Tuesday Morning......Stuff

As of noon, one person has shown up from The Land to help Dre mud. It's a guy and he has all his clothes on.

As I've been by myself so much I try to set up as many systems as I can to run by themselves, always subject of course to human error, usually mine. I take one 14 gallon gas tank to town to fill up each time I go, plus the truck. It stands up and doesn't take up much room so I have more room for water jugs and or lumber. When I get back usually I'll work outside for a bit and drain from the large tank to smaller tanks. Usually six gallon. I'll put five or so gallons in the first one, change it out for the second, and then when I put the third under it I close the door and leave and let it drain out into the third tank. However somewhere in there I started with a half full tank and filled it up, then the first full empty, but didn't keep track of the math in my head so when I left the third tank there and closed the door. I put about three gallons of gas on the garage floor when it filled and overflowed. I opened all the doors and it dried leaving just my footprints.

Then I realized that I was pumping water from the pond into the holding tanks. There are four rates of flow. Gravity feed with a nozzle on the hose does about sixty gallons an hour. Gravity feed with the nozzle taken off is closer to 75 gallons an hour. Pump running with nozzle is closer to 100 gallons an hour and pump running no nozzle is about 120 gallons per hour. I opened the gravity feed before I left, took the nozzle off, did the math that I had until about 9pm, and left. Then I realized I'd had a request for the Condo where the holding tanks are for Tuesday and it was wiser to run the pump so I got extension cords and hooked it up but never redid the math in my head. When I got back from town, flooded the small garage, dried it, and was finishing up it hit me the pump was running next door. I jumped in a side by side and headed to the Condo. I could see water running down the driveway when I pulled up meaning the tank had flooded and some for sure would be inside the Condo and it was. I ran up the hill and moved the hose to the big garage tank and went about drying the Condo with a push broom first shoving water out the sliding door and then with two dry vacs. Eventually Tawnya and Tammy went over to make it right again.

At 10pm I took a side by side over to Last Hurrah to unplug the pump, wrap the cords, and pull the hose. I had avoided the trifecta of flooding the large garage, but not by much. When I got back to the lodge Tawnya said there was a meteor shower beginning at midnight so she pulled up a gravity chair and slept the night in the parking lot.

During the disc golf tournament a month plus ago I took the screen off the office window to do signup. Yesterday I cracked the window before I went to town. This morning when I woke up the clock on the nightstand didn't just say 8:13, it also said squirrel. When I went to open the blinds, the blinds said squirrel. While I was in town a squirrel came through the office window, found the sunflower seeds and sat in my window enjoying the view while munching sunflower seeds.

I walked outside and Tammy said there was a squirrel in her car. I went to the garage and got some coyote piss, not easy to get by the way, somebody has to hold the coyote, well, another time, and sprayed it on her engine and ask her to keep an eye out and let me know if anymore rock squirrels jumped up there. I wish Jax had a cell phone.

At 1:30 this morning I finished the last Rich Curtin book about Manny Rivera a fictional deputy sheriff in Grand County/Moab. While fiction it leans a lot on close to things that have happened and many of the characters and locations are similarly named or slightly spelled different. Two were close to my heart. In one book he mentions petroglyph arrows drawn on rocks giving direction to something and apparently made by the same ancient hundreds of years ago. To my knowledge Ute's were the primary artist of horses. I know a place where spread over a mile or two there are four drawings of horses with the head starting on the right and the rest of the body going to the left. If I were drawing it I'd start on the left side and go right with the body because I'm right handed and that seems natural to me. My theory is the artist of a thousand years ago is the same and he/she is left handed.

In another section of a book he weaves a Spanish conquistador into the story with a petroglyph drawing of the conquistador. I know such a petroglyph and it was drawn by my left handed friend who I never met, only the stories he told. Two of the ten or so times I've been to the drawing a midget faded rattlesnake was guarding it.

I think I can help Rich with at least two stories for future books. 

Until the world returns to what it was and perhaps Rich and I meet I've ordered the Bud Shumway series by Chinle Miller about a mythical deputy sheriff in Green River 50 or so miles from here. The walkies will be here next week the books in mid May. Apparently my reading needs are not considered essential.

There are several more. Tony Hillerman and upon his death, his daughter Anne, wrote of Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn detectives on the Navajo Reservation. Allen Chappell's Navajo Nation Mysteries, C.J. Box on Joe Pickett, Indy Quillan and Fox Walker, as well as the Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson. A lot of reading coming in the days ahead. I hope to learn a lot.