Two dear friends came to visit me on Sunday, and we had relaxing evenings that night and last night. Since neither lives very close, this is the first time I’ve seen them since Grace died; in fact, the last time they were here was last August, and all four of us sat around the atrium high as kites and had a ball. This time was a bit more sedate, as I expected, but despite my imbibing enough to considerably reduce my inhibitions, I didn’t cry much (except for once, a little, right at the beginning) and I don’t think I overwhelmed them talking too much about Grace. But even if I had done, it wouldn’t have mattered to them; they both knew how much I loved Grace, and they both can see how difficult adjusting to life without her has been for me. And one simple definition of a “friend” could be, “Someone who is there for you when you need them.” In fact, that’s part of what made Grace so special; she was always there for me, so much so that I may have sometimes taken her for granted. I believe some of the pain I’m feeling comes from a sort of nebulous guilt that I didn’t always show her enough how much she mattered to me, especially in the first half of the Teens when I was dealing with the dissolution of my marriage and my move to Seattle. It’s not that she ever grumbled about it; though she was perfectly comfortable grumbling about everybody else who annoyed her, to her I was always “my little angel” who could walk on water. I reckon part of me wishes I really could work miracles as she seemed to think, and that I could have somehow arrested or at least slowed the gradual collapse of her body, so that I could’ve had at least a few more years of her unflagging support and companionship.
Posts Tagged ‘Sunset’
Diary #780
Posted in Diary, tagged Grace, psychology, Sunset on June 10, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Diary #778
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset, video on May 27, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Sunday was the official end of chick season at Sunset; it’s a few weeks late because I had to start late this year, but as you can see the pullets are already starting to bop around the yard. They’re still a little skittish when the adult hens approach, but all of the adults we have now are docile and well-behaved, so I think the pullets will join the flock pretty soon. I’m unsure how the turkey will fit into that; she (?) seems bolder than the pullets, and is already as large as my smallest hen, so we’ll just have to wait and see. But the lamp timer has been put away until autumn, and in a week or two I’ll block off the nursery until March, and by midsummer we should start seeing teeny little eggs from the newcomers, possibly even from the turkey (if she does indeed turn out to be a hen).
Diary #775
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset, video on May 6, 2025| 1 Comment »
Sunday was the pullets’ first day out of the nursery; I opened up the wire so they could come out if they liked. In my experience, they virtually never come out the first day; more often, one of more adult hens will barge into the nursery to eat the feed the little ones have scattered. Last year’s brood were unusually brave, but these are more typical so I didn’t expect that (though I did think the turkey chick might come out, given her boldness when they were still in the bathroom and the fact that she’s managed to get out on her own twice in the past week). And yet here they are exploring, though they all ran right back into the nursery when one of the hens came in just after I put the phone back in my pocket. The chicken wire on the nursery has begun to fray and break, and will need to be replaced this year; really, I should’ve done it during the winter, but I was not really in the headspace. But this summer I plan to replace the henhouse roof (which has become too rotten and leaky), so I’ll redo the nursery at the same time and probably make it a little more “user-friendly” while I’m at it. Anyhow, for the next three weeks I’ll let them out every morning and shut them in every night; the heat lamp is now plugged into the timer rather than being on 24 hours a day, and by the time three weeks are up they won’t need it at night, either. And by the time autumn starts, they’ll just be part of the flock.
Diary #774
Posted in Diary, tagged Grace, psychology, Sunset, video on April 29, 2025| Leave a Comment »
For the last few years, Grace and I had a regular soak in the hot tub every Saturday afternoon. I started the tradition because a hot soak helped her arthritis, and making it one of our activities was the only way I could get her to do it regularly. Grace actually did much better on a schedule; left to her own devices she would eat, sleep, and everything else whenever she felt like it, which tended to aggravate her health problems. But if I woke her, served dinner, etc at regular times it was much easier to keep her various issues under control. Keeping up our schedule after she died has helped me not to sink into depression, but there are a few things, our weekly soak among them, which were just so closely associated with her that I haven’t been able to do them without crying. Well, a few weeks ago I started the weekly soak again; I’m finding it relaxing as long as I have an edible before going in. And as long as I stay stoned from then until bedtime, I don’t cry as much after I get out, either.
Diary #773
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset, video on April 22, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The chicks are done with their first week in the playpen, and so far so good; they seem comfortable with the temperature (something I always worry about the first couple of nights they’re out there) and the hens are mostly ignoring them, which is a good thing. In less than two weeks I’ll be letting them out in the daytime and only putting them in the playpen at night, and after three weeks of that they’ll be living with the others. I think it will probably go well this year; all the adults we currently have are well-behaved and calm of temperament, and I’ve caught the chicks picking on the turkey, so I think they’re spunky enough to hold their own. At least I hope so; heaven knows I could use a trouble-free spring.
Diary #772
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset, video on April 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »
One couldn’t ask for a better example of why A) it’s impossible to keep the bathroom properly clean while the chicks are in residence; and B) regardless of how cute they are, by the end of three weeks I’m more than ready for them to go into their playpen in the henhouse. This turkey chick is clearly a week or so older than the chickens, and gets all over the place; last week it was just the toilet lid, but starting late last week this sort of thing became a daily occurrence. And it’s not just while I’m absent, oh no; twice in the past few days I was brushing my teeth in peace when I suddenly heard flapping and then felt it land on my back, climbing up until it reached my shoulder. I’ve got to admit it makes me laugh, but all the same I’m glad they’re moving to the coop today, so I can get the bathroom clean of pine shavings, food crumbles, poop, unidentifiable specks of schmutz, and ants before my Easter company arrives this weekend.
Diary #771
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset, video on April 8, 2025| Leave a Comment »
I typically wait until the third week to expand the “chick corral” to full size, but with the turkey chick in there I figured it was best to do it at the beginning of the second week. I believe the turkey chick is also a week or so older, not only judging by looks but also by the fact that it started flying up to perch on the wall when it had been here only a couple of days. By contrast, the chickens are only just getting to flying stage; I caught the first one doing it Saturday evening, and I took this video Sunday afternoon. Actually, I took about six of them until one decided to do something interesting! As for the turkey, when I went into the bathroom early Sunday morning, I found several blobs of shit on the toilet lid; since the corral is immediately adjacent to the toilet, the turkey keeps using it as a landing target (and apparently did it often enough overnight to leave several droppings). Still, I’m going to try not to separate them; I don’t want to put the turkey alone in the playpen before the little ones. And if that means I have to clean turkey chick poop a few more times, at least the toilet paper is handy.
Living in the Future
Posted in Biography, Philosophy, tagged Grace, Louisiana, psychology, Sunset, Washington (state) on April 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The night Grace died, after the morticians and everyone else had gone, I sat down on the sofa and texted my dear friend Frank. It was 4:45 AM, but Frank prefers the night shift at the hospital and would be home by a quarter to seven Central time. He must’ve not worked that evening, but replied the next day, and he and Olivia quickly decided to come up and visit as soon as they could make it work; they arrived two Saturdays ago, the 22nd, and left last Saturday, the 29th. Their presence was an amazing comfort to me; I’ve known Frank since 1984 and Olivia since 1990, and in addition to being my dearest friends along with Grace, they loved her too and so the three of us were able to comfort each other. There was another reason they came to visit: they are planning to move here as soon as it’s feasible.
This is not a new idea for us; Olivia has been interested in moving to the Pacific Northwest for as long as I’ve known her, and after I bought Sunset in 2017 we started tentatively planning how to make it happen. Frank didn’t have any special attraction to the PNW, but he wants out of Louisiana, wants to make his wife happy, and wants to live near me as much as I want to live near them. All of my life, I’ve dreamed of having the people I love most within walking distance; it’s part of the reason I bought a big piece of land, so I could carve out homesteads for friends who want them. And it’s also part of the reason I added a wing to my house: so friends could stay while working on establishing their own homes. Once the annex was mostly done at the beginning of ’23, I officially invited them to move. But as Grace’s health declined I had less time to devote to anything else, so we didn’t really start making any concrete plans until now.
That it took over 18 years after I left Louisiana for good to get this ball rolling illustrates what I think has been one of my lifelong worst failings: the tendency to live in the future rather than the present, to repeatedly say to myself, “I’ll start working on x as soon as I’ve accomplished y“. Now, this isn’t an unusual shortcoming; if anything, I’d say it was only second to its opposite, repeatedly leaping without looking. But our time on this plane is so short, deferring important goals for too long eats up a lot of the time one would otherwise have to enjoy them. Grace delayed building herself a trike, something she’d wanted to do since she became too infirm to safely ride her motorcycle any longer, until she felt well enough to do so; alas, that time never came, but it isn’t something she could’ve readily circumvented, either. Given the logistics, I’m unsure if it would’ve made much difference had we started actively working on Frank and Olivia’s move soon after I bought Sunset, or at least immediately after finishing the addition two years ago. But perhaps it would’ve at least given them one last visit with Grace before she was taken from us.
Diary #770
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, disease, Sunset, video, Washington (state) on April 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The high price of eggs this year has inspired droves of people to line up at the local Tractor Supply every chick day since mid-February, and the store manager tells me they’re buying them out within half an hour. So I had to order some from the feed store in Montesano; even there I was at the tail end, so I didn’t get them until Friday. Chekhov went to pick them up for me, and Yellowbird decided to get a turkey chick as well; apparently turkeys aren’t routinely sexed, so I have no idea if it’s a tom or hen. So that little giant will be with the chicks at least for a while, and they’re about a month behind my usual schedule; that still means they should be laying by August. Alas, one thing I’m going to miss this year is Grace’s talking to what she called “the chickadees” every time she went to the loo; I guess it was better in the big picture they arrived a month late, so I don’t start crying every time I think of that.
Diary #769
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, disease, Sunset on March 25, 2025| 2 Comments »
Tragedies refuse to space themselves out so we can deal with them less painfully; more often, they follow each other too closely for us to be over one before having to deal with each other. So though I’m still grieving hard for Grace, our dog Annie has now passed away as well. Annie was almost 14, but she was apparently healthy and happy until about two weeks ago, when she suddenly dropped a scary amount of weight in what seemed like a few days (she was always a very trim dog, so it may be that I didn’t really notice until she started looking less-happy). Unfortunately, vets nowadays are almost as bad as people-doctors with making it difficult to get timely appointments, so when I called they couldn’t give me anything closer than 3 weeks out; I told the scheduler I was going to worm her to see if that helped. Alas, it did not; she would eat especially-tempting tidbits, but not her usual kibble. So I bought canned food to see if that would help; last Tuesday she ate it, but Wednesday she barely ate any at all, and what little she did eat she threw up over 8 hours later, completely undigested. By this point it was obvious she had reached the end of her natural life; perhaps she had some kind of undetected illness such as cancer which had taken a turn for the worse. So I scheduled her for euthanasia Friday, but just after four on Thursday afternoon she slipped away in her favorite spot. Speck had been with her all day, cuddled up to her and purring loudly, and when I realized she was going I sat beside her, stroking her and telling her she was a good girl as she quietly passed. I’m very glad it happened naturally so she could leave this world in her home, surrounded by creatures who loved her, rather than in a strange, scary place; would that all of us could be so fortunate.
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