Coyote Crossing

My name is Chris and I’m aneurotypical

There was a really inspiring spate of stories a couple weeks ago, mainly on Twitter, by people coming out into the open about suffering from depression. Here’s one thread of a number of them.

I understand that my coming out to my regular readers

10 random things I remember

1) When he was clean his forehead always smelled like corn chips. So did the pads of his feet.

2) He hated any sharp cracking sound. This limited our use of the fireplace we had for four years in Richmond. Our next-door neighbor there had a

Thistle, again

How many times have I saved this rabbit’s life? Once by adopting him eight years ago, certainly, less than a week before his “deadline” at the animal shelter. Again a year later, the first time he went into GI stasis and I found him cold as death

Three Announcements

1) In the first hour or so of the year, as Annette and I celebrated at our local gaybar-cum-Chinese restaurant,* I suggested that 2012 is the year in which we should make it legal. She agreed. We are happy. Details regarding the wedding are

Leaving the desert

We’re going to be leaving the desert at some undetermined but not too-distant point in the future. We’re discussing where to go next. The Bay Area heads the list. We have to make it work, of course, so some of our plans will depend on the results

Months, years, and days

The news from the Bay Area is full of remembrances this past week. Twenty years has passed since the big Oakland Hills fire. A lifetime, really.

More than a lifetime.

It doesn’t seem that long ago. I was working a dead-end job answering a phone

Healthcare

I have been unwell these last weeks, hence the quiet around here. I’m on the mend, it would seem: all but the coughing.  I spent the third week of June trying to focus enough to get some work done, for the most part unsuccessfully. I spent the week

Dasylirion wheeleri

This isn’t one of my photos. It’s a lovely Creative Commons photo by Dennis Behm. There won’t be many more of mine until I can afford to replace the Canon’s dying battery, which may be some time. Thank you, o stalwart battery. Your lithium ions

The Curious Case of The Peanut Butter Sandwich in The Night-Time

After I moved out of Zeke’s house, divorce papers filed and storage locker crammed full of the leavings of what had been my life, I flew elsewhere for three weeks, to a moist green place that was not the desert. A friend met me at the airport. We

Milestones

Somewhere in the hoopla over this past week’s political assassination I let fly my 10,000th tweet without noticing. At the end of this month this site will have been in operation, under one name or another and with a few hiati, for eight years.

I

Rest well, Mark

My friend Mark Gorrell died yesterday.

It wasn’t unexpected. Mark had been fighting lung cancer for some time, and sometime in 2010 it became clear he wasn’t going to win. In January the City of Berkeley had the good sense to say nice things

It makes the world go ‘round, they say

Ironically, I was just talking about this yesterday with Larry Hogue up a canyon in the southern Santa Rosa Mountains, about the not liking what I’ve become. I’ve mentioned this before here, but it’s flared up again. I have been an environmental

Quick Thoughts on Food and Class: There’s A Piece Missing

The Fat Nutritionist has posted an interesting article here – to which I was directed by way of one of Maryn McKenna’s tweets du jour – on the seemingly intractable divide between the Better Food movement (a name I just made up) and social welfare

Now that they’ve made podcasting easier than not podcasting,

... I have one here. Really, I mean I’ve been threatening to do podcasts up around here for like five years but putting it off because editing and reformatting and cleaning up was too much work, and here they go and make something where I just talk

Palms to Pines

We lit out for the countryside this afternoon, figuring that watching the sun set over the Valley from some vantage point up on the mountain was a good way to mark Valentine’s Day. Smart of us. There’s a road that climbs up San Jacinto from Palm

South Lykken

The shadow of Mount San Jacinto falls on Joshua Tree National Park. Photo taken from the north end of the South Lykken Trail.

It’s been an interesting week or so, perspective-wise. First came the obligatory and even trite introspection that comes

1,461 days

Day after tomorrow we move the boys to the new place. It’s an auspicious day, kind of. Or at least one in which making new happy memories is appropriate and fitting.

I can still feel him leaning against my chest to say hello to this Black Hills

New Office

Cheap cameraphone image of Coyote Crossing World HQ.

This is just a short post to note that after yet another move in the back of the Jeep — bringing the total such mileage involved to 880 since June 2008 — the Coyote Crossing Computer Machine

Lost and Ancient Archives

In May 2008, as long-time readers of this blog know, I left the San Francisco Bay Area where I had lived for a quarter century and moved to the Mojave Desert.  I remember the next month through a bit of a veil. There was a lot of work hauling

New home

This may or may not be a photo of the kitchen in the apartment for which we’re signing a lease on Monday. The photo is from a real estate agent’s website — the building’s been on the market for a while — and there are a few apartments in the