Over Due

This post was supposed to be uploaded on Sunday morning but as usual I didn’t have time, so I’m uploading it late and the next post will be up very soon telling you why it took so long to upload.


Turns out that if you are out of the country and then don’t contact anyone for over a week they automatically assume you’re dead. Funny that. So let me assure you all that I am still alive and well. It has been a busy week for me, but busy doesn’t necessarily mean interesting. For the most part I have been painting, but let’s start where we left off.

Last Friday morning was an early start as Wendy and I were heading over to Guy (Wendy’s dad) and Kay’s house to finally get ourselves a turkey. It was a 6:30am start and was still dark when I crawled out of my sleeping bag. By the time I got to the house the sun was just coming up so I sat in the porch to take some pictures and Rye (one of the cats) sat on my lap to keep me warm.

Copy this and paste it just below to create a spider's eye view

So we left the house at about 7:15am and arrived at Guy and Kay’s around 8:00am where we were greeted by the most Turkeys we’d seen since the ride last week. It can be very difficult to sneak up on a turkey in a car, as you might imagine, and as a result they all flew over the other side of the house. Wendy and I went and knocked on the front door and spoke to Kay who told us where the feed was and what direction we could fire in. Kay has been feeding the turkeys around her house, so they are quite tame and easy to get close to. They also come running to you when you open the feed bin. At least that was the plan. Proving once again that turkeys are not stupid, these guys had decided to stay on the other side of the house, and were even headed for the neighbours’ property, which would have meant no turkey for sure. Wendy put some feed out and we started to make our way around the house to try and run them back to the food. After traipsing around the property down and up inclines and through bushes and trees until eventually we had herded them back to the food. We had brought the air rifle as well as the 22. so we could take a shot without scaring any of them off first. I had the air rifle and aimed right at the head of one of the turkeys. It looked like the turkey was trying to stare me down because it just didn’t move at all, it just looked at me. I pulled the trigger and missed. Wendy stepped up with the 22. and fired. She missed too, and the turkeys flew away. We decided to go in and have a cup of coffee with Guy. He showed us the new library and work shop they had recently added to the house and we talked quite a bit about all the British T.V. he has been watching like Foyle’s War and New Tricks. Then we had to leave because we were expecting a new volunteer at the farm, and Wendy still had some things to do.

Wendy dropped me off in Boonville on the way home so I could get a burger. For some reason I just had a real craving for a burger. I took a little walk around some of the shops in Boonville and after a while Peter came down to pick me up as he had to go to the post office anyway. It turned out that the new volunteer was almost in Boonville and Peter wanted to stick around to meet her and show her the way up to the farm so I sat in the car while he went to the post office. Eventually it turned out that the person who had been standing across the road looking confused was the one we were waiting for, but since Peter was just having a conversation with someone else, and I was reading the paper in the car no one really seemed to make the connection for a while. The new volunteer’s name is Jaclyn and is just here for 2 weeks to help on some of the general jobs we have been trying to get done.

Jac and I ended up spending most of this week painting the valley cabin which I had started on a few weeks back. We painted the half of the ceiling that hadn’t been done, then we did a second coat on the ceiling. Then we decided to paint the walls, but were unsure if we had enough paint, so we did everything but the kitchen, then we did a second coat on that. During all this, a friend of Peter’s who wanted to go for a ride on the horses came over for a trek. It was a nice clear warm day and we rode up to the ridge again. This time it wasn’t foggy and I got a couple of pictures. This one is ok.

Booooooring

When we got back I took Harris (one of the horses) back to the pasture and as I was putting the gate back I heard a thud. I looked up and saw Harris on the floor rolling around in the dirt just loving it. I thought it would make such a cool picture that I went for my camera. Wouldn’t you know it, the little beggar got up and ran off. It was still a pretty good picture though.

Ooh the little scamp

This one is also good

If you look closely, you can see his willy

The next day, something very unexpected happened. Jac came out of her cabin in the morning to be greeted by a very friendly and unfamiliar cat. The happy little fellow followed her down to the house to meet a very surprised Wendy. Jac had arrived probably a week or more after Alex had gone missing and so she didn’t know that this eager companion was the little guy we had been talking about and assuming to be dead. We can only assume that someone had been driving past and seen him, assumed he was a stray because he didn’t have a collar, and taken him home. He was very hungry though and ate about three bowls of food. This made him look like a ferret that had swallowed a grapefruit. Wendy gave him a collar to make sure people knew he had an owner and now he is back to playing king of the hill with all the other cats. He seems to want to get into the house a lot now though and runs in every time the door is opened, which kind of upholds the theory that someone took him home and maybe kept him in the house.

The little feline whore

It turned out that there was a little more paint that we could thin a little and use to paint the kitchen, so we did a coat on that. Perfect opportunity to do another time-lapse video. This one worked much better as you can really see all the painting.



Being that we needed to let the paint dry and figuring that we had earned a day off after several days of nothing but painting, Jac and I decided to take a trip to Mendocino. It wasn’t really a sudden decision, we had actually been planning it for a few days and gave Peter and Wendy plenty of warning. We set out for the coast on Thursday Morning.

I feel it would pretty much be a waste of time trying to describe Mendocino to you but suffice to say it is a cool little town. It is actually a ten minute drive south of Fort Bragg (where Jeff and I saw Quantum of Solace). We spent the day walking around all the shops and checking out the cool old buildings in the town. I particularly wanted to check out the Lark in The Morning music shop I had heard so much about. I always like the accordion as an instrument and having heard Lisa play her button accordion at Thanksgiving I decided I should learn. In case you have no concept of the price of instruments it might be worth pointing out that I felt $400 for an instrument I’ve never properly played was perhaps a little silly. Considering, however, that the Accordion theoretically shares a lot of similarities with the harmonica, I didn’t think much of spending a few bucks on a harmonica and a couple of beginners books. Luckily it turns out I chose a good harmonica and exactly the right books for the one I’m learning with. Which was nice. I’ve barely had time to play it yet but so far I’ve figured out how to play Silent Night which I thought would be appropriate considering the time of year.

Other features of the day involved a walk on a beach, of which I got a shitload of pictures. Here are a few.

Another one of these for the collection

We also noticed how cool the sunset was and so I had to take a bunch of pictures of that. Here is one.

There was a cowboy riding towards it but he went over the cliff

Having been given some tokens in one of the galleries we went to have some cheap cocktails in one of the hotels before getting some dinner. After talking for some time in the hotel bar we suddenly heard some singing just outside the bar and when we got up to look we saw this...

This is exactly how it looked to me at the time

Suhweeeet. Bless their little cotton socks. To be fair they were really good carollers and they sang quite a few songs. It was very weird though with the weather having been so good recently it made it really hard to believe it was December. We paid for the drinks and were going to get food but decided that since we had been coerced into drinking by the token spewing old dope peddler in the gallery that it would be safer to get a motel room than drive home. After getting ourselves a room at the Surf Motel we went down the road for some dinner at that old haunt of mine (where I went once before) TW’s Bar and Grill. The food there is nice enough but the one thing you can count on is the quality entertainment. On this particular night it was Karaoke night. There were so many wonderful hits ranging from the likes of Coldplay all the way to Marilyn Manson. Delightful. We ended the night with the idea of drinking more (since we could) and just finding a movie to watch on T.V. The problem was that there weren’t any Movies on, so we channel surfed watching shit program after shit program with the occasional break provided by the likes of Family Guy and Robot Chicken. Thank God. About the time Jac and I were just getting tired enough to fall asleep, whaddayaknow? Judge freaking Dread. Well there goes my hope of sleep for the night, how about you Jac? Oh, she’s asleep already.

The next day it was back to Boonville to prepare for Wendy’s potluck. Wendy and her horse riding friends have set up a group to meet once a month at one another’s houses. This month Wendy had volunteered to host the potluck, so it was a bit of a mad rush back at the house to get everything prepared. I can’t really write much about this because it was just a bunch of people talking about horse stuff, which doesn’t make for an amazingly interesting blog. I had a good evening though. Everyone was friendly and chatty, but I was tired as hell and I kept yawning and drifting off. Luckily I don’t think anyone noticed and I did wake up a little when everyone started talking about checking the horses’ poop for problems. Jac was the only one who saw me chuckling quietly in the corner.

Yesterday Jac and I finished painting the cabin and then I started writing this. This morning I was woken up at the cabin (I say morning but it was more afternoon) by Wendy with both the guns. Apparently there was a huge group of turkeys just up the valley, so we traipsed up there. We couldn’t see any turkeys so Wendy tried calling them. We heard one answer on the other side of the valley, so we walked back. Still no sign of them. After walking around the valley for about half an hour, we gave up. Back at the house I’m finishing off my blog and hopefully I can upload it before anything else happens.