with Dogs on the Desert of Unrelenting Greenness where

we seem to have acquired a hummingfriend here along with

probably the grassiest spring

in memory [as well as, earlier, the greasiest].

The first few days were given over to febrile if futile housecleaning, relocating the little paintings from the truck to the repo and tracking the waxing moon until Linda, who had stayed behind

for Patsy’s opening, arrived Sunday, soon followed by the first of doubtless many

packages [dumped at the post office by Fedex with the driver as usual not copping to it*]

and then fairly early Tuesday morning I was over at Parker to meet Dave’s ten solar-powered

airport strobes which were brought straight to the gate by Buzzard Freight and subsequently

dropped at the bridge. Buzzard buzzed off to Cedarville and the next afternoon Seth and Sonny, finally mostly finished with their complicated relocations**, came by with their latest auction

acquisition [capable, as soon as they get the password, of conveying cryptic messages

to Burners, civilians and locals alike] to whack away the sockgrasses from around the east

porch. Thursday morning, a week already gone, it was time to head for Gerlach and beyond,

roundabout, for provisions…

*Annoyingly, or doubly annoyingly, as once the computer says something’s “delivered” one first has to check to see if anything’s been dropped 1/4 mile away at the gate and then spend 45 minutes on the phone to customer “service” finding out, since the drivers never admit to arbitrarily leaving packages eighteen miles away at the Post Office, exactly nothing until the P.O. can be contacted the next day to determine whether it’s there at all. Which, yeah, it was.

**But not the continuing chaos of their lives as as soon as they found out Dave’s delivery was delayed a day they rushed to Sacramento to collect their auction winnings only to arrive [mechanical problems with the tow vehicle apparently] too late…so came back over the hill empty-handed and exhausted, slept through Tuesday’s delivery and returned to Sacto that afternoon to load up…only to have the trailer break a spring in Placerville, the result being the only prize that made it back over the hill was the orange truck. Friday they set off again, this time to replace the spring and retrieve the rest only to return, in Sonny’s words, “very defeated”. As I haven’t seen either of them since what that meant remains mysterious…