~o:> at least the carpets were clean

This morning (this would be Thursday, September 9):

I did the treadmill, then trotted down the long pasture driveway in a little rain.  Let the horses out, fertilized about three quarters of a acre, moved two days’ and five horses’ worth of manure, threw down a bale of hay, and took down one of the summer fences (that makes the third out of nine).  Went home for breakfast, did some picture book pages (I wish I’d stop distracting myself with interesting Photoshop problems—or do I wish that?) then ran back to the pasture to meet Greg-with-the-truck who brought me four yards (even though he charged me for three) of some of the coolest natural gravel I’ve ever seen.  I spread the gravel with the Brave Little Tractor (which is WAY harder than it sounds, and a little death defying), went home, did some more pictures then cleaned the fridge.  All penance for my very consistent and long-term lack of focus and productivity.  Tomorrow, I will irrigate, have carpets cleaned, finish the fridge and consult with Mitch, who makes furniture and fixes recalcitrant blinds.  A day neatly and busily done.

Tomorrow’s plan:

Treadmill. Care for the horses. Wait for Mitch to show up (assuming he doesn’t show up while I’m still at the barn).  Clean up the rooms Mitch will actually see.  Set up an Apple support call-back because my Time Machine backup has wigged out; schedule it for after Mitch. Carpet guys (Tucker is very, very sorry about the carpet) coming at four o’clock, a good hour after I’ve finally started the very last day of summer irrigation.  YAY!!

What  actually happened (Friday, September 10): On the way home from the horses, dressed in my pleasingly filthy jeans, I checked the irrigation ditches.  Whoa – even at the river, nothing but a trickle.  And the only person who can open the actual river gate (assuming there’s any water in the river itself) is the Water Master.  Race home to call him.  Leave a message: twenty pounds of ammonium sulfate pellets icing my dry pasture (yesterday’s fertilizing); no rain fell yesterday after-all, and I can’t put the horses on the grass till the chemicals are watered in.  Yikes.  What do we do now?

But he doesn’t call back.

Maybe irrigation is already over for the year (I had yearned for this moment all summer) and nobody told me – or it could have been shut down because of the construction that’s tearing up every road around for miles. I make more calls; nobody seems to know what’s up.  I’m going to have to set up sprinklers, I guess.

Mitch is not there when I get home (whew).  Mitch is still not there an hour later (dang).  Finally had to call him; Mitch is very zen about appointments, and he mocks me about the Apple call, as he eschews everything tech.  He says, we must reschedule for right after the Apple call (noon?).

Apple call not productive (at least they didn’t charge me). Time Machine cannot be fixed; migration of files from one computer to another computer results in renouncement of all historical backups.  Only fixes: a Terminal hack Murphy could do, but I am scared to mess with, OR the purchase of a new drive and starting over from scratch.

Still waiting for Mitch.  I start processing more photobook pages while I wait.  I do so many, seems like I’ve been sitting at my desk for maybe a month. But still no Mitch.  Finally he calls.  Sorry.  Maybe we can get together next Monday. The Water Master still hasn’t called, and I’m supposed to have started my turn half an hour ago.  Obviously, I couldn’t. Which is a problem, but which also frees me up to run to Sam’s Club for a new Time Machine drive.  G needs a drive too.  A simple, quick Sam’s run: two drives.  And maybe a bag of frozen chicken breasts.

Piece-a-cake.

This is what you get when you take the time to revisit your family photographic record.  Hubba hubba.

I find the drives (not the ones I wanted) and the chicken pretty quick.  And then some strawberries.  And blueberries.  And Spinach and California mix – and a bag of Halloween Candy (which I swore I would never buy again, preferring to hand out little prizes. But here I am, selling out—Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups).  Oh, and three reels of sort of reasonably priced LCD Christmas lights (slowly replacing my money-sucking traditional thousands of lights with these – which cost a heck of a lot more than the old ones).  And a cooked chicken.  And I don’t remember what else, but it was WAY more than I went for.  What a surprise.  Oh, yeah –  a case of toilet tissue.  And, did I mention I was out of gas?

And I ain’t so bad my own seff.

I am definitely not going to irrigate.  It’s now over an hour past my start time.

Then, as I’m driving home, the Water Master calls back: “You can go ahead now and take as much water as you can scrape together.  Let it run for as long as it takes,” he says.   Which is really nice of him.  But means that my turn is going to have to be about eight hours long instead of the usual two because the water is so weak, and I gotta start NOW.

The fierce look of a son working with the men.

Have I forgotten that the carpet guys are coming?  Yes.  As I drive up to my house, I think, WHO the HECK is PARKED in my DRIVEWAY????? And then,  Oh.  Oh, yeah.  Not only have they actually showed up, they are early.

So I let the carpet guys in, run upstairs and change back into my filthy clothes, grab my water wheel, run out to the car – and realize that I have not taken the groceries into the house yet.  So I haul my stuff into the house (eight loads of it), kiss the puppies, stick them into their kennels, leave the carpet guys setting up (it’s a married couple and they’re really nice) and dash to open/close the irrigation gates all the way down Center (two miles’ worth).  I get stuck at one gate; can’t get the wheel to turn.  I call the Water Master (who is trying to cut corn) for help.  But a nice (but kinda scary) guy happens by and helps me get the wheel to turn.  I tell the Water Master thanks anyway and watch the nice and scary man turn the wheel till the gate is wide open.   And I am very grateful as I back away from him. (But how can a guy who is walking a tiny fluffy dog really be scary?)

Run home to find the carpet machine screaming away in the front hall, right in front of the studio door – the door behind which G is, at that moment, trying to record acoustic bass for a Christmas album.  Run out to the studio, where G is philosophically baffling the heck out of that door, trying to muffle the sound of the carpet machine.

A daughter, reveling in her grandmother’s princess finery.  This kid, at least in this moment of time,  knows she’s beautiful.

At this point—

Oh, I forget what happened next.  I do know that, eventually, way after dark, we finally shut off the irrigation water.  What wee bit there had been—maybe got halfway across the pasture.  Irrigation finally done for the season (Yay, again!).  And the carpets upstairs ended up clean (except Tucker was in that one bedroom checking things out before I caught him.  Did he do any damage?  How would I know—the carpets were already wet).

All of this may explain why I can’t seem to focus lately. (Lately?)

Last night, I was having this little chat with the heavens; I think the gist of it was, like – gee, out of all the terrible things that could be happening to us, mostly they haven’t.

I was rehearsing a little list of scary things as I got ready for bed, trying to wind down—mind just sort of on cruise control: at any minute, a meteor could crash into the planet, or for that matter, right through the roof of my house.  Or there could be an earthquake, right here under our neighborhood, in the middle of the night.  Or a flood – if somebody should fall asleep at the gates up at the dam.  Or the house could burn down tonight—wiring problems, or some gas explosion.  Well, really—things like that can and do happen to people.  Or bad people could decide on a whim to pick our house to rob for their drug money (waste of their time).  Or evil government people could just decide to show up in the middle of the night and arrest us (thinking of the world possibilities – this one isn’t likely in the US.  Not yet, anyway).  The point is, our lives, which seem so real to us as we tuck ourselves into bed every night, can simply disappear in a flash of strange circumstance.

And suddenly, it dawned on me: yes, these things can and do happen.  But not very often.  In fact, hardly ever.  That’s what makes them news.  As dangerous as life can be on this planet, living in human systems, playing roulette with nature, it’s amazing how peaceful life actually can be a good deal of the time.  At that point, I let go of the breath I had been holding all day.  And I was grateful.

I thought, sometimes the Gift isn’t the hand of God, knocking aside meteors so much as it is the hints and help and teaching He has left for us to discover.  My sister sent me an article out of Time Magazine, a piece about the newest thing in psychology: positive psych.  Like, instead of the focus being to identify our neuroses and mitigate our human misery so that we can at least function, the new school of thought is about finding ways to help people actually be happy.

Wow.  Innovative.

In the article, there is a sidebar that offers eight new steps toward a more satisfying life.  They are, and I list only the topics, 1) count your blessings, 2) practice acts of kindness, 3) savor life’s joys, 4) thank a mentor, 5) learn to forgive, 6) invest time and energy in friends and fam, 7) take care of your body, 8) develop strategies for coping with stress and hardships.

The princess, reading.  Grandma’s house.  All magic.

Do you find this theory to be shocking revelation? Because the community of psychologists seems to be shaken to the core by this kind of thinking.  Highly controversial.  (I can picture quite a few of us boring, conservative-valued “religious” folks watching, slack-jawed with wonder, as these professors and experts run around acting like they’ve just discovered a brand new continent.)

There are other interesting points in the article, like the “expert” who sums up the signs of pessimism thus: people who plan in detail for the hardships of the future.  By this, I assume she means people who wear bike helmets and watch their calories and put money into a savings account against future need?  People, then, who have hope that they can actually overcome the bad surprises, prepare for them, live through them and go on with their lives?  People who have hope that life will be worth going on with?  Really – such pessimists.

The end of my self-discussion seems to be this: if we do the things that have ALWAYS been wise for people to do, we will probably (not always –  drunk drivers still run into really nice families who have done everything right – and meteors are extremely ecumenical) sidestep whole hoards of the Terrible Things that could happen.  And we will probably have pretty good lives – building, loving, inventing, creating, dancing.  Crazy lives, maybe.  But ones that seem, at least some of the time, to make pleasant sense.

Nice guy, doing a 38 mile (one way – and almost straight up) early morning ride, just to start the day.

It has been said (usually through a sneer), “Nice guys finish last.”

I shrug.  If you read that phrase another way, it could mean that nice people, who do nice the way nice has been recommended be done since the first baby crawled out of the sea (enigmatic, huh?), will probably still be alive and healthy long after all the grasping, desperate, self-absorbed, short-sighted and feckless guys have cheerfully, miserably, dramatically done themselves in one way or another.  Thus, finishing last.

The son who gets up at six to go with him, straight up the canyon.

He who has the most family around him at the end of his mortal time (assuming it’s not because they just want to share in the estate) wins.  And the life he lived – it was worth being lived.

Was there a shorter way to say all this, I wonder?

And by the way,  if I owe you an email – or a phone call or a visit, or a present of some kind: hold fast.  I will answer.  And if I don’t, throw something at me.  There are effective ways to get my attention.  There have to be.