Drive

This morning, I drove the ambulance on a call for the first time. I didn’t want to. The PRESSURE! Not just one life to be responsible for, but three! The patient’s, my partner’s, and mine. And everyone else on the road, for that matter. And the rig is huge ~ it’s an off-road, 4WD, mountain ambulance. I sat straight up in the driver’s seat, clenching my abs so that the rest of me – mind and body – would not be so tense.

Five minutes in, I was loving it. Lights flashing, I sped by two highway patrol. Cars, trucks, and semis slowed and parted in deference. I didn’t even have to wait at the wretched construction zone ~ the flaggers waved me through, and the pilot car, midway through a one-lane-only stretch, pulled his string of vehicles over to the shoulder as I zipped by unhindered. This, I thought, is what it must be like to be Mick Jagger.

Driving back from the hospital, I was relegated to “normal person” status: no patient, no lights flashing. I was alone – my partner stayed in town to go linoleum shopping with her husband – and while I was sitting, waiting, waitingggg at the construction zone, I found a camera in a side pocket of the ambulance. And I took pictures. And then I fixed the date. It hasn’t been 2010 for a while.

And when I got back to the ambulance barn, I backed that baby in. She’s just a tiny bit crooked.

Full Disclosure

1) I’ve been wanting to write about the old cow camp for a while. Wait. No. The more honest version of that sentence is: I’ve been feeling like I should write about the old cow camp for a while.

2) I didn’t write a book while I was on the mountain. I thought I would, but I’m quite happy I didn’t ~ my time there was about something much bigger than a book. However…

3) At some point, it dawned on me that perhaps writing on this blog has kept me from writing another book. Not that I write a ton on this blog, but the pressure of writing for immediate public consumption (not in my nature) plus the pressure of the constant deadline (there’s always another post) has made me not want to write anything else ~ the blog is always in the back of my mind, always needing to be attended to.

I’ve been ruminating on/over/about this for a couple of months. I am not quitting this blog, but posts might shift to more images, less words. Maybe I’ll change the layout so the photos are bigger. I might find truncated “captioned photos” incredibly lame (“truncate” is derived from the Latin for “maimed”) and go back to writing full posts, but less often. I don’t know. All I know is that I have to allow the natural drive to write to come back. And that means writing mostly for me for a while.

Service Announcement

Two items of note!

Text versions of my handwritten posts can be found HERE.
If you prefer the plain text, bookmark this page as it will be continuously updated!

My NEW SHOP will open next week!
Monday or Tuesday, I haven’t decided. Get ready, get set.
There will be antlers, necklaces, dog chew toys, gorgeous vintage coats,
new prints, and maybe some squid!

Coming Down

Hillbilly ‘Lectricity

That’s my big old Ford charging my laptop battery for me.

Tangent: I love Apple, I am a diehard Mac user, but I swear they program their computers to break the day after Apple Care runs out. A year or two ago, my laptop, which is about five years old, stopped being able to gain a charge when plugged into the wall. The little port on the side of the laptop finked out. But I refused to get a new laptop, primarily because of this:

Those are Charlie’s baby teeth marks. When Charlie was a tiny pup, I left both him and my open laptop on my bed and caught him teething on the corner.

When the charging issue began, I searched high and low and finally found an external battery charger on ebay for about $30. This means I have to take the battery out to charge it, which is kind of a pain, but it’s way better than buying a new computer and the system is perfect for the mountain.

I got a nifty power inverter (pictured above, found here) which connects the laptop battery charger to my truck battery. My camera battery chargers plug into the power inverter as well. Then I run my truck every now and then to keep my truck battery charged.

So, technically, my laptop has been powered by gasoline, but you do what you gotta do.

For Charlie’s fence, I have a marine battery + solar panel connected to the fence. Charlie’s fence uses a very small amount of electricity so I could get away with using a little 1.5 watt solar panel that Mike had sitting in his basement. The solar panel slowly charges the battery all day as the fence slowly draws energy.

A larger solar panel would allow me to use the power inverter with the marine battery to charge my laptop and camera batteries (instead of using my truck battery), but the bottom line was the bottom line ~ I didn’t want to shell out for a larger solar panel. But if I lived like this permanently, I would.