Thursday, December 6, 2007 - Demopolis AL
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Foscue Creek, Demopolis AL, December 12, 2007
Later: As I expected the furnace air intake and combustion chambers were full of wasp and mud dauber nests. What a mess and what a job to clean them all out. I had to take the furnace out of the cabinet and disassemble a lot of parts to get the chambers free so I could bang, poke, prod, and shake the nests all free and break them up enough to get them out through the openings. In addition the burner needed a good cleaning as well. I got the puppy all reassembled and back in place just before dark. Set the thermostat and turned her on - no fire. We got a fan but no fire. Fooey.
Night camp
Wal-Mart Parking Lot in Demopolis AL
Wal-Mart Supercenter in Demopolis AL
Wal-Mart Supercenter Store #731, 969 Us Hwy 80 West, Demopolis, AL 36732 - (334) 289-2385
- Good level parking, reasonably quiet
- Poor Verizon cell phone service - access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies is slow but reliable
- Find other Wal-Marts in the area
- Check the weather here
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.