Cosumne Gal

Mama Carla comes to my front door at the same time every day, late in the afternoon. She lets me know that everyone is out in the woodshed, waiting for dinner.


Chester and Mollie are waiting by the door. Chester is just happy to be alive. He still drags his gimpy leg, but he gets around fine. Mollie is impossible to please.


She always looks at me like I'm really a sorry excuse for a waitress. "Don't expect to get a tip from me," she says.


Angela waits in the rafters. She seldom comes much closer. If I sit to watch the cats eat, she waits until I leave. I think she knows I can barely see her in the dark woodshed.


Slink is also good at waiting, but as soon as a can opens, he's the first to the bowl. Sometimes if I'm out in the yard, he'll lay nearby and watch what I'm doing. If I catch his eye, he talks to me. If I could ever get my hands on this cat, I think he'd tame easily.


Bootsie sneaks around in the background. He's not only afraid of me, he doesn't trust some of the other cats, either. So while they eat, he waits (see him back there?). He's pudgier and shorter than Carla's kids. I have seen his sibling a couple of times recently, the one I couldn't catch. I'm afraid it's a female. Darn,


Below are the three grays: Rosie, Chester and mama Carla. Rosie and Chester are slick, like seals. I wish I could pet them. I love the orangey tones to Rosie's coat.


"Yammer, yammer," Rosie chides. "Could you just get out of here and leave us alone? You're not getting a tip from me, either."

I had a birthday last week. It lasted all week, and then some.

A lot of wonderful things came my way. Not all of them were meant by the givers to celebrate my birthday, but I'm going to treat them as if they were.

A while ago I got a bag of books in the mail from Merlene in Texas. Last week I pulled one out and read it. It was a Nevada Barr book about Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. She had thoughtfully included a brochure about the park for reference. Or maybe she was using it for a bookmark and accidentally left it in the book. Whatever. It was helpful, I used the map in the brochure to follow what was happening in the story.


Nevada Barr is an author who has worked for the park service. Her character, Anna Pigeon, is a park ranger. In addition to wonderful descriptions of the parks and behind-the-scenes information about the park service, there is a mystery in each of the books. Is this great literature? No. But it's fun and if you're a travel geek like me, you'll enjoy it. Thanks M!

Next I got a book in the mail from my online friend in Colorado, Linda. This was an entirely different subject.


"Think life has to be hard? Think again! You're used to a world of struggle, stress, and turmoil, but that is not the only world you have access to. There's another reality you can go to where life is easy, problems don't exist (and the ones you bring with you are solved) and joy abounds – if you know the way." [from the back cover of the book]

The Ken who shares my birthday (not KennyD or cousin Ken) and who is as snarky as I am, only better at it, is undoubtedly thinking right now, "It's legal to smoke pot in Colorado, that should make it easy to opt out." No, the alternate reality, of course, is within you. And you don't need pot to go there.

You probably think I already have an easy life. It's true I have no major problems, and I don't need much to keep me happy: a cuddly cat or two, a good camera that works, an occasional chicken show. But I do have many of the personality quirks that the author says make it challenging to live in Easy World. It was good to be reminded of these. I'm still digesting what I learned in the book. Thank you, Linda!

The day before my actual birthday I got to have lunch with my cousin Ken and his parents, Aunt Beth and Uncle Jim. We went to a Mexican restaurant and had a great time visiting and talking.

Aunt Beth brought me this:


She had cut a spray of beautiful yellow orchids off a plant she's raised for 40 years. I think I'm a decent gardener, but I've never had a house plant (or patio plant as this one is) for that long. The plant was given to my aunt and uncle on their 25th (did I get that right?) wedding anniversary. Thank you to my relatives for a great lunch, a good time, and this magical flower.

On my birthday morning, a stranger knocked on my door. It was a delivery guy, with this cute bouquet from Maureen and her husband, who is my brother.


Can you see the vase? It's a chick standing next to an eggshell. I love it! Thanks Mo and Bro.

The sunny bouquet was a good start to an otherwise strange day. I had errands to run: deliver a sample of Gollie's poo to the vet (just a routine thing, she's not sick), visit the county tax assessor's office, and buy groceries.

The tax assessor is very annoying, he (she?) sent a letter demanding copies of divorce papers to be used to figure out how much MORE property tax I'd be charged. The letter was unintelligible, public service at its worst. So the night before, I filled a paper bag with a whole bunch of paperwork that might be relevant. I had also "gathered" the stool sample (scraped it off the couch) and put it in a plastic bag. I didn't seal the plastic bag, though. I tossed it into the paper bag on top of the paperwork and put the whole package on the back porch for the night to "season."

Next day I dropped the cat poo at the vet's, then took my paperwork to the assessor's office. "Your letter made absolutely no sense," I said. "Here...copy whatever you want." The little man at the desk took the bag away and brought it back a few minutes later. I have no idea if the paperwork was stinky enough, this was one of those occasions when it was the thought that counted.

Bob didn't get home until 10:30 p.m. on my birthday. He came into the house, and walked straight to his bedroom, didn't say a word to me. I think he was almost asleep by the time I opened his door and said, "Gee mom, I hope you had a nice birthday." And then slammed it. I had definitely slipped out of Easy World.

The next day when Bob came home, he apologized for forgetting my birthday. This was the card he gave me:


There are two things you need to know. First, in this house one is admired for being a smartass. Second, anything with a Green Acres gift card attached is wonderful. Thank you, Bob.

Don't feel sorry for me, I didn't spend my birthday waiting for someone else to make it perfect. I did that myself when I went grocery shopping.


Some of my favorite things: A Diet Pepsi, fresh ground peanut butter from Raley's and fresh celery to put it on, a container of strawberries all for me, and a bar of incredibly expensive unsweetened chocolate that will last for at least a month.

I'm sorry to say that I only managed a couple sips of the Diet Pepsi. Many years ago I lived on the stuff, but I rarely drink soda anymore. It tasted like I'd imagine toilet bowl cleaner would, so I flushed it. The rest of my feast was perfect, though. Thank you, Jan. And Raley's.

But that wasn't all there was.

Later in the week I dropped some eggs off at Amanda's so she could hatch them for me. My own small incubator is quite full and the hens are laying relentlessly. Amanda has three young, lively kids that I got to visit with. That's gift enough, but when I left she gave me these:


Thank you Amanda!

On Friday I was invited to a tea party with some friends. They are mothers of some of the "kids" Bob went to school with. It's always fun to see them and catch up on their lives. My birthday was not the occasion we were celebrating, but I'm counting this as one of the fun times during my birthday week. Thank you Anne, Wendy, Sue, and Robin.

Friday afternoon was the grand finale. Max brought me this:


Max is an old friend from high school days. He had more golf carts than he needed, so our mutual friend Carlotta suggested he loan one to me. What fun! I've already tied my yellow wagon to the back of it and hauled stuff, and I drove it around the fields. The best part was Max and I got to talk for a couple of hours, and then we went to dinner and got to talk some more. Thank you Max! I'll get to see Carlotta this coming weekend, and that will pretty much take care of my birthday this year.

I spent a while trying to think of something interesting to blog about. My mind is occupied with hatching chicks and reading a book Linda sent me, though. Also this morning there is a nice breeze and I'm watching the buzzards perform right outside the window. They appear to love a little wind, it's a good opportunity to show off.

No profound thoughts were coming, so I just went outside and took a bunch of pictures in the yard. This is especially for those of you in other parts of the country (or the world) where snow is still falling.

Spring is happenin' in California.


I have lots of camellias and they're all blooming like mad right now. Some of them are named varieties and some I raised from seed. The one above is named Blood of China. It's on a large, tall bush. I call its petals on the ground "Bloodshed." You weren't expecting that, were you?


This camellia is Mathotiana rosea. It's a japonica, as are most of my camellias.


The flowers are large, but not as large as the dinnerplate-sized blooms on this unnamed reticulata.


You know how college students go wild this time of year...at spring break? Well, the front of my house looks like Camellias Gone Wild.


There are 3 that I've grown from seed that are taller than the roofline on the house. The one in the foreground is about 12 feet tall. I collected seeds from the old camellias that grow around the state capitol building in downtown Sacramento. I used to walk in the park there on my lunch break and one day I noticed seeds on the camellia trees. That was over 30 years ago. Don't bother to plant camellia seeds if you move a lot.

This is one of my seedlings.


This is another. It's growing in full sun, which is okay even in Central California because when you plant from seed, the plant has a deep taproot. So if you grow your own, you don't have to just plant them in shade.


Those are peonies popping up in the foreground. It's not just the camellias that are blooming. Even though I never got my giant bag of tulips planted last fall, there are a few old ones coming back up. Forsythia in the background.


The really exciting news out in the yard is that the lilacs are just starting to bloom.


This is on my ancient vulgaris bush. The prissy French lilacs will take a while longer.

I planted one of my favorite wild bushes a few years ago and it's blooming well right now. This is redbud.


There's nothing wrong with the picture, the flower isn't really red. It should probably be called magentabud.

If you knew me well and had to decide which animal I most closely resembled, it would probably be an ox. Most of the time I just plod through the day, physically and mentally, putting one foot in front of the other, swatting away the annoyances like an ox swats flies.

There are things that turn me into an entirely different animal: Caltrans, the county government, developers. Mostly the things that threaten my community, my way of life, or things that defy credibility. I can become very outspoken, hostile, and aggressive. Like a badger. Or just snarky like a...a what? What animal is snarky?

But then there are things that turn me into a raging lunatic, a Tasmanian Devil. Later I always wonder, “What was THAT all about?”

The reason for these rare episodes, I’ve concluded, is “Things That Don’t Work.”

I have carpeting in only one room in my house, the living room. Carpeting doesn’t work in rural areas the way it does in the city, where people walk on cement when they’re outdoors. In the country, carpets get not just dirty, but filthy. 

The carpet that was in this house for 40 years, amazingly, never looked dirty. It was a shag in my mom’s favorite colors of orange, gold, and olive green. It was butt ugly, especially after it aged, but it could be hurriedly fluffed up with a vacuum if company was coming, and would actually look presentable.

When we finally replaced that carpet a few years ago I was determined to get something that wouldn’t show the dirt, and wouldn’t instantly reveal to visitors that I have pets in the house. Imagine my dismay to find that modern carpet only came in 50 shades of beige, one blue, one gray, and one dark brown. For a while I considered a commercial carpeting, something used in restaurants or movie theaters, but those big garish prints would have looked pretty weird in my house.

So I settled on a beige that I thought would blend well with cat puke. 

I stopped feeding my indoor cats cheap food many years ago. You know, the kind that has lots of red dye in some of the pieces to make them look like fake meat? That food is a disaster when it’s mixed with feline digestive juices and redeposited on a carpeted floor. So I buy very expensive, mostly meat-based food for Velcro and Gollie. It is beige like the carpet.

Before the pellet stove installers arrived, I tried to clear the path they’d have to take to haul the stove into the house. I moved some furniture only to find, just as their truck was coming up the driveway, a patch of previously hidden dried kitty vomit. I plopped a paper bag of books on top of it and promised to deal with the problem later.

Today was later. I pulled out my carpet cleaning tools. I have at least one can or spray bottle of everything that is made for this purpose. This dried stain seemed like a job for 409 foaming carpet cleaner.

I like it because I can spray it on the stain and when I come back in a minute or two after it has soaked, I can still see where the stain is so I can scrub it. At this point my carpet has a subtle camouflage design from a few years of spot cleaning, you know? It's sometimes hard to see the new stains. In a few more years they might be totally invisible.

Anyway, my brand new can of foaming cleaner managed a couple of weak squirts before it stopped working. I tried shaking it. I tried taking the nozzle off and cleaning it (hello? it had never been used!), finally I just got pissed and tried banging it on the floor in an impossible rage. That didn’t work either. It never does, but I have to do it.

Now I have a brand new, but dented, can of 409 carpet cleaner that doesn't work, but it seems like a waste to throw it away.

Why can’t I get my money’s worth out of a can of spray cleaner? Whipped cream in a can is good to the last drop that you squirt into your mouth. Cleaners that come in spray bottles often stop working, too, usually when there’s about a third left. But I can either dump that into another partly-used bottle, or just take the lid off and pour it directly onto the stain. Somehow the liquids don’t work as well as the foaming spray stuff, though.

Now I’ve had my senseless tizzy for the day. I can go back to plodding and see if I can come up with a decent blog entry.

Two nice fellows installed the pellet stove yesterday morning. I learned one thing right away, Bob could have done this himself. The guys just rolled the stove into the house, connected the narrower stovepipe to the existing one, plugged the stove into the outlet, dumped in some pellets, and were on their way.

When I was first shopping for a pellet stove, I stopped at a store that wanted $1000 more for the same stove. They said they charged more because they did a professional installation. My my. There's nothing to professionally install. It really wasn't much harder than bringing home a new blender; the biggest challenge is finding an empty electrical socket.

I haven't seen a cat on the rug yet. Like KennyD said, this doesn't heat the same as a wood stove. The room is cozy, but the stove isn't hot. Also it makes unfamiliar noises: the pellets drop, the fans come on. Those are things a cat has to get used to. In the meantime, Velcro is making do with every bit of sunlight she can find.


Luckily we've had sunny mornings. It's supposed to be 78° this weekend. I think maybe spring was last week.

There was lots of activity here in the valley this week. It was all rather random, though. Today I'm lazy, I'm not going to try to write transitions, I'll just put some dots between the stories.

This week the levee district sprayed Roundup on the levees. I'm not sure it's worth the $1500 it costs each year to belong to the district. I understand it's easier to see problems when there's no thick, tall grass to deal with, but I've not seen anything done to actually improve the levees. I think the theory is you let it blow out, THEN you deal with the problem. I'd feel better about that if my house wasn't just 100 yards away. Theoretically the levee district is a good thing, the board is all local farmers, and I know they have improvement plans that have spent years being held up in environmental review.

I was out feeding the horses when I saw the pickup on top of the levee, pulling a trailer with a tank full of Roundup. That was interesting. I didn't know the top of the levee was wide enough to drive on. About the time I was running that thought through my brain, one hind truck wheel slipped off and the whole rig almost tumbled 14 feet down onto the state highway.

The spray rig was behind the tree.

I helped by running into the house to get my camera. By the time I got back outside, though, the workers had managed to get everything under control and there was nothing to record. No news at 11.
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The weather was gloomy most of the week. I pulled weeds in the flower bed. It was a mess.


I usually do clean up work in the fall. This year I had to do some major renovation work and could never find the right time to do it. There were 3 types of ground cover to eliminate: wild strawberry, wild violet, and sweet woodruff. All those things are perfectly wonderful in the proper place. In Sloughhouse they quickly become pests. The good news is it only took me two days to do the whole bed. I can't believe I managed to work that fast. After I took the picture above, I spread several bags of bark around. On Saturday I picked up Cousin Bev and we made a trip to Green Acres after breakfast at Bert's Diner. There were so many people at Green Acres, there were employees out in the parking lot trying to direct the traffic.

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We got a little rain last week, just enough to justify staying inside by the woodstove for a while to read a book. I had received this book in a care package from Merlene in Texas.


It won the Pulitzer Prize, okay? So how could I write anything but a favorable review? I did enjoy the book. It was about people who came west in the late 1800s and was based on letters that were written by a woman to the friends she had left in the civilized east when she married an adventurer. There were tales from New Almaden, Santa Cruz, and Grass Valley (in California), Leadville (in Colorado), Idaho, and Mexico. In those days Mexico was considerably more genteel than the western states of the U.S.

I was particularly interested in the book because my own ancestors came to California about the same time. They were well educated and came from the east. There are indications they might have been a bit snobby about that. I think I gained some valuable insight about them.

While most of this book was great, I thought the ending was clumsy. There was so much detail about the first half of the main character's life, but the last half was covered in barely a chapter, almost as an afterthought. The author tried to tie the pioneer woman's life to her grandson's in Grass Valley in the 1970s. I don't think it worked, it seemed contrived and silly to me.

This book is worth reading, though. I'm especially recommending it to my cousins on the Blawat side and to Linda in Colorado.

Thank you, Merlene. Do you need the book back? I'll put it in the pile of other books I need to return to you.

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Velcro is not happy. The little woodstove is gone. I'm not sure she'll be happy with the pellet stove that's due to replace it next week. Evidently the pellet stove will stay cooler while it's making heat.

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The pigeons had a rough February. There were lots of sunny days, and I let them out to fly whenever I was in the yard with them, but that didn't save them from the stinking nasty Cooper's Hawk. At the beginning of the month there were 40 pigeons. Now there are 28. The hawks aren't the only threat, though.


What's that slinking around on top of the pigeon pen right in the middle of the day?


It's Slink. He thinks he's found fast food.

As long as the pigeons are in the pen, they're quite safe. So that's where they'll have to stay.

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I haven't gone to a poultry show recently. I've been collecting eggs and putting them in the incubator. Now I'm sitting here counting my eggs before they hatch.


The first four are due in a day or two.

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I had a really great time Friday night working with the Sloughhouse
4-H poultry group.


We practiced showmanship. Those of you who were in 4-H here in the early 2000s will be interested to know that this is Amanda's group (she used to be Lahmon). See the smiling little photobomber at the bottom left and the one in the middle with the pink sleeve? Those are two of Amanda's three babies. The oldest is the one whose shoulder I have my hand on, mostly to hold him in camera range for a second or two. You can't help but absorb some of the positive energy these kids have. I love 4-H.

OK, that's it for today.

My father died when I was 10. That left my mom, my little brother and I to take care of our place at Sloughhouse. We have always rented out 75 of our 80 acres and lived on the remaining 5. I was taught from an early age to save as much rent money as possible to cover the potential expenses: replacing a levee or a pump were at the top of the list.

In the late 1980s the levee took every penny we'd saved. With the rising cost of taxes and insurance over the years, it's been hard to save much of the rent check, but I've done it. So when this truck showed up last week, I was pretty sure I could handle the cost.


This property had 3 big irrigation wells. The one above is between the house and the Corn Stand and must be 75 or 80 years old. It had a 25 hp pump. Its primary job was to irrigate crops, but it was also the well for the house, which was overkill. See the big black tank on the lower left? To keep the big pump from cycling on and off a lot, the system stored water in that tank. Then it was pumped into a pressure tank that sent it to the house. When the pump was used for irrigation, we'd have to go out a couple of times a day and manually direct water into the storage tank so it wouldn't run out.

The pump hasn't been used for irrigation for more than 30 years, but there is a lot more water directed from the house system to the Corn Stand, where it's used to wash vegetables and for the hydroponic strawberries. This put a strain on the pressure system, so a bigger pressure pump was installed. That didn't work too well; sometimes the big storage tank would empty and the pressure system would be full of air. What fun it was to stand at the sink with your glass, expecting to fill it with water, and have a blast of air blow it out of your hand instead. Worse, a lot of sand had accumulated at the bottom of the storage tank and the pressure system would suck that in and then blow it into the pipes. My drip system didn't like that. Neither did the washing machine.

So for years I've been saving money to replace the big storage tank and maybe have the system redone to work better. The pump guy, however, suggested it would be better to pull out the big pump and replace it with a 5 hp submersible, doing away with the storage tank altogether.

My brain could not handle that. How could it be good to take out something big and replace it with something little? I had to talk to everyone I knew, do some research online, and then just tell myself the pump guy knows what he's doing and he's been taking care of our pumps for a long, long time. Also, he lives in the neighborhood.

So, the pump guy came back with help and pulled out the old pump and its 130 feet of 6-inch pipe.


They filled the big storage tank first, because the well would be offline for a couple of days. That much water should have lasted 3 or 4 days because Bob and I were conserving it. But, as we discovered later, the bottom of the storage tank had rusted through in a couple of spots and the foot of sand in the bottom of it was the only thing that was sort of keeping the water in it. During the night the storage tank emptied, the pressure system sucked sand, and the next morning this is what came out of the faucet.


I made a trip to the store.


And we drank this for the rest of the day.

When the pump guy finished the job, this is what we were left with.


I guess I expected the pipes would all be underground. Now we'll be insulating the pipes and putting in some kind of permanent supports for them AND, because so many people run the forklift around here, I will be putting a cyclone fence around the well and tank area.

All my adult life, I've slept with my bedroom window open just a little so I could hear the pump. Sometimes the storage tank would overfill and water would run all over. I'd have to go out and switch it off. Sometimes the storage tank would fail to fill and the pressure pump would run and run. I'd have to go out and switch it on. I don't have to do that anymore, but I'm too much of a pessimist to think there won't be some new, unforeseen problem.

I'm just happy I saved enough money over the years, and for the past week everything has worked fine.