Snow Day

Yesterday morning the dogs and I woke up to a winter wonderland. We couldn't wait to go out and write our names in the snow!

Since it was Squeaks first experience with the weird white stuff, she had a blast running, jumping and sliding, while Taz half heartedly gave chase. I even ran ( slowly, to be sure) with them for a little bit, huffing and puffing clouds of steamy breath. It was still dark but I took some flash pictures when I could get Squeak to hold still long enough to focus the camera.

The house was chilly, so I got a good fire going in the fireplace, but before we could even get warmed up, Squeak wanted out again. Taz laid down in front of the fireplace, but Squeak sat by the back door doing her “I want out!” squeak. She sounded so pathetic we went back out and played some more.

Taz and I pooped out, but Squeak couldn't get enough of it. When her tiny little paws would get too cold she'd come in for a warm up and then cry to go out again.

When it got light I took some more pictures, and some video of the dogs playing. Squeak drove us crazy, wanting out every 15 minutes all day long.

After leaving Colorado, I didn't think that I'd ever like snow again, but now when it only happens once in a while, it's kind of fun.

J.C. vs. The Big C

With typical macho Cleland stubbornness my brother J.C. put off going to see a doctor until his pain got unbearable. At first the doctor thought that he just had a kidney infection and an enlarged prostate, but when treatment for that didn't help, J.C. went in for more tests. They catheterized him and when he began bleeding into the catheter they sent him to our local hospital.

The doctor at the hospital couldn't stop the bleeding so they decided to send him to the Corvallis hospital, a much larger facility. Carol arranged for him to be transported by our local Waldport ambulance (which she drove for many years.) They hastily put together a crew to transport him but unfortunately none of them were very experienced and he didn't have a very good ride. The driver got lost in Corvallis and the EMT attending to him got car sick.

After countless ultra sounds, x rays, and blood tests they found cancer in his prostate that had spread to his ribs and shoulder. They put drainage tubes in both kidneys and started him on chemotherapy. In the meantime his daughter Brandy drove up from Elko Nevada and stayed overnight at the hospital with him. A few days later, much to everyone's surprise, they sent him home.

The next morning Brandy and I went to Newport and after leaving the prescriptions at Walmart to be filled, she drove me to the hospital parking lot to retrieve J.C.'s Honda. We were worried that it might not start after sitting so long, but it started right up and I drove it back to J.C.'s house with no problems. It turned out that when Brandy went back to get the medicine she left her lights on and had to get a jump start in the Walmart parking lot.

That afternoon J.C. And I had our first visit since he was transported to Corvallis and he seemed to be in pretty good spirits, despite the kidney tubes and the medicine he was on. When he began to tire I asked him for his fancy cell phone so I could call Carol to come and pick me up.

My history with phones of any kind is that if any thing can go wrong it will, and it's especially true of cell phones. I once tried to call Carol on J.C.'s fancy cell phone and somehow ended up having a pleasant conversation with Cheri, his ex wife in Elko, Nevada. This time proved to be no different .

I listened for a dial tone, didn't hear anything and handed it back to J.C. “It's not working!” I said.

He looked at it and said, “Well, you just took a nice picture of your ear!”

I let him dial it for me.

The next day, Sunday, I put on my rain coat and walked up to J.C.'s. I found him in the living room watching football on his big screen (3 inches bigger than mine) HD TV. He was having problems with one of his kidney tubes not draining right, and he had a lot of swelling in his legs and feet from water retention, but he was feeling pretty good because the Broncos were beating the crap out of Kansas City. We watched football for a couple of hours until Brandy returned and I walked back home.

Shelby

Forget the Barby Dolls! Forget the sugar and spice and everything nice!

Give our 7 year old granddaughter Shelby a tree to climb, a baseball bat to swing, or a “Transformer”to play with!

She dressed up in her Halloween costume, (“Optimus Prime” a transformer that turns into a semi truck) and made the rounds last night. If you didn't give her candy, she wreaked havoc and destruction!

I Always Sleep With One Eye Open Cuz I'm A Guard Doggy!

Two nights ago at 2:30 am, Taz woke me up, growling and barking. (He was growling and barking, not me.) I realized that it was a different bark than his usual “Wake up, I need to go outside and pee!”bark, or his “Wake up it's time to get up!” bark, so I reluctantly got out of my warm bed and followed him into the living room. I noticed that the fire in the fireplace was burning, the Cedar kindling crackling and ...Wait a minute! Who lit the fire?

Lately, in the afternoon I've been bringing in logs and kindling and laying a fire for the next morning, to take the morning chill off the house. There must have been some coals buried in the ashes and the fire lit itself.

When it sunk in that Taz had woke me because he knew something was wrong, I sat down beside him and petted him until he rolled over and let me scratch his favorite belly spot. “You're a good doggy!” I said, “You're a real good dog!”

I told Carol about it later that morning and we agreed that Taz was turning into an ace watchdog.

Last night about midnight he woke me again, barking and growling in the dining room. I jumped out of bed and hurried in to see what our ace watchdog had spotted. There he was looking at his reflection in a glass pane of the french door, growling ferociously, his hair standing on end. I sighed and closed the curtain. Taz looked up at me with a “Am I still a good doggy?” look on his face. I petted him, told him that he was a good dog and we both went back to bed.

Hard Rock Mining

Along with millions of other people, we watched the rescue of the miners in Chile last week. As some of the details came out I couldn't help but remember my years working in a similar mine.

Instead of Gold and Copper, the Henderson mine was a Molybdenum mine. Located on the east side of Berthoud Pass in the mountains of Colorado the entrance was at 11,000 feet, and the hoist operator dropped us in a wire enclosed “cage” 2500 feet down a shaft to the working level. The half mile descent took a hair raising 3 minutes and when we stepped out to go to work, the temperature was over 90 degrees. In the winter on graveyard and swing shifts the temperature on the surface was sometimes 40 below and when we would emerge from the cage after the shift, wet and steaming, our clothing would freeze between the shaft and the dry room.

While I worked there the mine was still under development; we were digging drifts and shafts to the ore body in preparation for production. The similarity of depth and temperature with the Chilean mine is striking but there was one big difference; the mine in Chile was dry, the Henderson mine was wet...very wet. If we had been trapped underground for very long. the main danger would have been from drowning because the water, which was like a constant warm rain, had to be pumped from every heading to the main shaft where a series of huge pump stations at 6 different levels pumped it up to the surface. There were backups to these pumps and the mine had its own coal fired power plant in case of a power failure, but a serious cave-in would have shut things down and the mine would have quickly filled up with water.

I rode in a carpool with 5 other miners so I only had to drive once a week or so but it still took two hours out of every day just going to and from work.

Looking back, I suppose it was about as safe as a large mining company like AMAX could make it, but it still was dangerous work. Our crew had more than its share of accidents. One miner had a severe compound fracture from a rock fall, (his leg bone was sticking out of the side of his boot,) another had a punctured lung, (a one inch drill rod through his chest,) and I even got carried out in a stretcher one night with a slashed arm when I slipped and fell off of a drill boom onto a sharp edged rock.

After two years of helping to carry injured friends up out of the mine and riding with them in the mine ambulance sixty miles to a hospital in Denver, I decided to find another line of work.

I guess I'm a slow learner.

Another Rant

Proselytizing: The act of attempting to convert people to another opinion and, particularly, another religion.

In my opinion, sending email espousing one's religious or political views is just as objectionable as having a Jehovah’s Witness knock on the door and try to tell me what to believe in, or someone calling me on the phone telling me who to vote for.

Lately TV has been inundated with mud-slinging political ads, most of which are exaggerated, taken out of context or just plain lies, and most people will tell you that they don't like them, but then they'll go ahead and forward the most outrageous email as long as it supports their views.

I'm tired of getting emails demonizing President Obama, or any other political figure.

I'm tired of getting emails telling me that God has blessed me, but if I don't pass it on to ten others, fire and brimstone will rain down on me.

Carol and I have our own, sometimes differing, opinions and beliefs on politics and religion and we respect each others right to those opinions and beliefs. We try to stay informed by various news sources and we are both registered Independents, voting for the person, not the party..

Religious or political emails are deleted, unread.

New Memorial

We decided quite some time ago to update and replace Rick's memorial plaque in the Drift Creek Wilderness area.

After Rick died, a group of his friends and I, along with his brothers, and his son Chris, scattered his ashes at his favorite fishing hole on Drift Creek, and fastened a brass plaque to the huge old Cedar tree overhanging the stream there.

Over the years the tree grew enough to pull the fastening screws out and I had to replace them. The plaque was getting beat up from Elk rubbing the velvet from their antlers on the tree and the weather was taking its toll on the brass. The plaque almost always had a variety of fishing lures hanging from it,tributes from friends and fellow fishermen

Then when Chris died of Leukemia, we thought it would be fitting to include his name on a new memorial along with his dad's. We composed the wording and emailed it to Rick's daughter Roshelle, to see what she thought of it. She answered that she liked it and would like to go with us to put it up.

In August Carol and I went to Toledo, picked up the new plaque, and contacted our grandson David to find out if he would like to go along with Roshelle and me into Drift Creek.

FATHER AND SON

RICHARD EUGENE CLELAND

1965 to 1997

CHRISTOPHER MICHAEL CLELAND

1984 to 2006

THEY LOVED TO FISH HERE

AND WILL BE HERE FOREVER

With Love from Family and Friends

We agreed to go in on the morning of the 25^th of September to replace the plaque.

Roshelle spent the night, David arrived around 7am and after arranging our packs with tools, sandwiches and water, we hit the road in David's pickup.

We arrived at the Harris Ranch trail head on Butler Peak at 8am and started down the trail. On the way, David and Roshelle talked about his Army career and her starting college at OSU. He talked about going to Afghanistan this fall and she told us about her dorm and room mate. It's hard for me to believe that they are both so grown up.

We stopped at the so-called halfway point for a rest and while we were talking, we were surprised to hear a motor running somewhere. “My drill!” I said, laughing. Sure enough, it had jostled around and turned itself on in David's pack. He pulled it out and removed the battery.

Nearing the bottom end of the trail my legs were getting weak and rubbery, and I was starting to get worried about how I was going to be able to make the 2 ½ mile and 1500 foot climb back to the truck.

When we got to the old Harris Ranch site we found that the meadow was so overgrown with blackberry bushes and ferns we couldn't find the trail. After several failed attempts we decided to try following the stream up to Rick's Cedar tree. It involved climbing along the steep bank, crawling through the underbrush and for me, falling in a hole with one leg bent double, my knee buried in mud and my other leg stuck out like a “Dancing with the Stars” move. David pulled me out and Roshelle sat with me while I tried to get some strength back into my wimpy legs. David went ahead while I rested and in a few minutes he yelled back, “It's right up here!”

Eventually I hobbled my way to the Cedar tree and took my backpack off, ( which felt like it was full of rocks) and dropped it on the ground. David was in good shape despite the hike and Roshelle wasn't even breathing hard. I was pretty shaky, as I found out later, looking at the pictures I took. Most of them were blurry because of my tremors.

David made short work of removing the old plaque and installing the new one, and soon we were eating sandwiches and drinking bottled water. Roshelle and David took pictures with their cameras while we rested for the trip back up the trail. I brought out a little clay ashtray that Chris had made in grade school and tucked it into a deep hole between the roots of the old tree.

Feeling better, I took the pruning shears I had brought along to cut the blackberry vines, and went to see if I could find the meadow trail. It was easy to find from that end, and I backtracked across the meadow, trimming overhanging brambles and opening the trail as I went.

When I got back to the tree, David and I noticed a small fish struggling in the shallow edge of the stream. It would almost run up on the gravel bank before it splashed its way back out to deeper water. The three of us followed it up and down the bank trying to catch it by hand.”Look, it's got a crawdad in its mouth!” David said, “Maybe it can't see where its going.” We finally lost it in a swirl of mud and returned to the job of loading up our packs. Roshelle insisted, (much to my relief) that she and David carry all of the tools and gear, leaving me with a small, empty pack. David had most of the weight in my old backpack which is heavy even when it's empty.

Somehow I got a second wind, and my legs felt almost normal. It was a long grind up the trail and the last half mile seemed to take forever, but we made it out in an hour and fifty minutes, not bad time really. I was bone tired and exhausted, but David and Roshelle looked as fresh as if they'd hardly left the truck.

Oh, to be young again!

Blessing or Curse Part Two

A few weeks ago I blogged about seeing an Indian lady at Eckman Lake, chanting and shaking a beaded, feathered bag. Later I read something in the local paper about a group of indigenous ladies called “The International Council of Thirteen Grandmothers” who were here, blessing the local waters. At least I knew then that I wasn't imagining things.

Recently I found their web site: http://www.grandmotherscouncil.org/

The lady that I saw at the lake didn't quite look like the picture above, but I like it anyway.

Carol's Project

For several years now, Carol and I have talked about how nice it would be to have a walking trail around our neighborhood lake. Recently she decided to make it her project.

Together we composed the following letter to the Port Of Alsea, the local government body in charge of Eckman Lake. (In the winter, during high tides and high runoff the lake actually becomes part of the bay, and so it comes under their jurisdiction.)

Eckman Lake as a Wildlife Viewing Area

Over the past 20 years my husband and I have been regular visitors to a small 50 acre lake a few miles east of Waldport on the central Oregon coast. We have fished, kayaked, photographed wildlife and just plain relaxed on the lake.

For several years we picked up trash around Eckman Lake while he was a member of the “Adopt a River” program, and although he's no longer a member we still do our part to keep the lake trash free.

Over the years we have watched families of Deer, Otters, Beavers and Nutria going about the daily business of feeding and raising their young.

Every spring a pair of Ospreys return to their power pole aerie and raise two or three chicks to maturity. One of our most rewarding sights has been watching the chicks mature, take their first hesitant flight from the nest and then gain confidence in their ability. Within a few days they are doing fantastic aerobatics, playing like puppies in the sky.

As amateur birdwatchers, we can only recognize a few of the many other bird species that live near or visit the lake, but we are familiar with the Blue Heron, White Egrets, Cormorants, Loons, Green Herons, Canadian Geese, Mallards, Wood Ducks, Kingfishers, Gulls, Red-Winged Blackbirds, and countless other birds and waterfowl.

On several occasions we have seen Western Pond Turtles sunning themselves on partially submerged logs. Bullfrogs inhabit the water plants along the shoreline where Salamanders lay their eggs in fist sized gelatinous globs.

One sunny day kayaking when the water was unusually clear, we watched a Large mouth Bass protecting her babies in a nest she had scooped out of the sandy bottom. Schools of tiny Sticklebacks provide food for the Bass and Trout that live in the lake. During the winter, high water and high tides provide access for the Coho Salmon and Steelhead to swim through the lake on their way to spawn in upper Eckman Creek.

We feel that if there was a trail around the perimeter of the lake, a prime wildlife viewing area and greater accessibility for fishing would be created. This would surely bring visitors to the Waldport area.

Since private property abuts the water line in many areas, possibly a boardwalk similar to the one at the Darlingtonia Wayside, north of Florence, could be built. It is approximately two miles around the lake and a wheelchair friendly, boardwalk – trail combination with interpretive signs and rest benches would be a great wildlife viewing attraction and provide much more access for fishing.

Hopefully there is a grant somewhere waiting to finance a project like this, possibly in President Obama's “Stimulus Program.”

The Clelands

Carol met with Maggie Rivers, the port commissioner and was happy to find that her lake improvement project was enthusiastically received. They agreed that circulating a petition would be a good way to see how much local interest there would be in improving the lake.

While she and our daughter-in-law Dianna were gathering signatures, they talked to many people who learned how to swim, fished, boated and even water skied on the lake when they were kids. Almost all of them were excited about an improvements project, and they made many useful suggestions. Dredging, to deepen the lake and remove the silt and overgrowth of water plants was number one, followed by a wheel chair friendly boardwalk along the highway side of the lake for fishing and wildlife viewing, and a kayak - small boat ramp at the park.

As of this writing, in a little over a week, they have collected well over 1,000 signatures.

The Great Sleep Out

Yesterday afternoon while Carol and I were sitting out on the patio sipping a glass of wine, (hers white, mine red,) I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea.

“Lets sleep out here tonight!” I said, “We can move the table and chairs out of the way, blow up the queen size air mattress and use the sleeping bags we bought for camping. It should be fun!”

Carol wasn't as excited about the idea as I was, but she reluctantly went along with it.

We tried to remember where we had stashed the camping gear and finally found the sleeping bags in the shop and the air mattress rolled up under my bed. I got the shop vac to inflate the mattress while Carol unrolled the sleeping bags. “Just lay one on top of the other,” I said, “we should be snug and cozy between them. It's too much of a hassle to zip them together.” The dogs were already showing interest in what to them, looked like a big comfy doggy bed.

As usual I retired first, and hardly got between the sleeping bags before Taz and Squeak hopped aboard, bouncing me up and down as they worked their way into a comfortable spot. I soon found the drawback to not zipping the sleeping bags together, when a cold draft of air hit my leg. I adjusted the bag to seal it off, which caused another cold spot on my arm, and on and on it went. I finally drifted off and slept until Carol came to bed, which caused some major bouncing up and down and a lot of laughing while we and the dogs tried to bounce our way into comfortable positions.

Naturally, all of my sealed off cold air drafts opened up again and I struggled to get them sealed back up. Carol was having trouble with the dogs claiming her side of the bed, (After all they were there first!) and by then the air mattress was starting to lose some of its bounciness because it was also loosing some of its air. Carol finally gave up around ten o’clock, surrendered to Taz and Squeak and moved back inside to the comfort of her bedroom.

When I started to feel the hardness of the patio bricks against my hip, as the leaking mattress deflated, I packed it in and traipsed into the house, the two dogs right behind me. Squeak jumped up on the bed and snuggled up against my back, Taz curled up in his doggy bed under the bedside table, and a collective sigh could be heard throughout the household as our world returned to normal.