Coyote Crossing

It’s been quieter here than I think it ever has been, with the possible exception of the summer of 2008 after I closed this blog and before I opened this blog. Oh, and November 2006 was pretty much dead around here, as I recall. But still, I posted one photo all last month here, and that’s close to a record of taciturnitude.

There’s been a reason for the quiet, and now there’s another one.

The reason is that I’ve been writing anywhere from 2 to 5 posts a day for KCET during the week, and that’s taken a lot of my writing energy.
The now there’s another reason is that I’ve just joined PZ as co-blogger at Pharyngula.

The third reason, now that I come to think of it, is that there’s been all kinds of stuff to look at in my yard, like:

There is also the fact that I have determined to plow through the revisions to the existing Joshua tree book chapters I’ve written and finish the book. I got a huge amount of writing done in the year and a half I was in LA, and got much guidance from my wonderful writer’s group there, and subsequent events have made it clear to me that I got off down the wrong path a bit, so there are a few dozen hours in the next two or three months I’ll need to spend fixing things and getting the book ready to ship.

So I can’t honestly say there’s going to be a whole lot going on here any time soon, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get to read new stuff of mine almost every day if you want to. Check out the above links for KCET and Pharyngula, and don’t forget you can find me on Twitter and Facebook and sort of at Google Plus, though it’s spammy as fuck over there lately.

I’m not saying this place is closing down. It might be. Or I might find a hundred things I suddenly need to share here that don’t fit at KCET or Pharyngula. But for now the paid gigs take precedence. Come on over to either place and say hello.

4 comments on "Update on Coyote Crossing"

In the Jeffrey Pines south of Mono Lake. Zeke was about two years old in this photo.

Need to go back there.

4 comments on "Deadman Creek, Mono County, California, 1994"

Got the last couple of things from the Palm Springs apartment Sunday morning: the bed platform, the step stool, a handful of cleaning supplies. Spackled the few holes we made hanging artwork and bolting bookcases, vacuumed up the dust from making a couple of the holes bigger so I could spackle them properly, Tetrissed everything into the car. Walking out for the last time I looked back and tried to summon up some gratitude for the place, the way I usually do when I move out of a house. It didn’t quite work. So I left.

There’s a high, thin cover of cloud blowing in from the southeast, from the Sea of Cortez and the Gulf. We’re going to get some rain in the next couple of days. Some parts of the desert will likely get a whole lot. I have my fingers crossed for flash floods cutting through a couple of solar projects under construction.

Our new neighbor moved away—was it something we said?—and as she fed the local cottontails and quail, I decided I’d better take up a bit of the slack until they got used to it. I picked up a bird seed bell at the supermarket. It’s not cracked corn and sunflower seeds, which would be better for the quail. But it’s something. The quail never got to it: the bell was discovered within seconds by the local scrub jay, and then fifteen minutes later the jay had been elbowed aside by the Boss rabbit.

It was an interesting glimpse into rabbit interactions. I’ve only ever had one rabbit at a time before, and though I did watch him boss around a dog and a cat, and a few humans, I never saw him with one of his own species. Subordinate bun was hungry and curious, and crept up toward the seed bell. When he’d get too close Boss Rabbit would charge, and each time Sub Bun would avoid the boss by leaping directly into the air. Three, four times in a minute and a half this happened. Then Boss wandered off and fell over in the shade of the peach tree, and Sub Bun carefully went over, tried a nibble of seed bell, then a mouthful, then eight mouthfulls, digging in with his bottom incisors to pry off great chunks.

He worked at this for five minutes or so, then Boss Rabbit came back. He took Sub Bun by surprise, but there wasn’t a fight at first. S.B. made a submissive display without moving away: He stretched his head out low to the ground, and Boss Rabbit came over and nuzzled him for a moment, then they both ate. For five more minutes. The Boss Rabbit changed his mind and chased Sub Bun away again.

At length the boss wandered off to find someone else to dominate, and a covey of about 15 very noisy quail—including one quite small youngster—wandered into the yard, eating everything but the seed I’d bought for them. Sub Bun took out a bit of his frustration by chasing the quail, barreling into groups of six or seven birds and busting them up. I don’t have the patience to watch the Olympics, but why should I when I have world class quail bowling going on right here?

Though tomorrow’s bout may well be rained out.

1 comment on "Rabbit fight"

We just moved the last of our stuff into the house in Joshua Tree.

We live here now.

This is something I first wanted a dozen years ago. It never occurred to me, after it didn’t happen a dozen years ago, that it could ever happen at all.

We had two dozen quail in our yard this evening as we unloaded the 14-foot U-Haul. A bat amiably checked us out as we unloaded the few things that fit into Annette’s Mini Cooper. There be rabbits here, and roadrunners, and this evening as we chatted with our next-door neighbor a Steller’s jay decided to holler at us. Yesterday I was scolded by a ladderback woodpecker for having the temerity to take out the recycling. That was a couple hours after Annette spooked a rosy boa from our driveway.

In the last month we have moved, and lost a Jeep, and I have started a new venture at KCET, and it has been crazy. But we have made it through most of July anyway.

I am sore and I am going to take myself and stand under some hot water for a bit. But y’all have deserved an update for some time. There will be more to come.

5 comments on "It’s official"

3 comments on "Last night in our new backyard"

The cat moves to Joshua Tree thursday night, and therefore so do we. He calls the shots, really.

It’s been around 117° here for the last couple days, and the power will be turned off on Friday. Not because we’re moving: because Southern California Edison decided it was a good idea to schedule important maintenance in a week when air conditioning is likely keeping some of my neighbors alive. And since the cat has a thick fur coat of which we are reluctant to deprive him, we will be placing him in the Little Scary Box and placing the Little Scary Box in the Big Noisy Scary Box and driving the Big Noisy Scary Box to San Bernardino County on Thursday evening, and he will Never Come Back to the Coachella Valley.

I might not either. Aside from cleaning the old apartment.

I have been reluctant to admit it. I have been wanting to think the best of Palm Springs. When we moved here in February ‘11 I was intoxicated by the beauty of the place, the staggering slopes of San Jacinto and the Santa Rosas, the color of the light across the Indio Hills at sunset toward the Little San Bernardinos. It was lovely, and it still is.

And yet nearly from the moment we moved in there have been those little things. They started out as little things. I told myself that.

It wasn’t long before I was running the tally in my head.

PRO: It’s beautiful here.
CON: If I don’t get out hiking before 11:00 am it’s too hot to go hiking, especially given the sheer and overwhelming verticality of the trails nearby.

PRO: Hey, lots of great-looking restaurants here to serve the tourist trade!
CON: Oh, right: tourists have lousy taste.
CON: What is it with these restaurants leaving their “OPEN” signs lit when they’re out of business?

PRO: Florian lives here, and he’s a great guy. Nice to have a friend in town even before I move in!
CON: Good lord, is that band at the Roadhouse actually trying to play “White Wedding”? Have they ever heard the song before?

PRO: Coffee in the neighborhood as good as I’ve ever had in San Francisco or Berkeley.
CON: It’s five blocks away and it’s 112° out already, at 9:30 am.

PRO: Thriving LGBT community in the desert!
CON: Thriving LGBT community in the desert that wants nothing to do with local residents!

PRO: The temperature’s finally down to 82°; let’s turn off the AC and open the window.
CON: Wait, is it only 11:30? Open Mike night at the Roadhouse goes on for another two and a half hours? Can we shut the windows again?

PRO:
CON: Open Mike Night was supposed to end an hour ago.

PRO:
CON: Sure, let me just meet that 10 am deadline after falling asleep at 4:30, once the fucking Harleys left.

PRO: Spending most days in the company of the rabbit
CON: Rabbit gets sick and dies

PRO: Veterinary staff treating rabbit and animal shelter people accepting donations of dead rabbit’s personal effects are wonderfully supportive and kind
CON: This constitutes the first sense of community we’ve felt in 13 months of living in Palm Springs

PRO: Palm Springs PD responds quickly when Jeep is stolen
CON: Palm Springs PD responds even more quickly when Jeep is stolen for the second time

And so on.

I remember setting up my home office here in Palm Springs and thinking “this is where I finish the book.” I have written not word one of the book since then. I have written most of another book, but nothing on the one I thought I would.

It’s been interesting. Palm Springs was never supposed to have been anything but an attempt to make things work for both my LGBT-urban sweetheart and my desert-rat self, and it didn’t work for either of us. Some of that is certainly our fault: we each have a degree of social anxiety. But some of it is just that it’s not a very welcoming place, Florian and Espresso Cielo notwithstanding. Annette has been singularly unhappy here, and not just because of the heat.

In May I had a brief speaking gig in a theater in Joshua Tree, and Annette came along. We were there for three or four hours, talking to local enviro-artist types and getting a look at the artwork of the theater owner, who was voluble and kind and quirky in the way we appreciate. Before we got back to the Palm Springs apartment that night Annette had decided we were moving.

This was fine by me, to put it mildly. Joshua Tree was a place I’d imagined living since I was here with Zeke about a dozen years ago. My ex- and I talked about making the move, and then our landlord sold the house out from under us and deprived us of the leisure we needed to move across the state, and we bought a house up the road a piece, and the rest is history. I love the place, but I would not have asked Annette to move there. It’s small. It’s rural.

But it has artists, and it has LGBT folk, and it has people so glad for kindred spirits that we’ve gotten emails from people we don’t know welcoming us to town and inviting us over. We were told we needed a certain credit rating to rent the house that seemed right and we didn’t have that credit rating. That didn’t matter if we could pony up first and last and the deposit for the cat and we couldn’t until August. That was OK because the agent was willing to finance the first and last and cat deposit so that we could get the keys July 1, which gave us a no-interest loan to make the move over the course of a month. We got the keys and went to our new place and looked at the yard and each of us thought “this back yard would work just fine for the wedding.”

Then the Jeep got stolen. I got it back and it got stolen again. It was totaled the second time and I was on the hook for $200 in towing charges. This afternoon I found that someone had charged $338.00 of my bank account funds toward their Southern California Edison account; it may be a mere coincidence and accident of transposed numbers entered by an SCE employee, or it may have something to do with the checkbook that was in the Jeep when it was stolen the second time.

And I’m like “Okay, enough with the stick: the carrot was working just fine.”

Last night, Monday night, I sat in our Joshua Tree backyard waiting for a local friend to come by with a copy of the Zeke book he wanted signed for his dad. IT was cool and comfortable: only about 97° at sunset. I had my phone, and I had a set of binoculars, and with the two of them combined in uncomfortably awkward fashion I managed to grab this photo of my new neighbor:

He has a small freckle inside his left ear, and so I am calling him Spot, at least until he tells me what his real name is. He is one of half a dozen rabbity habitues of our yard, that I know of. And there are quail, and bats, and mourning doves and hummingbirds, coyotes and cactus wrens and no motorcycles at 2 am, from what I can tell.

I remind myself that if it weren’t for a year and a half in Palm Springs, neither Annette nor I would appreciate our new place quite so much.

4 comments on "My penultimate evening in Palm Springs"

Taken earlier today:

Goodbye, old friend.

And yet I can’t be thoroughly sad, given that my still-alive, non-mechanical associates include the likes of Mr. Hank Fox, here. He’s asking people to pitch in to help me replace the Jeep, but even if you’re not inclined to do so you should go read what he has to say anyway just so you can get a sense of how touched I am. Though I will confess to feeling a bit like Tom Sawyer in the rafters listening to his own eulogy.

5 comments on "Ouch"