1/22/07 okay, i have one. Not a story, per se, but a character that is just too interesting to not let ihub know about.
Hence, a variation on the Desert Chronicles.
There is this woman named Sandra in my little cowboy town. She was born and raised here. She is an incredible businesswoman; she owns and runs the grocery store in town, the deli, and has a sheep and hay ranch, and several real estate holdings, but, in addition to being color blind, has the absolute inability to pick men that are suited to her.
She has been married 7 times, however, the mathematics are imprecise because she married one of the guys three times; i am not sure of the actual status now, but i think single again; the last ex moved to Oklahoma to raise parakeets (i am not making this up). With her, decisiveness and Smirnoff's Vodka tend to not go hand in hand, unless one is making a killing on a real estate deal, in which case she has never made a bad move. But figuring out which guy to go home with is a tough go for her.
She once married a rancher across the line over in Nevada, but cooking, etc. are not her forte', and the Schwann's man didn't come within 40 miles of the ranch, so housewifing just didn't take, and she moved back to town and her business pursuits.
She has an absolute heart of gold, and has a mexican hired hand to do the thinking for her on the ranching end; between the two of them they manage to somehow not lose too much money ranching, even if they have no lambs this year because they put a ram in with the ewes that only had one nut and turned out to be sterile.
Being a local in a place where there are hot springs around every corner, she has no appreciation for the abundant geothermal resources of the area. She irrigates her alfalfa with water that comes out of her well, 1000 gallons per minute, at a temperature of 108 degrees. And less than a couple hundred yards away, she has a hot tub on her back porch that is heated electrically. And she uses No. 2 oil to run a water-heated system for the house; she could hook onto her irrigation pump and heat at about 5% of the cost, but it has not occurred to her, and i am not taken to given unsolicited advice to someone who has a fierce temper. She has one spring that is about 190-200 degrees, a fact that the mexican ranch workers exploit regularly by using it to scald chickens by dipping them into it before plucking them.
One time or another, almost everyone in the Valley has come up short on their paycheck, and Sandra floats them credit in her store. Thus, virtually everyone owes or has owed money to her, and she is easy about it. Her political base would be beyond landslide should she ever decide to take a local office, which will probably never happen as she has more tryst actions in her past than Bill Clinton, if you know what i mean, and i bet you do.
Sandra is a bud of ours. A couple New Year's Eves ago, we decided to go and party at my pig farmer brother-in-law's hunting cabin up in Oregon. Sandra's date was a midget, about 4'10", but such matters bother her none, as he could mix drinks that could cauterize one's nostrils, and that was all the qualifications he needed. Anyway, i am getting ahead of myself.
We had a great old time that night. But the sleeping arrangements were unusual for such an outing, as the hunting cabin has three big sleeping rooms, and at the end of the night, people were pretty much crashed in whatever bed they could find, except for those of us still somewhat in control of our faculties, thus i ended up sleeping in a sleeping bag near the woodstove.
Suddenly, about 5:00 AM we hear Sandra shouting and freaking out in one of the bedrooms. We rushed in to see what was wrong, and almost lost it.
We could hear this Poooooo, Tick, Shoooooosh sound, over and over, reminiscent of a Darth Vader in an agitated state.
As it turns out, this one guy that crashed in the bed next to hers has a sleep apnea problem, and has a breathing machine he uses at night.
Sandra, not knowing this, and waking up after major New Year's Eve drunken revelry, in pitch darkness, hearing this machine running..... woke up thinking she was in an emergency room and had been in a car wreck, but she felt herself and nothing hurt, so she was afraid she had died.
But she had only killed a few million brain cells, which is child's play for her, and in the end, the guy was very embarassed about his breathing machine, and the midget, who was sleeping on the floor between the two beds, (for unspecified reasons) slept through the whole thing.
