Morning to you

The comment by csfb on the Papillon entry pricked my memory when I was wondering what I would read next.  Songlines, by Bruce Chatwick came to hand from the bookshelf.  My copy's a library discard in middling good shape except for half the front cover being carefully cut off by someone before I got it.

I've read the tome several times through the years and each time enjoyed it.  I won't say each time it's something new, so much as a reminder of glowing moments of the last read.

Chatwick's work is anecdotal non-fiction.  It's the story of network grid of songlines defining Australia before the Europeans arrived, and his attempts to learn what remains of them from the aboriginals who still remembered some as late as the 1960s.

Aboriginal traditions seem a bit unique regarding all this.  The ancients, wandering the land sang every landscape feature into existence, creating a gridwork of maplike, deeply sacred records of the landscape in songpaths.  Features, everything not yet showing themselves, they sang into the underground to lie dormant waiting for someone to sing them to the surface.

Sort of brings to mind a lot of things in my consciousness and thoughts these days involving numbers and time, but it's also proving to be a source of a lot of sideline thinking about some lost aboriginal thinking within the US.

As for Ultra Edit, I'm five days from expiration of the trial period.  If I don't renew it will become just so much stored clutter doing nothing on my drive.

That is one fine piece of software.  The person on one of the threads who recommended it declared it was the best software investment he'd ever made, and I believe I'd have to agree.

I'm going to miss it, but unless I break through into being somewhere I'm not yet with the numbers I'll have to put off purchasing it.

I've got the wall broken out in the bathroom shower to expose the plumbing there and a lot of stopgap measures in place to keep water coming to the rest of the house, but I'm going to have to do something soon about a lot of crystalized hardware still inside the adobe wall. 

Every move I've made thus far, everything I've touched in the repair saga has caused some other ancient copper or brass horror to crumble upstream.  I'm lucky to have been able to shut things down enough to keep water to the kitchen, the bathroom sink and the commode.  But it's complicated the process of bathing..... doing that and my laundry wash in basins on the floor of the tub, which is a blessing to be able to do, but not as happy a blessing as being able to shower.

My old buddy Jerry Sires wrote a song once called, Labor Day Pump Lowering Blues. 

"There wasn't ever any doubt I's going to lower that pump myself,

And keep that several hundred dollars

Not give it to someone else (Bad newwwwwwws Mike wails in the background)"

So Ultra Edit's going to have to wait in line behind a lot of other things, including firewood that's going to be needed, filling up some gas bottles to keep the front of the house warmer in a month or so, plugging some leaks the recent hailstorms knocked in the roof, catfood and groceries and skyrocketing-priced gasoline-gold to get me down off the mountain occasionally.

Unless, of course, the great computer in the sky slips a final piece or two into place and gives me a way to understand precisely the relationship between bonus balls and all those other numbers.

Great day to youse

J