The first freeze warning of the winter is swooping down on us and it brings back memories of forty below back in Idaho.

There's a giant pine tree living next to my house that offers great shade in the Summer and lots of needles in the Fall. I'll bet this tree was around when De Soto pillaged and enslaved the Chickasaw Indian tribe that lived here.

When you're old like me and running on gravy time there are two ways to die (barring an accident), the Doctor Way where you submit yourself to a corrupt medical system that claims they can cure you with modern science at a big price, or just live until you don't. You might live longer going the doctor way but otherwise your money could be spent on you, not them.

Every breath every step moving on gravy time down to the creek. It's cloudy, it's calm and it's Sunday. Shoal creek has been around for a long time and the earliest history I can find shows that Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto and his men wintered along the creek in 1540 here in Lawrenceburg, quite possibly on the land from which I write this. They arrived here on Christmas day and met the Chickasaw Indians who called the place Chicasa.

Pictures from the field just came in, looks like the camera was a hit with Lilly. Success!

Later on, while Lilly naps...

Just another eclectic video on a windy rainy day...

This is just a marvel of Chinese creativity. Combine a 3M sensor, a cheap processor, a lens and some buttons with a molded piece of plastic and make a functioning kids camera. I pulled it out of the box and took a shot with existing battery power and it worked.

The lighting was poor and it's only 3 megapixels but it delivered an acceptable image. I'm sure my little Lilly will get much better shots, from a four year old perspective, that I can't wait to see.

I need to dive into settings and turn that Date off, and who knows what else I'll find there.

The stupidly extravagant way I've spent my life should have killed me off long ago but no, here I am, running on Gravy Time.

I live in Tennessee the land of the free and I ain't beholden to nuthin. Every minute of every day is spent doing exactly what I want to do, when I want to do it. I move forward to a future fraught with pitfalls but bursting with possibility. Gravy Time.

I got Lilly a camera for her birthday next Saturday and then created a guide for her:

Now he's torn down and rebuilt every car on the road...

To be, as opposed to not.

Steph's sisters, mom, and niece visiting in Driggs, ID.

Since I'm cruising down Memory Lane here's a nice little drive through Teton Valley, ID from a European perspective:

Drove to Crockett Park this morning to visit the birds on the lake. The park road had a sign that stated Original route of the Trail of Tears and it just astounds me that such a honorific human event would be glorified. Maybe we're just supposed to hang our head when we drive by and say sorry for the Native American population transfer from their ancestral homelands here in the South to reservations in the West. Maybe I even drove over a spot where one of the ten thousand Indians died during the trip, that would be cool.

Put up a video.

Today around 1015 a product called Mucuna Pruriens will arrive in the mail that I hope will have a positive effect on my Parkinson's tremors. I'm going to mix up a tall glass of the powdered stuff in water, sit back in my easy chair, and consume it. I'm insanely in touch with my body so I'll know if it's effective or not. Of course, I will update the results here...

Update: Tried it with water first, then put a scoop under my tongue, with no effect on the tremors. It has other supposed benefits so I'll include it in my morning herb mix, other than that, disappointed.

Oh well, how about a portrait of my Roatan Honduras driver, Omar. This is his first appearance on the blog.

Our local fox was hanging out below his den across the creek this afternoon.

Lately I've been imagining that my little place is a bungalow I've rented in some quiet retreat spot somewhere. I have all the basics necessary for a fun day and beautiful peaceful images await me when I walk out the door.

Leaves are amazing, they're vibrant when alive and somberly beautiful when dead. But do they truly die or is the process of returning to the earth actually a form of living?

I used my Sigma lens this morning in a search for the truth and this looks alive to me.

Art:

How do you tell the difference between male and female chromosomes? You pull down their genes.

Sometimes deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is your friend, sometimes your enemy, but you're stuck with what you got and you wonder how it's going to play out as you approach that last curve in the creek.

Update: I just returned from the dermatologist where they froze a bunch of spots and removed three things from the top of my head. The guy that did the work had the same name as me except his middle name was Wes, we bonded. It will take ten days to get results back and I told Wes that I don't do doctors and pills so if the result ain't good, I'm booking a long cruise. He smiled and nodded.

My life has been like a leaf floating down the creek. Sometimes I bump into other leaves and bounce off and sometimes I get attached for a while. Inevitably, like the course of the journey from the leaf falling from the tree and hitting the water and floating to the place where all leaves go to die, I get stuck in a little cranny in the creek.

As I float swirling around the current cranny I realize I'm not depressed, I'm reflective. I'm not afraid, I'm concerned. I have a magic camera, an experienced eye, and I'm alive!

My spot in the Land of Leaf:

I've created a new Video Player for the blog. All embeded videos now have their YouTube ID inserted into a clickable button at the upper right corner. When you click on it, a new page will present the video as a stand-alone post. It's a great feature if you just want to share an individual video.

I can actually play any YouTube video with the Player: The Lilium

The girls dropped by to visit old Papa today. It's been great to watch them grow up and to catch an occasional photo shoot along the way.

Click the photo below to see the set. Look close for the peanut butter and honey cracker remnants around the mouths.

I've produced a new video with the four best shots of the Praying Mantis that appeared as a Sign in my kitchen after I returned from the cruise.

The talking head weather girl on channel 2 gushes that Fall is in the air! Yea, but it's mostly on the ground around my place. It is Fall after all.

How often do you lie when people ask how you are? For the grocery checker it's a casual greeting and they really don't expect a reply that matters to them, so I lie. If it's a neighbor that I rarely talk to, I lie.

If a friend looks me in the eye and asks, or if I establish a connection of empathy over the phone with someone, I tell the truth.

So what are the lies? Fine, good, great, ok, hanging in there, blah blah blah...

What's my truth right now? "Ok, but wallowing somewhat in the muck of eminent inevitability".

What's your truth?

The locally decorated stop sign heading up Ski Hill Road to Grand Targhee many winters ago...

The sign before that:

I produced a new video today.

Dillan's turning seventeen and I created his own website for him as a birthday present. Guys his age normally want cash but I'm stepping beyond the norm. He asked me what to do with it and I said anything you want!

My advice is to just ask around, ask his friends what they would do with a website that matches their name, ask his teachers. In this day and age it has value. He can then choose how much he wants to invest in it. Learn a little code, setup a blog, or just sit on it until he starts a career and then hire somebody to do it.

I've been thinking about what I would do, as a HS Junior in a small Tennessee town, with a My Name domain hosting a sweet little custom CMS (Content Management System) running my own Blog. I would start doing daily posts about everything and share the links with my friends via social media and if what I had to say had meaning and value eventually the audience would grow large. Then, I really would have a voice.

I just happen to be working with a sweet little CMS called Anchor. I've set up a test blog (which I'll announce shortly) that would be a perfect fit for a one person blog, like dillanflores.com.

The girls invited me to the Summertown Home Coming parade today. I missed the football float but grabbed a few shots worthy of checking out by clicking the photo below.

I just pulled the old Amazon trigger on a new phone, the Panasonic 2-Line KX-TG9541B. I've got two phone lines/numbers: my Google Voice line running through a VOIP adaptor (with a Las Vegas prefix), and the land-line provided by my Spectrum internet account (with the local prefix).

Right now I have the VOIP line hooked to a cordless phone, I'll dump that. The Spectrum line is a simple corded black thing, I'll dump that. The new unit will sit proudly on my desk and handle both lines with one common voice message, great speakerphone and tons of other good stuff.

I'm down in Alabama today visiting my old friend Crash Dog Man Hunter. He was in a punk rock band I used to frequent back in the Bay Area and he just went through gender re-assignment surgery. He also had a skin transplant and I have to say, he's looking good!

He looked like this when I knew him, went by the name of Venice Neil:

Temperature records are crashing around me as the days in the upper nineties continue to languish. I'm staying cool and just flowing along and the creek is my inspiration.

Here I am once again in life trying to decide which hole to put it in. My old engine loves the SeaFoam but since I installed my new Weber carb I'm never really sure which hole to pour it into while I'm pumping the throttle cable to keep her from dying.

The one on the left? The one on the right? Both? And which side of the little flappy thing? I better send this link to my son Riley, the man who has torn down and reassembled every car on the planet, he would know!

Update: Just got a call from The Man. There's a primary and secondary intake and you pour the SeaFoam down underneath the primary intake flap. Turns out the one on the left was the primary, engine clean at 210,771!