14 September 2021
Last night was The Night of the Coyote. I fell asleep late, past midnight. I’d spent the evening immersed in much research (much much research) to hunt down the manufacturing location of a Dell monitor for the work-station that I’m putting together for my creative endeavours, including the Westerns.
Of course, the Dell website contained no “Country of Origin” info in the voluminous specs. A definite sign that the thing sure wasn’t made in America. That particular would have been trumpeted and yippee aye oh’d, yippee ki-yay’d — all over the website.
Scouring about 100 product reviews, rummaging through consumer info sites, and micro-examining pix on e-Bay brought me to only one conclusion: The Odious 5-letter Proper Noun that shall not be typed on this Apple Page.
My consumer boycott list would also include Southern CA and the Bay Area, except those s-hole regions do not manufacture much, except crime, medieval diseases, and phony votes. Those two population centers need more and more cash from outside of CA to try to survive their own botched suicides. Those urban sprawls are on my exclusive No-Travel list; their No-Go Zones expand as I type this essay in a very distant and safe place.
Despite the moral mandate of my non-Xi list, I purchased the computer screen manufactured in that commie-country by Dell, an American company, instead of a very comparable one by Samsung, a South Korean brand. That multi-national has supposedly recently switched its production from There to Vietnam, but product reviews were patchy; they also indicated the merchandise was still a commie-export.
You really do not know the full and undeniable truth, horrid as it may be, until you get The Box at your front door.
With some disappointment, I yielded to the practicalities of reality. I do confess that Dell’s fashionista promo pic got to me for the 27-inch Monitor. That seamstress poised in front of her screen is a marvelous selling ploy to a designing woman like myself.
I ordered this digital screen, straight from the Foreign Factory, with a profound sense of disappointment, but I’d done my best to buy ethically. The CEOs were the villains in this tale of retail treachery.
I slept like a log until 5:50 a.m. At that instant, Chance the Beagle bolted to an upright position at the end of the bed. With a rebel cry, he catapulted his body over the footboard, almost leaping into the doorway as he let out another baying shriek of canine torment. My bleary eyes followed Dear Husband trailing after the tricolored pooch in the semi-darkness; and then I tucked my head under the blanket. The baying of my hound was joined by the barking of half a dozen other dogs in the countryside around my house. I eventually fell back to sleep.
It was almost eleven of the clock when I woke up this morning. I queried Dear Husband about that sudden and loud eruption of the howls before sunrise. Hubby is in charge of the dawn hound patrol. He’s also in charge of the graveyard shift hound patrol. This division of labor has been ongoing for years and, after last night, it isn’t likely to change soon, or easily.
According to the Hound Patroller, last night there was a pack of prowling coyotes adjacent to our property. All of the dogs in this neighborhood of woods and meadows, about 60 acres, were on high-alert because of those predatory animals.
I questioned Mr. Milligan about the sounds those critters make. He described them as high-pitched yips, with a short cadence and a tinny timbre.
It was evidently feeding time for these carnivores who wanted to signal one another and gloat about their hunting prowess. They’d killed some of a large flock of wild turkeys that had recently tromped through these parcels of land. There must have been at least fifty of those game birds on my property, just this past week. Last winter, some wild turkeys had scampered on the roof of our new house, with thumping sounds that we’d initially misperceived as sugar pine cones dropping from the trees.
During the earliest morning hours today, those wild creatures were still yowling and taunting the domesticated canines who then formed a circular barking chain, all around the forested pastures of my town. The turkey drop this season was accomplished by those coyotes.
Since I know very little about this type of canid, I decided to conduct some research into the subject, for personal and professional reasons. I found the following information in my non-politically correct Encyclopedia Britannica, published n 1959:
“A North American member of the dog family, also known as the prairie wolf, Canis latrans. Ranging from Alaska in the north to Guatemala in the south and frequenting almost every kind of country, especially the plains, the coyote is smaller than the wolf and more jackal-like. The length is about 36 inches, the tail being 12-15 inches; the general colour grizzled buffy above, and whitish below; the legs ochraceous; the tail having a black tip and a dark gland-patch near the root. There is, however, considerable local variation in size and colour.
Coyotes are slinking and stealthy creatures. They live in burrows in the plains and hunt at night; hares, chipmunks and mice form a large portion of their food; but also the fawns of deer and prongbuck, sage hens and other game birds.”
TURKEY????
“A surprising amount of vegetable food is also taken, fruit of prickly pear cactus, rose hips and juniper berries. They dig burrows for themselves, usually on a slope, or take possession of those already made by badgers and prairie dogs. There in the spring, the half-dozen or more coyote pups are brought forth.
The yapping cry of the coyote is one of the most characteristic notes of the West.”
Those notes of the West might still be ringing in the ears of the four-legged domesticated friends who, along with their humans, did not sleep much last night. Poor Chancey Boy slept most of this day. Which means he will be ready to spring into action tonight, if those nocturnal sneaks are at it again — partying hardy and hungry with wild turkey in their favorite habitat, our wooded grasslands and open woodland. Every three acres, there’s a house with people in it, interrupting those calls of the wild.
Dear Hubby tells me that those ornery mammals devour everything. Not even a wishbone is left from the scrawny poultry. And coyotes are scavengers. The California ones move on to their next meal whenever the unsuspecting victims present themselves.
As for me, this Thanksgiving, I’m hoping to have a lot more than a mere wishbone.
“Gobble?”
27 September Monitor Update
My Dell monitor directly from Dell has experienced delays in shipping.
I’ve been informed of at least a month-long delay, and have been kept waiting, waiting, and waiting. They are still building it — Someplace Over There.
Well, I did say sometime in 2011, “Dell can go to hell.”
It looks like they’re there now.
I typically never go BACK to anything, and my decision to buy a Dell monitor did go against that ingrained grain. But sometimes rules are made to broken, at least the rules that hold you back.
Evidently, those iron-clad rules, aka supply-line contracts, are holding Dell back, or their customers back. When I cancelled my order at Dell, I felt very pleased, overjoyed, in fact, and tickled pink to click on the perfectly precise and true Pull-down-bar Reason — one motivation that I’ve never seen offered to me in an online setting:
I DON’T WANT TO WAIT THAT LONG.
Well, Dell, what hasn’t been held up by the hellacious container ship fiasco in Southern California? What products did I not have to wait that long for??
Certainly not my paper refills for my gorgeous leather journal from the Colonel, Colonel Littleton. That Great American Leather Company is located in Tennessee.
And not my wedding anniversary gift, the Mata Ortiz Vase, crafted by artist Roberto Banuelos in that tiny town in northern Mexico. That art object arrived quickly from La Fuente Imports in Colorado Springs.
My beautifully embroidered top from my friend Paolo in Puebla, Mexico arrived at my front door less than 2 days from the minute of my online purchase. Special 2-day air delivery for a special customer of Amor Puro!
It seems to me that the supply lines in Made in North America are flowing just fine. But the globalist-greed pathways are all plugged up. Those containers of crap-r-us are floating out there in the Pacific, harboring COVID, plastic, rust, Q3 and Q4 losses, illness, ill-will.
What goes around has come around this time, in less than a year! The crook-made disasters just keep piling up!
A Dell monitor on that jungle-selling platform might be my next buying option. This piece is the last one of the digital puzzle of a new workspace to actualize in front of my eyes, but it was the first item ordered.
From www.owc.com, Other World Computing, in Illinois, was able to speed-ship My MacBookPro of yore. That’s the 2014 model with the simply wonnnnnderful keyboard, and I cannot restrain my Muse, and my fingers, from typing sheer magic and utter brilliance in essay form!
Yes, oh yes, oh yes! My beloved first Mac has returned to my life. It’s been re-built with a faster processor and bigger memory, and larger storage. The laptop, that is, not my life. Although I am feeling very "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" of late.
Winning always feels that way for me! The night of the coyote is letting my inner wolf howl with joy.
My hunt for a monitor is less of a howl and more of a yelp. I finally pulled the trigger of limited choice on an HP. Hewlett Packard, the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley, is technically defunct. This multi-national got parted out, and corporately split in 2015. The personal computer (and printer) components form HP, Inc.
(Do you not find it interesting that the acronym PC can mean either “personal computer” or “political correctness"?)
My HP monitor is on its way — today — from a 3rd-party computer shop. The model is a year old, so it’s less tainted morally than a spanking brand-new covid-commie assembly of artificial intelligence.
The millions of people in those provinces over there have got to rise up and do something about the death grip of their fat generals on their lives. I am speaking of an Asian nation, not my own.
An HP product is making a return to my life, but I never cast the fate of that company to a netherworld. It appears that revolutionary American corporation created its own karma. Sometimes, intelligence, common sense, and a moral sense do not intersect or even co-exist.
30 September 2021
The Night is Over
The coyotes have finally vacated the nocturnal arena of my house. And my HP, Inc. screen monitor has arrived: cracked and undersized.
I had decided that the Vizio wide-screen TV, purchased in 2012, shall work just fine for my creative needs. It was made in 2011, when the world was a much happier place. I personally was chomping at the bit that year to move to a new house, but I told myself:
All things in time!
I’ve got the New House! Who cares about a spanking brand-new digital device? The Latest is not always the Greatest. In fact, in reality, it’s not even good.
From the shelf in the Storage Closet, I’ve pulled out the TV Quilt. That beautifully decorative functionality was used on the CRT Zenith relic in the family room of The Peach House. (The Zenith is long gone from my life.) The fuchsia fabric is a much-loved part of that textile design, sewn sometime in the mid-1990s.
The pattern is called Jacob’s Ladder. Jacob had been sent away from the Promised Land, known as Canaan, by his mother, Rebekah, to protect him from his brother Esau, who planned to kill him.
The motive? Envy. Revenge over the blessing that brother Jacob, and not Esau, received from their father, Isaac. Those vulgar desires never get old.
While in flight, Jacob came to a “certain place” where he reposed during the setting of the sun, or crépuscule. He dreamed of a magnificent ladder, set up on earth, reaching up to Heaven. Angels were traveling up and down that ladder, journeying to earth and back to Heaven. Jacob then received a vision of the Lord, and His message of affirmation, prophecy, and promise.
As a child, I first learned about this Bible story, in church, through singing the Negro spiritual called “Jacob’s Ladder”. It was a simple resonant a cappella version. My auditory memories of it, to this day, are sublimely moving.
It’s best to remember those songs of old-time religion. And it’s best to think of those lyrics in terms of the transcendent history of our nation. Those musical words inform us of the irreplaceable relics of the real past, not the disposable dreck of the digitized version.
It’s also best to have a relic device, or two, in storage. The inventory of vintage electronics — FOR SALE — must be the latest Wave of the Future, coming at us, directly from the past.
I believe I’ve written about these artistic themes in life, many times, on this website. To the point where I’ve thought they’d become hackneyed, and no longer relevant.
The pristine desire that drives my flying fingers at the moment — is to return to the year 1888!
That night was over aeons ago, but it’s really just about to begin!
Now that the Vizio wide-screen has been set up, we’ve realized that this device is strictly for watching a movie, such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It is already believed that I’m half-pixelated. Dear Husband does not wish for me to become completely pixelated!!
The dreaded trip to Costco to see Whatever They Have looms before me. The prospect of being pixelated has just regained some appeal, but, decades ago, I determined that eye-strain is not worth any job. Calling in on Friday to spare the blue eyes permitted me to process many words until the Blu-Ray era.
Wearing Ray-bans helped too!
22 January 2022
Mission Accomplished
This task only took a few months to complete. The guys at BestBuy had the best buy on an LG, Life is Good, monitor, assembled in Mexico.
Writing my first Western took less time!
I will confess that I did not use this wide-screen at all for composing SHADOW. I input written notes into the digital files for future novels on this device, but all of this staging has been largely so that I can organize my work space; and then move on to other projects.
A new, smaller quilt was needed for this smaller wide-screen. I instantly chose the Turkey Tracks quilt, sewn in early 1996. Somehow, those turkeys from this past autumn needed a fitting tribute.