June Sweeps - Day 494

 

Here we go again.  It seems like yesterday I was here at the cabin, and it was the day before the day before the day before yesterday.  There's another ground squirrel in a trap, but nothing more, and no droppings on the middle deck.  We're coming back here not tomorrow but the day after the day after tomorrow, and since it'll be another work day, I don't imagine I'll get sick of it in any way--maybe sick of the drive, I dunno.

I felt really sleepy on the drive down, once I got to the long middle stretch of the drive, so I turned off my audiobook and tried to find some music.  There were two stations I could find, one Country and one Classic Rock.  As soon as I got to the little town at the foot of the canyon, the reception got better and lots of stations opened up, and I sang along to keep awake.  Big Anklevich always talks about how he's going to die in a traffic accident during his commute, but he never talks about falling asleep at the wheel.  I wonder if that's a problem for him.

I wouldn't make it as a trucker, that's for sure, because once I got here, I did sit down and tried to read a chapter in my library book, but fell asleep almost immediately.  This time I at least had the foresight to set my phone to wake me up before I overnapped and got all groggy (or until the whole afternoon was gone).

The power was on when I got here, though the water had been shut off.  I'm sure my brother would've preferred the opposite (since the water doesn't get used if nobody's here, but the electricity does), but of course, he'd prefer that both were turned off.  

I think that I'll finish my sequel to "Caller I.D." either today or tomorrow (this trip, definitely), and that's good, since I started it in, oh, 2013 or so.  I have a couple of technical details in this story that I ought to do some research on, but now that it's written, it's a bit late--smarter to do your research and incorporate that into the writing, rather than be forced to rewrite if it turns out to be inaccurate or illogical.  I ought to make a few notes for a third story, that I can follow up on in a year or so when I put out my episode for this one, which I think I'll just call "Caller I.D. 2," and stick the darn thing all together when I get three or four installments done.  

After this project, I don't know what I'll work on.  I could pick up the Lara and the Witch story from last week, or I could write the Darth Vader story I've had in mind for more than a year now.  

On Sunday, I thought about it for a good long while, as I sat in the sun and ate my lunch, and it's a story I think I'll really enjoy writing, but is absolutely impossible to write without contradicting the Star Wars Prequels, let alone "The Clone Wars" series I haven't watched.  If there's a vague way I can go about it, not mentioning any planets in the Prequels and only characters from the Trilogy (like Kenobi, the Emperor, Bail Organa, and Skywalker), and have every other character be my own invention, I think it's fudgeable, but it's a stumbling block that is really something that will make the story harder to write.  

Still, to have Vader encounter a shrine or statue or mural depicting the famous Jedi Anakin Skywalker is almost worth the price of writing it.

(This shirt gave me pause.  If I do write a Vader POV story, it's a good question to ask: "Does Vader know he's bad?"  I think there are plenty of villains that think they're doing good, or perhaps are simply insane, but I'm going to say that Vader is one of those unique few that know what they're doing is wrong, that know they're not on the side of the angels, and yet they keep on doing what they do)

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In June: 1005

On Saturday, my thirteen year old nephew absolutely filled my brother's traps with food from what we'd brought for lunch that weekend (I watched him do it), obsessed with catching something in each one.  When I got here, there was a ground squirrel (or potgut, as they call them here) in the largest trap (the one that had the woodchuck in it last Wednesday), and it was surrounded by chips, cookies, and cereal, enough to keep it alive for at least a week.  I can hear it scratching at the trap's door with its human-like little hand, even though it's down on the ground and I'm up on the second floor.

I also got it in my head to write a short story--an utterly stupid one, mind you--about a man who falls in love with a faerie princess, and she says they can be together . . . as long as he never quotes Monty Python in her presence again.  In my head, it's something I write for Big Anklevich as the husband, Renee or Tena as the princess, and me as the friend who just doesn't get why it's a big deal, since they used to quote the sketches and movies even when they were too young to drive.

We'll see if I do that or not.

It's actually cool enough I'm thinking of closing the window, as there's a breeze blowing through the room that's not cold, exactly, but enough to make me want to have a long-sleeve shirt on.  You'll often (too often?) hear husbands or guys with significant others complain about how their wives/girlfriends are always cold, but I'm definitely among them, and my brother, who's in much better shape than me (always has been), complained on the weekend that his hands and feet are always cold, and sometimes start to tingle while he's working on the powerlines, and he has to make sure that it's due to lack of blood circulation rather than some low-level voltage he's feeling.

Right before the sun set, I decided to, as I always do, take a drive over to the lake and walk around there.  Last week, I spent a good long time, and the week before, I arrived just as the sun was disappearing, but managed to sing a song.  This time, I had a different mission in mind.  Ever since I arrived here, I'd been hearing the little rodent rattling at the bars of the trap, trying to get out, and, despite my eye-rolling on Saturday of my niece having let the big woodchuck go, I decided I'd do the same with this squirrel.

But not here, not where it would poop on the deck, or get stuck in a trap again, or more likely, both.  So I picked up the trap, which was heavy and unwieldy, and took it to my car where, due to its size, I couldn't fit on the front seat.  So I had to stretch it across my overly-cluttered backseat, and drove on over to the lake to have my walk.

The potgut was pretty frantic, being so close to me, and I'm sure my smell made it freak out.  Its own smell was surprisingly strong inside the car, even though it was only eight or nine inches long and probably weighed less than a pound.

I got to the area of the lake where the road goes right down into the water (it's a makeshift boatramp and has a little jetty that is usually deep underwater at this time of year, but is almost completely aground this time), and got the trap out.  I hadn't even lifted the door all the way when the little brown squirrel scurried out and onto the ground, heading for the hills of freedom.

I put the trap on the back of the car, surprised by how many gnats where swirling around me, and started to walk around the far side of the lake from the dam (where I always go).  But I experienced something I had not had to suffer through before: the gnats were everywhere, and not just hundreds of them, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions.  They were swarming through the air all along the shoreline, creating a veritable cloud that I was passing through.*

They were buzzing all over my face, around my nose and mouth, and even though I breathed through my teeth, they were so bad, I kept getting them in my eyes, and had to stare at the ground, letting my tears wash them away.

I had intended to walk quite a ways, but after less than a quarter mile, I had to turn around and run back to the car, buffeted by wave after wave of tiny flies, which I'm assuming just hatched this week.  I hope there are bat colonies up here, and that they are out in force tonight, because it was really rough (I made it to the car, coughing and blowing my nose, and had to keep the windows rolled up on the drive back to the cabin).

Push-ups Today: 55
Push-ups In June: 992

I finished editing two Rish Outcasts today, and that is quite the accomplishment.  Still, they were both fairly recent files (one from May and one from the end of April), and to free up space on my recorder, I really need to edit stuff from last year or earlier.  I laid down a couple of Christmas stories that just sit, like bloated mosquitoes overfilled with cow blood, because I don't want to edit them in the spring or summer.  But I'll make it a point to edit at least one chapter tomorrow, so I can delete it from my recorder.

The end of the night came quickly, and hard.  Due to the hour, or due to the allergy pill I had taken, or due to life, I suddenly felt lethargic and sleepy, and I wanted nothing more than to sit on the couch and read my book for a few minutes and fade to black.  But I had very few words written (around 350), and had absolutely zero sit-ups done (I had done some push-ups earlier, but today's my odd day when I can do as few as I want).  Then came the struggle--the eternal struggle of whether I would do the sit-ups on this hard wooden floor, or go all the way upstairs in the dark and do sit-ups on the mattress there, or whether I would let entropy win and just go to sleep.

And it was a struggle.  I cursed myself and called myself names (technically, those are the same thing--I could also say that I berated and criticized and castigated myself while I was at it), but man, I didn't want to do the exercise.  I stood up and went to my comfy chair and wrote a couple more paragraphs, now about 94% done with my story.  Only fifteen minutes or so, and I would be done.  I looked at the clock, and it was after two.  So I had read for hours, or I had nodded off there and missed it.

And after that, instead of hitting the couch, I sat on the floor and promised myself I'd do fifty-five sit-ups, to match the push-ups.  And it was slow going, inelegant stuff.  But once I reached 55, I thought I'd do 66, and then 77, and I managed a hundred, so that was something.  And I like to think that it made me sleep deeper and better, because I woke up once with the sun low in the sky, and the second time, an hour or so later, I got up.

Words Today: 556
Words In June: 6512

*I read somewhere once a statistic of how many insects there are on the Earth per each individual person, and I want to say that it was some ludicrous number, like 250,000.  I'd never believed it--how could I?--until today.  If a scientist had told me that I, the only person by the lake tonight, had been surrounded by a BILLION gnats, I'd have had no trouble accepting it as fact.