late at night and i've finally finished my blog report which wraps up the numbers of visitors on blogs like this one. this is the king of my blogs; it got over eight thousand last month, and has over four hundred thousand total visitors in history. why? no idea really. i just blab here, say whatever i want, don't even put caps on anything, ramble about my various travels. i make a point of not worrying about grammar or organization though my keyboard is doing some pesky period-drop these days and i am rooting those out...mostly i don't put much up here, i think people visit because it has a cool name and draws a lot of google traffic. out there?...yeah people have a thing with out there, it has a place in our brains. this is one famous blog that glorifies out there...

thank god it's feb, i was getting sick of jan. jan is a death month, too long, too cold, too dark, but at least i lived through it. i don't care what happens to the groundhog, only hope for the usual - eventually spring will come and take over. i've gone to iowa and to brimfield, repeatedly in some cases, but i'll say one thing for illinois, you get out on those interstates, and the farm fields go back into the horizon, and make you feel like there's lots of fresh air out there. in fact it's kind of windy, bleak, snowy, and miserable, with lots of pesticide dumped out there, so even spoon is not fit to drink, better go home and have cadillac water.

which we pay dearly for.

it's been a long cold january and it doesn't seem to be going away - today was sunny and fifteen and seemed balmy, but every time i look at the ten-day forecast it never has us going over freezing, and i find that depressing. when i first moved out here they had something called the january thaw, which came at the end of january or late january, and maybe today was it. but it just seemed too cold to me. i haven't gone for a walk in a long time.

january is the month both my parents died, and i've been in a kind of mourning funk. but the threats to people i know are very active. my wife's father is almost ninety, or ninety, and no sooner did he tell her he was doing fine, walking every day, than he ended up in the hospital with something serious. everything is serious when you are ninety or pushing ninety.

The second was an ex, my daughter's mother, who fell and broke her hip; my daughter reported that she was coming up from kansas to iowa (6 1/2 hrs) to deal with it. it seemed to me that i could give her moral support since i'm less than two hours from iowa city and i offered to come up. but when push came to shove i couldn't do it. too many tangled feelings about what happened between us and unwillingness to dredge them up when she's injured and in a hospital bed.

the whole thing left me with a very stressful feeling as if i'll be watching people go steadily downhill from here which is probably an accurate way of looking at life when you're seventy-one. these are just folks older than me - what do you expect? some even in my generation.

i get a peculiar obsession with people who are exactly my age, like annie lamott or that leader of van halen, david lee roth, who just announced one more tour after he'd already retired at least once. one more tour? and he's playing graceland...i guess you've made it, if you're playing graceland. i can only imagine what his band looks like, and how he feels running out on stage in a body like mine, he must be broke, if i were him i'd kick back and enjoy those millions but my guess is, most of 'em are gone. that's the way money is and it gets more that way when you develop habits of spending it.
br> so my kids and relatives are giving me side-eye wondering if i'm going to go next.

i'm the same 220 pounds i've been for about forty years, but i'm getting a lot less exercise because of the cold. i need to get back on my feet. four cups of coffee a day isn't helping me though i enjoy it more than you can possibly imagine. and today i cleared the snow off the solar panels on the roof. it involved a ladder, many times, and using my arms, but not much danger. i was only on the fourth rung. and my balance is ok, overall.

time to do my nighttime runaround. take meds out, pick up a kid, do some shopping, etc.

that and reading is what i do to keep from just lying down and not getting back up.

i've told this story a couple times but haven't had much luck getting people to understand why i'm so paranoid about empty fuel tanks and very cold winters.

one winter i lived above the deli in mt. vernon iowa as i worked and went to school. i had an old pontiac and on weekends i'd take it to iowa city, pick up my daughter who was about three, and bring her back to mt. vernon to be with me. it was on one of those trips she said to me, "daddy, this car's all crashed up, you need a new car." she'd taken it upon herself to improve my life along with her mother's.

but i was so out of money, i let the gas tank get down to empty, and it froze. when i talked to my friends about it they said, wait 'til spring, or, get. a long extension cord, a hair dryer, and a piece of cardboard to lay on as you slide yourself under the car (in 0 degree weather).

I could borrow the hair dryer, but would have to buy the cord and that would require a special trip to someplace that was a long way to walk. but the biggest problem was that the deli itself opened out into the parking lot, which meant that if i ran that extension cord into where i could plug it in, it would be right in the deli and i'd have to leave that back door ajar while i did my car repair.

the people who ran the deli, and rented the apartment to me, were very nice, but they had made it clear that they ran a business there and i was not to make such a scene as some college kids might make on general principle. in other words i'd promised them i'd be good, wouldn't yell and scream on weekends, etc. i never even asked them about the extension cord; i just waited until spring.

in iowa that meant something like january to late march when things thawed out and stayed thawed out. in that three month period on weekends i'd hitchhike to iowa city, pick up my daughter and put her on the bus back, spend the. weekend, then take the bus back to iowa city, and hitchhike home on sunday night. i assured everyone i wouldn't hitchhike with my daughter.

finally things thawed. what i really needed was money so that when i got to the gas station, i could put gas in the tank. this i did, eventually. it was a long winter.

been working on a new esl site, a place where I can link to my work and to what could become a new novel, as soon as i get organized. lots of links will come from here. Lots of links will go directly here. it's an old backwater but has a good url and a completely ESL perspective which will help me remember my career with a good clear glass.

my first step was to put squares on it, but the sharp observer will notice that the squares are the same as the ones on my professional site, and that's because they go places that are vaguely related to my teaching or esl in general. i have squares here and also at my grill site.

another truck accident happened near scattergood; this time a single truck flipped and burned, at mile marker 257, best i can figure, just east of where delta road crosses i-80. several developments here. i am still tracking down whether the comments of someone i met at scattergood in the eighties is relevant. they said, basically, that ancestors of nixon and hemingway resided in the cemetery; that because of the cemetery, they had move i-80 over; because they had to move it, they had to put a curve in it and run it on a hill; and that it could be the only curve in the interstate in the whole state of iowa. now my guess is that curve is just east of delta road, but stare as i do, i can't pinpoint it exactly. another commenter pointed out that the wind hits the road at a different angle right there, whereas in the entire rest of the interstate the wind comes right at you, right there it doesn't. so it's really a matter of what you get used to and whether you feel like you can keep going 70 on an icy interstate when you have no evidence that the road will ever turn or curve. now in the "mass casualty event" of about december 12, right before my surgery, there were accidents in a six-mile stretch on both sides of the road, somewhere east of west branch, and i never was able to place exactly where. but i'm getting the distinct impression this isn't just an only-one-time thing. fortunately nobody has died that i know of. but commenters did say that west branch was kind of like the befmuda triangle of i-80.

it's very cold here, and the snow blows around a lot, and even lands sometimes but doesn't seem to stick much or make solid ice to confound us on the galesburg streets. i, still being sick and all, get steadily more militantly against any driving at all, out there at night, after ten or before it. just getting tired of it. i want to stay home like an old fuddy-duddy, car in the garage, all things locked, sleeping in at every opportunity.

today i'm depressed because i did a bad thing to our one main car. i somehow failed to shut it completely after changing the battery; perhaps a battery holder prevented it from shutting completely (i'm referring to the hood). while driving the hood flew up and smashed up against the front windshield, fortunately not breaking it, but damaging the hood itself.

i lost most of a night of sleep cursing myself and wondering if the damage could be more severe than it appeared. the car had been giving me the creeps because of the appearance of electrical issues, and this was bad on that night when none of the four windows would open, though that appeared to be more because of frozen rain which did after all melt after it had run for a while. by the time i got home three our of four opened, enough to convince me that it wasn't an electrical problem, and that the car was otherwise running fine, though there were still somewhat random signals of electrical issues. don't know why a car would do random electrical blips for no apparent reason, like some fuse is coming loose.

the whole thing has left me somewhat damaged. what am i some kind of idiot? i can't relive it and "do over." it happened, now rest and let the morning sun come through the window.

two boys were fired over the last week, in unrelated situations and places, so leaving me the feeling that it was directly related to my incompetence or perhaps my adhd which i'm sure i freely contributed to them. there is nothing for it, for me, except to be here and watch as they work it out, as they have families and people depending on them. they'll have to find something and all my efforts to help will just kind of make them feel worse, besides what do i know about trying to make it in los angeles or portland. in my family we were talking about back-to-the-land, subsistance farming and my sister mentioned a place called drain oregon where they had something going. all i could think of was east jesus, a desert subsistence community out near the salton sea. move your family to one of those? i'd say, all options are on the table. i send them my prayers.

meanwhile another cold spell is coming here. my wife won't even go out in it though she'll do some minimal exercise for her dog who doesn't seem to ever get enough. way too cold for her. and getting worse.

went up to iowa to get my second cochlear implant turned on (story here), and people had no idea what i was talking about when i mentioned the "mass casualty event" of three and a half weeks earlier when cars and trucks smashed each other all apparently outside of, or not far from, scattergood school. this hopefully meant the school was not intimately involved with any of the wreckage or survivors (everyone survived though 20 ended up hospitalized), which was good. nobody in the state knew what i was talking about, it's all distant history to them.

back up, rest, take care of our own. days are getting longer, and we will get out of this, to the point where spring will arrive, and we'll see flowers.

just finished an interesting book, You and I Together, which deals with reincarnation. in brief, two souls keep reappearing together, as man and woman, in love but separated violently and dramatically, repeatedly. Finally in this current life they find each other. The psychologist is vexed; he's spent a lifetime convincing people that "regression therapy" is good for dealing with your own subconscious, not your past lives. But he too has to admit that it appears to be real.

the book was a page-turner, and that's why i went through it so quickly, but it left me with lots of questions. for the record i believe in reincarnation, and i'll also buy the theory that the five or six people we deal with most closely in this life, have been with us in different forms in other lives. we could recognize each other, if we weren't programmed not to. we could unravel a tangled web of relationships, but we have conveniently forgotten everything about the previous one.

which brings me to the first question: is it possible that there are people out there who don't forget everything about the previous one? who can, for some reason, remember all the details of a house they've never set foot in? who can identify, in another person, someone who they have known "forever?" I think it's at least possible though i won't get sidetracked into proving it, or trying.

but then, why would life make you a woman every single time, and make the same frustrating and deeply wounding experience, time after time, with the same guy? that, it seems to me, is not how it works. or, it hits you six times, separating man and woman, then voila lets you be together and have love win. that also, is not how it works. not in my opinion. it seems to me it would only come out ok if you did something karmically regenerating in the next-to-last life, and also, the only reason you would have gotten punished or tortured so severely in five lives in a row would be something very karmic, very demonstrable, something with a reason for it.

i like the idea that love can carry over from one era's circumstances to another, so that, basically, the two people have the same connection, an enduring one. damaged yes but still there. five stars for all "love wins" books. as jimi hendrix says, meet you in the next life, don't be late.

pouring down rain here. it's landing on piles of unraked leaves, muddy paths, places where the dog's been digging. it's gray, cold, wet, dismal. i'm glad to be inside, dry and warm. may i stay that way.

at one point the older of the two girls asked me what kind of new year traditions we had. i stumbled. our last two or three kids were disrespectful to our traditions to the point that we gave up trying to instill a strong sense of family tradition by doing things together. in the old days, we'd watch back to the future, all three of them, or just one or two, or whatever. and we threw in a bunch of clint eastwood and good bad & ugly, just so we'd be all movied up during the cold season. but these days i don't even want to sit by a movie. i might get one out for them, or find it, but i was eager to go back upstairs and do my writing projects.

some cultures have a tradition that making a lot of noise is good luck. lots of the traditions come to what they think is good luck: jumping from a chair, not eating chicken, etc. if so we'll be very lucky. having a nine-year-old and eight-year-old in the house has made a lot of shrieking, running, shouting, that kind of thing. and i actually like it, as long as it's innocent, which most of the time, it is. kids are cooped up, indoors. it's been a long winter, already. they have lots of energy and we'll be glad when school takes them off our hands.

it reminds me that, really, we have a clean slate. they are supposed to be with us only five months or less. nevertheless i strongly suspect that we'll see them a lot if not just keep them our last hard ten years of life while we go steadily downhill and become less mobile, less able to get around. we're already wearing out. social services can see that. yet these kids need stability and hopefully to stay in galesburg to give their dad time to be ready for them. they need to set him up and ensure he stays away from their mom who is apparently all that bad stuff.

my point is, they're kids. they're innocent. they don't know from a new-year tradition and if i give them one, they'll keep it and always have something. they are already truly loving the stability, the good cooking, the dad who is gentle but somewhat deaf - and of course they adore the dogs who seem willing to take infinite abuse just for the ability to hang around them and absorb their boundless energy. it seems good all around. the house is alive again.

toward the end of raising our adopted kids, last of ten, we got tired. they absolutely couldn't tolerate school in a way that none of our biological kids had experienced. it was either that, or it was so well worth it to us to pretend that way that that became their entire life, and they won: we let them drop out. all three of them. it was kind of over my dead body but there wasn't much i could do. i couldn't make them go to school, and couldn't set up homeschooling myself without support. i let it happen. in the dead silence aftermath i think all are sorry they didn't finish. they'll have a lifetime of explaining why they just couldn't make it through high school and all their explanations will sound hollow after a few years given the fact that they could have made it through school, except possibly the youngest one, but just didn't. they have no one to blame but themselves. and now we have to stand here biting our tongues and hoping they make it anyway. they might. it will be a miracle if they find actual jobs. but it can be done.

with these younger ones, i'm afraid our benevolent spoiling might ruin them, too, if we carry on long enough. after all it's only a matter of time before school becomes a chore and in our kids' case it's their only chore. if they beat us, they cruise. and we're easy. that's my hostility speaking. deep down i don't think we did the older ones any favor.

we have a seventeen-year-old, their older brother, who is very casual about school. in the last week he only actually went two days out of five, and whether the ride was impossible given his staying with his girlfriend, or not, didn't matter, because he just wasn't there. he is having trouble with motivation at this late stage of the game; he only has to finish two classes in his senior year but just getting there is an issue. it's obvious that having everyone: me, my wife, the social worker, his birth mother and father, and his girlfriend, all pressuring him, isn't working. the more pressure, the harder it is for him to just finish. we try to make it clear to him that being so poor in the attendance department is a red flag for the social worker and that she may have to move him to some place with better security, or at least a better track record for getting their kids to school. we tell her, if he's not home, we can't get him to school, and if he doesn't come home, there isn't much we can do about it. it's agony watching a kid go through what our kids did, knowing full well the sentence of years of explaining why you just couldn't make it looms over you, thus it could be the most important choice he makes. he's pretty good about going to work. he's not a behavior problem.

but i have doubts how long that social worker can watch him slowly drop out more and more, to the point that, well, he's 17, and he's her responsibility, and she could put him some place that actually makes sure he gets to school. away from the girlfriend of course. hoping he doesn't just run away, come back around, refuse to attend altogether. all of which could happen.

so i watch the moods of my wife and the social worker, wondering at which point they'll just say "enough."

lots of friends and family members. are critical that we could let our three just drop out as they did, ruining their own lives, etc. everybody has their own line before they cave in, give up, and say, ok if it's that torturous, you can't go, absolutely can't, then you can't. you win. you stay home.

i know our own line is pretty high, and we didn't want to do that to any of them, let them drop out. if what they were doing was acting, it was pretty slick. they were in deep pain. it'll take a few years before any of them can even revisit it.

with that kind of trauma behind us, it's hard to believe we'd take on an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old, but yes, it's time to start over, and make sure at least these two follow through and finish what they've started. so far, not so hard. galesburg schools aren't that impossible for a kid to do.

Happy New Year!

life goes by so quickly - so another year has gone by. we have a new family now, two girls, nine and eight. i will document. in fact i've started below, sticking to a tradition, not always adhered to, to catch up to the family over the holidays. no christmas card this year; this is the closest. to it.

had surgery dec. 15, my ear still hurts, i'm only hearing out of the remaining one, and then only when the battery is charged. but i'm beginning to like the silence and the crickets - late at night, when the battery is taken off - at that point i have what is called "residual" hearing or about 1% in each ear and that's it. silence. it's a little risky to drive with it but i've tried it - mostly because the one battery dies at inopportune times.

will get the whole family picture on this blog a s a p. if that's a resolution it's one i might keep. i have writing projects too - more about them later. now i'm enjoying the freedom to choose what i'll work on.

peace and prosperity - the spiritual kind - to you in the new year.