sunday morning and everyone's asleep, except me, so i leave my hearing aids out and live with the tinnitus that i wake up with. another name for it is crickets, but sometimes i don't mind, especially since the hearing aids pick up so much that i don't like. i've kind of gotten used to living in a sound hell, and never enjoying music, but just making do with the variety within the world i live in. for example, i walk the dogs alot - even with the silence of the woods, i hear the rustling of our steps amplified and the pulling of the leash, etc., and find those sounds, compared to my usual racket, comforting.

spring in new mexico is dry and windy, and this one is no exception. we are thinking of moving back to illinois, and in that case would probably be living with lots of rain, and the beginning of things turning green - but that kind of green is unknown here until about july, when we finally get all twelve of our annual inches of rain. meanwhile, things are so parched that mice break into the laundry shed just to get the dripping from the hoses. but of course they also stole the christmas candy that i was trying to hide. and they became huge in the process.

we have spent days cleaning out that shed. the mice turds were huge and plentiful. they nested in several places, one of which was a bax of old stamp albums, just paper. i had saved it in hopes of scanning some of the pictures and using them. but now in our preparations to move it's scan now, or forever forget about it. i'm not going to save old mouse-nested boxes of anything.

in fact, the guy before us had saved old coffee cans of nails, bolts and such-like things. i was in heaven for a while to have nails and bolts for any project that i wanted to do. i finished a whole dack, in the middle of the pandemic, without having to go to the hardware store. but now my wife's right - why move a bunch of random nails if you're about to move, and you have to pay by weight? and when they're only a couple bucks at the other end? still i find it hard to throw them out. she says it's because i'm a hoarder. no, it's just my values. anything that is useful, i don't want to throw out. even if it's possible use is way in the future.

i never got to make the things i wanted here, and therefore am leaving lots of scrap wood around. for example, wanted to cover the deck, and make a bicycle shed. i just got busy with my writing, and promoting it, and lots of things went by the wayside as a result. oh well, one does what one can. the shadows of the trees in the wind as the sun come up, dance on the walls above my comfortable chair. spring will pass too, it will just take a while, and fortunately, the tumbleweeds stay down in the valley where they belong, and up here in the mountains, mostly what we worry about is if someone throws a cigarette and catches the whole mountain area on fire. which has happened more than once.