Gorgeous morning. Just enough clouds to keep things from heating up too fast. Sweet and gray for a while. Now they dissipate and the cruel sun reemerges for the day.
The llamas have their summer strategy down: In the morning they lie in the exposed dry silt of their former stream to warm their bones after a chilly night. As the day heats up they move to the tall grass and stay cool lying there, only their heads visible floating above the brome. I realized this week that what kept the deer from the herb garden was not so much the herbs but the llama poop I used everywhere as fertilizer. I lost a half-year's manure in the flood, and what we have since then will require some strategizing to reach and bring home, absent a footbridge. I could drive twelve miles around and approach the pasture from the upper road in the pickup and simply load up, I suppose. Otherwise we'll be hiking back and forth and wading across the creek with five-gallon buckets full of fresh stuff.
I face priming and starting up the pump today. This becomes a real challenge sometimes. The pump is tired and doesn't like to start up anymore. It's frustrating and disappointing when I take such care to ration our water resources and we do so well, and then inevitably my brother does what he does at his bedtime, either leaving a faucet on just a little or flushing the toilet in such a way that it runs and runs, and I'm upstairs reading and don't come down for an hour or two, just in time to hear the glug-glug of the pressure tank emptying itself. I hate having to monitor his every activity but I must stay on the ball if we're to keep in water. I've heard from the owner of this place. He says he'll arrive sometime in August to make the promised repairs. I don't know whether he'll be able to score a driller on such short notice, though. I'm told some people have been on a waiting list since March.
In any case, with the creek level dropping inches per day, I'm steeling myself for a late summer of thrice-weekly runs to the Pit River to fill our many gallon jugs in order to keep the herb garden going. If I had three or four big barrels I could fill them now, while the creek is still flowing, and we'd be set.
This week of illness (my hiatus) follows last week's of hard work, and I see the pattern again--for every productive week, one of swelling and pain and semicoma and muddled thinking. I have physical body-function bipolar disorder. And the drag is that after a week of recovery so much has been left undone that I spend the well week doing double the work to catch up, and then down I go again. I've been on quite a roller coaster this past few months. I really need to make consistent some capacity for progress. I've been applying for retailer licenses and negotiating for a little building on Main Street in town. I want to open a bookstore by the end of the year or the first part of next year, but if I can't stay well there's no point. It will fail just like my planned move to Carolina.
I want to do some audio blogging and ultimately little podcasts and so I've taken time this week during my awake and alert hours to explore and learn about this. I'm sure I have the recording software I need on one of these MacAddict CDROMs, and I have the microphone, but I don't know whether I can do the necessary MP3 conversions. Possibly I'll find conversion software on the CDs as well. I can't use iTunes without OS X.2, and I'm 9.2. We learn new things. Soon we'll be a voice. We will endeavor not to use our voice to complain about the caprices of our health.
Dreams all week have been weird and wild. I spent a month or two with the elder former president Bush in one epic recent dream. That was pretty weird. And in another dream a pet pond turtle was overheated and flattened and barely alive. I'm forming a theory that the tortoise symbol is my liver, and that this squished and hot and barely functioning thing in my dream is a vital health clue. Must remember to follow up on this.
So that was my week! hope it didn't bore you to tears. But now that we're caught up I can move into more creative areas. There's a gorgeous poppy blossoming in the garden this morning. I'll try to get a photo of it before it fades.
10:06:06 AM 
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