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The first thing was, to kill them all: big black flies! You know, the kind that get inside the house and buzz around at night, thonking into your lampshade, the ones you can’t ignore. But this was something out of a nightmare: each of the three small windows in the bathroom was covered with at least a dozen, crawling back and forth across the glass. Naturally, I wondered where they’d come from, and the answer muttered darkly in my brain.

Maybe I was wrong, I thought, but only for an instant. Grabbing a nearby swatter, I immediately attacked, wap-wap-wap, until all movement ceased. There were dead flies on the floor, dead flies in the bathtub, dead flies in the sink. Dead flies where I’d never find them, either. These didn’t seem to move so quickly. Of course not. Damn. Not wrong at all. Anyway, there was no way they could have gotten into the house all at once like that. Besides, it was a cold, blustery day, not fit for invading moscas. No, these guys were native. These guys hatched.

After an early warm spell in March, we had an aggressive infestation of mice. They hung out in the bathroom and the kitchen, the added-on rooms that aren’t adobe, where loose boards and hollow walls afford all kinds of hiding places. The cat did her bit and ate the stupid ones, but the others roamed at will and left mouse shit in all kinds of places one would rather not imagine. The worst place was the bathroom “cabinet.”

I don’t know what to call it, really. When the bathroom was added on to the original old adobe house—that should give you pause right there—the plumbing behind the bathtub was sort of walled in with plywood and rough boards, but there’s a space with shelves back in there, except they’re not closed in. You can see the back side of the concrete blocks that make the outside wall. In other words, anything that gets pushed off falls into the blackness and is never seen again—another thing you just can’t think about because you have to function.

At any rate, that is where they were, and I prepared to hunt the little bastards. This time I didn’t use the old reliable mouse traps with the metal bar that’s on a spring and comes down wham, but opted for new-fangled plastic ones that don’t work worth a damn. That is, yes, apparently they worked, but not the way you’d want them to: namely, the traps just disappeared. That’s right, dragged or flopped, whatever, gone forever in the Place That No One Sees. Were the victims dead or merely angry? How was one to know?

Believe it or not, the depredations stopped. I may or may not have smelled decomposition—in this environment, it’s hard to tell—and soon forgot about the nasty business until today.

You know what must have happened, right?

No?

There must have been a carcass, maybe two, back behind the tub and inaccessible, but not to flies. One got in and laid some eggs. The eggs hatched into maggots. There were many pupae. The adults emerged today and headed for the light, still cold and groggy as I smashed them into bits!

I needed the vacuum cleaner afterwards. The lights went out when I plugged it into the power strip. How typical! One wonders if the hatching’s done. [Note from 5-9: not yet…] The bounty of the Lord is everlasting, but loaves and fishes next time, please.

Oh, it’s hard sometimes, knowing which way to go. My sister just had an operation on her trachea to manage a cancer scare. She’s in a hospital in Dallas and doing fine, but I’ve lost one sister already to liver cancer, and this makes me stumble. My wife will need a troubling operation on her eyelid, of all places, to remove a small lesion. It’s always something, I guess. What I can’t stand is someone cutting into the body of a loved one for any reason, no matter how big or small a procedure we’re talking about. It activates a primal defensive reaction in me and causes great pain. Never mind that the people I’m concerned about are strong and in excellent shape, the business knocks me down. I feel like I’m taking the blow.

Two days ago I hit my favorite hiking trail to walk four miles. It was an outstandingly beautiful and comfortable day. The combination of “warm enough” plus low humidity and just a little breeze is so ideal for my own version of a human body that when I’m out there in it, I never want the experience to end. What that meant on Tuesday was that I hit my two-mile marker—the turnaround point—and kept on going. I knew that by doing so, I’d add about a mile and a half to my route by completing a large loop that also would put me close to the edge of the cliffs and offer some wonderful views. (It may not look so steep here, but if you dropped a basketball where I stood to take this picture, it would rapidly roll into the gorge of the Rio Pueblo and be gone!)

Naturally, I amended my already-changed route before I finished. Spotting an old Jeep track that went straight up a hill, I decided to take it and see if I could short-cut a few switchbacks. That worked out well, but did I ever have to climb. My knees hadn’t been heard from, however, until this morning. The right one is stiff and a little bit swollen. Lifting my foot through the leg hole in my underwear was tricky—ouch!—and there’ll be no hiking today. Apparently it’s possible to do too much at once, though this rarely applies to the things that I must.

Something’s happening. God loves me. Just look at that. I’m in love. What is going on.

The sun finally came out after a week of rain, snow, and howling wind. There was even snow this morning (!), but this afternoon was twenty degrees warmer than yesterday. The wind stopped, too. When that happens, the sun wins. I had to go outside.

Lulled by the warmth after being cold for days, I took my time tending the minimalist wood stash art installation. That which used to be a two-cord mountain and is now about three armloads. By tending, I mean bagging up more chips for burning—works great in the old Ashley if I leave them in the bag—and splitting up as little of the actual wood as I think I can get away with for another day. A little game to ease us into the coming days of not building fires because it’s warm enough, you just forget. I think last year, that was just before the 4th of July.

That’s all right, though. Dues paid.

Buffalo!

Cold, damp, no wind. Quiet except for a few cows bawling in the valley. The scrunch of walking on wet sand. Smells of sagebrush and wet dirt. Snowed off and on today, sometimes a lot. Yesterday, too. For several days, actually. In the middle of that, we saw a hummingbird, so time to put the feeders up.

I see this is turning into a photo blog again. You will forgive me. Actually I bet this is why a lot of people come here. You know. The opposite of what people used to say about reading Playboy in the olden days, not that I ever did. Read, that is. But I just have to share these images. Instant gratification is the name of the game. Show and tell. Yes, of course, I tweeted this image first, which means you ought to follow me @jhfarr. (I post a lot of images that never make it here.) The version above is ever so slightly tweaked, all but straight out of the camera on the 6s Plus. One could do a helluva lot worse.

The funny thing about the “phone” for me who never had a smartphone up to now is that I actually like using it as a telephone. (I mentioned that on Twitter, and my brother made fun of me.) For one thing, the iPhone pumps out way more volume than my perfectly serviceable old dumbphone could, and I can hear what people say again—radical! The fidelity is five times better, too. The other thing that makes this so much fun to use is the way the iPhone manages my calls. Being one of the last people on Earth to learn about this, I needn’t go into details, but what a hoot. I also like telling Siri to call my wife or set an alarm so I can take a nap and it just happens. They tell me I can launch apps the same way, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Man, I feel like I’ve arrived. Maybe now I’ll get a haircut and buy a couple shirts.