July 14th, 15th, and 16th

The older you get the more you come to appreciate a single important fact: you just can’t put a price tag on a great view. Man, what a view this place has! It’s downright biblical. In the spring and fall the Hualipi Valley looks like heaven: wet, green, and filled with wildlife. In the summer and winter it’s a vision of hell so epically severe that Dante Alighieri would shake his head and say “Yep. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote The Inferno!” All right - Dante would never have said “yep,” but I’m sure you know what I mean. In the winter there’s blizzards, freezing rain, and hungry mountain lions. In the summer there are lighting storms, massive dust devils, and hungry mountain lions. Don't get me wrong: having large, predatory cats as neighbors isn’t as much of an inconvenience as one might think. I vastly prefer them to my neighbors in Richmond. They’re quite, keep to themselves, and have never once left an empty bottle of Remy Martin on my doorstep.

It was too hot to get more than a moderate amount of work done this weekend. I organized Tina’s office, cleaned up and organized the warehouse, wrote a few thousand words of Lucha Libre Hero (my next project for Hero Games), and tinkered yet again on the jeep. This produced the rather predictable result of nothing, even when the mad Dr. Frankenstein creator of the jeep himself showed up to help me work on it. Near as Frank (my father in law) and I can tell the jeep’s electrical system is – to use a technical term – screwed. I’m going to replace the coil next trip and see what happens but I’m not terribly optimistic. If I have to learn the arcane mystery known as “setting the points” I may run screaming from the workshop once and for all. Which is a shame, as I really, really want to get the damn thing running so I can concentrate on other tasks. I need to move on to getting the ranch house up to code for an inspection, then building a nice big porch for it so I can landscape us a front yard.

Ah, well: bitch, bitch, bitch.

On a happy/sad note Tina and two of her cousins arrived to just in time for me to leave on Sunday. She had a major book shipment to take care of on Monday and Tuesday, while I had to get back to work on Monday for various reasons. This has gotten to be a regrettable pattern over the last few months: we are both coming out here but consistently at different times due to work considerations. This will end in the next few months but it’s a drag while it lasts.