Did your big dream come true?
Do you talk about finances with
your cat?
Have you ever changed a tire in
sub-zero temperatures and, if so, how did that change your driving behaviors?
When do you think is the best
time to tell someone you love them?
What word always makes you
think of your mother?
Have you ever found someone
with an eye patch inordinately attractive?
Do you mark dates on everything
you put into your freezer?
—Mitchell Hegman
Even though I entered semiretirement several years ago, I am still working hard to improve myself in personal matters. In the last two years, I have made remarkable advances in my ability to take naps. I have now progressed to the point where I am capable of taking two naps a day.
—Mitchell Hegman
Prickly Pear Creek is escorted through my home town by stone and concrete retaining walls on each side. As a boy, my best summer days were spent in the creek and all along those walls. The walls served as a kind of elevated path you could take to cross through town.
On hot summer days, a bunch of
us swam at Long John’s Falls, near the house where my father grew up.
When I think back to those
times, my fondest memories are not of walking the walls, or swimming, or
floating the creek in inner tubes.
My best memories are those
dreamy, almost other worldly times when I flopped face-down down atop the sun-warmed
concrete cap of the wall to warm and dry myself after swimming in the chill
creek waters.
I still smell the wet concrete
against my face. I feel myself almost
melting into the wall. With my eyes closed,
I feel the warm sun pressing down on me.
I hear the voices of other kids still at play in the water—a kind of
disjointed music with water running through.
I know the big kids are
watching out for the little kids. One of
the biggest boys will be doing a backflip soon.
I listen, waiting for the shouts of approval.
I am in no hurry to go home.
—Mitchell Hegman
The stranger lived by eating lizards and drinking rainwater captured in rusty buckets. Nobody understood why he lived in such a way.
Speculations about the stranger
abounded in the small, dry town nearby.
Some said he lost millions to a crooked business partner. Others said he murdered a man on the East
Coast and was hiding from the law.
The locals were wrong about the
stranger. He had neither lost millions
nor murdered a man on the East Coast.
The stranger was simply weird
and he liked the taste of lizards.
—Mitchell Hegman
Today, I am going to repeat myself in two ways. First, I am going to repeat myself by sharing a short video two days in a row. Secondly, I am going to repeat a story. I previously shared this story (in a slightly different fashion) on April 5, 2014.
This is a real-life love story.
—Mitchell Hegman
This week I caught two mice in my house by means of a live trap. My habit is to carry the captured mice a fair distance down my country road, give them a sharp scolding, and then release them in the sagebrush and juniper.
I am not sure how the mice are
finding entrance to my house. I have
read that an adult mouse can fit through an opening the size of a nickel. Younger mice can use openings the size of a
dime.
After releasing the last mouse
I caught, I got to thinking about water.
What do mice do for water while
living in the hollows of my house?
Off to my Google machine one
more time.
A little research revealed that
mice are pretty much stomachs equipped with tiny feet. They are all about eating. Mice spend all of their waking time seeking
something to nibble on. They can go for
only two to four days without eating.
Water is another story.
A mouse can survive for a month
or more without directly drinking water.
To take in water, mice rely on indirect sources. They get water from foods they eat. Even foods that seem dry to us will supply mice
with enough water to sustain them.
The ability to intake water
indirectly allows mice to permanently inhabit all manner of places.
—Mitchell
Hegman
When I visit someone’s house and notice they have a treadmill, I typically ask them if they use it much. Most of the time, I am told they don’t.
I have a treadmill in my house,
but I try to use it. For the last few
weeks, I have been using it as a staging base for my sunroom project.
—Mitchell
Hegman
When I was a child, I thought the best people in the world either found gold or unearthed ancient civilizations. Today, I think the best people either work for hospice or feed stray animals.
—Mitchell
Hegman
For the last thirty years, I have left messages and whatnots inside walls and other spaces within buildings I have worked on. When building my house and cabin, I dropped things in hollow spaces and wrote notes constantly as I brought the structures from the ground to finish.
I have continued this practice
while remodeling the house.
Yesterday, with help from my
brother-in-law, Terry, I finished laying down the subflooring for my sunroom. After screwing down the first sheet of
plywood, I said to Terry, “We need to leave something in the floor.”
Between the foam I laid on the
concrete and the plywood, I had a half-inch space for placing items. Almost instantly, I thought about the various
pairs of chopsticks in my kitchen silverware drawer.
Uyen’s chopsticks.
I have not used any of them since
her passing ten years ago.
I placed a pair of Uyen’s
chopsticks and a receipt from Home Depot for the flooring materials atop the
foam in one of the available spaces. My
sister Debbie clipped the banner from the Independent Record newspaper (which
is a relic I still receive) and added that.
A few minutes later, Terry and
I dropped the next cut of plywood over our offerings.
Here’s to the future!
Chopsticks
Chopsticks and Receipt
From a Distance
—Mitchell
Hegman
Turns out, smartphones are not as smart as I thought they were. Sometimes, to get an app to work, you need to give the phone a good old-fashioned beating.
While video-chatting with
Desiree, I dropped my phone. Dropping my
phone is not unusual. I would estimate I
either drop or knock my phone to the floor a half dozen times a month.
Anyhoo…when I picked up my
phone again after it smacked face down on the floor, the front (selfie) camera
was wildly out of focus. To fix the
focus issue, I surfed through an array of smartphone settings and poked at all
kinds of stuff.
I found nothing to fix the
problem.
Frustrated, I fired up my Google
machine to seek possible solutions. When
I clicked on the first link with answers and began reading, I was immediately
skeptical. The first solution suggested I
turn the phone away from me with the camera on and tap on the back of it. The second was to pick up the smartphone and
shake it.
Doubtful or not. I brought the front camera to life, turned
the phone away from me, and tapped briskly at the back with the end of my TV
remote.
I’ll be damned if that didn’t
work. The camera came
into perfect focus. Finally, after all
my years of trying, I found something I can fix by beating on it.
—Mitchell
Hegman
The other day, as I stood at my kitchen window looking out to evaluate the day, two chipmunks zipped into place on a brick ledge just outside. The chipmunks circled each other for two seconds and then copulated with lightning speed before rocketing away in opposite directions.
Jeez,
I thought to myself, I have never seen chipmunks diddling before. As I thought about it, I had to admit, I
never really bothered to consider chipmunks as either male or female. They have always been, well, chipmunks. And I call all of them “Chip” when I greet to
them.
A quick tour through my Google
machine gave me answers. Male chipmunks are
bucks and the females are does.
Chipmunks will eat almost
anything and they mostly hibernate through winters, though they may emerge from
time to time. They are very much
solitary creatures, but twice a year, in the spring and in late summer, males
and females will get together briefly to mate.
—Mitchell
Hegman
Photo: Phil
Armitage
I constructed my house thirty years ago. I started framing walls in April of the year and by early November I was nailing all the finishing trim into place.
When I first started trimming
around the windows and doors, I enlisted the help of one of my carpenter
friends for a day.
While working with me, he made
an observation that sticks with me to this day.
“I am happy to see you are getting everything done before moving in,” he
told me. “I have watched a lot of people
build their own houses. I have noticed
that if they move in before getting everything done, whatever was unfinished
remains unfinished after they move in. They
never get to it.”
Funny thing about that—I finished
everything in my house save the trim around one set of bifold closet doors at
the entry from my garage. I vowed to buck
the trend noted by my friend and finish the closet after we moved in.
Thirty years later, the closet
remains unfinished.
Untrimmed Closet
—Mitchell
Hegman
I answered my phone fairly early yesterday morning and found Tad on the line. “Do you know what day today is?” he asked.
“Nope,” I answered.
“Today is National Collect
Rocks Day. I just heard it on the
radio.”
“I didn’t know there was such a
thing.”
“There is. I think we need to collect rocks today.”
“I’m in,” I said.
Within a few hours, Tad and I
were wandering through the rumpled landscape near my house, seeking rocks. We slowly picked our way along rock-strewn
slopes and tan shoulders of bentonite.
We also made our way to the “Chinese Diggings,” an area worked for gold
by Chinese coolies in the late 1800’s in a quest for gold. They left behind stacks of often beautiful
rocks as they classified down to fines with gold.
Legend holds that the coolies
cleared buckets of “nuisance” sapphires from their sluice boxes and dumped them
back in the ground.
Maybe.
I always look for a pile of
sapphires when I go there.
Today, I am posting my finds
from our version of honoring National Collect Rocks Day.
Specimens I collected on
National Collect Rocks Day
—Mitchell
Hegman
—Mitchell
Hegman
Posted is a photograph of me sitting with my 20 pounds of housecat.
One of us can open and close
the screen door when we go outside. The
other of us knows how to open the door, but not close it (which allows flies,
yellowjackets, and moths to enter the house).
—Mitchell
Hegman
As summer wanes, western conifer seed bugs begin to appear in numbers. They are seeking a warm place to overwinter and somewhere around your house or my house would suit them nicely, thank you.
I have seen a half dozen of
these bugs outside my house in the last couple days.
Western conifer
seed bugs are often mistakenly identified as
either stink bugs or boxelder bugs. As a
point of fact, they do look similar to boxelder bugs. And when feeling threatened they will emit a
somewhat sharp an unpleasant odor, but they are not a true stink bug.
I don’t mean to be disparaging,
but these are some pretty incompetent bugs.
Western conifer seed bugs are notoriously bad navigators while in
flight. They are loud fliers as well. One of the first bugs I saw this year,
crashed into my shoulder. Over the
years, more than a few of them have zizzed directly into my face and
tumbled to the ground from there.
The good news is western conifer seed bugs are not harmful to humans or animals. They are merely annoying. Western conifer seed bugs feed on the male flowers and young cones western pines and Douglas fir.
Western Conifer Seed Bug on My
Hot Tub Cover
—Mitchell
Hegman
I was surprised, while traipsing about in the mountains near my cabin, how quickly some of the trees and understory are blushing with fall colors.
Obviously, Montana is never
fully awash with colors as is the Northeast of the United States. But here you may find river bottoms and
mountain places and intense swatches of color that provide for lovely displays.
The scale is different, but the
colors are the same.
Fall is absolutely in the air
at my cabin. Yesterday morning, I found
frost on my truck. Another sign is the
emergence of shaggy mane mushrooms (they are edible).
Posted today are images of
early colors presenting immediately behind my cabin and a shaggy mane just
outside the door.
Colors Crossing
Blushing Understory
Shaggy Mane Mushroom
—Mitchell
Hegman
Yesterday morning, my brother-in-law, Terry, my friend, Mark, and I chopped a load of firewood for Terry at my cabin. The weather was long-sleeve but calm. Once we had filled Terry’s truck, Mark used a splitter in the back of his truck to split a few logs for use in my firepit.
After completing our work, we
sat by a fire of our making and chatted about nothing important.
You might imagine I wanted more
out of life than this, but, honestly, it doesn’t get better.
Mark and Terry Splitting Wood
for my Fire Pit
Turning Colors Near the Creek
Following is the last few paragraphs form my journal entry on 9-11-2001:
I first heard the news of the attack
on the World Trade Center towers while at work on the Dearborn Ranch house. A kind of shockwave rippled through the
entire construction crew. Some of the
crew huddled together, murmuring. Others
took to vocalizing distain as they bumped into other craftsmen. After absorbing the news, I wandered around
with conduit fittings in my hand, confused about whether I should be thinking
about the attack or my job.
Then something vital stabbed
into me: Helen, my daughter, lives in Manhattan, not that far from the Trade
Center. I dropped everything and whisked
up to the construction office to use the phone.
The jobsite sits at center of stony ridges and swells of land that block
cell signals.
I called home. Busy.
I stomped my feet. Twiddled. Waited.
I imagined entire cities falling in my mind. Buildings slumped to the street while spewing
their dusty guts out in all directions.
I imagined fire in the sky. I
called again. Uyen answered. Helen had just called. She was sobbing but otherwise fine. Helen has not yet heard from Tung, one of her
dearest friends who worked and lived very near the twin towers.
After arriving home this
evening, I watched the news and fielded phone call after phone call—friends,
family, and people I have not spoken to for a long time. All of them were worried about Helen.
At present, two American cities
still burn: Washington DC and New York City.
Military aircraft patrol the skies.
All commercial flights in the nation have been grounded.
Over and over Uyen and I watch
videos of the towers collapsing amid rolling clouds of dust and smoke. If there is anything worse than this, I can’t
think of it right now.
—Mitchell Hegman
I sat for a long time watching 3 honeybees working on the blossoms of the Russian sage alongside my house. As I watched the honeybees flirting with the tiny purple flowers, I thought about my hero, Nikola Tesla.
Tesla was brilliant in more
useful and practical ways than most intellectuals. He was awarded hundreds of patents for electrical
inventions that, to this day, make our lives better. We still use his power transmission system
and his induction motors. He his largely
credited with development of both radio and wireless remote control.
Tesla was also notably eccentric. He was obsessed with the numbers 3, 6 and 9. He said of them: “If
you knew about the magnificence of the numbers 3, 6 and 9, you would have the
key to the universe.”
Tesla’s number obsession led
him to require 18 napkins to clean his plate at every meal. He would walk around a building 3 times
before entering. And he would only rent
rooms whose numbers were divisible by 3.
Considering the vast number of
electrical engineering contributions attributed to Nikola Tesla, I am willing
to entertain his eccentricities. Maybe
there is more to the number 3 than I can comprehend.
The 3 honeybees I watched never
faltered or crossed one another as they spiraled around the purple displays of
sage. I became a little dizzy trying to
track all 3 at once, simple man that I am.
My Russian Sage
—Mitchell Hegman
I used to fancy myself a pretty adroit multitasker. In recent years, however, I have come to understand I am not good at it. If I engage in several projects at one time, I often find myself fluttering between them with a notable loss of fidelity at each turn.
When I have multiple projects
at home (anything on the spectrum between cleaning and remodeling), I end up endlessly
wandering from room to room for one of three reasons:
Turns out all of this wandering
about has an upside. Walking is good for
me. A recent long-term study has
quantified this.
A team or researchers led by
physical activity epidemiologist Amanda Paluch from the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst tracked over 2,000 middle-aged Black and White men and
women, sourced from four different US cities.
According to an article posted
at sciencealert.com:
“The group, with an average age
of just over 45, wore accelerometers that tracked their daily step count and
step intensity during waking hours, as they went about their lives.
The experiment began back in
2005, and participants were followed up at regular intervals in the years up
until 2018, by which point 72 of the original group had died.
Most importantly, the
researchers found here that individuals taking at least 7,000 steps per day had
an approximately 50 to 70 percent lower risk of early death when compared to
those who averaged fewer than 7,000 daily steps in the experiment.
By itself, step intensity
(measuring the quickness of steps taken) had no effect on mortality.”
7,000 seems to be the magic
number for steps. That number of steps,
by the way, carries you a bit over 3 miles in distance, according to my Google
machine research.
My typical daily walks carry me
a minimum of 4,000 but often closer to 7,000 steps. Add to that the thousands of steps I take
wandering about my house in confusion and you have a recipe for a long and
healthy life.
—Mitchell Hegman
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com
(Peter Dockrill)
I have updated my bucket list. Here it is:
—Mitchell Hegman
I suppose it’s a character flaw to imagine,
as I do,
that the newly
departed are not fully absent.
I envision
them hiding in plain sight
before transitioning
to what we call “the other side.”
Surely, our
lost loved ones can be found
silently
stacking boxes in a cavernous warehouse,
or stationed
along assembly lines
plugging
wiring harnesses into appliances
as they belt
through their stations.
I dreamed of
my own mother
working in a
store that sells nothing but black woodstoves.
I suspect my father
can be found in a rundown bar somewhere
tipping back fresh
glasses of draft beer.
How can death
be absolute when nothing else is?
I am pretty certain
one of the departed
was driving
the sky-blue SUV
that wrongly
lurched in front of me
at the
four-way stop two blocks from my house.
—Mitchell Hegman
My love—if not obsession—with listening to music extends to back when I was a toddler. At the age of five you could find me playing my mother’s LP records. I especially liked Johnny Horton, the Sons of the Pioneers, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
Today, I appreciate most music
genres. When I am driving or if I am
home during the day, I have music on constantly. At the cabin, I have music playing 24 hours a
day.
About two months ago, something
unaccountable occurred. I don’t know why
it happened, but for some reason, I began to focus almost entirely on the
drummer in every song. For some songs,
this kind of focus completely changes the listening experience.
Posted is a song featuring one
drum and one voice. In this song you
have no choice but the drum.
—Mitchell Hegman
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpxMlG8boZ4
I am posting four captures from the game camera at my cabin. As I suspected, more than deer are wandering through the mountains there.
The first two images (of deer) are from where I placed the camera on a game trail on the mountain above my
cabin.
The second two captures, a fox
and a mountain lion, are from a placement of the camera immediately below my
cabin. The lion is within forty feet of
my cabin. If you look above
the lion, you can see one of my cabin’s windows.
Whitetail Buck
Mule Deer Buck
Fox
Mountain Lion
—Mitchell Hegman
The time is 4:10 in the morning. I am sitting on planet Earth with twenty pounds of housecat sprawled beside me. We are listening to Bob Dylan singing Hurricane.
A man can be wrongly convicted of
a crime he did not commit on this planet but the sky is often pretty.
At present, stars are pivoting
above me. Smarter people have named the
more prominent stars. The names are
difficult for me, so I make up my own. Blinky, for example.
When I was younger, I imagined
I would grow up to be a truck driver named Mack. I guess sitting here with my cat is the second-best
thing.
End of report.
—Mitchell Hegman
Advice from a toddler:
Thanks to Desiree for sharing
this first!
—Mitchell Hegman
I recently finished writing my third draft of a book about the functions and use of digital multimeters. I am now taking photographs of multimeters and accessories for use in illustrations.
I own a couple dozen multimeters
and several voltage testers from different manufacturers. I enjoy tinkering with all of these test instruments. And photographing them for illustrations is,
as I like to say, “good stuff.”
If all goes well, Jug and I will
have copies of the book for sale by the turn of next year.
While talking on the phone with
Jug about issues with a few photographs, he stopped me at mid-sentence. “Do you realize what you just said?” he
asked.
“What?”
“You said you were ‘posing’
meters.”
“I did, didn’t I. Well, it’s surprisingly sexy.” I laughed.
“You may want to keep that kind
of talk to yourself.”
“Gotcha.”
Posted is a digital multimeter
posing with an analog meter in my makeshift studio.
—Mitchell Hegman
If the shoe fits, find the other one.
—Mitchell Hegman
