Life

I mentioned a week or two ago that I was pretty ill over the summer and had lost 28 or so pounds in three months and was mostly incapacitated during that time from the pain. I'm not various meds of which one is pain. Over the last six weeks tha pain has gone down substantially and while I haven't had a completely pain free day yet it's massively better. The stomach swelling I had has gone down by 75% percent. I know long think I'm having twins.

Jax and I, and somedays Teresa goes with us, are out hiking everyday. I'm getting my endurance back but it's going to be a long road back. My hope if by February I'll be able to hike back from town again.

So far one of the best off season's I've had. There are currently 13 big horn, six mule deer, three grey foxes and two adult skunks that show up during the day time to get hot dogs. Jax knows not to mess with the skunks but he is curious and he does not understand why two of the last four days he has walked down the porch just to check them out and say hi and they have sprayed him. Teresa has stepped up and cleaned him both times. He looks so lost when he gets sprayed like "what did I do wrong". Today he wouldn't talk down to that end of the porch even when I just sent to fee the foxes as they alternately took turns coming up the hill.

Mountain Lion

Every year when guests ask me if we have a mountain lion I tell them 2nd to 3rd week of March and right around Thanksgiving. There are three hawks currently patrolling the canyon. A male and a female sharpshin hawk and the third one I'm not sure of yet but have seen it from a distance. Each morning the ravens have been gathering and heading toward the north side of the property where I see the female the most. Linny and I have seen this befoe where they gather to kill a competitor. I told Teresa the female sharpshin would be dead in a few days. I have seen at least one raven shadowing it everywhere it goes. At the boat ramp I saw a raven sitting on the next branch same tree to the female hawk. Two dayw later I saw six ravens come out of the tamarisk at once. I was confident I was about to find the dead female but when I walked over there it was a dead three point mule deer I have seen many times on the property over the years. The first day I saw it was still complete from the neck up and I didn't see any marks from a mountain lion or tracks. The next two times I visited I did notice that the neck was broken and bent back as I've seen the mountain lion do before.

The Fingers

Can hardly go wrong hiking back in the Finger Canyons.

Not a No Cows Day

Jax loves to chase them. With normally four potential directions to chase them you would think that the odds of getting him to chase them the way I want them to go would be at least one in four to get them off the property but in reality there is almost zero chance.

The Beach

North side of the beach is not looking so good with dead foliage that was washed down but the south side looks great. Turning into pretty good sized.

Disc Golf Kind of Day

Ignore the dates on the camera they are way off and I don't know how to fix it. We had disc golfers come in by truck, Jeep, motorcycles, bicycles, and the Moab Jett group came in by boat.

Some Clarifications

This is me working on bookings at my desk with Jax's bed and Jax right next to me, as it should be. Heather called yesterday to say that there are comments on Facebook about Kobae about to have a friend apparently from the recent post about a lady calling me from Moab to tell me she found a tortoise, sent me a picture of it, and ask about it. That is never going to happen. Kobae is a lot of work and he's mean with attitude issues. For every five times we go hiking I save his life at least once because of the dumb stuff he does. His choice for what path to take is made from one foot off the ground and he's nearly always wrong so he's in trouble all the time. Four out of five times he gets out of it but once out of every five he doesn't and not only do I have to save his life but occasionally, once every couple of years, I put my life at risk saving his. Why would I want two of those? Second, we don't know until they are six or eight years old if they are male or female. If male Kobae would kill it first chance he gets and if female he would crush it the first time he tried to have sex with it. If you've stayed here you've seen what he does to the stairs. A second tortoise would be dead one way or the other first time it had contact with Kobae. I'm so far removed from thinking about having a second tortoise despite telling the lady I would go look at it I finally went to town this week and forgot to call her. Never, ever, going to happen.

Euro

Somebody left a 10 Euro bill in the mail box for disc golf. I looked it up and it's worth $10.32.

No Cows Day

It's a daily battle to keep the cows off the property. We're constantly checking gates and fences.

Hayduker

Moocher swings by. Only the third Hayduker or the fall season and he's doing it backwards so almost back to Moab.

The Following Night

Phone rings at 8:30 at night. Unusual unless there is a late check in and there isn't. A lady wants to know if I have my tortoise. I say he's in San Diego. She says they found one wandering the streets of Moab. Can I tell her anything about it. She sends me a picture. I can tell her everything about it.

Fast Forward

In the morning Heather and Linda took off for San Diego and Teresa left for a week in Chicago to see friends. A day and some change later Kobae was back in San Diego.

The Little People

With evening the raccoons ow the left side of the porch, the skunks the right side, ringtails when they show the rafters, the grey foxes the left side of the parking lot and the red foxes the right side of the parking lot. Jax normally keeps them from raiding each others positions but there are quick lightning strikes occasionally.

So the Plan Was......

To put Kobae in the biggest tub they could find that would fit in the back of the SUV and take him back to San Diego in that. However after trying it on, time for a new plan.

The new plan was to life him up and put him in the back of the SUV and take him back to San Diego that way hoping he doesn't destroy the inside of the SUV on his 13 hour journey.

With me in my weakened condiion that left it up to Teresa and Heather to lift him and get him in the back of the SUV but somehow they did it.

Lydia

Lydia, who worked here a few years ago came by to visit. She's married and has a baby now.

The Evening

Kobae

We got one last hike in and not very long. I don't take him back to San Diego for the winter normally until around Thanksgiving but this year with my health issues I can't take him at all so Heather and Linda are coming to get him, in a SUV. Should be entertaining.

Life Two

Five doctors have seen me. I"ve had x rays, mamogram, cat scan, colonoscopy, poop test, and something else I don't remember. One said I had chicken pox when I was young and those weren't bites they were a virus from the chicken pox and it shows up years later and messes with your body. There are five doctors and nine opinions. Anyway the one I'm going with and taking meds for is the poop test said I have five different infections in my stomach and that's why I'm swelled up.

The pain was paralyzing for a few months and I was mostly non functional so I couldn't go hiking anyway. Three or four weeks ago they gave me so paid meds that work on the blood veins or similar and it has helped a lot. There is always pain but manageable pain.

I feel like I'm getting better each day. My weight loss has been extreme. I went from 210 to 184 in a few months. Had to put an extra hole in my belt. I hung my canteen on my belt and my pants fell down.

Takss forever to take all the drops and pills each day. To be fair I probably deserve some of this. My body has treated me a lot better than I've treated it. Got to wrap this up. Jax and I are packed and just waiting for Kobae to head out on an adventure for the day.

Life

We're getting hikes in but I was without a camera for so long I forget to take it with me. Couple days ago a hike with Kobae into a dead end canyon still managed to take seven hours. I'm not getting the red out of the camera and half the pictures I take are out of focus. I forget on this camera to have to take a fake photo which will adjust the focus and then push it all the way down to take the real photo.

So back in March or April I woke up in the morning and had a bunch of bires on me, or maybe stings. It's happened before. There's this little wasp like looking bug that bites me and has a bad effect but that didn't happen this time other than they hurt some. In time they turned into scabs and eventually fell off. In time my stomach swelled up with a big air bubble type thing on it which you can push around with your hand. Best to describe it as the worst sunburn you've ever had on the inside of your stomach with a volcano in the middle. Yes, really.

Moab 240

It was that time again. The Moab 240, a 240 mile running race, came through and we were the first aid station at the 29.2 mile mark. Got to run a marathon to get here. 257 runners this year. As I recall the registration fee is about $1,700 per runner. Killian Korth won and just prior to his finishing he was 32 miles ahead of the second place runner. Rebecca Rick won the women's and finished 4th overall. Rebecca left here in 14th place and moved up consistently. David Goggins left here in 18th place and finished 22nd. The race started in Moab at noon Friday and the last finishers came in at 9am on Wednesday. It rained almost the whole time for six days. Lot of trenchfoot among the racers. Still these miracuous creatures, right at 150 of the roughly 250 finished. It's amazing.

I'm not sure I remember how many of these we've hosted but I do remember having to do at least one or two rescues each year. The last runners came through at 12:30am Saturday morning and kept going. The aid station closed at the cut off 2:am and everyone was accounted for and on their way to the next aid station and continuation of the race. I went over and said good night to everyone pretty happy I didn't have to do a rescue this year.

At 5:am in a rain downpour there was a knock on my bedroom door. Teresa said "Tom, you're up." I thought that's impossible. Everyone left here just fine. I walked out and talked to Thor, the female medic. She said there were three runners that didn't make it to the next aid station. They were four and a half miles down Lockhart Basin. I explained I don't have anything that can get more than a mile or so down Lockhart and maybe not to the moutb of Lockhart in this driving rain. She thought it might be that they are at the mouth of the road and not down it so Jax, one of the volunteers, Greg I think, and I headed out into the storm. Was tought to see and I wasn't always sure we were on the road as there was so much rain but a half hour or so later we made it to the start of Lockhart where a ham radio operator had the runners sheltered in a tent. The operator said he could take one of them so we took the other two and made it back at 7am.