The weeks news. Happy days, spring at last!
It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven.
It’s the time of year that is the most difficult up here at this elevation; rain and warmer temperatures are melting off the snow, but what is still on the roads is either too soft to run a snowmobile on, there is too much dirt showing to run across, or the snow is still too deep in places to get a wheeled vehicle through. It’s now when I miss my UTV, the tracks will go almost anywhere, making getting around much easier. However, the UTV was costing me a fortune to keep repaired, so we make do with what we have. I hope to have this minor problem resolved by next fall, making our lives easier. We’re not getting any younger, and I plan on staying here a very long time. We did, just today, manage to get both 4 wheelers from where we had them parked up to our turn off, so now we don’t have quite so far to hike if we can’t get the snowmobiles through the soft snow.
To give you an idea of the amount of snow we still have in places up here, I have a 16 ft canoe that I left sitting on sawhorses last fall in our yard, about a total of three feet off the ground. I am just now able to see a part of it poking out of the snow. So, the snow will be with us for a few more weeks, though I still think we will have the trucks a lot closer to home by the end of this month, if not in the yard yet.
The lovely wife and I have been married for a little over two years now, and we finally got around to getting her a military dependent ID card. The only place left to get one in this area is the Air Force base north of Spokane, a trip of over two hours and often a waiting time of a few hours in the ID card office depending on the day. We left early and arrived soon after the office opened. Nobody else was waiting so we got right in, leaving the base in under an hour. The reason we waited so long to get her an ID? The health insurance through her job is much better than what the military provides and we couldn’t see any good reason to waste time while she was still covered by it. However, she recently switched jobs for a time, returning to the old job when the new one turned out to not be a good fit. This meant that there was a break in her insurance, and we were uncertain whether her insurance would resume in time to refill her prescriptions. To make sure that she was able to get her prescriptions refilled, we made the trek up to the base. Also, as with most insurance, her prescriptions cost money, though not much. With the military insurance, the cost will be even less, if not free, depending on the medication. Anywhere we can cut costs always helps.
My faithful traveling companion, Kiyo, is doing much better. He is healing fast, the stitches should be coming out soon, and I hope to get him back in his wheelchair shortly. There have been some movement in his hind legs, but it’s mostly random; though last night, he seemed to be trying to move them. The vet doesn’t think he will regain the use of his legs, but we are hopeful he will get some use back. A reduction in his incontinence would be very welcome to him and us; less mess and less baths if he can actually tell when he needs to go. We invested in a pet bed especially for incontinent pets that has a mesh panel in the bottom with padding around the edges to make the pet comfortable. It keeps the pet laying on it dry since it allows the wet to fall through to a tray beneath the bed. Now all I have to do is make something to raise it to the same level as our bed so that he feels he is sleeping on the bed with us again. Since he has spent the majority of his life sleeping on the bed with me, it has been hard for him to sleep on his own bed on the floor. Hopefully, that will change soon.
Things have settled down around here, and since there’s nothing I can do either outside, or inside until the rest of the snow melts and things dry up, I am writing. I hope to have a book finished soon and turned over to the lovely wife for her editing magic. My current work, for those interested, is a satire of those Dungeon and Dragon games that spawned books and movies, among other things. I thought I would try my hand at something funny, instead of what I have been writing. Not sure where the story is going yet, but I am having fun writing it. I’m pretty sure it will be a short story, but you never know. Things sometimes have a way of getting out of hand, and before you know it, you have a three-hundred-page book. We’ll see how it goes.
Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.
