When it rains in the desert

It floods.  WOOT!  We got it yesterday.  It was c-r-a-z-y! The thunder boomers were booming, Scout’s eyes were rolling in her head, she was pacing, ears peeled back as far as they would go to teensy little points, stuck to the back of her head.  It was horrible for her.  It ended up being a 3-pill kind of storm.  Vet says 2-3, I never give her more than one for this type of thing but yesterday she got one every hour for three hours.  She went loop-tee-dee and managed to dribble pee all over the floor at one point but she still was a nervous frigging wreck.

I, on the other hand, would have loved to sit in my car shade and watch the storm roll, but that didn’t happen.  Trusty war dog would not go out with me and I feared to leave her in the house.  My yard went from dry as a bone to this in about 20 minutes.

front yard looking South

It looks like I have a little lakey-poo in the back and I even got the sunset reflection in the first one – the other two are just desert silt filled with water on the back of the property.

relections in the rain pool DSC01782.jpg DSC01783.jpg

Check this out – if you read the text below the video, I didn’t even know Pahrump had a wedding chapel.

Today I had an appointment for lab tests – yuppers, finally covered by Medicare Part B (it’s better than nothing), at 9:30 a.m..  I got there at 9:10, you know, all the BS where they want you to come a few minutes early, so I waited…and waited…and waited.  At 10:15 I asked if they forgot me.  “No.”

“Really, I see others going in that came in after me?”

“You’re next!”

“Whoopee!

I got in at 10:25, the blood draw took five minutes.  Fuck this shit!  Hurry up and wait.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could bill doctors and dentists for hours spent waiting in their offices? It was a fasting test so no food for about 15 hours the way it turned out…and no morning coffee either.  *sniff*

I went to Walmart, Home Depot, and finally headed for home.  Got a call from my doctor’s office about half an hour after I got home, “The lab assistant’s computer was down while you were here, we need you to come back and sign papers.”

“Seriously?  When does that have to be done?”

“Today.”

Well fuck me Martha, and anyone else that wants to get on the bandwagon.  Of course I have a ton of money so driving 15 miles round trip means nothing to my gas tank, and I have nothing better to do with my time. Kee-rist!

I haven’t even drank wine lately because it doesn’t sound good so I can’t go there to escape the insanity.

On the poker side of life, I started doing some long overdue dusting and rearranging a book case/dust catcher mess of knickknacks and came across a book that was given to me years ago by James Crumley – and signed – “The Last Good Kiss” and OMG what a character he was.  I went looking for him on Facebook after finding the book and then searched him on Google, only to find he was gone.

He played in the Montana poker games I dealt and he could light up the whole county when he came in to play.  He was fun, sarcastic, smart, loved women (married five of them), and always had something in the mix.

We used to play a hand of ‘Scramby-Amby’ every now and then in the old days, especially when the games ran long, cards were dead, and players wanted to juice up the action. We had a screamer of a game running and everyone wanted to Scramby.  The gist of it is, the dealer spreads the deck, face down, players reach in and slide their two hole cards to their position.  No one knows what they have, but they can look once they have their cards.  Then it proceeds like normal Hold’em.  The dealer picks up the deck, scrambles, shuffles, and up goes the flop after the betting round off the blinds is complete.

James never slowed down once, fired chips on every street, and he swore he never looked at his cards. This kid believes him to this day…I never saw him look and I pay a lot of attention at the table…besides, he loved to g-a-m-b-l-e!

He drew pocket fives, the board brought two fives…quadzilla. Nice pot (considering Montana was hampered by the pot limit law in those days) and I got a nice tip for doing nothing much other than laughing my ass off over the whole thing…all the way through.

We talked about writing and screenplays…that’s what he did…and the possibility of him helping me write a book, when I dealt to him and when I played cards with him. Shit, like I couldn’t just write one after all these years? Can’t seem to get there. But when I started transitioning down to deal the big tournaments in Nevada around ’87 we lost touch.

RIP you crazy kid…you were a true Montana rose.  I’m sorry you’ve moved on.

Dan Michalski over at pokerati.com told me once that I know all the cool people.  I do, I really do!

5 thoughts on “When it rains in the desert”

  1. That’s pretty good stuff. A suggestion only . . . considering how hard you worked on that place . . . put a ring of dirt, a berm, out away from the base of the trees. The pile of sand around the bases directs water away from the root system, drains away. The berm, it need be only three or four inches high, out about three feet from the base, will hold any moisture in toward the base and roots.

  2. Ken, yes – and the weeds will grow like CA-RAZY! I have other posts at Tango of hiking the desert and pictures of blooms. We could have a whole slate of new bloomers with this rain. I haven’t seen the indian paint brush out so far this spring but this could bring it on.

  3. TM – I built a berm/ring around all of my trees and the clusterberries along the fence (seen in the first picture) but you couldn’t tell from the mass amounts of water sitting on the ground. 🙂 And I set up a water line to all of them. The tree water line lays in a circle around them with drip sprinklers – that way it’s easy to expand as the trees grow. Thanks for the advice, any other tips just send them in because I may have missed something.

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