Halfmoon's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
Jason

Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by Jason »

I was talking to a guy who emigrated from a third world country and he mentioned that he had like 18 siblings. I asked him why so many and he responded "my parents were poor, what else was there for enjoyment."

So if I was a homeless, urban dog living an awful, peripatetic life of scrap hunting and basic existential doggie despair and some ASPCA asshole hunts me down in order to take away the one thing I enjoy in life, not only would I resort to a life of hurling myself into the knees of humans, but I would organize all my other ball-less doggie friends into an army of hurling, knee capping projectiles. I'm talking like basic training and shit. I mean to the point where no one would dare walk outside because of the fear of being splayed out on the sidewalk with their hot coffee and croissants all over the fuckin place. I'm talking men, women, toddlers. Anything ambulatory, we're knocking the shit out of their knees. You would need to call in the national guard to fight our hurling asses.

Maybe I'm just more empathetic to the animal's perspective than you. I don't know.

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

Empathetic = projecting. :lol:

Did I mention that Buddy was never near a female in heat even before the demise of his testicles? Maybe he was just frustrated from the start.

Jason

Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by Jason »

You did. And its just this type of unrelenting anthropocentrism that has him poltergeisting. I'm assuming being off the grid you don't have a television but if you did I guarantee your retired ass would already have been sucked through it where you would reanimate in some type of alternative world reminiscent of early to mid 20th century Europe but with Buddy and his friends rockin' the little mustaches.

I mean you couldn't give him just one fucking day at the doggie run? Just one? And this is not projecting. The employment of "dog" and "doggin" and all the various etymological permutations of the word as it has come to describe the more dubious expressions of human sexuality is for a damn good reason. Or at least that's what Urban Dictionary says.

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

Jason wrote:
Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:04 am
I'm assuming being off the grid you don't have a television but if you did I guarantee your retired ass would already have been sucked through it where you would reanimate in some type of alternative world reminiscent of early to mid 20th century Europe but with Buddy and his friends rockin' the little mustaches.
Funny you should mention this. I've often said that I wish humans would have one week of the year where they experience the conditions they impose on animals. I was thinking more of being tied out in the yard or locked in a little pen, but I guess you could add sexual frustration to that.

I used to think there should be some sort of doggie prostitution services where frustrated males could have fun without reproducing. The problem as I understand it: female dogs want nothing to do with sex unless they're in heat and ready to be impregnated. Otherwise, they just slide out from under any hopeful male and walk away.** I'm guessing that's true of most non-human animals, though I really don't know. I wonder why humans are different.

By the way: we now live on-grid with television, though the Buddy/Joey stories took place in the off-grid past. Try to keep up. :D

**Case in point: before we retired and moved to E WA, we had neighbors with a miniature beagle named Fred. They kept him tied in the yard 24/7. We felt bad for him, so one day we liberated him from the chain and took him for a drive. He sat on my lap in our van, and Misty the Weimaraner (6 times his size) stood between the front seats. Fred kept trying to climb from my lap onto on Misty for some doggie lovin'. She would let him get one foot onto her back and then slowly move away with his other foot still on my lap, stretching his legs until he slipped off and fell. This scenario repeated itself for the entire drive. We found it pretty funny, but poor Fred was a bundle of frustration. If not for testicles, he could have enjoyed the scenery.

FBeyer
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by FBeyer »

halfmoon wrote:
Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:53 am
...
I used to think there should be some sort of doggie prostitution services where frustrated males could have fun without reproducing...
I worked in cancer research animal testing at some point.
They had to introduce non-cohort females to the cages of test-cohort in order to avoid the males killing each other out of sheer sexual frustration. So you'd have a cage of 6 males, one sex slave female and a poor human working in the lab who had to scissor snip little newborn-sized mice heads off of newborn baby mice all the time...

Sexual frustration seems to make someone miserable if you don't do something about, and someone else miserable if you DO do something about it.

Jason

Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by Jason »

The idea of plying Lassie with table scraps or extra biscuits in order to turn her out is admittedly, a little discomfiting to me. Probably because my general modesty and great esteem for human women is also found in the animal kingdom.

That's why I think doggie sex robots would be a better than the doggie prostitution thing. This also takes away all the ancillary issues usually associated with prostitution i.e. doggie trafficking, doggie pimping et al. So Dogbots or Rodogs or whatever you want to call them would be my answer. I mean considering that male dogs have no compunction in humping anything they can wrap their legs around, I don't think they would even notice the difference. Especially some poor sack like Buddy who never got to experience the real thing.

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

FBeyer wrote:
Sun Dec 10, 2017 1:39 pm
a poor human working in the lab who had to scissor snip little newborn-sized mice heads off of newborn baby mice all the time
FBeyer, that sounds like a candidate for the most horrific job ever. Maybe you should start a thread and see if anyone can possibly top (bottom) it.
Jason wrote:
Sun Dec 10, 2017 2:06 pm
...my general modesty...
:?

Farm_or
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by Farm_or »

And maybe with the robot prostitutes, they wouldn't suffer the humiliating embarrassment of being stuck together for long periods of time after the deed was done?

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

Ewww...

Trust a real farmer to remind us of that. :evil:

frihet
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by frihet »

For the Love of trees - my eyes became wet a and my heart got softly touched.

Taking off my hat for you and your husband.

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

Thank you so much, frihet. I showed this to DH; it made us both happy. You also reminded me to get back to work on another piece of my story. :)

frihet
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by frihet »

You are very welcome, both of you. Merry Christmas from the North Sea. Out here on a 400ft tower of steel 😊

I just love trees. There is something about their silent presence. Majestically with you, without bothering you with moving or talking.

Have been dreaming about Sequias. Have been to Washington state several times. Not traveling around much though. Seattle, Portland and a retreat center. Are they native to Washington state? Thought they grew in Northern California?

DutchGirl
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by DutchGirl »

Hi Halfmoon.

So this last month or so I missed out on loooooootsss of talking about dog balls, I see. :lol: :roll:

I hope you and your husband are well. I'd love to read another part of your journey, but I'll wait patiently and drop by every now and then.

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

Frihet, I hope you're warm and well on your 400' tower of steel. Giant sequoias are native to California, but it's not unusual to see planted ones around Western Washington. There's something about them...they invite hugging.

Dutchgirl, thanks for dropping by! I'm highly distractable, but I'm trying to get back on track. Yes, you did miss the dog* testicle discussion. Try to contain your disappointment; I'm sure we'll sink to those depths again!

*I'm not really sure it was about dogs in the end..... ;)

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

THE RETIREMENT YEARS

QUEST FOR WATER:

[Tragically, I have no fuzzy old photos to illustrate this.]

As mentioned before, we bought our mountain property with no real expectation of ever having running water. We originally built the house without plumbing and hauled drinking water from a spring far up the forest road for the first couple of years. Water for showering and cooking was collected in the spring runoff season from holes we dug in low spots and piped overland into a 1200-gallon plastic tank. As needed, we would supplement with water from a nearby creek and boil it to avoid giardia. Just about the time we were running low in early winter, the snow would fall; then began a continual process of melting snow on the wood stove and storing it in barrels.

As I write this from the current perspective of seemingly-infinite faucets, it sounds like some terrible hardship. Everything’s a matter of degree, and at the time it didn’t seem so extreme. It was just one of the chores we did like cutting firewood or plowing snow. Still: we dreamed of having a well…and as usual, DH had An Idea. :D

We’d been told when we bought the property that a dowser (water witch) had identified a potential well site on the mountainside high above our housesite. We were pretty skeptical of the dowsing, but that spot had willow growing around it and provided enough elevation for a gravity-fed supply if it panned out. We decided over time to try digging a well there, not because we really expected water. We just figured it was worth the effort for even the possibility of a gravity-fed water. DH also identified a site parallel to the house that had promising geography and vegetation but would require pumping.

A note about local geography. This mountainside featured seams of granite in bare outcroppings interspersed with deep soil. We’d always thought of granite as something impervious and enduring, but a lot of this rock was actually quite crumbly. The crumbled version (called decomposed granite or DG) was often found in water-collecting underground pockets. Running into a pocket of DG was a pretty good indicator of a water vein.

We managed to find water at both sites and developed wells at both. The hardest part was putting in the water lines. Rudimentary, not-to-scale drawing follows:

Image

We hired a backhoe (with operator) to dig the trenches, but we were on a budget and didn’t want to pay for any down time or hauling the machine in and out more than once. That meant we needed to lay and bed the pipe as quickly as the operator could trench. The pipe was buried a minimum of 4 feet deep in all places to avoid freezing, and the backhoe was turning up about a 70/30 split between dirt and granite chunks. As soon as a 20-foot section of trench was opened up, DH and I would jump into the trench with shovels, PVC pipe, cleaning rags, primer and pipe glue. We’d throw out any remaining rocks, lay the next 20 feet of pipe, clean the ends, prime and glue them. Then we’d pull loose dirt from the trench sides over the pipe to bed it and protect from the rocks that would inevitably get thrown back in by the backhoe.** Climb back out of the trench, shovel some more rock-free dirt on top, and it was time to repeat for the next section. The whole length of pipe including the offshoot to well #2 was probably about 1300 feet, so we repeated this process more than 60 times. We gradually lost the race with the backhoe, so the operator was eventually filling in the trench behind us as we raced to keep up. No pressure, of course. ;)

And on the 10th hour, we rested.

**We were determined to properly bed the pipe, because we had no desire to dig it back up. Neighbors had installed their water pipe with the help of a well-lubricated work party who threw dirt and rocks enthusiastically onto their water pipe and broke it. The owners didn’t know it was broken until they tested the system a year after the line was buried.

This frantic effort only got the water line within about 6 feet of our house. After that, it was all shovels. The dirt around and under the house was what locals called moon dust: fine as talcum powder when dry and just as irritating. Digging up to the house and installing a shut-off valve in a vertically buried pipe wasn’t so bad, but from that point on? Just don’t let me be reincarnated as a gopher, because it is Not Fun. The house was only a couple of feet off the ground, and our trench was 4 to 5 feet deep, so a great deal of digging was done on our knees. We wore bandannas over our faces and heads, but the dust invaded our eyes, noses, mouths, ears, shoes, pants…you get the picture. Without expectation of a well, we’d built the house with the kitchen and bathroom on the far side, so we dug 30 feet to that side and built an insulated box to hold the pipes rising into the house.

In the middle of this project, my brother came to visit us. We always seemed to be in the throes of some epic endeavor when he arrived, and he took it in stride. While we dug, he split and stacked firewood. Before he left, he said to me: “Watching you two together makes me understand the old term ‘helpmeet’.” High praise indeed.

The gravity-fed well worked out so nicely that we didn’t use the other one. City–dwellers are accustomed to turning on a faucet and having water pressure, but most with private wells have to pump the water into a pressure tank. Having great water pressure without a pump or a city water system never stopped seeming magic.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

That sounds like a super cool project. Not enough slope on either site where I am perma-culturing to take much advantage of gravity.

Not trying to be a bummer, but I would like to put out a small warning for any young readers, based on similar yet different experiences in my life file, which would be do NOT enter into "help-meet" type relationship without clear contract for shared equity, unless your SO is cutting you a check at union rate bi-weekly!! Otherwise, you may find yourself sitting on the couch of a relationship therapist who is saying something like "You seem obsessed with the concept of ownership."

saving-10-years
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by saving-10-years »

@halfmoon Lovely story. Well getting water to your house was 'magic' (but the kind that you made happen through ideas, ambition, planning, experiment, trust and tons of very very hard work). I know we are similar ages - doesn't it exhaust you to even think that you did that at the time? My feats are much smaller scale but I wonder how the heck we ever did them.

In my case at least I was the one with the bright idea, your willingness to get on board with DH's ideas is fantastic. Helpmeet indeed. More stories please (when you have time).

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

@7W5, your warning is completely valid. I would never recommend our choices and lifestyle to anyone else, male or female. People have said to me over the years that they wish for a relationship like the one DH and I have. I always respond: "No, you don't." Our life together has been textbook co-dependence based on blind trust, mutual adoration, shared goals, unconditional commitment, spirited disagreement and literally forsaking all others. That last one comes at a cost for the survivor when one of us dies first. It was well worth the price for us, but we're very odd.

Also: everything we own is community property.

halfmoon
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by halfmoon »

@saving-10-years, it does exhaust me to remember all that we did. The interesting part is that my learned work ethic still rises to the occasion when necessary. I continue to do what needs to be done (and take satisfaction in that), though DH is increasingly taking back a share of the maintenance load. No significant new projects at this point.

I really like your list of the elements needed to accomplish our goals: ambition, planning, trust and tons of very very hard work. Pretty much covers it. :D

George the original one
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Re: Halfmoon's journal

Post by George the original one »

halfmoon wrote:
Wed Jan 17, 2018 10:14 pm
DH is increasingly taking back a share of the maintenance load.
That sounds like a good prognosis!

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