie and turkey sandwich. I had one at the Wildflower Bakery in Scottsdale a while back and I mentioned, in the entry where I reported it, that you can’t get a sandwich like that in Wickenburg. That’s what I need to correct. Now you can.

One morning after that lunch in Scottsdale, I stopped in at the Old Nursery Coffee Company, which is my favorite place to get coffee in Wickenburg. Heather, the owner, also has a limited lunch menu. I’m talking really limited: two items. But they’re two good items, especially the chicken tarragon salad sandwich. Yum.

I told Heather about my sandwich. She said, “Ooh, that sounds good.” And then, a week later, she was offering a similar sandwich at the shop.

I had one today and it was good. There’s something about brie with turkey….something I like. She makes it with lettuce and roasted red pepper. I told her to hold the pepper because peppers and I disagree with each other. She offered me tomato but I turned her down. It was fine without it.

So yes, you can get a turkey with brie sandwich right here in Wickenburg. I’m just wondering what else I might find at the Old Nursery from Wildflower’s menu — I dropped it off a few weeks ago to give Heather some other ideas.