Monthly Archives: December 2015

“You can easily recognize the good parts of your life because they are starkly outlined in crap.” -John DeChancie, from Starrigger.

This has been one of my favorite quotes for years.

Been a Hell month around here –with some amazingly good stuff snuck in here & there. My much beloved support dog, Kenta the American Eskimo,

was diagnosed with SLO. It’s a very rare auto-immune disorder wherein the immune system attacks the nail beds, causing the claws to die back at the quick, fall off, and,  if they grow back, they’re usually very deformed. Their claws/toes are easily bruised & it’s very painful when they’re having a flare-up. So I’ve been horribly worried about the poor baby and I cannot stand to see him in  pain.

We did find a vet who knows about as much as there is to know about it, he’s on a special diet, meds, & supplements, and mostly is doing well….except when he bruises a toe, then he gets just pitiful.

Last week my yard & house flooded very badly; the insulation under the house was saturated, as were the floor joists, & the water came within about an inch of coming in the heating ducts. Turned out the city of Veneta never bothered to design a stormwater system that can actually deal with water….this is in Oregon, remember. Land of temperate rainforests. The City Manager basically said, “Tough luck, lady.” He also suggested I get a tanker truck, pump water from around my house into it using my sump pump, & dump it somewhere else (I am not making this up!! I really wish I’d taped that bit….I’d put it on YouTube).

 

So now I’m diving (so to speak) into my first foray into community activism, trying to find & organize everyone in the area with flooding problems, and there are a ton of them. I hope to lead them to the next City Council meeting, preferably carrying pitchforks and torches. I need lawyers, engineers, the Corps of Engineers, hydrologists, and God knows what else…money, mainly. I can’t even afford to fix the insulation & whatever else is currently rotting underneath my feet.

the hatch to access under the house weighs a zillion pounds, but at least it’s wood…when the water gets high enough, it’ll just float open.

Then, the day after the Great Flood, a huge tree limb fell & crushed my car trunk. Thank God & Allstate for Comprehensive coverage (& they told me I was a fool for keeping it on such an old car!).

But then from outta nowhere snuck in the good stuff; I found a woman that I’d been trying to find since high school. She and I were great friends from middle school thru HS & I’ve always wondered how & where she was, because I thought she was absolutely amazing. Somehow,*poof*  up she popped the other night in a Google search I’ve done dozens of times before w/o success. We’re getting reacquainted via email.

Ditto reconnecting with two other old friends, one I’d thought had vanished into a black hole. So that’s been very cool, getting to know “lost” dear friends again. I decided to celebrate with some chocolate tonight, & found a recipe for Chocolate Chewies that remind me of some that my mom & I were addicted to in the 70s-80s, on Hilton Head. They are GF (no flour at all), DF, incredibly easy to make, & as droolicious as it gets.

aseasyasapplepie.com/flourless-chocolate-cookies

So, something yummy amid the catastrophes…and some good things –good people I mean– slid in amongst the crap. Both of my friends do terrific things; one of ’em does amazing work with raptors; writing, photographing, rehabilitating, educating about, and saving them:

Kate Phillips Davis’ Raptor Center

My other friend, Felecia Walton, went to Med school at UNC-Chapel Hill & is a Laboratory Research Analyst at Duke University.

To quote Bruce Hornsby, “What the hell happened to me?”

But I’ve been lucky to have known some amazing, amazing people.