Hobbies - EV Melotte

Well - the double trip to the DR is over,

DJ has a stress fracture and I had more skin ripped from my body as my Dr attempts to slowly replicate me in his secret room under his office, one millimeter at a time over the last 25 years.

I found out it's been 25 years since my malignant melanoma and he is always finding little carcinoma's he feels he needs to cut out.   Research has found and backed up by the National Cancer Institute that cannabis actually cures many kinds of skin cancer.  But, then how would big pharmaceuticals make their money.  Instead of  big pharm reaping profits all that money would go to schools and police departments and infrastructure.  Can't have that!

In 2015 Colorado gave 35 million to schools from taxing cannabis up from 13 million in 2014.  Another 23 million has gone to support youth programs.  All drug related crime is down 23%.

But I digress.

 . . . .

So DJ needs to wear a storm troopers boot for a while and seems to be in terrible pain.

And I'm walking around a little lighter having two tiny holes in my skin.

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As we were sitting around yesterday nursing our wounds (with coconut rum) we saw a couple monarch butterfly's.   I looked over the edge of the deck and on our Hummingbird Mint there were five monarchs.

I took some photos that look like every other monarch photo in the world.

A few nights ago there was a fantastic sunset

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I think some of this story you have heard before.  We are coming upon parts of stories and complete stories.  We believe the "parts" were assignments that became stories.

this is called

Hobbies - EV Melotte

I never, as a child or adolescent, belonged to any church, club, or organization.  I was never part of any clique or group, nor did I ever have a “circle” of friends.

Webster defines “hobby” as “a pursuit outside ones regular occupation, engaged in for relaxation.”  Now that I can get my teeth into.

I read.

There were a few other things that I did for fun or relaxation. In Goodrich I used to search through one particular field every spring, looking for railroad spikes left from a logging railroad that had once passed through there. By the time we left I had thirty-six of them.  There is no accounting for the tastes of collectors.

I designed clothes for my paper doll.  There were no crude colored-paper cutouts. I drew them carefully, including every pleat and gather and dart, and colored in the prints and stripes and plaids the way they would really hang. As a teenager I designed clothes for myself. I didn’t usually have the fabric to make them, but anyway the fun was in the designing. The ones I did make up turned out well, but sewing has always been stressful to me and I’ve never liked it.

I wrote poetry.  When I entered my teens, I switched to essays.  I wrote a one-page essay every single school day, during my first study hall, all through high school.

I walked in the pine woods and talked to the trees, especially to one huge and massive old pine tree that I privately called the Grandfather Pine, and always addressed as “Grandfather.”

  I first made its acquaintance sometime before I started school.  Whenever I approached it I would stop just outside its circumference and ask, “Grandfather, may I come in?”, and wait for its pine-murmur to give me permission.  Then I’d go forward, to sit leaning against its trunk, and talk to it, and listen to it, and spend an hour or an afternoon just pondering on all the things I didn’t understand.

As an adolescent in Whitewater, I couldn’t find a pine woods so I walked on county roads and talked to the cows.  If you lean on a fencepost and talk to a herd of cows, they’ll come over to the fence and listen to you.  I like cows, especially Brown Swiss cows.  I wouldn’t make any claims for their intelligence but they’re good listeners and very polite.

But mostly, I read.  I read anything, and everything I could get my hands on.

My father and both of my oldest brothers, who were old enough to remember, all agree that I was three and a half years old when they discovered I could read.  That has always been a mystery to us because no one in the family taught me, and at that age I’d never had contact with anyone outside the family.  However, it was, by the time I started school I’d read every children’s book and every “young people’s” book in the house.  I remember being annoyed at The Swiss Family Robinson because every time that stranded, shipwrecked family needed something, Mother Robinson reached into her bag of odds and ends she had grabbed from the ship just before it went down, and pulled out exactly what was needed.  I figured it had to be a mighty big bag, and if they’d ever need a horse she’d have found one in there somewhere.

By the time I’d turned eleven and left Goodrich, I’d read all my parents books expect the last two-thirds of Don Quixote.  I never could manage to get all the way through that.  I don’t know whether I was intimidated by the extraordinarily thin, crackly pages or if the story itself bogged my down in depression.  It was so obvious that he was going to keep falling on his face.

I read all the books in the bookcases at school except “Les Miserables” which I wouldn’t even touch because the name turned me off.  I read all my school books all the way through as soon as I got them, even the arithmetic ones.  I read as many library books as we could afford to ship back and forth to the Medford Library.

I read for relaxation and amusement and escapism and adventure and from a hunger and thirst to find out.

I still do.