Friday, December 04, 2009

“How you doing?”

“Good. Glad I caught you alone. Mind if I sit and talk while your eating your lunch?’

“No, don’t mind. Sit.”

“Thanks.”

I had deliberately chosen to enter the Crypt during the lunch hour so I could talk with the Boss Man alone. I was looking for information about that Old House, and Boss Man knows most everyone and what there is to know about the events outside the city.

“You know 212 Road, Boss Man?”

“Sure do.”

“You know the Old Stone House (Boss Man talks over me) up on the hill?”

“Sure do.”

“Big old, two story house up there?”

“Yep, sure do.”

“I know who owns it now, a hunting guide told me. But who owned it – in the past, I mean. You know?”

“No! No, I don’t. Well, I don’t know who owned it, xxxx owns it now.”

“Yeah, I know. His Mom owns the property South of the road along there.”

“Well, I’m not sure . . .”

And he thinks about it for a while, and says: “You know, you’re right. But, he owns it; Sure and sure. His Mom is in a nursing home down in Texas, see. He owns it.”

 

I asked; “You know that building off to the East of the house/”

“Well, I’ve seen it.”

“Bunk house I guess. Strangest building I’ve seen. Had one door on the North end and five rooms. Only way you can go from end to end is zig zag back and forth through the rooms.”

“Man needed more than one door in that place.”

“How so?”

“Party house,” Boss Man says.

“Kidding.”

“Nope. Way I heard it, used to be a party up there every weekend. That is if the one from last week ended.”

“Be damned. Nothing up there now.”

“Nope.”

“Who built it?”

“No idea. That building was there long before I got here.”

“Pretty building sitting up there.”

“Yeah. Sure is.”

“No utilities.”

“No. Nothing like ‘em.”

“Doesn’t need Pointing.”*

“Nope. Held up pretty good, considering.”

“Yep.”

“I’ve got xxx’s mower out back, been fixin’ on it. Talked with him two, three weeks ago. No, it’s been six or seven. Heard he is looking to sell out.”

Laughing. “Couldn’t afford the Million and a half, he’d ask for the acreage.”

“Hell. Neither could I.”

We swapped around some information as I had some Boss Man didn’t.

Boss Man said: “xxx has some brothers and a sister that are lawyers, they’re arguing over the place.”

“Money is easier to divide than property.”

“Yep.”

“xxx wants to retire to Texas.”

“Figures. Down there near the place you’re building?”

“Yep. . . Well, within easy driving.”

“Thanks, Boss Man.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. See you.”

There was a Long Gun Deer Hunter in a tree stand just to the left of this pictures edge.

I left the Crypt and went down town for coffee before going home.

* Point and Tuck – the mortar repair between the stones, the join.

_____

From the reaches,

Ten Mile

Thursday, December 03, 2009

I’ve just finished editing the My Pictures Files, after collecting all of them from the two lap tops, and save disks from former computers. Thank the young repairman.

Having finished the edit, I had a rather full trash can. I think that Windows can never do anything as fine as increase the sound level of the Trash Can munching the trash. I love that sound.

Anyway, payday came and went. One of the wents, for me, is the monthly trek to the local Co-Op to pay the vehicle fuel bill. The Co-Op was busy as all get out bye the way, with the Soy Bean Harvest. There were all manner of truck and trailers waiting weighting, mixed in with the little fellows bringing in the Two and a Half ton trucks and others with the high boy trailers full of produce.

Some evidently were still bringing in Milo and the increase Co-Op staff was having a time of it. One girl told a milo driver to take his load to the bean dumping point, which wasn’t bad because the driver was a farmer and probably wouldn’t have dumped. But it does serve to illustrate the activity. They are dumping on the ground, the silo’s are full. Some time this week, I’m sure, the Co-Op will start carting the over flow off to Cheney and other points.

The activity shines a light, I feel, on the manager of the Co-Op. He retires in June from the job after forty-seven years. He is/was an Air Force veteran, who took the managers job after leaving the service. He took over an almost defunct operation and built it into a business as strong as the farmers that support it. Good man.

In the back office there’s a lady I kinda like. She’s a married person with two kids, so don’t take that incorrectly. She handles the small stuff with aplomb and always a smile. One of things the manager and she have going is “look at our seeds.”

Out front of the main building, along the walk one must use to enter, is a cleared area with about two inches of gravel spread over it. That gravel gets packed down something fierce when they put stuff out there for Sales Displays.

But, like I said, these two people have their ways and one of the ways is they’ll take some of the seed they order each year and sow it by hand over the gravel. They don’t till the gravel, they simply cast the seed over it.

 

And the turnips grow each year. That Barn Red piping is a Round Bail Feeder on display. Part of the fun thing with these turnips is the accidental manner of the first year.

The girl dropped the packets carrying them in one year and a few turnips grew in the area. Each year after they’ve been casting one packet out when they arrive each spring, as “Advertising” they claim.

I imagine this will continue next spring. Don’t really know if the new manager will handle it after that – he was a government worker before being recruited for this job. Hope he will, it’s rather interesting to see the stuff grow where grass hasn’t a chance.

The turnips, for information, are gathered by the kids and fed to 4H pork and goat projects. They don’t go to waste.

And guess what I have. . . .

Yep! Of that Old House. That pump head was out the side door by the kitchen.

I’d forgotten Long Gun Deer season was in full swing.

_____

From the reaches,

Ten Mile

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

I’m having difficulties getting started this morning. Housekeeper called. She said she wasn’t coming today. Why?

The day was too icky.

Now, that in and of itself isn’t earth shattering or even interesting, unless you realize I had been thinking of writing and what makes words so interesting to a reader miles removed from the events or even the plot of fictional stories. If I were to have started – Appointments are a balancing act. One gives, and takes, to fit an event into the schedule and expect another to return the same, arriving at mutual satisfaction and accomplishing work, pleasure or goal achievement; the reader would yawn, think of THEIR next appointment and mentally drift away.

One of the things a writer may do, is create a highs and lows; give the illusion of distance (the 1000 yard stare equivalence) for the readers imagination; like the words conveying mystic:

 

The writer may, as I started, to develop rant. Set up the situation of antagonist/protagonist and say all things pointy and sharp, and try to say all things the reader will respond to, but not everything. The reader must be allowed his or her opinion – If it’d been Me, I’da said or told that . . ., to . . ..

Then the writer could develop their own story and drag the reader along with them.

After Housekeeper upset my ordered life this morning, I left my on-line poker game before I tilted away my thirty-one cent profit and surfed the web. Well, not really. I checked my blog status. I float in the dark, bobbing on the waves, my ratings go up, my ratings go down.

I became curious as to the blogs higher in the ratings and the blogs lower in the ratings than my blog. I’m honest enough, just, to satisfy myself as to the why of either case. I actually pick one or two of each to read to find out WHY that blog is above and climbing, or below and falling. I do, and I do not mutter, as some might, “I’m better than that.” or “Boy, that’s sick. I can see why that one is sinking.”

And then occasionally, I run across one I don’t mind giving an up to:

Once in the wintertime when the snow was very deep, a poor girl had to go out and fetch wood on a sled. After she had gathered it together and loaded it, she did not want to go straight home, because she was so frozen, but instead to make a fire and warm herself a little first. So she scraped the snow away, and while she was thus clearing the ground she found a small golden key. Now she believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so she dug in the ground and found a little iron chest. "If only the key fits!" she thought. "Certainly there are valuable things in the chest." She looked, but there was no keyhole. Finally she found one, but so small that it could scarcely be seen. She tried the key, and fortunately it fitted. Then she turned it once, and now we must wait until she has finished unlocking it and has opened the lid. Then we shall find out what kind of wonderful things there were in the little chest.

http://thecybercadesproject.blogspot.com/

That is the entire entry. Except for a picture of a small key. He’d been better served, possibly, with a skeleton key than the flat key used, but the words speak for themselves.

I’m still trying to fit that word image into the picture image in this entry.

_____

From the reaches,

Ten Mile

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

The picture below is the first with the camera that replaced the Nokia wide angle. This one is a Cannon EOS. I stepped out the back door last evening, a few minutes after sunset and took the picture Westerly in the Auto Mode. It was dark enough out that the flash automatically activated.

The camera came with software to manipulate the photo and I used that to auto adjust the exposure to increase the lightness of the picture.

Examining the photo, I found it interesting from several aspects. The evident slope on the other side of the fence expresses the dry creek depth I ran the mower into this past summer – not on purpose, I assure you. The tree framing the left side is the culprit cracking my concrete patio. It is a Black Walnut Tree, of fifty or more years, and bears excellently most years. It is now thirty or forty feet high and I fully expect it to grow even taller.

Up there, where the truck is, is the old highway. That highway came straight to the point of the trucks location and then hooks a sharp turn to the North (that would be to the right side of the picture). The point where the truck is grades ten degrees to the inside of the turn and will flight your vehicle if one comes over it at much over twenty-five miles per hour.

The white picket fence in the left background is my Renters home. I use Renter in lue of his real name. He owns just over a hundred and forty acres and the house sits in the Northeast corner of the property. It was in the Southern portion of his land the Old Man was killed when he drove over the edge of the embankment, beneath the Osage Orange Trees. I wrote about that incident I believe. As a side note, the place where we found the car with the body has washed undercut and an area of half an acre fell into the flooded dry cut. That happened well after the auto accident however. I had a part in replacing the fencing down there after that.

The white building in the center of the picture, the focal point of the picture, has a rather interesting history. Said history is long, and beyond the telling here, but it use to be a small engine repair shop. The owner eventually died and the building sat vacant. It was vacant for ten years before I arrived and was vacant for another ten years. One could say it is vacant yet, but it does have an owner now, and that owner caused, last year, the building to receive its first coat of paint in over twenty-five years. The little place sits on a tri-angular piece of land. The sides of that piece of land are about thirty feet long, and the North side (by the truck up there) is about six feet off the old highway.

I’m sure the property lines drift over the years.

On the other side of that building, the locals have cut, by driving over it, another spur road, coming off the old highway, and on this side, the county road goes South and is in-line with the old highway pointed off the curve North.

There are a couple of houses hidden left and right in the picture, behind the trees, which have their own stories. I’ll not be telling them here for a goodly while, in due respect to your patience. About six years ago, down in the village, there existed a Feed and Grain Store. One of the best buildings in the village. The owner passed on after a life time of honorable labor. The building sat vacant for a number of months and was finally purchased by a lady out of Fredonia Ks. She segmented the building and opened: 1) An Insurance Agency; 2) a Quick Trip Shop; and 3) a liquor store.

The Insurance Agency failed. Then the liquor store failed. And finally, the Quick Trip Shop failed. The Agency failed because the “Old” insurance business in town was purchased by a local lady and she is well liked. The liquor store failed because the owner lady could not, herself, keep the place open the hours required by drinkers, and could not find hired help to work the hours. And finally, the Quick Trip Shop failed because the tobacco prices and licensing became too steep and her other resupply problems got out of hand time wise and minimum quantity purchase requirements from distributors.

Which meant that the village had no grocery, no QT within three miles, no liquor store within sixteen miles North, South; None within thirty miles East and fourteen West. I use liquor store here to include over-the-counter 3.2 beer also.

Well, the lady's building now sits empty. But the owner of the Greasy? Surely, you know him. I’ve written about the Greasy and the old house on seven acres West of town? The one with the buzzards on the roof?

Yes, of course, him.

He reviewed the facts, before opening the Greasy, and concluded that the village needed a liquor store.  So he purchased the Old Building out there on the old highway on the little tri-angular chunk of land. And petitioned the County Council for the liquor license to set the Old Building up as a liquor store.

The petition was denied. The cause of the rejection is the county denial of all such petitions outside of in cooperated city limits. In this case, the Old building, sitting on the West Side of the county North/South road, was on the wrong side of the road that marks the City (village) Limits.

The owner of the Greasy now owns many pieces of property. He owns a building down “town” in which he started a Meat/Butcher Shop in the rear (defunct), his mother runs a T-Shirt Business from home and rents the front of the building, the entire up-stairs is vacant. He owns the home he lives in and two acres on the East side of the village (in the middle of Estascy Heaven), and he owns the Old building. As the other City Council Members swirl remarks of; “He has no money, he owes money every where. No one knows where he gets his money.”

He rents the building the Greasy occupies; which is half a building that was once a Quick Trip/Gas/Restaurant complex.  Having failed turning the Old Building into a liquor store, he tried to turn the other half of the Greasy into a liquor store. The owners of that property thought differently, and informed him they would be applying for the license themselves.

That failed. For the same reason the Old Building bid failed.

So the owner of the Greasy remains the proprietor of the Greasy, his ex-wife working for him (or to keep an eye on him and his doings), and the statement of the boyfriend of the ex-wife; “She’s got plenty of money, I’m not worried about that,” causes me to remember she is the older sister of my near neighbor. Who I know to be an illicit pharmacy dealer.

(My near neighbor’s West Side Yard. The East Side is worse; the car does not run and was rejected in the Cash For Clunkers program. The near neighbor is restricted from driving by the State.)

The local Sheriff Deputies choose to hang out at the Greasy.

Small towns are fun – they teach survival skills.

_____

From the reaches,

Ten Mile  

Monday, November 30, 2009

What works for others, doesn’t necessarily work for me.

Of course, that is not original – that wouldn’t work for me. Yesterday I spoke of the Poker Gods, hinting that I shouldn’t; mention Poker at all, that is. But I did and as expected suffered. Badly.

Content with the vagrancies of my fate, I trundled off to the Hoyles Game Boards and played dominos. Against the computer. And lost seven of eight. Expectations are the pits. The Steelers, the Red Skins – Lost. I also played ZILCH against the computer, and lost. MAZE race against the computer, while watching football, and lost. My Frog got eaten four times and I find myself returned to a level of childs play at levels I’ve done so well playing – four times!. That Frog got eaten four times. It’s a tough level.

I did have a good book. That is, I think it is a good book. I opened it to read and distant friends pounded on the door. Meal time. Except we met out at the Highway store after I sorted myself out and sorted the vehicle problem. When the group arrived at the destination . . . Why, we found someone had made a mistake and the venture to gather together the dinners was taken while the meal was cooking in the oven at home distant. and someone had set the heat a trifle high and I do think we arrived back at their house just in time.

It was somewhat smoky in there, however.

We had Hot Dogs, out doors, on the BBQ and deck.

 

I only mention this because I might have found an answer while browsing this morning. Then again, maybe not. Considering I can not make heads nor tails of that harness the horse is wearing. I do think, however, that horse is proud of itself, its work and the day.

 

Photo: teach50/Titled: “the simple life or is it?”

_____

From the reaches,

Ten Mile

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Difficult to get jump started this morning. The clock indicated I’d rolled out at Four, caught up with the blog reading and coffee by Five AM.

All of which is normal. Pandora is in the thirties, but I’m not into “Waiting On The Robert E. Lee” this morning. I’ve run, in my mind, through this subject and that for writing inspiration today. Nothing pleases me. My thoughts appear chaotic even suspecting, knowing, the ideas are there I cannot ease them out.

To speak of poker, even circumstantially, would offend the Gods and upset the teeter. Speaking of poker: Linda indicates the Pokerworks Family H.O.R.S.E. tournament is this Sunday at a new time; 2230 hrs. Their buy-in is $5.50. I normally enjoy railing the Bi-Weekly Event. This Sunday, I think me not. I plan to get back some of the hospitality I’ve dispensed over the past year.

There are several Ball games today I want to catch, and there were a couple yesterday I simply had to watch. Those priorities hampered the assembly of the table I purchased earlier this week – Yeah, I know. But, I don’t have a great deal of hurry pushing on me to get the table up. One of the nice things about being lazy, I can watch work with ease.

One must admit it has been a short week, and I have been busy.

I have been watching, from the wings for sure, and without much passion, the way the local Sheriff has handled the village drug problem. After his election there was a period of quiet and assessment related, I’m sure, to the shootings of some months before.

This Sheriff, after this period of assessment, seems content to allow users and dealers to follow their desires until they begin beating their chests in public, or cause grief to “normal” citizens; he then institutes a policy of harassment and applies that pressure until someone gets the message.

He doesn’t appear to chase the dealers. But he has cost them a great deal of money, I suppose, looking over their shoulders and general schedule upsets. Which causes me to realize the “schedule” they do keep. Schedule being something I’d not associated with that sub-culture. But which makes sense, thinking about it.

Enough chaotic thinking this morning. The day will shred-out as it will.

Have a good one. I know I will.

_____

From the reaches,

Ten Mile 

Saturday, November 28, 2009

There have been times – a great many over the course of years – when the tales heard simply do not fit ones concept of the teller. Ones judgment is called into question and a major adjustment of concept is required of the person. It is somehow disconcerting. The world is incorrectly aligned. Get it square.

But there is no immediate means to right the thinking.

And, so it was yesterday when I ventured to purchase batteries for the defunct camera. I still want pictures of that old house, now that I have found it again. The house sits a quarter mile North of 2012 Street and several hundred feet East of where memory places it. Actually, when I published the pictures of the flooded low water bridge, I was standing just out side the gates of the field giving access to the Old House and didn’t realize the fact. True.

I didn’t look up the damn hill or perhaps I’d have seen it. But, I didn’t. Look up the hill, I mean, therefore didn’t see it. My world was incorrectly aligned. I have no immediate means of righting that. Perhaps when the camera is repaired or replaced and the pictures of that Old House are published and the notes of research are filed away, the mind will “forget” the embarrassment of my non-aligned world.

That, however, is not the story I wish to relate this day. No. The story I wish to relate is of two casual friends. By casual friends, I mean these two are people “I have seen around” and have little interaction with other than the “How’s your day going, Man? Okay? . . . .Swell. Great!”

 

 

I ran into the two at a Quick Stop Shop after I purchased batteries for the camera yesterday. I also bought some Old Fashioned Cream Drops. I love those things. I loath the idea that Old Fashioned Cream Drops are only available to me during certain periods of the year. It used to be only around Christmas, now Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know I’m not alone in this, as they sell out quite quickly. Anyhow, we’re talking about these two guys,  not the Old Fashioned Cream Drops.

Like I said, I ran into them at the Quick Stop Shop.

They were “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Do!”

“Don’t!”

“Man, I’m telling you! You don’t know lonesome!”

“You’re an idiot, (name deleted). I’m more lonesome than you’ll ever know. And a hellva lot more lonesome then you or you’ll ever be!”

From the bulging veins, red faces, and aggressive postures, I figured, while sipping my coffee, that 1) friendships were being severed; 2) blows were imminent; and 3) the Cops were soon to be called.

Number 4) happened. One mock spit on the floor and left by the front door; the other actually flicked a booger at the first and left by a side door.

I turned to the Counter Lady to pay for my coffee, and asked if they were both as lonely as they were making out.

And she told me both had extensive family in the area; the one in the hoodie was a divorced guy and the one in Camo had never been married. Both were Oldest Sons and neither owned much of anything, though both took care of older parents and watched over siblings.

Both, she said, were in their middle fifties.

I left the Quick Stop Shop for the comfort of the truck and my Old Fashioned Cream Drops, in route to the Old House.

Eventually I got there and loaded the new batteries and turned on the camera.

I got the same message.

The batteries are dead.

Damn! I feel lonely and rejected.

_____

From the reaches,

Ten Mile