This is a story about the mystery of the Stargate Coasters and the pears.
The story begins with Stargate episodes on Amazon.com. It probably begins further back, but that is where I will start.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping for the first time in my life. My mother, once a chronic insomniac, continues to be jealous of my ability to drop off anywhere, no matter the noise or distractions. If I need sleep, I sleep, anywhere, in any position, at any time – except for naps. I’ve never been a napper. She’s attest to that. With changes in my body the past two years, my system is slowly stabilizing and sleep is returning, but it has been a battle.
A science fiction fan, a few months ago I started spending my sleepless hours snuggled up in bed watching reruns of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe on Amazon.com, taking advantage of their Amazon Prime membership and Amazon Instant Prime Videos. Unfortunately, Amazon continues to make it extremely difficult for members without an iPhone or Amazon Fire. Android continues to be ignored, even though it is the fastest growing mobile OS worldwide.
A slip of the finger and I’ve purchased an episode or season. This leads to time wasted going to my desktop computer and contacting them for a refund since these are available for free.
The storyline expands with our housemate and his preparation for moving to Canada. In preparation for his move, he ordered computer equipment and materials he will need in his new home, as anyone would when preparing for a big move and life change. Along with Christmas presents, daily visits from UPS, FedEx, and other shipping companies have been a daily routine for months. The boxes pile up and are sorted and divided up when we get time. Continue reading
Here’s an interesting tidbit few people know about Lorelle. She creates great snow sculptures.
This year, after too many years without snow, spending winters wearing shorts and sunglasses, I’m back in snow in Oregon.
A guitar!
Both wanted a chance to play, so to speak, vamping it up for the cameras.
Climbing in the trailer one last time before we moved it, I smoothed my hand over the long scratched up and torn screen door, patched with silver duct tape. His passion for exploring outside was one of the things we loved about him and had in common. It was also his undoing, but then again, it could be ours. You are not safe indoors where more people are injured than anywhere else, but you are also not safe when you walk out the door. Everyday is a risk in some way, and we all take chances. I took a chance deciding to let Toshi stay outside that morning instead of putting him back in the trailer, as I did every time. We both took a risk and we both lost. This is life.
We spent three hours by the side of the highway changing the tire. It would have been fast and easy to just replace the popped one with the spare, but when the front most tire exploded, it holed the second tire. Our second spare was on the roof without a rim, so we plugged three holes in the second tire before we gave up. We filled it, drove for an hour, pulled over and filled it again, drove for another hour or less, pulled over and filled it again, and again and again until we found a place to park the trailer near a truck stop late that night.
A sign along the highway told us this particular truck stop featured a tire repair facility declaring “we can handle anything”. Late that evening, I drove up in the Toyota to see if they had the special RV tires we need. The two guys sitting on the floor in the “hanger door” smoking and drinking told me they don’t do small tires. I went back to tell Brent, who insisted that their sign said they could handle our trailer, and he went over and got the same answer: “We don’t do small tires.” Fine. Okay. Got it now. We just never thought of our trailer tires as “small” since they are bigger than normal car tires, but truthfully not as big as our own truck tires.
Ten miles along the highway, the truck overheated. We still had twenty miles to go. We fought through rush hour traffic to get off the highway, steam pouring out from under the hood. After so long of fighting problems like this, we rarely stress out, but more just sigh and suffer. We find a place to pull off and low and behold, the radiator is empty of water. Surprise! Long story short, it’s a Friday night, and we want to go somewhere important, like the first concert we’ve been to in three years, and we are stuck outside a non-service station somewhere in Greensboro with a hole in the radiator hose. The engine is too hot and the reach up to the water hose is too far to get to and fix, so we kept refilling the radiator and limped home two hours later.
I finally arrived at the Firestone and told them to take the radiator out and check it. We battled and danced ("It’s not our fault, ma’am." "But the hole is where you repaired the water hose!" "We would never do anything like that!" "Everyone makes mistakes!"). When the radiator came out, there was the screwdriver hole, evidence as plain as it could be. I could even tell it was a standard screw driver which cut into the radiator. They said they would either repair it or fix it, no charge. Whew!
Being small and quick, they’re hard to spot and harder to photograph. You have to look for quite a while as they blend in with the grey and brown rocks quite well. By watching them over the years, we’ve learned that they follow the same 5 or 6 paths over and over again, pausing at a high viewpoint to scout out the area for predators, then diving back down into the rocks. If you watch long enough, you can predict their path and have your camera ready to catch great shots of them dragging shrub branches and grasses through the rocks.
While photographing these aggressive pikas along the highway, Brent was on one side of the rock field and I was on the other side along an old abandoned road working my own set of wild and vicious pikas. A couple of willow trees and the rocks kept the two of us out of sight of each other.
A car drove by on the highway only a few yards away. It slowed down as it passed. This is not unusual. It happens all the time. A car slowing or stopped usually means “oh-oh, animal sighted” so everyone stops to see what others are stopping to see. When we stopped a week ago to photograph some beautiful fall colored trees on the hillside above, cars stopped to see what we were seeing. After the millionth car and millionth answer to the tourists, “See the lovely colored trees” and watching them drive off disappointed, my dear, patient husband answered back, “Yeah, it was a bear! You should have seen it! It was THIS BIG! Big and drooling and had HUGE teeth and claws!” “Really?” “Nah, we’re just photographing these trees. See how pretty they are?” “TREES? You’re taking pictures of TREES? Come on, Martha, keep driving. What’s so great about trees?! Crazy people!”
Then the mantra chant started in. I call this the motivational self discussion. “Oh, my god, what am I going to do, it’s a real moose, oh, my god, oh, my god, oh, my god, what am I gonna to do, what am I gonna to do, oh my god, oh, my god, oh, my god….” and so on. When my head finally cleared from the shock, I had the wherewithal to ask Brent if moose charge.
As the moose, drooling, trotted towards me, his little – whatever you call it thingy dangling from his neck swinging back and forth – I realized that my slow scoot-and-butt-drag-with-the-tripod towards the rocks wasn’t going to work. I finally voted for the duck-and-pray-that-he-thinks-I’m-a-bush idea. Curling myself up behind the tripod, I heard the monster break into a run, his hoofs crunching into the gravel, right at me.
“Oh, sh#t, it’s a real freakin’ moose!” he screamed into my ear. As the monster trotted off into the woods, I laid back on the gravel panting, now warmer than I had been in days, and pushed back my hood and pulled off my hat, tugging off my scarf from my face so I could suck in safe, clean air. I shook my hair out of my hat and lay there on the old road just glad to be alive. A voice from the road interrupted my relief.
A change is happening. We feel it all around us. In some ways, it makes us happy, in other ways, it terrifies us. Without a doubt, it changes our perspective.
While I was working, two hummingbirds, bright green, started hanging around the window by the computer. They are so small, fast moving, and just darling to watch. Suddenly one lunged for the window and I drew back, startled. I heard it hit the window with a bang. What was going on?
During the overcast day, from my window out on the park, I watched dozens of butterflies of all shapes and colors flit all over the place. The most delightful chipmunks dash all about, finding food after the long winter. Blue jays fly about kamikaze style, resting momentarily in the trees around the trailer and then darting off again. Some kind of yellow and black bird adds color to the many other birds flying around. We’re not sure what it is and we’re still hunting through the books and CD. Birds like this send Brent on an obsessive mission. He must know what everything is called.
We survived a horrible wind storm and thunderstorm through the night, the pounding rain keeping me awake for much of it. Brent is my main source of information on tornados. Having come too close to too many on this trip so far, my fear hormones rage easily. Dark clouds now mean different things to me than just rain. It could mean death or destruction. Brent kindly reminds it’s just a dark cloud and probably means rain, but I watch it carefully, analyzing its darkness and questioning its intent. He carefully explained that tornados come with a loud train noise, like one is barreling down upon you. In the night, the wind boiled up and over the ridge, seeking the exposed top where we sleep, battering trees as it tore through the forest. I could hear it coming, rattling branches against each other, and rustling the new leaves of spring. Train sounding? Sorta. My heart pounded.
The motorcycle group starts prowling the woods behind USA, their black leather jackets dark against the new green growth. They are gathering up broken branches and hauling them back to burn in the fire pit. I know National Parks have laws against this, but state parks make their own rules and I never know from one moment to the next what the rules are, right or wrong.
take lots of pictures, my heart pounds and my anger increases. I heard a commentary on a radio show recently where someone said that doing some thing or another wouldn’t bother his conscious much, but if the aliens came down and picked up a human and put them in a caged zoo, well, that would bother him….I thought about how we would feel if we were the bear. We’re wandering around, seeking food as is our lot in life, just doing what bears do, and suddenly we are seized and hauled away. Not only from our food source, but from our family, our familiar places, and all that we know. We humans think nothing of it when we do it to animals, but I wonder what our 
perspective would be if it were done to us? So, it’s better I wasn’t there. Besides, the action got better outside the trailer.
A man a stall away is putting up the tent camper with a huge brown, phallic cigar hanging out of his mouth and the smell is overwhelming. The disgusting stench drifts through my trailer’s open door, so I close it and open the windows on the other side, overlooking the television watchers.
One of the TV watchers is out of the van starting a fire in the pit. So is the family of the screaming baby and nature killer young boy next to us. Smoke swirls around the cigar smoker and the chattering couple next to them as well as the chattering couple next to them. The baton twirler’s father and the group of motorcyclists beyond – well, they have big blazing fires going.
The hummingbirds are absent. In fact, in the past few hours, I’ve seen only one blue jay. One big yellow butterfly flitted around, but it got too close to the nature killing child. After blasting it out of existence with a rock, he ran over and stomped on it, grinning from ear to ear with the success of his hunt and destroy. The adults look on and smile at him, weariness in their faces.
So summer has arrived. That means making reservations months in advance, planning out our course and traveling on weekends and sitting still during the week. It means finding out when school vacations are in the different places we travel so we can work around the mass exodus of families heading for nature for longer than a weekend. It means increased security. Increased worries, increased fears. Violence doesn’t just happen to people in nature. People bring violence with them to nature. They bring their booze, boom boxes and messes. Instead of debating how we will approach an elk for a closer photograph, we have to decide how to approach the twit laying on a picnic table 50 feet from his car with the music blasting out the open doors and ask him to turn it off. Gone are the bird songs, the soft rustling of the wind through the trees and grasses, and time spent watching the squirrels and chipmunks chase each other.