i go on hiatus from marketing sometimes; i just get discouraged and avoid it. besides, i'm working on my book (see last post). deep into the civil war, the panic of 1893, the atchison topeka & santa fe. i want to finish it. it's intense.

my wife pointed out that i hadn't been working outside, which is true. it got real hot afternoons and i've turned into a wimp; then it rained a lot and that was a pretty good excuse. actually i like it out there. i'm smoothing out piles of ground stump and dirt, where a stump grinder turned up the earth a lot. he actually didn't see every stump, so i have a few yet to pull out. it's a kind of landscaping, making it so grass can grow during the rainy season, which is coming.

to some degree it's already here. it's rained three or four out of the last five days. it's glorious, because june is so darn dry it'll about kill you. a little rain makes it so i can pull those stumps, and i can make things better if i want to. the raking is good for me.

while i'm out there, i mull over the characters in my book. they are real live people, who leave some clues and say some things, if you can find them. they live through the civil war, then they live through the panic of 1893. they travel around the country - for a while, in horse and carriage, then later, they get an auto. they're kind of on that cusp where, at first, you're not going to go out to colorado or california, it's just too far. three weeks on a horse and wagon, the scorching sun donner pass and all, too much. but then you get an auto, and everyone wants to try it. meet you out in sunnyvale. you can catch their excitement. they take their pup tent with them. sometimes they stay in a motel, and that's real treat.

i sit in the center of our village counting mask rates. some people wear them, some don't. my own kids don't, but should. we tell them to. the minute we're not watching, they don't. they're young, and really really don't believe they're in any danger. meanwhile numbers skyrocket in florida, texas, arizona, california. it makes us nervous; we're surrounded. things look bleak. a deadly virus is winning the war.

in our little town, it hasn't claimed a single person. we have about eight hundred people, and we're all still here. about five hundred of us are real nervous. lots of us wear masks regularly. i stay in my truck where i won't feel the obligation to wear one, because i'm just sitting here, not going anywhere. i watch the people who walk in the downtown boardwalk in front of me. 50%, 70%, sometimes 30%. the percentage changes according to what time i'm out here.

our friend says it's locals that are the worst. we're actually a tourist town, and all our tourists are from texas, where it's really out of control. so we're nervous about having a town full of texans walking around with the virus. but it turns out, those are the ones that are wearing the masks. they're sensitive; they know the law; they don't want us thinking bad of them. whether they have it or not, they're at least following the rules. it's the locals, and a few of the visitors, who just don't believe in it. they make up stories about how they really don't work. hey, if i was single, i'd probably have a fewof those stories. you delude yourself when you're on your own. people can be influenced very easily; it doesn't take much.

we came out of our little valley the other day to sign some papers to lease our house. i realized how country i was. i was virtually unable to keep a mask on; i couldn't hear myself talk. i didn't really know what was happening here in town. i hadn't talked to many people about the situation and i'm more and more uncomfortable, even going anywhere. just now some guy walked next to my truck and coughed. he was carrying a mask in his hand. i'm hoping the outside air, the gentle breeze, took care of it. but i put on my mask anyway. i'm not letting that virus get in there.

my wife also is obsessively checking the news. just a few years back we lived in texas. her deepest fear is, no icu beds, no care. she's got a point. lubbock is now up to hundreds of new cases a day, in lubbock alone. almost ten thousand new ones in florida, a day, in a state that is full of old people. four 9/11's a day, you could say, in florida alone.

yet we still have zero in our mountain zip code, and hope it stays that way.