1-30-08

This is a test photo where I took this photo before I polished them. the one on the far right has been polished and you can see the reflections sure interfere with how it looks. It sure makes them look almost flat. Don used to work with a company that did jewelry photos and he said they sprayed them with something that took the shine off. I need to do some more work on this before I try to sell on ebay. I am going to need good photos to do that.

And polished..

This is a truck that evidently had its brakes give out coming down the mountain. This is highway 77 from Globe and this side of the pass has some pretty steep stretches on the way down. There are two of these runaway ramps and I have seen several times where people have used them but this is the first time I have seen a truck in one.

I was watching a couple of days ago and saw a truck come down the hill from camp with a huge cloud of smoke coming out of it. It came down into this area too. My camp is just across the big wash to the right of this photo. The highway department takes pretty good care of these ramps and it doesn’t take long for them to smooth out the gravel for the next truck.

I did a major muck out of the Pod. I don’t know how it happened but I sure did find a lot of muck in there to shovel out.

Ahh, my last batch of bread baked on the pizza tile and a batch of cookies as well. Wow, I sure am enjoying this ‘real’ food. Thanks again Tova for teaching me how to do this. Actually I just decided to try adding walnuts and raisins to some of the dough and kneading it in. Works great!! The cookies are Tova’s recipe for her ‘Tova’s Wholesome Oaties’

I was making a run into Globe for some groceries when the ol’ Bloodhound quit me…..

The clutch splines wore out….. dang…….. double dang……….

My mechanic Bob Clement up there in Montana is going to send me some parts so I can get this dirty old dog back on the trail.

We have had some serious rains down here. The story I here is that out of the last three rains, there has been a years worth of moisture. This last rain I collected over 2 ½” of water in my ice box that was outside. It rained pretty hard for a while and when I got up in the morning I could hear the wash running like mad.

I headed on down to the Windspirit in the afternoon and was surprised to see that Don was being hooked up to an IV drip. Don has been having health problems from having Lyme disease several times as well as having Valley Feaver that is quite common down in this desert area.

Don has run though several doctors trying to get ‘fixed up’ and get back healthy again. He hasn’t been doing well as long as I have been coming down here (four years). He is so thrilled to finally have found a doctor that seems to have finally taken interest in getting him back in tune. This is Dr. Miles from down in Tucson and he is a Naturopath. He is a really nice guy and came up here to give Don a drip of vitamins that he has to do every week. This has been going on for several weeks and he is doing much better. Dr. Miles works in a clinic that he says is a Integrated health care facility. They have chiropractors, herbalists, I cant think of the name right now but the ones that stick pins in ya, massage therapists and some others I don’t remember. He has an airplane and also a sail boat down in Mexico. Don is an old sailor and I think he said he went for a plane ride with him last time he was down getting his IV.

We all sat around visiting. Most everybody here is interested in herbs and more healthy living and Mark was really a wealth of information. He seemed so relaxed and seemed to fit right in to the community. Evan here in the background is slicing olives that he has collected from some of the olive trees here. Lorrayne is showing off some of the ingredients that she is going to use for a meal she is cooking. The community gets over stock food from one of the specialty stores down in Tucson. Most of the stuff is organic and beautiful.

I wish this photo had come out better, as it was really beautiful as well as yummy. The kitchen here is totally vegetarian but not vegan.

When the vitamin bag was almost drained, Don got an extra dose of magic stuff. Don takes several hundred dollars of antibiotics as well as other oral pills. We all have our fingers crossed that this will finally get him back in health. He has been having serious headaches as well as almost zero energy. So far his energy level is up and I don’t think he has been having such sever headaches.

This is Maya and she is from Israel and has been traveling around the United States. I was surprised to hear that she had been visiting up in Montana. She spent time in Darby, Bozeman as well as Sydney. She has a really nice calm manner and speaks English very well. She said that everybody in Israel learns English but Hebrew is her native language. Anthony was trying to get her ipod hooked up and playing on the tape player when he said ‘oh, it is all in Japanese’, nope just Hebrew which looks sort of weird too. She was ‘noodling’ here and it was nice to have someone play live music in the kitchen.

After supper she brought out this little flute that she is making. I was amazed at how simple it is. She collected a piece of cane that grows all around the place here. She has drilled holes in it but she said she needs to drill more holes. She puts it in her mouth at an angle and sort of blows across the end to make the flute noise while she moves her fingers on and off the holes. I was so taken with it and I asked her if it was a instrument that is played in Israel. She asked me if she could use my computer (I had it there and poped it open and it automatically hooks up to the new wifi that they guys have set up so everyone can get computer signal where ever they live here). She called up the photo of the raft below. I thought it was where she had learned to make the flute but later she told me that she learned that in the army. 

I think this is where she learned the flute making. She and a friend built this raft and cruised the Sea of Galilee. Don’t ya just love it? I really like this little woman. She said she finished high school and then did her service in the army as all residents are required to do. Now she wants to be a world traveler……

A trip into town I saw these two trucks with their loads of copper ingots. The trucks are almost always on the road from my camp to Globe. That copper is really heavy stuff as you can tell from the relatively small loads that they put on the trucks. I am sure this load is the limit that they are allowed to carry. These come from the smelter down by Winkelman I think.