Crisp, fall weather today.  The high point of my day today was the long run I took along Top of the World Drive.  I ran in the shadow of the mountain for the first 6 miles or so, then came out into the sunshine, still feeling strong. 

I really had to pee, though.  Sara told me that, the other day when she was running with the cross country team, one of the girls had to pee and just went and knocked on a door. 

Wow!  Did the person let her in?

No, they just closed the door in her face. 

Some people are just bolder than others.

The low point of my day was in the ladies' locker room at the rec center, where I changed after running.  I have never really noticed this before, but my left boob is hideous when it's cold!  The circulation isn't great, because the mastectomy side is a thin layer of living tissue stretched over a water balloon.  It looks purple and splotchy, like hands do when they are cold and chapped.  You can see the exact line of the implant. 

Chats on the Farmhouse Porch

Time for a "Chat on the Farmhouse Porch".  Go check out Patrice at Everyday Ruralty!

How many animals do you have?

Not as many as Patrice!  We have Scarlett, out spoiled princess of a Rose-Breasted Cockatoo; and Tobi, our adorable rabbit.  As my daughter Sara says, "Look at that face!  Awwwww......  Look at that face!"

Have you begun Christmas plans:  travel; decorations; crafts; menu...?

WHAT!?!  No way!  Wait!  What month is it?

Do you celebrate harvest season or Halloween?  

Well, my kids still like Halloween a little, but they are starting to grow out of it.  Chuck and I like to dress up and find a party, preferably one with dancing and flirting.  This year, I think I will go as a chimney sweep!  I also want to have a Dia de los Muertos party.  I was thinking sugar skulls... La Loteria...  suggestions?

How do you heat your house?

Well, we do not live on a natural gas line, unfortunately.  We have to buy propane, which is very expensive, to heat the house using under-floor and in-wall water pipes.  We try to use this as little as possible and rely mainly on our wood stove and our 1927 cook stove for heat.

Do you like dishes with white centers or centers with patterns?  

I don't even notice whether the dishes match or not.  Bad, huh?

Slumber Party

It is getting colder at our house.  Time to get the stoves ready for cooking and heating.

 This has me thinking about Halloween and whether I could make a cute Chimney Sweep costume.  Black top hat...leotard...muffler...soot smudges (we have real soot!).  On the other hand, these are not cuddly brushes.  They are sharp, stiff wire. Not good in the dance floor.

I am sitting at one of those wireless Internet stations in the airport, waiting for my flight for Phoenix to board.  Ah, in fact it has started boarding; but I like to be one of the last people to get on.  I'll wait a little.  I have had some stress this morning already.  I was so sure hat I had booked this flight under my old name; I held off on changing my name on my drivers licence and my credit cards for this reason.  Imagine my surprise when I went to check myself in and saw that I had booked in my new name.  SHIT.  Turns out that this problem can be solved, for $50 and a long wait at the desk.   

The line to board is moving faster.  I am going to see my aunt, who has not been well and has been asking for me. I have postponed this trip long enough  Finally, I stopped trying to block out a three-day visit and am just going. My aunt protested, "That's not much of a visit!"  Don't think of it as a visit, Aunt Marian.  Think of it as a slumber party. 

Gotta fly. No time to edit.

Chats on the Farmhouse Porch

It is late in the evening, and I am almost ready to go home from the night school where I teach.  It is sweltering in here - we have turned on the school's boiler, but the weather has warmed up again.  I'm thinking that I would like to go home and have a soak in the hot tub with an adult beverage.  Did everybody else have a great day?  Let's hang out with Patrice on the Farmhouse Porch for a little while.

1.  Are you doing any crafts or DIY projects right now?  No!  I wish!  I am feeling so un-creative at the moment.  Mostly I'm just too busy with Mom stuff and teacher stuff to do the more home-like projects I would enjoy.

2.  If I could snap my fingers, I'd make Curried Chicken Pot Pie for dinner.  I have been craving it.  It's a little bit fiddly, but so yummy.  Maybe this weekend...

3.  What author would you like to have lunch with?  Diana Gabaldon, who writes the "Outlander" series.  I would try to pry some details about the next installment out of her.  Perhaps I would have to ply her with mojitos or something.

4.  I wanted to tell all you folks at "Chats" that I really do have a front porch (with a swing)!  But because of the isolated location of the house, I don't get to sit and chat in real life with very many people.

5.  My rental property has been on my mind a lot lately.  I have to do an upgrade of the electrical system that is going to cost over $3,000; and my brand new tenants are moving out already!  They signed a year's lease.  But the wife is a brittle asthmatic and is allergic to something in the house.  She has been at the Instacare already and coughs incessantly in the apartment.  I decided to  let them go.  But it is going to cost me...

Nine Mile Canyon

 It has been a frigid week in Utah.  We had snow at our house, so we welcomed the opportunity to toss our stuff in the car and drive south, to the Central Plateau and Nine Mile Canyon.  We were there as volunteers For the Central Plateau Archaeological Association:  Nine Mile Canyon is absolutely packed with prehistoric ruins and art; it also has a lot of mineral resources.  Over the past ten years or so, as the extraction industry has ramped up their activity in the area, the archaeologists have been working hard to find and document everything in the canyon, so they can work to preserve it.  We drove down Friday afternoon and met up with Jerry, the lead archaeologist for the CPAA, his wife Donna, and about 15 other volunteers.  A lot of them were archaeology students; some were members of the faculty at Southern Utah University; some were local ranchers and property owners; some were (like us) just friends who like to go camping.

Chuck, setting up our tent

We took our warmest tent, sleeping bags, clothing, etc... It was really cold.  We would wake up to temperatures in the 20s, and I don't think the high temperature hit 50 at all while we were out there.  I wore every layer I had and slept in my hat.  The clear, cold skies were good for star-gazing.  The firmament in the Utah deserts is still clear and sparkling from horizon to horizon.

Staying warm by the fire

By the fire with Jerry and Donna

 One of the volunteers put up huge supply of firewood.  Normally, I don't approve of big campfires; but this one (on which we could have roasted a whole pig) was welcome.

 On the first day, we drove to the part of the Canyon Jerry wanted to work on and split into teams.  He had been there earlier and found some sites down low near the creek bottom.  Those needed to be recorded; and he wanted our team to climb high up the canyon walls, searching for more sites. No trails.  We just scrambled up the sides of the canyon, like what you can see behind Chuck in this picture, fanned out, and started picking our way up and along each cliff band, searching for  arrow heads, pottery shards, rocks that looked as if they had been deliberately stacked, rocks buried perpendicular in the ground, or rock art.

 We climbed higher and higher...

...and explored our assigned side of the canyon carefully, but found nothing.  Finally, Jerry radioed and asked us to come back down to work on recording some sites that had been found earlier.

Nothing that needed to be recorded was spectacular.  Let me show you an example of spectacular rock art, for example.

The Great Hunt

We did not find this.

The team found this.  NOT spectacular, but it still needed to be recorded.

 What you can't see is that, on the little slab to the right of the petroglyph is the scratched graffiti of a guy named Cecil from Vernal, who found this spot in 1961.  There is graffiti in the canyon from the 1800s up through the 60s or so.  People mostly know better now.  Mostly.  The graffiti gets recorded, too.

 We also recorded this, which is a piece of wall...

 ...as is this slightly better specimen.

 I knew nothing about recording sites, but they showed me what to do.  You have to sketch what you see, map its location, measure everything, fill out forms and create a  description narrative.

It was fun, and a beautiful day, despite the cold.

As we looked across to the other side of the canyon though, we were very excited to see a really big structure in the cliff face.  It was visible from the road, if you know what to look for; so we were pretty sure that someone must have visited it before.  But it had never been recorded, so Jerry was excited.  You cannot see the structure in this picture.  It was too hard to see for me to get a good picture.  And I was sure that I would get a chance to take great close up photos the next day when we climbed up to it.  We were a little unsure of HOW, though.

This is NOT the structure I am describing.  This is just an example, so you get an idea of what we saw high up in the cliff face.  It was a structure like these.  Only five of us went over to try to access the structure the next day:  Jerry, Donna, Chuck, me and another guy.  The remaining volunteers went to climb a butte that had the remains of an entire village on its top.  Our group started bush-whacking our way across the creek bottom.  We bridged the creek by tossing logs across until we had something stable enough to walk on, then made our way to the cliff face.  The others went up; but I didn't, and I was so sad!  First, I needed to stand below and out a little way from the cliff so I could call out directions to Chuck, who is a really good climber, as to where it looked like he could find hand and foot holds.  Then Jerry, Donna and the other guy had a go, and managed with great difficulty.  Jerry's wife needed to be boosted from below and pulled from above to get up trickiest part of the 20 foot cliff-band, after which here was a bunch more scrambling that sent rocks plummeting noisily down.  They all made it eventually, but I was still down below and knew I was going to need a boost like Donna did, if I was going to get up there.  I was bummed to be left behind and had a little sniffle while I waited below for them to do all the recording.  However, I stopped regretting it when I saw them trying to descend.  Even Chuck had a hard time.  The other three really struggled and Jerry's wife panicked at the tricky part.  .Why is going down always so much harder than going up?

That was all we had time for this weekend.  But maybe we will get to go along again next year. There is still a lot out there, waiting to be found.

Thursday Thirteen [Thirteen Tiny Things]

1.  Queen Jody, the school cook, loves to steal my coffee mug and surreptitiously wash it.  She looks inside it and thinks, "Gross!"  I look inside it and think "Flavor patina."
2.  I got to use the word "internecine" in a sentence this week.
3.  At the local grocery store the avocados are coded wrong. They currently require me to show ID in order to purchase them.
5.  Chuck and I took our tandem on a ride with another couple on their tandem and made quite a stir with our tandem tandems.
6.  Random edibles:  banana candy from Vietnam.  Think of a brown Gummy Bear mating with a Bit-o-Honey bar.
7.  Finally found out the giver of my mysterious wedding gift.  A wind chime and a giant fortune cookie appeared on my desk when I returned from my wedding trip.  There was no card and no one that I asked know anything about it.  Turned out to be one of the teachers on my staff, who realized that she had not included a card, became embarrassed, didn't tell me it was from her...  etc...  After a few days had passed, she got even more embarrassed.  She finally, after about a month, she told a colleague, who in turn told me.  I sent her a thank you card, apologizing for the lateness!  HAHAHAHAHA!
8.  I went to the store late last night, with a horrible hankering for some "Abuelita" brand Mexican chocolate.  It makes the BEST cocoa!  They didn't have it!  Had to settle for a box of Junior Mints.
9.  Gift pack from United Way, to thank me for being a teacher.  Two pens, two pencils, sticky notes, and three Jolly Ranchers.
10.  I got a sunburn during the Marathon last week, and am now peeling so horribly that people are looking at me, then looking away...
11.  A former student came to the school last night and asked me if I remembered him.  He shook my hand and then held it for a while while I was talking to his daughter-in-law.  It was very heart-warming.
12.  We have a little boy who will be staying in our babysitting room while his mother takes English classes.  He is autistic and  keens loudly for the entire time his mother is studying.  I do not know how I am going to handle this.
13.  Until Saturday, I am letting myself eat anything I want, 'cuz I just ran a Marathon, so there!  I went and got a big ol' burger and fries from Wendy's today.  I haven't eaten fast food in months!  it was soo gooood!

Marathon

I did it!  Thank God, because I was boring myself silly with all those long runs at the end; and I was sick of my Six Word Saturday postings being about running, running, running.

So, the nickel version:
I finished.
In finished in under 5 hours (4:58!)
I ran the whole way.
I was not last.
I sprinted the last 100 yards, which made me almost barf.
But.
I did not barf.

I have been pampering my knee for several weeks, and it paid off.  It didn't hurt much.  Not as much as some other things.  Or, I guess I could say that everything hurt as much as my knee by the time I was done.

My muscles are starting to feel better.  It's my sunburned face that is the problem.

Will I ever do this again?  I hope not.  However, I have a funny feeling that, once recovered, I could forget the pain, rather like childbirth, and foolishly sign up for another one.

 Don't let me.