Cosumne Gal

Today was our last at work. Janice and Judy were laid off. I retired. Everyone else threw us a party. It was a bit strange, everyone who didn't get laid off was relieved, many of the people who are close to retiring were wishing they could join us. The Edbiz is not the happy place it once was, fake Mai Tais or not.

We had a wonderful luau. The people I worked with often wear black suits. I nagged them constantly about that. Today almost all of them wore colorful clothes. It was beautiful. The pot luck lunch was great.

I didn't get a gold watch. I didn't want anything. But my coworkers did give me this cute ceramic crow.


And Melanie wrote this for me.

Things are busy here. I have 2 more days at work. They are not going to be easy ones. The math people discovered I was retiring and requested updates to a job I originally did for them 2 years ago. I'm the only person who has worked with math software and InDesign. My compatriots could figure it out. Eventually. But that's not something I'd do to them. (Besides, I like the math people and the job we produced is so cool.)

Bob started an enormous new row of chicken pens. A very ambitious project. I helped by painting both sides of 12 pieces of plywood and many feet of 2x4s. And then I had to clean the paint out of my hair. And then I had to clean it off the shower floor. The same day, I stacked half a cord of wood in the wood shed. I can stack wood, just can't push a wheelbarrow. I have selective disabilities.

Today after work, I washed my car. Tomorrow several tons of hay will be delivered. Which means it will probably rain tomorrow night, before the hay gets stacked under a roof. That's okay, I'll feed the wet bales first. I need to have it rain because my drip system is plugged and I haven't had time to clean it. It's hard to keep sand out of your water when it's pumped through 80 feet of luscious, sandy topsoil. (Yes, the system has a filter. That's what's plugged.)

Wednesday I have 2 appointments. Thursday is my retirement lunch. Friday I'm having breakfast with one friend and dinner with 2 others. Sunday might involve a trip to the poultry auction. And those are just the things I remembered to put on the calendar.

I've been online making travel arrangements for the Hawaii trip that's coming up. I'm not very good at that, so it takes me longer than it should, but I'm learning. And I've found a huge big house in Hilo and a great condo in Kona for good prices. Which should offset the nasty airline ticket prices. Usually we go in November, when the prices are much cheaper, but Bob will be in school then. I'm also trying to find a vehicle rental that isn't 1/10th the price of a new car. At this point I think it would be cheaper to hire a limo and driver. Any ideas? We'll have between 5 and 7 people. Plus luggage.

I've been taking pictures. There will be no scuzzy hair or shower pictures. Someday soon I hope to get caught up with my posts. Busy is good, this is not a complaint.

This may be what I need to get retirement started on the right foot.

I need to get my tricycle back so I can do laps around the field, preferably at the hottest part of the day. I need to do laps at a pool, too. I need to keep a very tight budget until I know how much my retirement check will be. I need to make a list of things to do and make sure they are done. This part could be rough on Bob because he's off work too, and most of the things on the list are not chores I can do by myself.

So much for retirement being a life of leisure and ease. I tried that last week. Yuck, can't do it. If you sit too long in Sloughhouse, the cats use you for a pillow, the spiders build their nests in your hair, you become covered with dust, the weeds keep growing until your house is lost in them because the gophers only eat stuff you've spent money and time to plant. If I can't check off some accomplishments by the end of the day, the day seems like a total waste, if I'm just wasting time why am I still here?

At least that's how it seems today. I'm at work. I have everything finished, cleaned up, ready to vacate. But there are 5 more days to cross off the calendar. I'm wearing out my shoes tapping my toes with boredom. When you're a short-timer, they don't give you any work to do, but everyone else is busy so you can't go around and take up their time in idle chat. Maybe I need a chill pill. What is that, anyway?

Poor Bob. John was smart to move out when he did.

Sixteen months ago I was in Texas visiting my friend Merlene. One of the wonderful things I discovered on that trip was Texas Mountain Laurel.


As I reported last year - and if I was a good blogger I could link you back to that post, but I'm not - I brought home a dozen seeds and carefully prepared them for their new life in the good Cosumne dirt. I put a few directly in the ground. I've forgotten where, but have been very careful when I'm weeding.

The others went into pots on the window sill. One of them "hatched" late last year. I kept in in the house until the weather seemed settled this spring, then carefully transplanted it outside. I put a circle of nasty stuff around it to keep the slugs at bay and have been carefully tending it.



The others have just been sitting in their pots doing nothing. If I were a tidier housekeeper, they would have been trashed long ago and would probably be sprouting happily at the landfill by now. But I can easily overlook anything that's not in my way, so the little pots have stayed on the windowsill for a whole season and then some.

This morning there are two new shoots. Here's one.


It happened overnight. This is the window right in front of my computer, and I actually do notice things when they're right in front of my nose.

I can't believe how stubborn and pessimistic these plants are. They must have to be that way to grow in their natural habitat, they just hang around and wait until they're sure conditions are perfect. Or maybe they were waiting for a summer solstice. I'm curious to see how they fare here. Will they stay shrub-like, or turn into trees?

So, Grandma Merlene, here are some live reminders of our wonderful trip. Jerry and Maureen are in Texas right now, enjoying some of the same sights, all those travel brochures we collected, as well as the Caro books, went to good use.

Did you have Beta or VHS?

I had Beta because it was better. It didn't really matter, both are extinct now. You've had to replace those vast collections of tapes with DVDs or BlueRays, or whatever. And there's no guarantee they'll be usable in another 20 years.

All this is on my mind because I've been upgrading computers and cameras this week. I have thousands of digital pictures, and I love them, but what will become of them? My ancestors took photographs and put them in albums. Those pictures have captions, so we who came after could know where and when the picture was taken, and who the subjects were. My photos are mostly numbered jpegs. Someone will have to click on every single one of them, open it, and scratch his head trying to figure it out, if jpegs and the CDs and DVDs they're stored on are even usable in the future.

My stepfather had a collection of old home movies when I was a teenager. I can remember the trouble we went to trying to watch those. Find a projector that worked, hope the film didn't break. The movies were fun, but difficult to deal with even 45 years ago.

I had a VHS camera when Bob was little. I've been planning to have those old tapes transferred to DVDs. There's no VHS player in this house. There's no TV to play tapes on anyway. Once I get the tapes on DVD, we can watch them, but then what? Will his kids be able to see their dad as a boy, wallowing in  mud puddles, watching parades, and having fun?

Sometimes I think our technology is too ephemeral. Nothing beats those old photo albums.

Photography has been one of my hobbies since I was old enough to pay for having film developed. (Note: that does not mean I'm a decent photographer.) My mother was a photographer as well, and because of her early efforts, the family has some wonderful photos. I have an old camera of hers, a Rolfix Jr. It has a Schneider lens. I think it uses 120 film, if that's even made anymore. I don't recall ever seeing color photos from it, only black and white, but they are superb. I have a big problem with this camera. I just opened it to take this picture for you.


And now I can't figure out how to close it. Sheesh. People used to be smarter before my time. (I used to be smarter, too.)

Mom always had at least one camera that none of us could figure out. She had a fixed-lens Kodak 35mm that took totally crappy pictures. They were always overexposed, underexposed, or out of focus. There is a 5 year period of my childhood of which fewer than a dozen decent photos exist because of that camera.

Then she bought a Polaroid. Those photos are now pieces of shiny cardboard with a few streaks of color running through them.

My own first camera was a Brownie box camera. It was a decent little thing, taught me a lot.

My first serious camera was this Pentax K1000.


When I bought it, other people were just beginning to buy "automatic" SLRs. This camera is entirely manual and that was a good thing for me. If you could see this camera up close, you'd think it had been used in a battle zone. It's dirty, the case is battered and worn. I took it everywhere. Everywhere in those days meant on trail rides with the horses, to Raider football games, on hikes, and out in the backyard taking pictures of flowers and praying mantises. I had lots of "stuff" for this camera, lenses and filters and doodahs.

Then the digital age was born. I went through 3 small digital cameras in as many years. The batteries were always a problem, all had lithium, rechargeable ones, and I was always recharging them. The pictures they took were uninspiring, you'd press the button and the camera would fiddle and fart around until the subjects had walked away, and then it would take the picture.

A couple of years ago I bought my Canon S5 IS, inspired by other bloggers whose photos I admired. I love this camera.


It's quick, it's very light, it's reliable. It looks enough like a complicated camera that other amateurs are impressed. And it uses AA batteries. No more waiting for batteries to recharge. This little dude gets more than 600 shots per set of batteries and when I need more I can find them easily at the nearest convenience store. Very convenient. The only thing it doesn't do well are macro shots (I have trouble focusing it).

In the back of my mind, I always thought it would be neat to have a digital camera body that I could use with my Pentax lenses. A couple of weeks ago I was investigating online and discovered that Pentax was one of the few digital cameras that still came with AA batteries, but those models would soon be discontinued in favor of ones that use lithium, rechargeable batteries. And all the Pentax digital models use the bayonet-mount Pentax lenses.

So, before I'm officially retired and have no money, I bought a new Pentax Digital SLR.


This is a K200D. I haven't used it much, just to take some test shots and make sure they'd upload to the new iMac without going through iPhoto. I hate iPhoto. So does Jon MacMan, and he's the expert.

I love the simplicity of the Pentax. Without loading any software, I just plugged it into a USB port on my computer and the pictures showed up in a folder on the desktop, exactly where I wanted them. The camera has some cool features that will probably be lost on me, my needs are simple. I expect to use it more for artsy-fartsy shots than as my everyday machine, though. It's considerably heavier than the Canon. It's considerably slower than the Canon. AND - I didn't know this - you have to use the viewfinder, not the big digital screen, to take pictures on a digital SLR. You can see the photo right away after you take it, but you have to take the photo looking through the little eyepiece. My glasses and my old eyes aren't happy about that.

I think the new Pentax is going to be great for recording Capn' Picard's life and times, though.

We have so much to look forward to!

I've had a Mac of some sort for over a quarter of a century, both at work and at home. I don't care what kind of computer YOU have, let's not get into PC wars. If you have some other kind and you like it, then bully for you. Personally, I wouldn't touch anything else because I love Macs.

Now I have a new iMac. All my stuff is transferred from Super Bubba, my old G4. All the peripherals are hooked up and they work. All of this happened in less than 2 hours. Life is good. So is Jonathan, he's the Mac Man.

All I gotta do is learn to play. I'm off to a good start. I like my face alien green. I think I'll get a haircut like Kai, from Lexx.


Actually, I wore my hair in a bun for many years, but never had that hangy-down thing across one eye. I don't like the pouty lip effect, though, I prefer my gleaming orange and yellow teeth.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Oh, and I'm declaring this computer a Microsoft-free zone. I never want to hassle with Word or PowerPoint again.

I am retiring from work at the end of this month. I have a lot of vacation time to use before I go, or I won't get paid for it. Also I really have nothing important left to do there, they've been giving the new work to the "keepers." So I've been home quite a bit lately. I feel like a stranger here.

Except for a brief foray at college and a little while living in apartments in town when I first started my work career, I have lived in this house all my life. This is my place. I've never moved because I love it here, despite the dust and flood threat, and the highway that's way too busy and too close to ever put it out of your mind.

But I have been waking up in the morning with nowhere to go and nothing I really need to do, and I feel out of place. I have a closet full of work clothes, it seems now like they belong to someone else. All I need is an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Brush my hair? Well, maybe. Shoes? Why bother (Take that Mr. Podiatrist!).

I've been bringing things home from the office. I don't have as much as most people, my philosophy was always to travel light, but still I have a couple of bags of things. As I look at them, they seem like they also belong to someone else.

It's not frightening, it's just unsettling for someone who prefers to keep both feet firmly on familiar ground.

The dirt is still familiar, the life is not. But the sun is finally shining, so I'll work it out.

There was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle today about the Sierra snowpack and possible flooding. Here

I'm just passing this along so you'll all know I'm not just being paranoid. Well, not about THIS issue anyway. I reserve the right to be paranoid about other stuff.

The article doesn't mention the Cosumnes River, probably because it has no relevance to people in San Francisco. The Cosumnes has no dams. Damn!

Boy: What's all that stuff?


Mom: It's something I ordered from a cheap-o catalog, I didn't know I had to put it together myself.

Boy: Uh oh.

Mom: It wouldn't kill you to help me put it together, you know.

Boy: Knowing you, it probably would. Bye. (He exits the house.)

Mom: No, wait a minute! Do you know where my rubber hammer is? (No response from Boy.)

Ok, so I have a checkered past when it comes to do-it-yourself projects. Perhaps my most remarkable achievement was changing the valves on my 1969 Opel. My brother Jerry made a tape of the directions and sent them to me from Vietnam. My mother assisted. She carefully labeled all the parts and made diagrams so we'd know how to reassemble the engine. It wasn't easy to get the head off an Opel in those days. I'd driven it over the mechanic's pit in our garage and it was barely wide enough to fit. I think the shaft between the front wheels had to be disconnected for some reason. The caused the wheels to tip outwards and the car almost fell into the pit. After that, things went very smoothly though. I took the head and had it ground, and put the engine back together. The only thing I did wrong was misconnect two spark plug wires, a mistake that was easily fixed, and the car started right up and ran great.

Mechanical expertise is in my father's family's blood. Well hey, I have that blood. Plus my mom was an intrepid do-it-yourselfer, though she was generally better at destruction than construction. I grew up in a house where people could do things.

My ancestors never had to deal with pressed-board furniture that comes in pieces, though. Bookcase kits with screws and pegs and little letters on the pieces, kits with directions written by the only person at the factory in some foreign country who maybe, sorta, once-upon-a-time spoke a few words of English.

My first attempt at kit furniture involved a bookcase that had a compartment at the bottom with sliding doors. It ended as a bookcase with no doors. The doors got smashed by a hammer when they refused to cooperate. A hammer is one of my favorite tools. Kit furniture instructions usually say, "all you need is a Phillips screwdriver." But I find a hammer very handy when the pieces don't fit like they're supposed to.

You can imagine my joy when I discovered that my favorite tool came in a rubber model! I became a much better at construction with my very own rubber hammer. That and a vast repertoire of do-it-yourself carpenter language (it's okay to use those words when you're building things).

I couldn't find my hammer. So I had to put my latest purchase together with just one screwdriver. I only messed up once. Had to take out all the screws and reassemble the whole thing, when I was one step away from finishing, because I switched two parts at the first step. But there were no screws or pegs left over at the end! The drawer actually works! See...it's a new stand for my new computer.


Boy: Why do you need a new computer stand? You already have one.

Mom: Yes, but it doesn't have a drawer. I need a drawer for all my passwords and access codes.

Boy: What have you been doing with them up 'til now?

Mom: I wrote them all over the old computer stand, but the cleaning lady scrubbed them off.

Every year there is a reunion for people who have lived in Sloughhouse. A lot of us who were born here are still here, but people who have moved out of the area come back for the occasion. The reunion has been held at the local elementary school for many years. A lot of us attended that school, so it was a familiar place for us.

Last year they tore down the old school, built a mountain, and placed a really big, ostentatious new school on top of it. The good news (for us in Sloughhouse) is that the school is still in our community and not up the road in Rancho Murieta. It probably should have been built there, that's where 90% of the students live. But there are a lot of cranky old farts who live in RM who evidently couldn't stand the thought of noisy, happy kids in their "community."

So this year the Sloughhouse Reunion was held in the cafeteria at the new school. And the attendance was pretty good, considering the median age of attendees is probably 75.

These are some of the people who were there.


Right up front are Floyd D., who ran the Sloughhouse store for several years after his brother Eddie gave it up and took up farming. Floyd had a lot of brothers. I don't know if I ever met them all. Floyd is sitting and talking to George W. George is perhaps the most radical person who ever lived here. I love that about him, he's always interesting. They passed a microphone around so everyone could say who they were and tell a story about living in Sloughhouse. George was the first one on the microphone. He took the opportunity to say that in his long life there has always been a war somewhere, that he's decided men - with their pugilistic attitudes - are the blame, and that things would be better if women were running the world. Well, that went over really big at a conservative farming community meeting. But you know what? George doesn't just sit at home and enjoy being an old fart. He's one of the few people you always see at government meetings, he's always out there trying to make things better. He roams around like Johnny Appleseed, planting native oak trees. He started painting signs with our creek names on them, and putting them up all over the county so people would know that our ephemeral waterways are creeks, not some place to throw garbage or line with concrete. George is my hero. His wife Judy is pretty darned cool, too. When I get to be George's age, I'd like to still be a troublemaker, too.

I didn't know some of the older folks who were at the reunion, though I recognized their names and has heard stories about them. Now my generation is becoming the older folks. I was thrilled to see two "kids" I haven't seen since elementary school. This is Sharlet H. and Greg McD (with Uncle Jim in the foreground).


Sharlet was the only student who lived within walking distance of the school when we were young. Her family had a small house right next door to the school. Here she is in those days:


Greg lived at the farthest east end of the school district. His father raised turkeys. Greg was a year younger than I am, but since our classes always had combined grades, like 1-3, 4-6, and 7-8, we were usually in the same classroom. This is Greg in first grade:


I just love seeing how the "kids" grew up. It's like getting to the end of a mystery and finding out that things either are - or are not - as you thought they'd be.

Remember last year, I told you about seeing some old classmates and one of them didn't have a clue who I was? That was Robert. This year he didn't have that trouble because of the terrible time I'd given him about being old and forgetful. Here I am with Rick G., the financial "brains" behind the Corn Stand, and my old classmate Robert.


Rick grew up across the road from my house. His mother lived in the same house until she passed last year. Now his son lives there. Robert still lives across the river, where he was born and raised on a cattle ranch. His mom Betty was at the reunion too. She's 93. She wasn't the oldest though, that distinction went to Jesse S., who is 98. They are still great story tellers.

Live long and prosper, Sloughhouse natives!

Keena (I hope to heck I spelled that right) is the youngest baby in the family, the daughter of Bob's youngest cousin Joe and his wonderful wife Anne. This is Anne and Keena.

This baby is very agreeable, she sat on my lap for an hour and smiled at everything and everybody. She's the kind of little one who makes the adults around her seem like they're very skilled at handling babies. Her parents and grandparents are going to have sooo much fun with her.

It rained all through the weekend again. The plants don't know what to do, they just keep growing like there's no tomorrow. The lilies you can see in the gateway are 5 feet tall! I have staked and tied them, but they've outgrown the 3 foot stakes. I'm afraid when they bloom this week, they're all going to break off or fall over. This afternoon I found signs of a gopher tunneling its way through the moist, soft dirt toward those big, fat bulbs. Sometimes gardening is so heartbreaking.

If this is going to turn into a tropical area, maybe I need to buy a suitable predator like a python. A really big one that I can see easily, so it won't sneak up on me and scare me half to death. A brightly-colored one that I won't mistake for a hose. Maybe one that's big enough to eat raccoons, too.

Rain just does not work in California in June.

By mid-May the grass should have been dry enough to cut. The sun would have cured it into tasty hay for horses and cows. With all the rain, most of the hay has been damaged.

In June, I need to keep the bird feeders full so all the birds have plenty to feed their babies. Every other day I've had to dump out wet seed. Birds come here because they can build nests that don't get wet and because we have lots of bugs. This year they've had to hang around home and use their wings to keep babies out of the rain. If there were bugs, they couldn't be out catching them. The snakes are still not out. How long can they hibernate?

All the rain and coldness has helped some flowers that don't normally do well in the traditional heat of May and June. The delphiniums grew very tall. But as soon as they bloomed, the rain knocked them over, stakes and all. The lilies are suffering the same fate. The petunias have prospered, much to the delight of the bumper crop of snails and slugs. Moss has grown over the cute sayings on my front steps. Instead of corn and tomatoes, maybe we should plant celery, brussels sprouts, and lettuce. I should plant ferns on the levee and call it "Fern Grotto."

It isn't dusty though, all the trees and shrubs are freshly washed. The lawn is still bright spring green. We haven't had flooding. We haven't suffered from tornadoes. Our neighborhood derelict nuke power plant hasn't leaked (that we know of). Overall we're not suffering like so many people are around the world.

But people in California are starting to get moldy, short-tempered and snarly. Vitamin D from a bottle is simply not an adequate substitute for real, natural sunshine.

It's 2 p.m. The temperature outside is 53. It's been raining and cloudy all week. Heck, maybe all month - I can't remember, I must have vitamin D deficiency. It's snowing in the Sierras again, there may be skiing on the 4th of July this year. Katherine has some peculiar-looking baby birds. I think they must be penguins, no other wild bird could survive here this year.

I'm sitting here wearing a sweatshirt and long pants, with my fluffy bathrobe over the top to try to stay warm. It isn't working.