Before Enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.

I’m not going anywhere with that title, it’s just something Landlady said last weekend and I had to look it up because I don’t remember ever having heard it. I do, in fact, chop wood and carry water these days. Actual enlightenment seems to be optional.

The Official TUAK Camera is a Kodak CX6200 which has the virtue of no mechanical zoom lens for my environment’s dust and dirt to kill. It has the disadvantage of me for an owner – I never really have figured out the zoom and doing so on the spot takes so long that…well, as you can see, I rarely bother.

But if I had thought to go to the trouble this morning, you’d now be looking at a nice sharp picture of the biggest hawk I’ve seen around here in quite a while. So, use your imagination.Really, I don’t know why I bothered to post that. The good news, to me, is that with my new eyes I could see it in the first place. 🙂

I was talking to J at shit-shoveling this morning. He’s having a dreadfully good amount of success selling off his house’s furniture for moving expenses. They’ll be gone in a month. He says the house is really starting to echo, which is making the thing all too real.

Which in turn made it all too real for me. One month to go. I’ll miss my buddies.

The beautiful – and occasionally dangerous – Avalon

Friendly little Cruise Control, who’s starting to drop his winter coat. He’s already been sold.

And Comet, ol’ giraffe lip, whom I’ve known since he was born.

Still carrying water, but there’s news.Landlady delivered the well pump to Ian as planned. Ian lost no time sending it back to the manufacturer, which lost no time diagnosing the problem.

Just got a call from [redacted]. The diaphragm was broken, which allowed water to get into the motor and short it out. A couple hundred bucks to fix; not bad considering ([redacted] was recommending a new pump of some other brand and wanted $3k for it and installation).

Anyway, it should be fixed an en route back in a couple days (along with a replacement electrical splice kit). When it arrives I’ll make a trip up so we can drop it back down the well. Going to see if I can find a ratcheting crank to make that process simpler, too.

So that’s good. I had settled in for at least another month of no running water, but it might be less than that.

Because life goes on.