Journal Notes 03-05-2009

☼ The taxes go to The Man today and that will be one burden lifted (until the day of reckoning cometh).

☼ Our road is now scraped down in places to bare earth, this warming weekend to become a sea of mud and about as slippery as the ice it replaces.

☼ The book’s innards are fully formed if not still fully ready for prime time and as far as I can tell, we’re still on track to get this puppy out of here before the end of the month, then three weeks in print, a week to ship, and the due date arrives, then the delivery from the womb of the truck and book infanthood begins.

☼ I will pick up a soil sample kit at the Extension Service office in town today. Things went fairly well last year with little amendment, but we need to maximize yield since our space is so small.

☼ We’ve had a third fresh deer carcass show up on our land in two weeks. Nothing has been taken in terms of meeting human meat needs or trophies. The parts–including head and limbs–disappear fairly quickly. By the time we (or rather the dog) find them, the guts are mostly gone.

If it were a pack of dogs or coyotes, we’d hear them closer and in greater numbers than we do. It is a silent and powerful hunter, and hungry–perhaps the Sasquatch of Goose Creek?

☼ Whatever complex combination of markers tell the dog that exactly HERE is where to do his business are entirely missing in this deep and now crusted snow. He ranges back and forth across the unbroken featureless expanse of white, circling, indecisive and perplexed, everything in his doggy nature telling him “this is wrong!” But in the end, nature takes its course, canine protocol and etiquette notwithstanding. And we finally come back inside.