Acme

A week or so ago, I drove through Acme. The name triggers memories of just about everfy Saturday morning between the penultimate year of the '60s and maybe the mid-1980s. Because Acme is the company that made catapults, rocket packs, pressure cooker lids that fit on rabbit burrows, and just about every other accoutrement of pre-computer technology a coyote could want to capture prey.

I'd always thought of Acme as a statement of high self worth, rudimentary branding that implied superlacy, and happened to come up early in the phone listings (before ham-handed companies started the A-race: AA Plumbing, AAA Travel Agency, AAAA Handi-Man). But here it was, the town, a few unmarked pole barns at the edge surely packed with giant sling-shots, magnetic bird seed, and such.

Washington kindly puts "Entering ___" signs at every little town. Precious few buck the trend and put up signs with some other phrasing. One of the things that keeps me entertained on long road trips are the Entering signs, like when the town is named after a person. I feel a little uncomfortable Entering Milton, the female towns being more my speed. Then there's Lebam (Mabel backwards, hmmm).

But back to Acme. The coyote association is probably true, since the town is located at a valley bottom. Who else but a trickster would give a name meaning Summit to a trown in a valley bottom, close to Mosquito Lake?

Someday, I will go back when I can spend some time. Maybe eat at the restaurant catering to bikers (somethign about Hog Trough). Maybe see if I can buy a back-mounted fan and sail and save on shipping.

Great Wednesday Part II: Cracker Plays Glacier

So I get to the venue, which is half bar and restaurant, and half general store to the last town on the road. Again the bad news good news oscillation set in, somehow ending up higher on the good side. I was about to order a porter when the bartendress said something about it being really foamy, so I asked for a Guiness, since it has a high nutritional value, and my reserves were depleted from all the climbing. But having a Guiness tap handle is different from having the drink itself, so I had to choose something else. Giving in to the hop-mad NW default, I asked for an IPA, only to learn that that keg had just poured its last. Unwilling to go Belgian (I continue to boycott Leopold's domain long after that devil got his due), I looped back round to the porter, and when they tried, it worked just fine.

As the chocolatey goodness coursed its way into my system and I was feeling happy, the other shoe dropped. There would be no ordering dinner and sitting around until the show started, because they were kicking us all out to let the band set up. Come back at 9 for first-come, first-served tickets. I squesked into the general store part just before closing, got the best food on offer (beef jerky, oh well), and decided to make a last-minute run to the end of the road for a view of Mount Baker.

After making it through an are of one-lane road controlled by robot traffic lights, I saw a bunch of cars coming down, and guessed form the fading light that I would not be treated to a sunset show, but I pushed on, blazing up straightaways and ripping the curves as fast as possible. At the end of the road, reflected in lakes, I caught the last red glow of the summit another 5000 or so feet above. Better yet, a big bright moon looking like it was resting on a ridge, carressed by trees.

No time to dally, though, and I looped around to rush down the hill even faster, fearing that hordes had showed up in my absence, maybe denying me entry to a place that looked like it could not hold more than a few dozen people. I skidded into the lot to see more than 50 people outside, and edged by way about midway through the amoebic crowd. Normally I don't cut in, but a large number of these were college kids with no real clue what they were about to see, and there was no sense them getting in while a true crumb was stuck outside.

I talked with a couple people, including Heather a brash hippy chick. There was a time in the '90s when I encountered a series of hippy chicks named Heather, all from Santa Cruz, a place dear to Cracker Van Beethoven. I took it as a good omen. The crowd kept good humor, milling about in the main drag, watching locals on ATVs roll through, and inexplicably smoking a lot of cigarettes but no weed.

9 o-clock came and went, and while some pompadoured doofus talked loudly so we could all confirm his idiocy, the crowd overall began to get antsy. After a while, the band came out to say there were technical difficulties, but they were working on a solution that would make loud music without eletrocuting them. (Based on Lowery's blog, such an accident might well be interpreted as part of the show, like when his DIY pyrotechnics backfired.) Through the windows, we could see cords connected and taped dow, ripped up, gear reconfigured, and finally an anorexic version of the black things from 2001 being erected. Then, music to my ears, a "Mr. Wrong" soundcheck. Pompousdour proclaimed this a country vibe, as if nobody else could hear.

Then they let us in. I got stamped and headed out back in search of a tree instead of a stinking bar toilet, looked at the stars a minute (could not make out the Big Dipper), and headed back in. Where despite a thick crowd I walked easily to the end of the bar, and quickly got a beer. There I found myself standing in a good spot, clear view of the band, close to another drink if I wanted it, and standing by a couple guys more my age than the college kids.

And I had a rare experience. Usually, in that idle conversation starting where you find out what each other do, my being an archaeologist trumps what the other people do, and sometimes they get awkward about it, apologizing for being corporate tools or whatever it is they do that is so boring by comparison. But these guys were in the beer industry, which makes them natural allies of archaeologists. I offered to pick up the next pitcher and share with them instead of getting individual cups, but they just said thanks and told me I should drink their beer. At this point, I realized that the bad-news half of the cycle had given up, that someone had beaten him up and sent him down the road, and it was to be smooth sailing.

The band came in, not complaining about the small venue or antique wiring at all, ensconced themselves in their corner (no stage, all egaltaritry here in Glacier), and I realized that the mob was focused elsewhere, and me and the beer guys would have a pretty much unobstructed view. Soon after they started playing, the obligatory (and for some reason familiar) gyrate-in-front-of-the-lead-guitarist chick appeared, but she was short enough that we could still see the band just fine.

Song after song that I know and love, the improvised sound system sounding very good (even if Sal seemed spooked from time to time by that 2001--or is that 2010?--monolith). If you know a band's songs, and have heard them a year or so apart, during which time they've toured relentlessly, it is easy to hear how much they love the music and have mastered all the fine points. I kept noticing how right on the inflections of guitars and background vocals were. Perfect.

There was a brief while when I wondered about the monolith and the band, especially lead singer David Lowery. He was hidden behind sunglasses even though there were no lights, he maintained a certain distance from the crowd (seeming unaware even when a wasted shaman kept dancing an pointing into the singers face), I began to wonder whether the beard was to cover the faux flesh of an android, a suspicion egged on by his robotically precise strumming. Was he the man who fell to earth?

But nah. Just rock.

The bar was not big, and the band was pent up in a corner. Frank halfway back into an alcove, guarding a hoard of chairs and tables. Sal just inches away from the pool table, stealing occasional wistful glances toward it. David perched in front of the crowd with nowhere to go. Johnny with no amplifiers to stand on or stage to work, face to face with the dancing girl until she was lured away by the shaman to dance in the center. The lights were just wall fixtures like in people's houses, and the windows behind them, looking out onto the porch, completed the illusion of a house party like they have not played in years.  Outside those windows were hippies who could not or would not come in, dancing, peering in, and sometimes talking with friends inside between songs. It was very nice to be by a window and catch this part of the show. And to top it off (both in terms of elevation and imagery) above and behind the band from by vantage point was an old copper still.

And through it all, no diva-ness. No bitching about the people outside betting a free show. Or about the facilities, or the encroachments on the stage, or the parade of people waling right in front of the band to get to the beer. Maybe a little bit if entrapment, when the bans asked how long the delay was, and some guy said "47 minutes" and was immediately accused of being uptight and German, with David proclaiming "I call bullshit on 'Glacier time,'" that being akin to Hawaiian time and other laid-back chronological reckonings. In fact, the guy was probably not from Glacier, and most of the crowd was pretty laid back about the delay.

But then David did acknowledge one guy for uttering the strangest boast he's heard from a crowd ("I have better handwriting than anyone in the room!"). And when some other person made the connection between a monmologue about rednecks and the song "Get Off This," they praised his multi-dimensional intteligence and added it to the encore. Two sets, two-song encore, and hours of rocking.

Long fieldwork the next day kept me from catching the Seattle show the next night, but I may not have gone anyway. A small show, like a house party with better sound, emerging into a cold starlit night instead of urban streets? Yeah, I'll take that.

Great Wednesday, Part I: The Field

Recently, a friend sent an email explaining why Wednesday is such a great day. If he's aggreeable, I'll post his brilliant and hilarious epistle, but for now I'll just tell you about a fine Wednesday I enjoyed this past week. It began with fog, the curtain that opens to the most gleaming northwest days.

Driving to the project area, I reached the gate that gave me the first gift of the day: a lock that opened easily. The road excellent by backwoods standards: well trammeled gravel neither washboarded nor potholed, logging trucks nowhere barreling down at me, just peaceful driving through misty mysterium.

Then up and around a bend, out of the woods and into the sun, above the clouds, a few watercolor wisps soaking upward, stroking and softening blue sky. Mount Baker and the Twin Sisters poking through to join me and the birds. Pausing in this peace, consulting maps, and then working down smaller roads to drop into a stream valley.

And I do mean drop. This mountain's black rock shales off steeply, and the thinning a few years ago (because yeah, it's a Doug-fir plantation) just made room for the youthful survivors to stretch out a bunch of poky branches over the bones of the thinned. Downed stuff and branches both too weak to support much weight, so there was to be no walking, just de-climbing this hill, a deliberate scramble down. Good fun.

By way of work, I was checking out every flat spot and cedar along the way. At about 1400' elevation they began to appear, right about the time I could hear the falls: cedars seamed and flattened by the healing of old scars, marking vertical strips of bark pulled off by people who would make things mundane and sublime from it. The scars were old and appeared among the stumps of long-ago logging as well. These trees may be common, but finding a grove still thrills. Here, the people of old left something special, they had stripped many trees twice, on exactly opposite sides. Hmm...

The last dozen meters or so was pretty much vertical, but enough roots stood bare and abandoned by the gritty soil and rocks racing to the streambed that I was able to ape my way down into this black-rock canyon. No real trace of the century old site I was looking for, but the rocks were rewarding enough. Black and metallic, some flat and straight, others as snaky and ropy as the the inside of a lava tube, then pockets and layers of pure white crystals. If not actual heavy metal, then  aesthetically so.

All of this falling from the bedrock, which down here lays exposed and sculpted by the water, smoothed soft lines and hard rock. Not far upstream was the fall I'd heard, a curvacious sluice dropping the stream into an oval hole in the rock below, then a further fall under and through the rock, emerging to the bottom pool. Maybe a person could go through, which would be really cool, but not something to do without a rope tied to your ankle, held by somone trusted and strong. So I did the next unsafest thing possible, which was to climb the flow-less mossy side channel and then cantilever myself as far out over the top as possible. Sometimes you just don't feel like back-tracking, especially since I could crack a leg in that tangle of trunks anyway. [If I had it to do over again, I would do it differently. This time I'd take off my boots to let my monkey toes grip, thorns be damned.]

I continued far enough upstream to know that the second sites I was seeking had, like most of this mountainside, long ago slid and slurried its way down to be buried under untold tons of bedrock and glacial debris. Then the long way up, regaining 700 feet of elevation I'd had to relinquish to get down. The tangles of salmonberry, dead branches, and rotten downed wood were no more help on the way up than down, and having to lift my feet high for each step made my heart pump faster than a keg at a frat party, my sweat to pour faster than gin at a yacht club.

It was grueling, to be blunt, but in a good way. Like, yeah I'm 45, but I'm not dead yet. I can keep climbing, kicking despair's ass downhill, bulling thorough thickets, doing the stoic stomp onward and upward. This kind of trail-less traverse requires frequent stops, both to keep the heart from exploding and to eye out the best route, the least chance of ending up boxed in or broken. As I neared the top, getting close to the road according to the GPS, I took the luxury of being very picky, avoiding the thickest and thorniest of the roadside vegetation to find an animal trail through.

And just before popping out onto the gravel, I found myself in a thicket of bitter cherries, whose bark is used as the red decoration in baskets. I'd been on the lookout for this since spring, and even though it was a long shot, I made a little cut to see whether a harvest was possible. And it separated easily, the thin red papery layer peeling off with ease. Basketmakers will be happy with this material, and now I know that at 2000' on this mountain in August, you can get it.

The final chapter of the field is one of those bad news good news things. The plan was to continue down the northeast flank of the mountain, letting myself out onto Route 542 (see that other post) to visit the North Fork Beer Shrine (and Brewpub/Beer Musuem/Pizzeria/Wedding Chapel) and take them up on a couple or three of their services before continuing on to see Cracker in the hamlet of Glacier.

But of course the 'master' key I'd been issued did not work on the lock, and I was stuck decidgin between a vain wait there or hike down to a road where nobody else would have the key, or a vain drive back across the mountain with an empty gas tank, maybe missing the concert and spending a freezing night on the mountain. I vacillated, but finally decided that since the truck was nosed downhill steeply, that maybe there was actually enough gas to get to the other side. The gauge millimetered up as I turned around and made my way up and over. There could be no avoiding the 4wd and low-gear/high-rev descent that eats up gas, unfortunately, but the further I got, the better I felt and finally I made it out the other gate and into civilization, or at least waterfront houses.

So I gassed up and made it back to 542, headed up valley to the show. At which point Part II began.

Backroads: 542

Route 542 runs east, not far south of the Canadian border, from Bellingham to Mount Baker. That must be why they call it Mount Baker Highway. I have yet to reach the terminus, but it is one of those rare roads that ends. Not at a T, not by melding into another route, but by going as far as it can go, dropping dead from exhaustion in the mountains.

From the Bellingham end, it's no backroad. Many lanes, stoplights, sprawlburbs. Then farms. Then woods and cool little towns like Maple Falls and Glacier. The latter is my destination tonight after work, to see Cracker play at a bar that is guarded by at least one monkey.

Driving into the country, away from the lights and crowds and conveniences that soothe civilization, it is pretty common to see outcroppings of religion. Churches clinging to rural byways (quiet now, but destined to be fortified checkpoints in the endtimes), splinter churches occupying the husks of failed enterprises, exhortations to praise Jesus and fear his angry old dad.

542 is pretty mellow as far as that goes. The churches don't look too scary, and the signs are pretty nice, a break from the waytoomanywordsononesignbecausetheLordhasamessageandIcannoteditbecauseicanbarelyread syndrome, or the heartfelt but poorly rendered signs that cry out whereever there is a heart of darkness.

It should come as not surprise that my stop at the bible camp was only long enough to get a photo of the sign, whereas I was inspired to stop and spend some time at the beer shrine. I love Creation, but don't mind fermenting it a bit to see if it gets better. Harkening back to monastic tradition (but jettisoning the flagellation and silence, as far as I could tell), these people brew and bake. As I sat at the bar, a devotee extolled the virtues of this and other northwest brews, and planned a pilgrimage to other such places as far south as the Bay of San Francisco, south of which are heathens who do not worship hops.

There is more to this road, and more I may write, but now is the time to hit that road, follow it up the Nooksack a ways, and attend my church (nature) in search of revelation (long-forgotten human settlements).

Fringe Flora

For a while I did archaeology on Kaua’i, which is at least as fun as you would imagine, despite a psychopathic thug who kept threatening me and one long, rainy, snot-filled stint when I did permanent damage to my wrist wrestling through packed clay. The reward for that was spending days in the presence of Makana (watching the wind place misty lei around the mountain again and again), that and some secret things you cannot hear.

I did more excavation there and then than I had since my initiation in a certain O’ahu valley. A fair volume of dirt moved, for sure, but more importantly a high rate of hitting things. Not cool artifacts and valuable museum pieces, but deep stratification, a cache or two, clear-cut features. And lots of charcoal.

Which is what helped me come up with the idea of a “settlement fringe flora.”

Generations of farmers, cooks, and eaters lay down blankets of soil. Cultivation and fallow, cooking and cleaning, occupation and abandonment: all these things lay down a record. All these things make rubbish and soil, holes and backfill, deposits and discontinuities that archaeologists come along later and read. Charcoal that gets buried in the process, the carbon sequestration incidental to human life, embodies a history of the environment (at least the woody part of it). Locked in charcoal is the cell structure of a plant, and patient experts could be hired for a dollar a minute to decode this. The information gained is especially useful when you use it to choose samples for radiocarbon dating, and start looking at things over time.

By buying a few hours of this service, I was able to find the obvious: that the 20th Century had wreaked havoc. Also an earlier chapter: arrival of Polynesian farmers caused discernible but less drastic changes like disappearance of some endemics and introduction of some useful plants. Both of these are examples of selection, intentional or not, cultural or natural, evolution’s famous cutting edge.

But what was really interesting to me was that in taro fields and villages alike, certain species managed to stick around through centuries of human presence. Akoko, Kukui, Lama, Ulei,...these four tended to show up whenever there was a fire. The first and last of these make perfect sense in terms of their own adaptation--they can colonize disturbed areas, they are abundant and not too long-lived, they flood the landscape, especially when humans are around and not planting exotic weeds.

Kukui? Not native, but also not necessarily the type of aggro plant that invades and takes over. No, it’s one of those plants that accommodates people so well that they help it along. The plant one, and it will provide oil, wood, dyes, glue, compost, medicine, even a reminder of a god. The hardshelled nuts will roll downhill or hide in soil for years, ready to sprout and make more.

Lama? This is the surprise. Diospyros sandwicensis, Hawaiian ebony (paradoxically pale wood and all). Not the fastest grower or reproducer, possessed of spiritual significance, and not what you would necessarily expect to be burnt willy nilly. Yet it shows up in many a fire pit. Partly, this is just a physical peculiarity, the hardwood probably preserves better than many species. But I have recovered it in areas where it would have been wiped out in a generation of uncontrolled harvest, where the only way for it to have been used over the long run would be for people to maintain its presence (conservation or cultivation? I dunno).

These four species, I think, are part of a fringe flora. Plants that occur around human settlements. All had uses in the organic technology of Hawaiians, all provided fuel to warm and cook, all escaped extirpation. All maintained some place in an environment settled and farmed, all occupied a Polynesian landscape in evolutionary stasis.

2D, or Not 2D?

The map here depicts part of Nu'alolo Kai, where archaeologists worked for a decade to draw the whole village. Earlier generations had dug the hell out of this site, making it famous, and providing centuries worth of artifacts that helped us understand things like chronological variation of fishhooks and Hawaiian rituals.

The wiser portion of the public knows that archaeologists don't generally fight nazis with bullwhips, but still labors under the misapprehension that we dig all the time. I do carry a trowel in the field, but as much as a talisman as anything else, a fetish of the archaeology tribe that points north in photos and opens beers. Sure, I love the craft of digging, the coat of ancient dirt, the occasional cool find, but excavation has its drawbacks. Artifacts and samples must be bagged, cleaned, sorted again and again, analyzed, documented every which way, stabilized, curated forever...

Besides the thrill of a nice artifact emerging from the soil (archaeologists sometimes don't want to admit this drives them, it sounds perilously close to the visceral pleasure of treasure hunting), the allure of digging a buried site lies in exposing a time capsule, or better yet a sequence that lets us understand how a culture adapted or persisted over time.

This can come with a heavy cost, though. Sites don't grow back, and digging them destroys them. We cannot go back and use the charcoal discarded by generations of archaeologists before radiocarbon dating was invented, and the smart among us now cringe a little, wondering what we're tossing that will condemn us in the eyes of our back-looking progeny. Meanwhile, descendants of the people whose leavings we excavate include may who don't need to wait, digging equals disturbance, disrespect, even desecration. Then there's just the matter of completing the job. Many of the Nu'alolo artifacts were not analyzed and written up for decades; it is way too easy to backfill and move on to the next hole without following through.

But remove the depth, the stratigraphy, the third dimension, and you cannot get to the fourth, the dynamic flow of time. Or at least that's how a lot of archaeologists tend to think. And so maps often tend to be peremptory, schematic, or outright crap. Lacking subtlety, accuracy, precision, intended to dispense with the questions "Where is the site? Where did you dig?"

When my mentor, his beard just starting to grey in those days, taught me the archaic skill of using a plane table, alidade and pencil to make a detailed map appear on paper, he opened my eyes to the potential of a flat rendering to record time. I think I was open to this perspective for a couple of reasons. I'd had this geeky infatuation with two dimensional worlds since tripping across a Scientific American thing before I was able to get close enough to girls to want something more than nerdly pleasure. Later, I ran across the word "palimpsest' and become fascinated with the idea of a surface adorned and written on, erased and marked again, remnants and shadows and faintest traces preserving pasts.

And so my maps try to show chronology. A pit where stone was salvaged from a wall that collapsed long after it was built over that older foundation peeking out. The wall at odd angles that bespeaks a differently oriented occupation, the rough shelter erected from and on the bones of something older and grander. Finding and depicting joints and superpositions that indicate time passing.

UNlike digging, with it's long-lasting obligation to process and curate stuff, the work is mostly up front with maps. You may ink a clean copy, apply labels, digitize, publish, and argue over hat it means for years, but the real work is in walking around and making sure you understand what is going to be drawn. Clearing vegetation for revelation, walking through again and staring until your mind grasps the geography of this place, deciding what points will give you the anchors you need to draw all that lies between, shooting points with single-minded focus, and finally the drawing. I am just superstitious enough to believe that part of the reward of all this time--carefully clearing without altering and pondering the layout while taking a break--is that the site gets to know you, maybe appreciates the attention and reciprocates, revealing some crucial clue. I am just scientific enough to know that different light and conditions, repeated glances and stares, and all the other effects of spending more time on a site add up to a more thorough viewpoint.

Whatever the reasons, the best maps I've done are of places I'd walked before, spots that allowed me to stand there for days. Like the place where I knew the site was sacred, and walked carefully, finally sitting and wondering whether it would be OK to move some of the tumbled stone to get a better view of the solid construction beneath. After that few more minutes of quietly communing with the site, I tentatively turned a stone, revealing a red feather. The Hawaiians all understood this: a gift and granting of the go-ahead to shift rubble and map the structures beneath.

Slow Solo

This time they traveled, not me.

They went for a few weeks of lake and grandparents, cookouts and cousins. I stayed to work, traveling a bit, but it hardly seems to count if when you get home you are just alone as when you were on the road.

So I sink into the spasmodic routine of the unattached man: work, kick back, procure food, do what I want, check internet, snack, attend to some un-ignorable task, kick back,....ummmm.

You get enough of that, and time loses its grip. No enforcing the kids' bedtimes? You just stay up til whenever. No other mouths to feed? You eat what you want when you want it, which for me turns into a meandering series of fractional meals formed of leftovers, maybe something cooked, handfuls harvested, and snacks discovered. Omnivoristic biped loping through an empty abode, satisfying his various hungers as they occur to him. Too many days since and too many until living amongst the women again, and time slips off the horizon. 

This is maybe more true for me than most guys, since I don't have TV, and so there's no cast reeling me in, making me wonder what day and time it is so I can spend time with them. I see trashcans out by the road, so I know it is Tuesday, but by tomorrow evening again I'll be lapsing back into chronobliviousness.

Tonight I feel like maybe staying up late, maybe ridiculously late if I think of something fun to do. Other nights, the alone man can fall asleep before dark and jump awake before light, unleashing himself on an unsuspecting and groggy world. Freedom burgeons without the traditional daily cycle.

Alone means no distractions, too, if you can ignore the copper and fiberglass and radiated tendrils that beckon you to neglect your own helm and follow electric sirens to sweet shores. Phone off and computer dark, though, and you can focus not just on what you want, but as long as you want. You can immerse yourself in a moment for hours, losing time while finding comprehension. Maybe just basking in the warm waters of istigkeit. 

Eventually though, the slow solo must end, or else veer off past where anyone else can make any sense of it or even want to hear it. After too long in those waters, a fair number of the unattached start to think nothing of peeing to keep the warm warm, losing not just societal strictures, but that modicum of self control that separates wise from crazed, honored from outcast. Eventually things need cleaning and the house needs to be ready for the returning ones.

But for now, I drift on random autopilot.

Procrastin Nation

Having committed to scrolling about two-thirds through my photo library and choosing from that page-load, I came up with this.

Which turns out to be the beginning of a wooden woodpecker, optimistically presented a year and a day ago as a work in progress.

I cannot be bothered to recall why I stopped--another sturgeon has started to emerge from an alder log in the meantime--but the carving is in about the same state as then.

I mention this not as a springboard for more bogus philosophy, but because there is a phone call that I should be making, and I'm not gonna do that just yet. Not really in that phrame of mind.

Besides, the cell-phone needs a charge, and it only makes sense to do that and then make the call. I figure a couple of hours oughtta do it. Hope I don't get sidetracked and only remember after business hours.

It's so easy for me to get sidetracked away from phones. I don't really like them except to call out on and to bridge the lonesome waters and chasmic canyons that keep me from my loved ones, sometimes. But most people call either because you got something they want, or they just are talk-addicts. Grudging acceptance is about all I'll give the cellphone, but I don't feel obliged to keep it charged or even remember where t is most of the time, much less answer it. I've neglected about 3 phones to death.

Think I'll go check if the coffee is still any good...

Now that I am back (as I suspected, not even enough dregs to drink), I can see thatI beat the dead phone horse quite enough. I should go shift the sprinkler, do something productive. I got this little red spray-head shaped like a flower, and put it on low, just a gentle little spritz a foot in diameter, and move it around during the day. Right now I am working down the row of blueberries. They're in full fruit now, and we've been getting clear hot afternoon sun, letting the berries ripen while the roots gets a drink.

But I should stop yapping and move the sprinkler, because a little procrastination can e good harmless fun, but wasting water is pretty lame.

So until next time, I log off from Procrastin Nation