Good dog!

Ramona the Pest has been a Very Good Girl lately. We’ve walked or jogged together almost every day since this semi-quarantine began, and now she’s learning to work off-lead. 

Getting a dog to work without a leash is challenging, because the handler has to trust and respect the dog enough to relinquish control of its movements, and the dog has to trust and respect the handler enough to listen and follow directions instead of running off and getting into mischief.

Some dogs are better suited for this than others. Under the wrong circumstances, an off-lead excursion can turn an asset into a liability or amplify a personality quirk into a real hazard.

Ramona is a bit scatterbrained when she’s excited, and walks are Very Exciting, so I start our lessons by walking or running several blocks down the alley with her on a loose lead. 

Once she’s settled down enough to focus, I drop the leash and let her drag it, paying close attention to our surroundings so I can run interference quickly if I see trouble brewing. I like working her in alleys, because they present plenty of distractions but few real hazards, and they’re narrow enough that I can catch up to her quickly if she tries to bolt. 

We had a great training session the other night. She did very well at heel, sit, and stay, remained polite while visiting her friend Bruce and his housemate (who was less polite), and even did a little modeling next to some breezeblock walls:

I’m pretty sure she knows how cute she is.

“I was told by Applecare that there would be treats.” — Ramona, probably

I wish I spoke dog. I’d love to know what he was saying. (Probably some variant of “You damn kids get off my lawn!”)

My long-term goal is to be able to take her on long runs off-lead, because handling the leash siphons off a little more energy than I’d like — no big deal for a 5K, but unpleasant at half-marathon distances and beyond. We’ll see how it goes.

Emily

Lotion bars

As a beekeeper, I tend to have a lot of beeswax on hand. Every time I harvest honey, I render the cappings, but I rarely get around to using them for anything.

Last fall, I used some of my surplus beeswax to make a batch of mini lotion bars to hand out to my colleagues at school. I ended up with way more than I needed, so I stored the leftovers in the freezer. They’ve been a godsend since we started washing our hands approximately nine million times a day to ward off coronavirus.

I realize normal people don’t just have chunks of beeswax lying around, but if you can put your hands on some, you can make your own lotion bars with just a few minutes’ worth of work.

For the basic bars, I used:

1 part beeswax
1 part coconut oil
1 part olive oil

A lot of recipes say to melt your beeswax in a double boiler to reduce the risk of igniting it, but I’ve melted beeswax in the microwave for years and never had any problems. The trick is to use a Pyrex measuring cup; cut the beeswax into thin slivers; and watch it closely, stirring every 30 seconds to prevent hot spots.

(If you ever do have a fire in your microwave, just unplug it and leave the door shut until the fire burns out. It shouldn’t take long, because there’s not much oxygen in there.)

When the beeswax was mostly melted, I added the coconut oil and continued nuking and stirring until it was all melted together. Then I stirred in the olive oil and enough wintergreen and peppermint essential oil to make it smell nice, poured it into silicone molds, and stuck them in the freezer to harden. Once they solidified, I wrapped them in candymaker’s foil and stored them in an old sherbet tub in the freezer.

To use, hold a bar in your hands until it softens up, then rub it over your skin. It takes a while to soak in, but it’s a good overnight moisturizer that doubles as an excellent lip balm.

Emily

P.S.: Hat tip to Mom Makes Joy, who posted the recipe I used as the basis for mine.

Just what the Doctor ordered

“An N95 respirator is the safest thing to put between myself and a virus, but it is by no means the most interesting.”

— The Third Doctor, probably

As a courtesy to everybody he interviews this week, Ron has been following the governor’s advice and covering his face.

With a bandanna.

Which makes him look as if he is planning to rob a stagecoach after deadline.

I couldn’t let him run around like that, so I rummaged through my craft closet tonight and let him pick through my fabric stash to find something he could handle wearing. He chose a blue fabric with Our Lady of Guadalupe on it. He could do worse than to have the Mother of God standing between him and everybody’s cooties, I suppose.

I, of course, insisted on geeking it up. It would take a pretty audacious virus to try to get past twelve Doctors. (This fabric predates Thirteen by a couple of years.)

Allons-y!

Emily

P.S.: Ron also has an N95 respirator to go with his stylish cloth mask. I found it in my craft closet tonight while I was searching for elastic. I think I bought it to ward off migraines while I was painting the kitchen in Cape, so if you see him in it, don’t side-eye him too much. I’m pretty sure the people fighting the pandemic didn’t want a slightly used mask that’s been rocking around in the bottom of a craft bin for three years. o__O

Hi-dee-ho, neighbor.

What’s better than a breezeblock wall? A breezeblock wall just at the golden hour, with three dogs and a cat greeting each other over it.

That guy doing his very best Wilson impression in the top photo is Bruce. He belongs to my preacher, Amy, who lives a couple of blocks down the street from us and has a fabulous hidden-circle wall around her backyard. Bruce and his housemates had a good time visiting with Ramona over the fence while Ron and I were walking the dogs yesterday evening.

Look closely to see Bruce peeking at us through the breezeblocks.

Jake the cat came out for a visit and took a moment to pose in the sunlight.

Ramona makes a new friend. This is Bruce’s housemate. I forgot his name.

This guy lives a few blocks over from Amy. I’ve never seen him before, but we got a kick out of his efforts to see us as we were walking down the alley.

Our dogs love this down time. We’re home a lot more than usual, and they’re getting a lot more attention. I finally had time to download the Hal Higdon app and start training for another marathon, which is something I’d been planning to do since Ramona was a puppy. I took her out this afternoon for our first scheduled run: a three-mile jog. She’s a good running buddy. If you’ve been thinking about taking up distance running (with or without your dog), now is a good time to do it. The weather is starting to warm up, but we still have a few weeks of fairly moderate temperatures, which gives you time to acclimate and build your endurance before it gets really hot.

Emily

Headed for the light

Ron and I found a welcome light illuminating the darkness this evening on Route 66 here in Tucumcari.

For several weeks, we’d been seeing signs of life at the long-shuttered Apache Motel. Ron talked to the new owner today, and this evening, she sent him a photo showing the lightbulbs around the perimeter of the motel’s iconic neon sign burning brightly.

We immediately grabbed our cameras and headed out.

The Apache’s new owner got some of the sign to light again.

The Apache was open when we took our first Route 66 trip in 2001. Some of the paint was peeling from the sign, but the neon was still burning, and chasing lights raced dramatically around the edge, calling attention to the motel for at least half a mile in either direction. At the time, I hadn’t yet learned to leave the shutter open long enough to catch all the lights as they flashed on and off, but you can see how vibrant the neon was:

The Apache sign on Aug. 4, 2001.

Not long after that, the sign went dark, and the motel sat empty until 2006, when new owners bought it and restored it to its mid-century glory. I stayed there during a November 2006 road trip, which I blogged about at the time.

The motel closed almost as quickly as it reopened, and it’s been quietly decaying ever since — a heartbreaking sight, given the work that went into restoring it.

The timing of the coronavirus pandemic — arriving in the United States just on the cusp of tourist season — couldn’t be worse for my beloved Route 66. But looking up at the Apache sign this evening, I was reminded of one of the things I love most about this old road: Its seemingly endless capacity for renewal.

Just ask the Over the Hill Gang in Arcadia, Oklahoma; the Illinois Route 66 Association’s Historic Preservation Committee; the owners of the “Murder Bordello” in Galena, Kansas; Dawn Welch, whose Rock Cafe literally rose from the ashes after a 2008 fire that gutted its interior and collapsed its roof; or Ned Leuchtner, who reconstructed Cool Springs Camp from a pair of stone pillars.

The Mother Road and her children may see some casualties in the coming years. But as Ma Joad said: “We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever … ’cause we’re the people.”

Emily

School’s Out

NOTE: This is part of the new novel I am writing. I am posting it here as a diversion for readers who may be living under shelter-in-place policies while the world waits for the coronavirus pandemic to pass. For an explanation of this project, please click here.

School’s Out
5 p.m. May 23, 2019 ~ Coldwater High School, Coldwater, N.M.

Holly watched the last vehicle pull out of the parking lot. Her work was far from finished — it would never be finished; not until she retired, at least, and that was still a good decade away — but the year was finally over, and she could quit worrying over day-to-day crises and focus on getting ahead of the paperwork that had been trying to drown her since August.

She sank into the aging office chair behind her desk and massaged her temples, wincing. She’d been battling a sinus headache for a month, ever since the upperclassmen had decided to hold their own after-prom at the abandoned church near Cuervo and three of them hadn’t made it back alive.