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Here’s your closeup of the preceding scene. Beautiful birds! My question is, do they lay eggs like chickens? I mean, of course they lay eggs, but every day? The reason I ask is, these guys have been around since before Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they look plenty big enough to eat. Pets, perhaps? I’ve always liked colorful domestic birds.

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Went for a four-mile hike in the neighborhood yesterday, since the pickup is still buried in the snowy driveway and I can’t get to the wilderness. It turns out that the two-mile turnaround point is completely out of town, however—all the way past Talpa on Rt. 518!—so I guess I made it, anyway. Just a few hundred yards from where we live, I came across our favorite chicken coop. There are a couple or three turkeys in there, too (closeup coming next). These folks’ woodpiles put mine to shame, you’ll notice. And off to the right, where you can’t see, is an acequia that runs most of the year. That’s why the willow (orange branches) is so happy.

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Just realized this was actually Christmas Day! Oh well. “Nine-days-ago wood pile,” then. I never tire of taking pictures of the woodpile, though. It’s like photographing a loaded pantry or a beating heart. That may be a stretch for you, but you’re not living in a mud hut on this hillside at 7,060 ft. Sometimes I wish we weren’t either, but at least we’re keeping warm.

Consider also that last night it got down to maybe six below (-6 °F, -21 °C), but I still had to open the kitchen window a few inches because we were getting cooked beside the wood stove: it was only (?) 73 °F in the room where we were sitting, but the radiated energy from the poor old Ashley (look it up in your Whole Earth Catalog) was like death rays from another planet. No, opening the window doesn’t fix that, but the extra oxygen is nice. It’s 19 °F at half-past noon in full sunshine as I write this, by the way. A beautiful day, looks just like the photo.

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That’s all she wrote. FarrFeed—my old blog—is all pooed out. Some say it was the weather. Others say it was because my mommy died. There’s a little truth in each of those, I guess. The site is like a closet full of clothes that don’t fit now. My God, what history! What laughs! what slopping barefoot in the blood and entrails!

But damn, it got me here. And even while I didn’t want to write there—not put any more into it—it was hard to walk away. To leave the richness of the past and the familiar clutter. But there wasn’t any elbow room: it was like writing inside of a book! Hell, it is a book. Four of them, in fact, and no doubt a couple more after I’ve sifted through the posts. That’s still the old stuff, though.

Regardless of psychic needs or writing strategy, however, I had no choice. The updated software—Thesis 2 framework for WordPress—was completely new. Hardly an update, more like a revolution, with all my expectations hauled off to the guillotines. There was no way to run the old site on the new theme without tearing it up and putting it back together again, a huge job. But I wanted a new main site, anyway, under my personal domain. Something I could fold everything into. I had this vision of a page with one big photo. Why not see what I could do?

So I wandered and pondered for six long weeks. Plenty of exercise, lots of hot baths, but no breakthrough. When I couldn’t stand the tension any longer, I sat down with the software for the very first time. The “just do it” moment. Three hours later, I’d cracked the secret of how to do what I’d seen in my head. At that instant, I knew there was no turning back, and that the only way forward was to drop my old sites.

That’s the story of how I got here. Finally, some room to breathe.

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