Thursday, July 23, 2009 - Red Rock, East Chatham NY
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LD's kitchen and a peek aft into my study, July 19, 2009
Today I started a project to reduce the weight and intrusiveness of the bed in my study
Today I shed quite a few pounds from this Lazy Daze' load and opened up my study area considerably. I didn't get good picture of the study but I think you can get a sense of how the bed intrudes into the study. A year or so back I replaced the old collapsing convertible sofa cushion with a twin mattress. This is a comfortable arrangement but is a bit large for the space and heavy to boot. Today I tossed it out along with the underlying sofa pullout mechanism that is designed to convert the sofa to a double bed. I salvaged the 4 inch foam from the overcab bed and added 4 inches of memory foam topper. I now have a comfortable 30 inch wide bed and a much larger study. Nice.
Night camp
On my property off Less Traveled Road - The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY
- I used to camp in a few locations on what little I had left of the family farm
- In the driveway by the house
- Across the road where the barn once stood
- On the 20 acre piece off Less Traveled Road
- Now, with the kind support of the friends who now own the place, I camp across the road where the barn once stood.
- Verizon cell phone service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Verizon EVDO service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Find other references to Home Place
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather here
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.