C.B. Potts's Blog, page 60

Friday Morning

It has been a good morning so far. I weeded the asparagus bed and made progress upon the herb bed next to it; then Tim and I stripped wire for a while so we can have some folding money until the royalty check arrives and I get paid on Sunday. Bright copper's pulling down $3.15/pound right now, so that was a quick twenty bucks.

Now it's time to sit down and do blogging for dollars, hooray! Then the weather forecast tells me we're in for five days of rain: this is the time I'm going to use to m...

Thursday Morning

There are certain things that will always remind me of my father. The smell of motor oil, the high fine whine of a chain saw biting into a tree, snapping turtles. When I was in sixth grade, my Dad found a wee snapping turtle and brought it home, and I brought it to school and it was the class pet. His name was Herman. He lived in a tank in the classroom until it was time for him to come home again; Dad released him in a swamp, none the worse for wear.

After my Father died, I worked for a whi...

Wednesday Morning

I think that if one were to need a female bezerker warrior - and let us admit that there are situations where such a thing might be very handy indeed - that there is no better way to ensure you have one than to saddle her with a pre-teen daughter. Yes, I love my daughter. But ye gods, does she drive me crazy. If there were boats to raid or villages to overturn, I could have done a heck of a job myself this morning.

I am, shockingly, out of patience. And of course it's a day where I'll have...

Tuesday Morning

Right now I hear the hooves, quick regular on pavement; an Amish buggy approaches. It's sunny today but cold. There was silver frost upon the ground this morning.

Yesterday at the scrap yard I saw an Isle La Mott fire truck, wee and yellow and with still shiny chrome. Last call indeed. The towing company that brought it in has a truck that's primary red and white; it looks all the world like a three-year old's vision of what a tow truck needs to be - and to make it even better, have it pull a...

Monday Morning

When a woman is fixing to die, she starts to look like a greyhound. There's a layer of fat that we carry, all of us, between our skin and our skulls. It retreats when it hears death coming, melting away, chased off, leaving only leather paper folded over worried bone. Sometimes the skin is taut; a phrenologist's dream. Other times, it hangs; despair's saddlebags.

There's a nervous energy there, frantic and uncomfortable. Existence tied together with caffeine and cigarettes, punctuated with br...

Friday Morning

Today, I can breathe. I'm sure this is in no small part due to the reappearance of the sun; for the first time in a week, more or less, there are blue skies. In response, the washer is churning away - I shall attempt to hang clothes out, although the forecast promises showers and I shall have to be vigilant.

This morning, while it was time to wait for the school bus, Nadia and I kicked the soccer ball back and forth; it's a vibrant tie dye color so we had a rainbow rolling between us. She's ...

Thursday, We Meet Again

I worked all the day yesterday on a book chapter, and will finish it today; my brain still feels as if it is not working properly. Words aren't moving through my mind in the same way. It's as if the fish-thoughts have found a new current, deeper, faster, where the water's cold. I have to be far more still if I want to catch them, and even then, they're weird.

You have to understand that there are times that fish fly, that they launch themselves from the water into boats, that they fling themse...

Wednesday Afternoon

Right now, I could write you a love story. Not a romance. The two are different, especially at first, and first is where we start.

The rain is cold today. It's thinking about becoming snow, rounded drop shoulders shrugging into crystalline corsets, thinning and branching, embracing frozen beauty. But the ground the rain's falling on isn't hard no more. It's gone green, lush with grass springing up, up, up, dizzy dervish dance growing before man rediscovers his Puritan urge to mow, mow, mow ...

Tuesday Afternoon

And it is raining like hell. The weather forecast had mentioned half an inch of rain; what wasn't shared was that that half inch would arrive all at once, falling with projectile force. In the great cosmic scale of things, this isn't a big deal - but in the monitoring the condition of the basement scale of things, well, it's worrying.

Luckily, the work Tim has been doing to shore up the basement walls seems to be paying off big time. There are a million really boring things I could say about ...

Checking In

Whew, y'all. Just whew. Things have been happening and hopping, although not necessarily as fast as I might like them too. At this point, though, it looks like I'll be largely off line until the first.

This sounds horrible, but in a way, it's also really, really good. I am discovering how distractable I am. When the internet is there, I'm checking email, facebook, and eight million facts a minute - and the writing, apparently, has been suffering. Without the internet accessible? The words ...