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Archive for October, 2011

From Ghost Train to Gollum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on October 28, 2011| 5 Comments »

The Trickster came to meet Chrystal and I long before we crossed into Nevada from California. If Raven is an omen, there may be some truth to his presence on the outset of our trip to Ely. He was certainly a help as we had certain tasks that required delicate negotiations.

The back wall of an old building in Ely. The freight doors are at wagon height. The old coal shoots are covered up.

Earthquake damage on the same old building. There were cracks in the bricks on the other side of the same back wall. I wouldn’t want to be standing in the alley if/when some shaking starts in!

No, John, those tires will NOT hold air.

Terry’s old Jeep trailer.

Don’t ask. The only thing cool in this photo is the old truck cab. This isn’t somewhere out in the sagebrush but it is in my dad’s yard. Or what used to be my dad’s yard.

Old wheel in the middle of the asparagus patch.

RTENT

Dad never even started it up again after Mom died in 1995.

Too many memories.

On a happier note: the display at Nevada Northern Railway.

#40 was running on the Ghost Train tours! This is my favorite engine of all the ones they have at Nevada Northern. Many years ago, #40 was involved in a terrible wreck (no people were injured) that nearly totaled the engine. It was so wonderful to see her out and steaming while we were in Ely. I almost think my dad smiled from Heaven when she blew her beautiful whistle. I will miss Nevada Northern a whole lot. If you are ever in Ely, Nevada, it is worth your time to take the train ride up to Ruth and back.

Sisters. Chrystal, age 20, and Jessica, age 13.

Looking at this photo, I am shocked at how white Chrystal is. Too much time in the Pacific Northwest has given her a Moon Tan. Jessica obviously spends more time out under the Nevada sun.

One of those girls spends a lot more time in front of a camera than the other. Bet you can’t guess who has done a little modeling?

Yeah, totally shows.

Nevada at 85 miles per hour.

No, I was not driving. Terry was.

I love how the landscape seems to stand still.

I love Highway 50.

We left Reno late in the day on Sunday. Chrystal and I drove north with two trunks and a few other items. I still have to return to Reno to get my belongings, but next trip will not be a whirlwind trip to Ely to deal with unpleasantries.

We drove north out of Reno to Susanville and across the Cascades just south of Mt. Shasta. Somewhere between Susanville and Weed, I noticed a strange phenomenon along the side of the highway, just over the white stripes: small insects hovering in the evening sunshine, looking strikingly like the mist from a soaker hose. Just in case I was hallucinating, I pointed it out to Chrystal.

She saw it, too.

We merged onto I-5 just south of Weed. Somewhere north of Yreka, Chrystal got out her digital camera and started scanning the horizon for the dragon.

I was passing a series of semis when we saw it. I braked and swerved into the slow lane behind the semi I was passing so Chrystal could snap a photo of it. Not bad for 60 miles per hour. (photo courtesy of Chrystal Wilcox)

We made it to Medford before dark. Bought coffee and gas. The little girl working the Starbucks counter at the Fred Meyer even worked overtime to make us coffee: we arrived right at 7:00 when she was closing shop. She couldn’t take a tip, but I hope she knows how much we appreciated her!

It was dark from Medford on. Winding through the mountain passes, we came on yet another strange phenomenon: a cell or radio tower glowing from the top of a dark mountain peak.

I turned to Chrystal and said, “Do you suddenly feel like a Hobbit on your way to Mordor?”

And the Zombie in the seat next to me smiled and said, “Gollum.”

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Nevada Time

Posted in Uncategorized on October 27, 2011| 2 Comments »

Last Friday it seemed like life moved as fast as molasses in winter.

The visit with the lawyer took 45 minutes. Then we had to go to the court house to file our updated paper. Of course, at the court house, we ran into people we knew. And Terry, being an ex-cop, knows everyone.

He ran into another ex-cop.

The quick stop at the court house took almost an hour. And I will say this for small towns and county court houses: there’s no metal detector at the door! No security! It’s wonderful and takes me back to a more innocent time.

The Clackamas County Court House in Oregon City has one entrance now: on the side, through imposing metal detectors manned by burly guards who rifle through your purse. You can’t take nail clippers into the court house.

I carried my purse into the White Pine County Court House. Inside my purse are two knives. No one even asked.

We paid the water bill at City Hall and we wandered over to Murdoch’s Towing to pay a bill. I let Terry go in to pay that bill.

While I was sitting there, waiting for him, it occurred to me that I should get a photo of the business right across the street.

Ely doesn’t hide her brothels behind a “high board fence” or out past county lines.

Ely embraces her brothels.

According to Wikipedia, the VIP Spa is probably not a licensed brothel, but the Stardust Ranch is.

You can read more on Nevada’s “institutions” here.

I honestly never think about photographing brothels. It’s one of those things that are not on my radar. They just are. But sitting in Terry’s truck and waiting for him to pay the bill at Murdoch’s spurred me to think like a tourist. Really: do you want to photograph the murals around town or get a photo of what really happens in Ely after the sun goes down? Hands down: the brothels win.

I took a ghostly photo of Ely the night we pulled in.

Doesn’t look like much, you say? Well, I say: take another look!

It really isn’t all bugs on the windshield.

Tomorrow I’ll just share Ely pics. It really is a picturesque little town.

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No Bigfoot :(

Posted in Uncategorized on October 26, 2011| 3 Comments »

But I sure looked when we crossed over the Cascades south of Mt. Shasta! Trivia: most California sightings of Bigfoot take place in the northern counties around Yreka, Weed, Alturas, Mt. Shasta and the coast range.

I did see a zombie in Medford.

She was hitch-hiking and I gave her a ride. True story.

It was an adventure for the pair of us. The whole whirl-wind trip to take care of the legal end of my dad’s estate operated under a phenomenon I like to think of as “Nevada Time”. Nevada Time is a slowed-down version of life. Tasks that normally take ten minutes to complete take thirty minutes to complete on Nevada Time.

The up-side of Nevada Time is that 90% of the people are nice. They’re nice because they are operating on Nevada Time and they have all the time in the world to be nice. You might as well be nice when you’re stuck in a time warp because you aren’t going to get out of it any sooner by being nasty.

Nasty was the bank in Reno. My brother had already been dealing with them. “Bring this, this, and this and that’s all you need.” So he brought everything and they said, “Oh, your sister has to be here in person.” “She lives in Portland.” “Sorry, she has to be here in person.”

At some point, banks forget what it is to be bereaved. I’ll let you guess which debit-card-charging bank we were dealing with.

Anyway, I showed up and we sat down with Richard at the bank. And he can’t connect the dots between Jack and John. My dad went by Jack. He signed everything John. His legal name was John. No one called him John. Our lawyer filled out the Trust paperwork using the names interchangeably, but she didn’t specify it was John “Jack”. Richard, the man at the bank, didn’t even know that Jack is a common moniker for John. He wanted two pieces of ID from both of us, too, and then he refused to complete the trust paperwork.

We drove to Ely.

That’s a five-hour drive from Reno.

If you ever make the drive on US Hwy 50, stop at the Toiyabe (TOY-yah-bee) Cafe in Austin and have an ice cream cone. Austin is a pretty cool little tourist stop.

Somewhere out of Eureka, there’s a Major Deer Crossing. I have never seen the Major Deer but he must be a pretty commanding buck because there are several signs warning drivers to watch for him. There are probably some Private Deers, too, but the signs don’t say that. Just Major Deer.

We stayed at the Jailhouse and had dinner at the Hotel Nevada. No photos, sorry. I think this is a case of familiarity: these places are so familiar to me that I forget to take photos. When I was a teenager, we would sneak into the Hotel and ride the elevator. It was the only elevator in town in the early 1970’s and it had an escape hatch on the top. If you pushed the hatch out, you could set off the alarm. The elevator would stop on the third floor, we’d dash out and calmly sneak down the stairs while security tried to figure out why the alarm went off in the elevator.

Ely is a real small town.

Friday we met with the lawyer and straightened out the John/Jack business. Then we went to the small bank branch inside the main grocery story and took care of setting up the Trust Account. They didn’t ask us for two pieces of ID: we were Jack’s kids and that was all they needed to know. The gal at the bank did say, “But of course he was Jack! We all knew him!”

Gotta love small towns.

We had to go to the DMV office to take care of a vehicle title. It took us 2.5 hours to find out we couldn’t take care of the title right then, but the Ely DMV Office got my signature on all the paperwork so I do not have to return to Nevada to sign anything.

While we were there, I noticed that the stream of people lining up behind us had to take numbers. I didn’t notice that we were supposed to take a number because 1) no one was in line ahead of us when we came in and 2) there was no ticket dispenser. The numbers were written in black marker on 5×7″ pieces of cardboard: 1, 2, 3, 4 – through 30. They recycle the numbers every day. Nobody got their nose out of joint when someone mixed up the numbers: Number 7 became Number 9 and everyone knew what order they came in the door without the numbers anyway.

They were very nice at Ely Nevada DMV.

My only question is: can we transport that office to Portland? They were so NICE.

The only problem was that they operate on Nevada Time and it took all of Friday just to set up the trust account and to get turned down at the DMV office. Actually, it took 2.5 hours for DMV to tell us we couldn’t straighten out the title issue.

I could have rounded up ten Bigfoots in that amount of time.

Tomorrow: more observations on small towns and Nevada Institutions.

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Bigfoot Hunting!

Posted in Uncategorized on October 18, 2011| 1 Comment »

I am about to go on a marathon drive to Nevada and home. It isn’t a pleasure trip (when is a trip to Nevada a pleasure trip for me?) but it is a necessary trip.

My brother and I are co-executors of our father’s estate and now that we are through probate court, we have to finalize some things. Don’t ask me about probate court, just never assume that because you have a trust and a will that your heirs get to sidestep probate. But we’re through and we’re legal and we’re about to wrap this up.

I am leaving Harvey this time. My husband can dog-sit.

So why am I writing about this? Because part of my drive takes me through the heart of Bigfoot country. Sometime tomorrow afternoon, I will be driving the lonely stretches of highway between Weed and Susanville, California around Mt. Shasta. And maybe – just maybe – we will get to see Bigfoot.

If we don’t see one on our way down, no worries: we’ll backtrack through the same country on our way home over the weekend.

I’ll have my camera handy just in case.

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Changing Things

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 7, 2011| 3 Comments »

I am thinking of changing things here.

Actually, it wasn’t even on my radar until tonight when I was in one of those cathartic end-of-the-week states staring at the computer and knowing I really should have a life moods. Only I didn’t want to have a life, I wanted to stare at the computer and maybe it would talk to me like I imagine God would talk to me.

Except the computer isn’t God and it doesn’t talk to me and it blatantly ignored me.

So I went blog surfing. For funny blogs, specifically. Because I want to laugh.

Specifically: I want to laugh.

I browsed “Stuff White People Like” but the truth is… that’s about corporate white people more than it is about working class white people or even red-neck white people and the jokes are… well, not about this white person. It’s a great blog, don’t get me wrong. And in the right mood, it’s totally true. White people are predictable. I work with some of them.

Oh, shoot. I *am* one of them. My kids even glow-in-the-dark.

Of course I checked out The Pioneer Woman. She’s hysterical. She’s a middle child. I am a middle child. We relate on a deep inner-middle-child level. Her brother, Mike, is different. My brother, Terry, is different. We relate on a level of having different brothers. And she loves horses, lives on a ranch and homeschools.

I love horses and I homeschooled my kids. But there were always mountains on the horizon. I couldn’t live in Oklahoma. It’s too flat. But I understand the jokes about calf nuts. I don’t relate to Basset Hounds.

And I do *not* love to cook. Categorically. I hate to cook. I’m OK with baking, but cooking… not so much.

You will never see a cookbook by me. Never.

Then I clicked on Hyperbole and a Half. You have to read the blog post about Simple Dog’s adventure. If I was half-way clever, I could have written that about Harvey’s Adventure.

I think I need to learn something here.

What people want is a reason to laugh.

I have decided that I need to give my blog a make-over. It isn’t really about the desert, my garden or my grandkids. That was the Plan, but the plan went the way of Mice and Men. I haven’t been to the desert in a year (the trip to Ely in May notwithstanding), my garden struggled through this summer of neglect (and miserable cloudy/rainy weather) and my grandkids remain a theme but they are really only special to me.

This blog needs to morph with my life.

I am not sure where it is going, I just know there’s a change in the air.

Inspired by Ree Drummond, Harvey gets glasses…

Yep, I am thinking seriously about changing things up here and going strictly for humor…

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Rain Barrel

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 5, 2011| 3 Comments »

Don talked me into purchasing new rain gutters for the house this autumn. We really needed new ones: the old ones were cheap, angled wrong, leaked, and didn’t cover all of the eaves.

Of course buying something like rain gutters involves sales men (because you didn’t really think Don was going to install gutters, did you?) and sales men always involve sales pitches. I pretty much tossed this back at Don and told him to deal with the salesmen and the sales pitch because I really didn’t want to. For one thing, this whole year has left me stressed out and tired. And for another, I just don’t like pushy salesmen.

And, of course, I came home one night after a miserable commute after and intense day at work and there are salesmen in my house looking all chipper and relaxed and I just wanted to eat dinner and go to bed. I don’t think I was very nice. They left their sales pitch and said they’d call back in a couple weeks.

Well, we decided to buy the rain gutters from LeafGuard. Don promised me they could work around my existing rain barrel. He said something about they were going to throw in a second rain barrel but he never could find the piece of paper that was written on. So when the laborers came to install our new gutters, a second rain barrel wasn’t on my radar.

The young men who came to install the gutters were very nice men and I actually liked them. This is good because Don vacated the premises on the day of installation and left the final inspection to me. (In his defense, he already had plans.)

The installers took pains to set up my rain barrel so that I can retire it for the winter and reinstall it in the summer. If that sounds counter-intuitive, it really isn’t. Yes, it rains nearly all winter here but it also can freeze. The last thing I want is to have water in my rain barrel and have that water freeze. I paid $45 for that barrel from Systern Rain Barrels. The manual says it should be out under the down spout from March-October and in storage October-March.

I inspected the gutters and the installers left. Then it rained and we discovered they’d installed one downspout incorrectly. Don (bless his heart because he just hates to make phone calls and I was absolutely overwhelmed with work and life) followed through and got them back out here. The young man who headed up the crew apologized and fixed the problem (said he had a trainee on the job but it was his fault for not noticing). I may not have liked the salesmen (probably no fault of theirs; its just they’re in hard-sell mode) but I certainly liked the laborers.

Don was disappointed that a second rain barrel did not come with the install, but he still couldn’t find the slip of paper with that quote on it and I was quite happy with the gutters.

Until tonight.

You saw that coming, right?

I came home from work and started to open the front door when I noticed something black at the end of the house, under the big rhododendron. I peered closer and thought that’s a rain barrel!

I asked Don if he knew we had a second rain barrel. He didn’t believe me and had to go out and look for himself.

Yes, LeafGuard came out sometime today when we were at work and installed their rain barrel as verbally promised when Don originally spoke with the salesmen! Didn’t say a word to us, just set it up and left it.

It’s really cool. Better than the other barrel in that this new one has a valve built into the downspout that you can turn so that all the rain water goes down the spout or it goes into the barrel. You don’t have to disconnect it during the winter – you just turn the valve! And they set it up so that it is not currently collecting rain water. (The blocks were already in place because I was in the process of moving my original barrel to the other side of the house – so glad I left them in place!!)

I’m pretty jazzed: I now have two rain barrels! And I can sing my mom’s favorite rainy day song to go with the barrels. (I miss my mom now!)

 

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