the calm between the storms UPDATE

Have you switched to Blogger Beta?
I can't leave a comment on your blog until I do too.
Funny how that works.
I thought I had a choice, Blogger. Apparently not, eh? Funny... I feel as though I am being lead down into an increasingly narrow chute...and that light at the far end might be a man in a white lab coat weilding a 'humane killer'.
Or maybe thats just me. I get funny around this time of the year.

I stuck a needle into the second joint of my index finger the other day. It didn't hurt as much as you might think it would, but it did kind of ache; and it made bending my finger difficult. To make matters worse, I couldn't pull it out. As I was attached at the time to a rather sizeable piece of sewing soaking it was out of the question ( and stupid, in afterthought.) Furthermore all my pliers were OUT IN THE GARAGE FOR SOME REASON. I ended up pulling it out with my teeth. This made an audible popping noise as the point left the cartilage, and chipped my front tooth.
No, I don't do things halfway.

The snow has gone. However the wintry assaults continue on rancho FirstNations. Yesterday starting at 11:30 in the morning, freaky disgusting bathtub-temperature winds rose up from the south and maintained a steady 45mph with gusts up to 60. Good thing, then, that these were not the usual winds from the south we experience here at rancho FirstNations. We expect more of the same tomorrow, along with torrential rains and a chance of snooooo. It almost goes without saying that we'll lose power again. We did twice yesterday. Yay.

In Oregon they called these freak warming trends a chinook.
A chinook is a salmon.
This is not a fish.
There are no fish associated with this phenomenon.
There is nothing remotely piscine about it.
That is why I moved away from Oregon. People in Oregon are fucking strange.

Tell you what though, I look out at the giant rotting stump which markes the place where the Tree of Evil stood only one year ago and thank God we kept bugging the city until they took it down. For those of you who have just joined us, the Tree of Evil was a freakishly large Lombardy Poplar that stood in the center of my driveway, just on city property. Lombardy Poplar is a softwood anyway, but this one was rotten all the way down the property side-that is, OUR side. To make matters more interesting, yardarm-sized branches would tear away from the main trunk and fall off just for the hell of it. Rather than breaking, though, they'd burst and shatter and spray wet cottony pulp all over the place. This made our driveway and the sidewalk out front a less than optimum place for mommies with baby strollers and hippies and dogs and cars and people and things.
Understandbly we got real tired of waiting for the next high wind to bring half the bastard plowing through our roof in the dead of the night and started a campaign of 'friendly visits' to City Hall. Finally the city removed it. No charge; their tree, their dime. SoooWEET! Took two days, four trucks and a crane. Giant chunks of this tree are still to be found at the city compost heap, chunks bigger than my car. All of them rotton and hollow down the side that faced our house.
Better there than my roof.