At Last! DirecTv Direct To The Trash

Neither broadcast TV nor traditional forms of highspeed internet reach out here where we live, and that's not going to change anytime soon. Just not enough population density to make it commercially viable.

15 - 20 years ago our only options were satellites for both TV for critical entertainment* and limited-bandwidth internet for equally critical connectivity. Two seperate things back then.

*For us the TV, or more accurately, screen-based escapism, is a critical mental health tool for winding our brains down at the end of the day.

Some time back I released this post about how we eventually dumped our satellite internet because it was no longer critical to our connectivity and they priced themselves out of our value-for-cost tolerance.

You might think that in this day and age not having an actual internet service at home would be a bit of an inconvenience. Well I released that post in June of 2025 after taking a time-out from social media while dealing with cancer, but I actually wrote it 2.5 years before that.

So that means we've done without a traditional internet connection for some 3.5 years now, relying solely on cell-data, and in The Wife’s case, since she has zombie-fingers which makes using the phone's touch-screen difficult, mobil hotspot over cell in conjuction with her laptop, for a connection to the outside world. All services that were already included with our cell plan, (just under $100 for two unlimited lines) and it has been no hardship at all.

Yes, the cell signal here on the part of the property where we live is not the greatest, about -115 to -110dB at 4G on the serving cell and no usable neighbor cell, and we have to use a cell booster to stay connected when inside the living quarters which are tucked into a corner of an all metal building. (our booster is too old to support 5G and boosters are expensive! So we haven't upgraded). Even with the booster, once in a while the signal isn't strong enough for a data connection for short periods.

When we do have data-strength signal inside, which is probably around 95% of the time, download speeds hover around 13Mb and upload at 1Mb.

Sounds pretty marginal in this day and age, but actually that's comparable to the speeds (real, not advertised) we got from our satellite internet anyway, when we weren’t bit-blocked by clouds that is.

And seriously, what do we need faster for? We're not runnimg a home business relying on connectivity speed for our financial survival, we're retired so there's nobody judging our digital productivity, we don't 'game', multiplayer or otherwise, so aren't trying to slam the bandwidth with fantasy pixels, or doing any of those other things that many people have been brainwashed into thinking they need higher speeds for.

We do do all our banking, bill paying, social media, research, browsing, shopping, video conferencing (for medical appointments), and streaming shows and movies just fine over our cell connection thank you very much!

And streaming brings us to the subject of this particular post.

Evening TV together has always been our winding down time. It’s how we give our brains a chance to re-center before trying to sleep. And our only options for viewing back when we first moved out here was DirecTv over satellite, or Netfix DVD. (Remember, even with the satellite internet connection we had limited total data allowance and couldn't stream more than one or two shows per month without having to buy more, rather expensive, bits. Besides, Netfix streaming didn't yet exist when we first settled here.)

We used that combination of the satellite TV and Netflix for many years. 

Since it was a 34 mile round trip to collect our mail (See here for when the mail delivery situation finally changed in late 2022.) we would pick up mail once a week, including the 3 netflix DVD's our 20 some dollar subscription allowed, usually on a Friday, then burn through the DVD's over the weekend so we could get them back in the mail (a drop box is only a 10 mile round trip away) in time for the next batch to reach us before the following weekend. And then watch stuff off DirecTv in between.

Initially this worked quite well. The turn-around time from Netflix was impressive and reliable, but towards the end of our relationship with Netflix the service level of both them and the USPS had degraded to the point where we were lucky to get 3 rounds of DVDs in our hands in a month, and only 2 wasn't unusual.

So a while back, before they stopped the service altogether, we severed our frustrating relationship with Netflix. Besides, by then we had burned through their dwindling supply of good stuff and the remaining choices were either re-runs or crap.

Now we were making do with DirecTv alone.

Not that that was much better.

For a long time now The Wife and I have generally found the offerings on American TV, network as well as so-called cable-stations, just too pedantic, purile, violent, dooms-dayish, psychologically punishing, or farcicaly fantacy-ish for us.

When we kick back in the evening to watch a show we want something conducive to - well, kicking back. Not something that's going to leave us bored, disgusted, discouraged (by the general state of mental decent into mediocrity),  or, both of us being on the spectrum and sensitive to situational and sensory stimulation, leaping out of our chairs with our minds rattled and bodies flooded with stress hormones.

What ever happened to the likes of Columbo and Murder She Wrote?

Anyway, by then we had enough cell connectivity here on the property (When we first moved here we could get a usable signal from an antenna on top of a water tower about 5 miles north of us, but only from the top of the east ridge, not down by the barn. Eventually a new tower was installed about 4 miles to the east and that signal is usually stong enough to reach down into the valley where our buildings are.) that we started experimenting with the Prime Video that comes with our Amazon prime subscription. (We earn more in discounts during the 15 or so annual trips we make to Whole Foods than the subscription costs, and that's before factoring in the 'free' shipping - and we do a lot of shipping with Amazon!)

Turns out streaming Prime over cell works pretty damn well! Open the Prime Video app on either one of our phones, select something to watch, and cast the phone's screen to the smart TV, which in our case, since we have no internet to actually plug into the TV and make it smart, is actually just a monitor for the phones and the DirecTv box.

The only drawback being the limited offerings. Turns out Prime Video isn't (at least wasn't.  It's  gotten better lately and currently accounts for almost 30% of what we watch) that much different than any other US based studio and for us, the pickins were slim. So, managed from one place through our Amazon account with simple click-to-add or cancel, we added subscriptions to Britbox and Acorn, all watched through the Prime app, which gave us access to shows from other countries which seem to have viewing, intelectual, and philosophical standards more in line with our preferences.

Back a few dwcades ago when I first started watching telenovelas for Spanish practice (with Spanish captioning on) I would sometimes forget to turn the captions off and now we have been watching everything with captions on for years. So moving on to shows in other languages was pretty seamless for us since virtually everything has English captioning available. (We've tried one or two shows that have been dubbed into English but prefer the characters talking in their own voices and language while we read the captions instead.)

After a while you start to get an ear for languages. Because they are related I can often follow bits of Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and even some French, and the Germanic/Nordic languages (Belgian is a mix of French and Germanic) are all related too with a similar sound and cadence.

Except for Finish. You would, I did anyway, expect Finish to be related to the Nordic languages but we recently started watching the Finish series Sunset Grove, and the language is completely different, tracing its roots back to the Uralic family of languages originating in Siberia some 4500 years ago. Which, BTW, even though you might think so, Rusian is not decended from a Uralic language but rather has Proto-Slavic origins. Go figure!

Anyway, all this streaming stuff had us taking a hard look at the value we were getting out of our quite expensive DirecTV subscription.

So we kinda eased into an experiment by adding subscriptions for Paramount+, through our Amazon account, and Hulu*, which is only available as a stand-alone subscription, to see how much we could wean ourselves off of DirecTv. Then, for shows we could still only get off of DirecTv, we researched and spreadsheeted other potential sources, many of which were surprisingly affordable.

*Side-bar. Hulu uses some sort of video encryption that is not compatable with casting to the smart TV. The only way to get Hulu from phone to TV is though a direct connection with a USB C to HDMI cable. (For some reason, if you tell the TV that it's a PC hooked to that port rather than a phone, you get a brighter, clearer image.) Only our identical Galaxy 32 phones don't output video on the USB C port, so we now own one Galaxy 32 and one Galaxy 25, which does output video on the USB C port. Seems counter intuitive that a device with a lower model number would have more features, but hey - they don't consult with me about shit like this.

The resulting spreadsheet confirmed what we suspected. In this day and age traditional cable/satellite TV subscritions are way over priced for the value they deliver! At least for us. Even adding a lot of various streaming subscriptions to make up the difference (I'll list what we currently have later.) we could still save over $2000 a year by getting rid of DirecTv! And without giving anything up along the way.

Of course DirecTv thinks they're exempt from any of the various "click-to-cancel" laws, so you actually have to call and talk to a live person to cancel their service. Not something either one of us are all that comfortable with. On top of that, this live person is actually a "customer retention specialist" that keeps flashing more and more "tempting" deals at you. (Why the fuck do you think I would want 6 free months of HBO?! All 10 chanels are crap, most of it old stuff either already seen or not interested in, and they keep repeating that same drivel over and over again.) And the fact that these "deals" aren't offered to loyal customers, only disatisfied ones on their way out, pisses me off even more!

With a sweaty ear, and getting hoarse from repeating 'not interested' over and over again, we finally made it to the end of the script, you know, the part where they grudgingly give in while make various threats about what will happen if we don't return the outdated equipment we've paid for many times over by the deadline they've given us.  On top of that, in a move that confounds all logic for a service industry, we were warned we wouldn't be allowed to resume service for 6 months. (BTW, the "We want you back" emails started up the week after we terminated the service - the lying bastards.)

Oddly enough, they only wanted us to return the three ancient, dumb-repeater boxes, one out in the main barn for when The Wife was using the stationary bike, one in her barn for when she was working on something out there, and one for Elmer's trailer when it was parked on the pad beside the barn. For some reason they didn't want this much newer, intelligent receiver/DVR box back. Now what the hell are we supposed to do with that?!

That all happened five months or so ago now and we have been happy with the decision, so I guess the two antennae on the roof are some sort of historical yard-art now, because I sure as hell am not climbing up there to take them down!

We have been happy with our current selection of subscriptions but are spreadsheeting our veiwing habits so we can spot any that are underutilized and can drop them. With Amazon Prime's click-to-subscribe/cancel it's easy to add/remove most of our subscriptions on the fly.

In a concession to the sometimes marginal cell signal, in order to avoid the occasional ten minute or so interuption while the cell tower resets, or whatever it's doing, we've learned to keep a handfull of fresh episodes of our current shows downloaded on our phones.

In addition to all that traditional veiwing stuff, when working on crafts in the living quarters The Wife likes to have something going on the TV. Not neccessarily to watch, but as a sudo-companion. With DirecTv she would pick one of the commercial-free channels, such as TCM and have it running with the sound muted.

To replace that feature we have loaded a couple thousand, and counting, personal and historical photos onto a stick which plugs into the TV's USB port and loops as a slideshow.

We also stumbled across window-swap.com, which is pretty cool. People upload 10 minute videos shot out their windows, both stationary and mobile, (We've traveled down a remote highway in Patagonia, navigated the congested streets of an English costal town, and careened on motorcycle down a mountain road, sometimes paved, sometimes not, in Costa Rica.) which then play slideshow-style, and The Wife has spent hours traveling all over the world peeking out people's windows.

Which brings us back to our current subscription list (All commercial free versions). Which, in decending order of cost, goes a little like this:

Hulu: At $19 our most expensive subscription and one we are keeping a close eye on, but where else are you going to get Only Murders In The Building, and HIP, the original French version of the show some American network has copied and called High Potencial? (High Potencial, just like PBS Masterpiece's show Patience, a study of a moderately autistic person navigating through the neuro-typical world, is a poorly done, watered down copy of the French original Astrid.)

Halmark+/Discovery+: This is a bundled subscription. We were after Discovery but do also enjoy some of Halmark's cozy-murder-mysteries so went ahead and grabbed the bundle

Paramount+: for some of the networky shows we watch

Prime Video: Although, factoring in the Whole Foods discounts and free shipping, this one is essencially free for us.

Britbox:

Acorn:

PBS Masterpiece: Not only do we get the movies/series you would see on your local PBS station, like Bookish and Inspector Ellis, but we also have access to the likes of, German, Italian, and French language shows, respectively Partners in Crime, Inspector Riccardo, and Panda, that have never aired here in the States.

Mhz: for loads of Nordic and Germanic shows like the original Walander (Swedish), Homicide Hills (German), and the somewhat dated but still fun Inspector Rex (Austrian).

PBS Passport: For the This Old House/Ask This Old House franchise, America Outdoors, and, among many others, the full catalog of Craft in America. Plus we can watch live-streams of all the scheduled shows on the local PBS station of our choice. (The Wife is pissed that growing up she didn't have access to all the educational opportunities of the PBS kids shows of today.  Somehow, compared to them, the Roadrunner just doesn't stack up as usefully educational!)

All but Hulu and PBS Passport are managed directly from our Amazon account.

Anyway, DirecTv is out, we are saving a bunch of money, and have access to way more than we could ever watch. Which is nice.

For instance, last night we watched the first episode of the Italian, Don Mateo, in part because it's billed as 'warm humor and clever mysteries'

and in part because Terence Hill (remember the My Name is Nobody spaghetti-westerns?) plays the main character. It was nice enough, but didn't really grab us so we took it out of our to-watch list because there's plenty of other choices out there.

Boy it's nice to get that DirecTv monkey off our backs!

We Lost Mom & Dad!

You know how it's pretty easy to find someone in a 137 acre cemetary, especially when you stood right there and put them into the ground?

Yeah, well, apparently we didn't get that memo - - -

After this year's family reunion campout I parked up in The Sister's driveway for a few days, where I was kicked back minding my own business when somebody - I don't remember now which one of us it was - piped up with the great(?) idea of going to visit

The Matter & Patter's grave since it's been two years since we were last there for a one-sided chin-wag.

So we loaded one of the cars with a few essentials, some garden tools, and ourselves, and headed off like we knew what we were doing - straight into rush-hour traffic! (who's running this cluster-fudge?)

After carving through the traffic like gladiators on a mission we got to the grandly named Oakland Hills Memorial Gardens, but here's where things went a little Monty Pythonish.

We collectively knew knew we needed to park alonside one of the tracks at the base of a hill, climb just over the crest of said hill, and find Mom & Dad on the other side.

We cruised on in, found the hill, clamored out of our chariot, grabbed an array of landscaping weaponry, and confidently set off uphill like a merry band of - well I don't know which band it was, but it was a band.

We crested the hill with purpose, paused when that purpose abandoned us as we looked around and said 'this doesn't look right', turned around, and headed back downhill. Only slightly deflated, we loaded everything, including ourselves, back into the car to try again.

OK, just so you know, this place is divided into 28 distinct " memorial gardens" and everyone of those is on top of a hill!

By the time we went up our third hill it was less of noble knights with implements held high picking their way gently around the reposing residents, and more of weary pilgrams dragging their goods behind and not carring who's head they stepped on.

Defeated again, we clumped back down like three of the 7 dwarves at the end of a long day in the mines. I won't say who was which, but Grumpy was involved and Happy - well, wasn't.

Though I suspect Mom was having a right old time watching us fumble around.

To this point one of us, again not naming names, (it might have been me - I mean Doppey) had been insisting the parental units were on the east side of the property on an east-facing slope looking down on the remains of an old service road.

Fed up with this nonsense one of The Sisters said bullshit, took charge, and lead us off in the other direction where we found our AWOL family members on the first try.

This time on the west side of the central lake, on the east slope of a hill looking down on the remains of an old service road where, as boys, Dad and our uncle - at the time a boy that lived a few houses down the lakeshore from Dad's - rode horses on summer afternoons. 

We did a little cleanup, some contemplating, and shared a few reminisces,

then decided, with or without the parents' permision, that after all that farting around we had each earned a Culver's vanilla, with raspberries and chocolate syrup, sundae before heading back to the house and going through a few of Mom’s old photo albums.

Christmas in a Black Print Dress

Among my many - well, let's call them quirks - I collect words.

Well, not words exactly, in fact, I was terrible at spelling and hopeless at Scrabble, and really don't like word games at all, prefering math games such as Killer Suduco and Cross Math.

So, more accurately, I collect words strung together to create memorable phrases.

I keep them, at first handwritten in a notebook, now in a digital archive, safeguarded for future perusal.

I've done this ever since I was in elementry school and first realized, in my own unformed brain, the profound effect of words strung together in powerful, evocative ways.

Some of these I don't need the archive to remind me of, at least sometimes (the memory is not infallible - hence the archived collection).

Like this one, arguably one of the better opening lines of a book:

I opened the door and the muggy dark rushed in like a pet that's supposed to stay outside at night. (Ed Gorman)

There's the relatable:

For me it’s not over untill someone cries and I apologize (Mark Maron)

I especially like when a whole discriptive passage is skillfully distilled down to a single, efficient yet rich and powerful, line:

You left the bathroom looking like the end of a long bus ride (Rod McKuen)

Or

It was the kind of heat where families begin to eye each other's throats (Robert Parker)

And there's the snatch-you-out-of-your-chair-and-dump-you-right-in-the-middle-of-the-scene:

In the low darkness of the alley the sole delineation of blood from the blackness was a certain vibration of the line where animal movement ended and the uneven bricks began (G.M. Ford)

And the gut-punchingly evocative:

As lonely as a midnight cigarette (Unknown)

And, of course, there's the profound:

Forget your perfect harmony - There's a crack in everything - That’s how the light gets in. (Leonard Cohen)

Usually I just collect these as reminders so I can continue to enjoy them, but in one case I couldn't resist doing a little more than that.

Apologies and credit to Rod McKuen who wrote The Christmas Cactus from which I stole the, within the context of the his poem, almost an incidental throwaway yet deliciously provocative, phrase that became the title of the following piece. (I missed the season with this one, but I thought I'd inflict release this rambling of mine from some time 30 - 35 years ago on y'all anyway)

Christmas in a Black Print Dress

You stand there
     between the apples and the pears
contemplating misted produce
     supple fingers selecting golden fruit
oblivious to what you really are

I stand here
     feeling the heat of sudden tears
the tugging of a crooked smile.
     My lonely quest for green salsa abandoned
I am transfixed, watching you from afar

You twist and move
     the line, the ripe swell, so sweet and smooth
Releasing dreams tangled in the dark
Those lush curves lighting lost possibilities
     awakening my dark heart with their sweet glow

You steal my breath, my knees,
     when your dress flirts in the breeze
Lifting in gentle silk caresses
      unveiling a tiny hint of truth beneath
Just hint enough to make my tainted blood flow.

Christmas in a black print dress
all wrapped up so neat and pretty.
A gift of promise in this tired ol’ city.
A beacon of hope to pierce this ol’ pity.
You are Christmas in a black print dress.

Government Efficiency in Action!

 Yesterday

Elmer - aka Robert -

received

a jury sumons.

OK, let's see here -

EXEMPTIONS 

(1) At 96 I have been over the age exemption for 21 years now.

DISQUALIFICATIONS

(3) Though I have spent 30 some years wintering on the Gulf Coast, I am not and never have been a resident of Texas, let alone this county.

(5) My moral character might be questionable, but no, I am no longer of sound mind.

(6) No, I can’t read or write anymore.

- - Oh, and by the way - I am fucking DEAD!

Any further correspondence should be sent to Jefferson Barracks, plot 8495, St. Louis, MO

ps. My wife is next door. Please don't tell her about the hot chick.

Pyro!

We, to put it mildly, are not fans of fireworks. 

And we especially have a low opinion of those brain-dead, inconsiderate, selfish, unthinking buffoons that spend a couple hundred dollars they couldn't afford anyway on things with garishly fanciful wrappers and puerile names like Black Widow, Ghost Shell, One Bad Granny, and Gorilla Warfare then turn around and set them off in suburban driveways with he-man fuck-the-neighbors bravado until they, or someone in the vicinity, become one of the 13,000 maimed or 15 dead crispy-critters of the season.

And that's not counting the number of pets that get lost and often killed because they panicked and ran out into traffic. And not just pets. I know of one place this year that had to put down several horses that panicked and irrevocably injured themselves.

And given the visual complexity, beauty, and artestry of drone-shows I think it's time we start questioning the validity and value of profesonal pyrotechnic displays too.

But - - -

Having just gone on that rant - this year when the fireworks store in a nearby town opened (permanent building open maybe 6 weeks a year and shuttered the rest of the time) - we were there.

The Wife had heard about a trick with an egg and a sparkler that she really wanted to try out.

To give y'all an idea of just how much we know about fireworks,

we picked out a small package of sparklers under a sign that said 15 for $10, I pulled out my card to pay, and the person rang me up for 85 cents! Turns out the sign meant 15 packages of 9 each for $10 not one packagr of 15 sparklers! (Don't ask my why 9 and not 10. Maybe it's an Asian cultural thing)

Anyway, at home we got all set up with a tin baking-pan on top of a metal plate left over from cutting out the windows for the cargo trailer, air-gapped on top of the wooden workbench by some painters-points (outside was out of the question, what with the risk of a grass-fire), and a fire extinguisher/fire blanket combo on syandby,

we shoved a sparkler through a raw egg, laid it across the baking pan, with kinked edges to discourage uncontrolled rollage, stood back, and lit the 'easy-lite' business end.

Interesting.

But now what the hell are we going to do with 8 leftover sparklers?!

Let's Lighten Up a Little!

 

OK, if you can't quite make sense of this I don't blame you.

I mean who the hell parks a trailer on its ass standing up against the side of a building!

Well, apparently I do.

But wait! Let me back up

to about 20 years ago.

That's when we bought this light-duty trailer off the lot of a Tractor Supply to use as our recycling trailer. (We bought the deck-boxes at about the same time. They've weathered and show a lot of wear, but are still functional, which is good because those damn things are expensive! The three of them together cost about as much as the trailer.)

Our county has a great recycling program, in fact other counties come check it out to see how it works, but the main collection center is a little over 20 miles away in the county seat. A place we don't visit very often.

We have this 'trash center', where we sort trash and the various recycling stuff (the recycling center requires your stuff to be sorted and placed in the proper bins) in the barn just outside our living quarters (when you live in a tiny space you do NOT want trash, especially kitchen trash, inside your living space with you!), but it fills up in faster than a trip to town every 6 to 8 weeks. So we periodicly empty these small bins into larger bins on the recycling trailer.

In fact it's clearly time to do that right now.

But first, back to the trailer.

This was a cheap-ass trailer that came with appropriately cheap-ass lights.

Incandecent bulbs with filaments that could only stand just so much banging and vibrating before they broke and needed replacing, and little spring-clip wire connections that are iffy to begin with and even more so since they were open to the weather and connstantly needing cleaning to restore conductivity.

We use the trailer infrequently so I put up with it - until I didn't anymore - - -

And bought a replacement kit.

A sealed, waterproof, LED kit that, if wired properly, will not require me to crawl under the trailer and jiggle wires everytime we hook it up.

Which brings us back to

this weird setup.

Cheap as it is, this trailer has a series of tubular raceways to manage and protect the wiring. But they are all on the bottom side so are damn close to the ground.

Rather than lay on my back and squirm into tight places when running the new wiring and hooking it up (After 20 years of exposure I thought it was prudent to replace the wiring as well as the lights. See, I do have my lucid moments!) I recruited The Wife and we tipped the trailer on end against the barn so I could do the majority of the work standing up.

First step was to climb the ladder and use the old harness, with connector clipped off, to pull the new harness through the tongue-tube

then split into left and right runs out to the side-markers then back down their respective sides to the rear lights. For a 4-way harness that's yellow & brown down the left side, green & brown down the right (assuming the trailer is down on the ground and you're looking at it from the rear.).

It was with great joy that I enthusiasticly removed the old, highly troublesome, markers, threw them, hard so they couldn't come back and haunt me, into the trash and mounted the new marker lights in their place.

While I was at it I ground down to fresh, clean metal to mount the ground wires with ring connectors and self-taping screws, using my trusty GB Ox-guard to ensure good, long-term, non-corroding  electrical connections, before further corrosion proofing with a coat of black Rustolium.

The combination tail/brake/side-marker lights were next, connected up with water-tight shrink-wrap butt-splices.

This trailer is low enough to the ground that those silly plastic license-plate holders that hang under the white light of the left tail-light assembly regularly get snapped off, so the plate is bolted verticly to the back of the left fender.

This does mean that there was no light on the plate. Since we have never pulled this trailer at night we've gotten away with that, but technicly - - -

So while I was at it I went ahead

and mounted a dedicated license-plate light to make us legal again.

None of this took all that long and the trailer was back on its feet before lunch-time.

Now when I hook up and run a light-test (the Ranger has an app for that!) I have a great deal of confidence that I'm not going to have to crawl around under there jiggling wires to get the damn things to work!

(It's the little things that make life easier.)

But now I'm not going to be able to ignore that 20 year old spare (the tires on the ground have been replaced due to age twice now). It holds air but the sidewalls are seriously checked, to the point where I hook up the air-hose and top it up from a distance in case it explodes!

We Use the Shit Out of Stuff!

 

This photo was taken in late 2015, or at least by mid-January 2016 when it was included in a post.

For context, which may not be easy for anyone that hasn't looked inside the rear doors of The Van as many hundreds, or maybe thousands, of times as I have, we're standing on the ground at the rear of The Van looking at what's inside the passenger-side door.

Starting from bottom left and going around clockwise, we have the inflatable kayak all bundled up in its grey carry-case, the large chamois I used as a bath-towel back then, a green flotation vest, a bicycle helmet, an EasyUp style canopy, and a folding camp chair. A chair I bought in 2010 to go with The then new Van.

The rest of these photos were taken this morning June 11 2026

This is the canopy (a different one) that is pretty much permanently sitting outside the barn under which I sit most mornings looking out across the valley and pond eating plain Greek yogurt (shit tastes terrible but ever since chemo screwed me up helps to keep the gut functioning) and checking emails after working out.

And this is what I'm sitting on.

Yep, same chair. Sitting out in the weather 24/7 for many years now.

A little faded, sinking well into the clay ground, and a bit worse for wear.

Especially as of a few days ago when the abused bottom layer of the two-layered seat portion split as I rocked forward to get up.

Since then that split has spread to the upper layer and I'm pretty much sitting more on the crossed steel supports underneath than on the seat-bottom now.

But I'll just have to make do for a little while longer because it will probably be next week some time before we make a run into town where I can replace it.

It's been a long-time companion and I'll feel a twinge when 'retiring' it. (Edit June 25: I guess not. It went out with the trash yesterday morning.)

Along side that chair is this little folding table I made for Elmer many, many years ago so he would have a place for his coffee and cigarettes when sitting outside his trailer.

Once he was no longer using it I commandeered it for myself.

A little more grey is showing through the green-wash than when it was new, but it's showing no signs of splitting yet.

Wonder if I can find another green chair? (Edit June 25:  Nope, the new one is dusty blue. Not a lot of choice in our small town so you take whatcha can get.)