Karmic balance in the barn

Did I mention that there's a homeless guy and his dogs living in my barn?

Last fall, a tornado came through the next town over, and among other things, it damaged an abandoned house in which this guy (we'll call him Avery, because that's the easy version of his name) was living (with the permission of the landholder) with his dogs. Even after the tornado, Avery lived in what was left of the house, until one crappy week in February, when the county ordered the house demolished.

I went over and offered him space in my barn, and helped him move everything. This is an act quite out of character for me, since I usually like to be left alone at my house. Still, he needed a place for a while until he figured out something better, so the deal was done. He and the dogs have been occupying the horse stalls underneath the barn since then.

I got an email from him yesterday (he walks over to the library in Brunswick and uses the computers over there to do email and upload poetry to poetry.com, among other things) saying he was moving on. We had always agreed that his time there in the barn was a transitional one, and that transition is coming again, I guess.

He asked if he could take a few cedar and dogwood seedlings from the lower pasture and take them to wherever he was going next. Sure. I'd just hit them with the mower, after all.

I'm not sure that the last four months has restored my karmic balance in the world, but I suppose it's helped some.

I am unsure of how I'll get the smell of wet dog out of the barn. I guess I'll figure out a way.

In other news, I've registered a new domain specifically as a place to host the pages and feeds for a podcast I'm planning to do starting soon. I've been listening to a large number of podcasts lately and while I'm interested in what people have to say, the production values are sometimes insanely lacking. Noisy backgrounds, poor compression, crappy microphones, too-hot mixing, and general amateurishness.

I can improve on that, yes I can. After more than 20 years doing DJ stuff and way too much time spent perfecting recording techniques, I can do better.

We'll see if anyone listens.

Things with Sarah are good, and low-key. We haven't really seen each other all week, due to work and tasks and general time issues, but we're going to catch up with each other this weekend while all the lemmings are jockeying their RVs around the countryside.

I will say, she has a real impatience when it comes to photographs. She's insisting that I print off, on the sort of lame color laser here at work, an image of us that a passerby took last weekend on Skyline Drive in Virginia. It won't look good on laser, and I don't see why she just can't wait until I order prints from Photoworks.com (which yes, is a recommendation that you try them -- inexpensive, high-quality prints from digital images, on real photographic paper rather than too-fragile inkjet crap).

She's probably more sentimental than I am. And she doesn't seem to have the same low opinion of my looks that I usually have. I did color my hair again last night for the first time in a couple of months, mostly because I hate doing it myself and the last time I did it, Melody helped. All the memories associated with that were a pretty big block to doing it again. Yes, I know, they shouldn't have been, but, they were.

I do still think about Melody from time to time, but the thoughts seem very distant, as if she's far, far away and the time with her was even further. I'm not sure how I feel about that distance.