• Location: Woodstock, NY
• Mood: sore
• Music: Bob Dylan, "Changing of the Guards"

Mormon Funeral Potatoes

About once every six months, I get a migraine of this intensity. It began yesterday. And if I make it through this entry, I'll be impressed. We were going out for a drive today to tour some local geology, but between torrential fucking rain and my head, that's been postponed. There was another dusting of snow yesterday, but it was all washed away by noon or so. The tops of the mountains hereabouts remain in perpetual snow, frost, ice – whatever. They're white. We're at about 1,400 feet elevation, and I know the highest peaks just north of us rise to about 3,500 feet, and the snow line seems to begin about two thirds of the way to the summits. The summit of Red Mountain in Birmingham is, by comparison, only 1,025 feet (the highest point in all Alabama is Mount Cheaha, which rises to 2,413 feet above sea level). When I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I spent a month or so with mild elevation sickness, adjusting to the city's elevation of 5,430 ft.

Which felt a little bit like this headache.

And yeah, I did sort of go off on a rambling tangent there, didn't I? My personal record elevation (excluding various narcotics) would be 12,183 feet, just east of Fall River Pass, along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies. It was a day in August (1986), and it felt like I had one lung, and there was snow. I saw pikas (Ochotona daurica) and black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia).

Wait, what?

Oh, yeah.

Shit, I'm listening to a lot of Bob Dylan these days. Dylan was one of my first musical loves, thanks to my mom. One of the first albums I ever bought for myself was Street-Legal (1978), shortly after it was released.

And...

Day before yesterday, I finally finished Alabaster: The Good, the Bad, and the Bird #4 (pages 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22), and I'm sending it to my editor as soon as I finish this entry. If I ever finish this entry. Only one issue to go, which has to be done by the 31st. Because I say so.

Yesterday we went out and did a little holiday shopping for one another in the village. I got new suspenders and a David Bowie T-shirt. Oh, and we drove to Kingston, into a hellish Consumerland, so that Spooky could fulfill her two-week long ambition to walk the hallowed halls of Beer World. It was, indeed, a world of beer. You know what? I feel like shit, and I've been working on this entry for over an hour. Here are some photos from yesterday:





The view from my desk.



The weather vane that sits atop the cabin.



I shit you not. "Over 2,100 brews to choose from!"



Back in a the World of the Sane, view north towards Overlook Mountain, the southernmost peak of the Catskill Escarpment. View from Levon Helm Memorial Boulevard.



See above. The trees on the mountain are primarily red oak, red spruce, and balsam fir, with a lot of paper birch and pine on the lower flanks.



See above.



On Tinker Street in Woodstock. This shop is the cat's pajamas.



Woodstock. The church was built in 1799.

All photographs Copyright © 2014 by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn A. Pollnac.



There.

Done.

Until Next Time,
Aunt Beast