Notation

I'm staff again on Saturday, no one else available to work, so Pegi and D send me home early. We got everything over to Terry's for the big wine event tonight. $250 a head, 25 people, great menu, expensive wines (though not a single one to my taste) and mostly donated, so the museum should make over five grand. I pick up a pot-pie on the way home, and drive slowly, looking at the changes in landscape as we slide into winter. You can see so deeply into the woods with the leaves gone. With no 4-wheel drive the driveway is barely doable and I just manage the top, where the clay, in this early freeze-thaw cycle, is holding a lot of moisture from the recent rains. 53 inches so far this year, not a record, but a bunch, compared to the scant eight inches we got in western Colorado. A foot of snow there is an inch of rain, an average year was four feet of snow and four inches of rain. A lot of rain didn't reach the ground, the air was so dry, 'virga' like a scrim that doesn't quite make it all the way. Pick up some chain for Leo to rig the hanging apparatus for Pegi's big winter show (the Cirque) on the main stage at the college. Sets me off thinking about rigging, which I've done a lot of, always carefully: dangling people make me anxious. When I do, as I think to myself 'achieve the ridge' it's barren and stark. And I must immediately change into winter camping clothes. It's cool though, has it's own set of perks, watching incredible winter sunsets over Dead Man's hollow. The sun is setting exactly now, it's cut into two semi-circles by a chestnut oak, orange, bright. The underside of vagrant cirrus clouds are lit pink. I have to roll a cigaret get another drink, put on my bathrobe over my winter camping garb, go sit out back and watch it. Yes, I think, this is it. Last night at the pub the past president of the Board Of Directors was meeting someone for a beer. Language is weird, isn't it? The way we make sense. And I asked him about the pallets in the side-yard where they store their debris. He's a plumbing wholesaler. I don't know what they do with it, he doesn't know either, he'll get back to me, but he thinks I can take whatever I want. Some of the pallets, for large heating or air units, would heat my place for several days. I'm on this, like a monkey on a stick, whatever the fuck that means, do monkeys like sticks? The bottom skid, for these pallets, is a 4x4 oak beam. It may be the perfect firewood, once you've got things going. I see pallets in my future, a new station. Never too late to learn.