Major Mitchell's Blog

Here are some things I’ve learned since being adopted by my human parents.

1. It is important to find a good hiding spot, like the one in the picture. This is important for several reasons. It helps you win games in the back yard, but it is also important when you forget and do something that makes your humans angry, like digging up the flower bed.
2. It’s important to use an inside voice in the house when you are trying to tell or explain something to your humans. This one is really, really hard since I don’t have an inside voice. I haven’t made them understand this one yet.
3. Eat all the snacks your humans give you, because they taste good and are good for you. Sometimes your humans might ask you to perform a trick like roll over or shake paws, but they are always worth it.
4. Don’t eat snacks from the gutter or that are thrown away when you take a walk. I tried this and they don’t always taste good, and sometimes they are covered with ants. Ants can sting and bite you.
5. Always take your bath when your humans want to give you one. First of all, they are always going to win. You can run and hide, but they know all the hiding places and will find you. If you can remember to be good while getting bathed, you’ll get a treat in the end.
6. Enjoy little children when you can. Little children grow up to be obnoxious teenagers and won’t want to play with you. Also, remember to check on little children when they spend the night. Do this several times during the night to make sure they are alright.
7. Don’t climb into people’s laps, even when they tell you to. My humans don’t like it when I do.
8. Enjoy your walks and exercise time outdoors, especially when you live in California like I do. You’ll never know when the governor and his friends in Sacramento will want to let the forests burn up.
9. Be careful when hunting blue-bellied lizards. They can release their tails if you catch one, and grow a new tail. It can freak you out.
10. Don’t bug your humans when they are sitting at the desk working, even if you do want to run and play with your toys. It can cause you to be put inside your kennel.
11. I’ve learned other things also and will share them later. It gets hard to type when you have paws instead of fingers. Goodbye.

Have you ever made plans and knew for certain that things were going to take place according to the way you had planned? Your plans were so perfect that it couldn’t take place any other way. The book you’d written, or photographs you had taken, were so remarkable that everyone would love them and in turn love you for thinking of them. Then you would be called upon stage to receive the Pulitzer Prize. Well … Maybe not quite that far. In fact, few people would admit to going that far, but all of us do make plans that benefit us personally, and that’s really not a bad thing on the surface. But what if there’s a monkey wrench tossed into the middle of our planning that’s going to require us to depend heavily upon the talent and willingness of those around us just to get by.
Last January I was walking my dog in front of the junior high school and slipped off the curb. I felt my left hip snap as I hit the pavement. The school was closed due to COVID-19, but there were several people who saw me fall and came to my rescue. Our dog, Molly, came and sat quietly beside me, knowing there was something wrong. One of the good Samaritans called for an ambulance while I called Judy on my cell phone. She brought the car to take the dog home while I was carted off in an ambulance, and a crazy period of life began that I’d never planned or thought would happen to me.
First of all, I have to admit I never felt a lot of pain during the whole process. How much of the pain-free process was due to my body’s ability to reject the pain or some nurse pumping drugs into my IV, I don’t know, but thank God either way. On the downside, once you’re admitted into the hospital, it’s just you and the doctors and nurses. Judy and I couldn’t see each other due to COVID-19. Conversations were over the phone. The closest we came to a real conversation was to stare through a window while talking on a cell phone.
One of the things I learned was when you break a bone your body rushes a great amount of blood to the break to start the healing process. The amount of blood depends on the size of the bone. The problem was, I lost two units of blood and began to hallucinate. I can remember not knowing where I was or what was happening. Needless to say, at this point Judy was beside herself. I do remember at one point that I thought I was in the middle of a shopping center looking for a men’s room so I could urinate. The nurses had trouble keeping me in bed, so I naturally fell out of bed. I don’t believe this helped the placement of the steel rod they inserted into my leg, but it’s good to know with the amount of steel they used, I’ll never break that hip again.
To shorten a rather long story, they finally decided my body was not going to replace the blood on its own, so they gave me a transfusion and I began to recover some sanity during the process. Judy gave the nurses a bag with extra clothing and my razor to make me feel a little more at home. I did learn the value of a good nurse during the process, and thanked God for our daughter, Debbi, who is an R.N., and our granddaughter, Lisa, who will graduate from nursing school soon. They are very good at their jobs. I was finally allowed to go home and I quickly learned the value of a good mate. Judy had not spent her time twiddling her thumbs. Our bedroom was pretty much a hospital room, with a walker, shower bench portable toilet and many other things designed to make me comfortable. The healing process has taught me the value of the words “yes, dear.” I hope none of you ever have to experience any of this. But if you do, treat the ones nursing you back to health with love and respect.
Today, I’m walking with or without a cane and have developed a pretty fair gait. The only painkillers I take are two Tyrol when needed. There are some things I believe I can do, which I don’t, because either the doctor or Judy tells me not to. But the therapist has given us the green light to attend this year’s Western Writer’s conference, so I do know my time will come.

Have you ever run across what should have been an easy fix, but no matter what you did, it seemed to refuse to be fixed. I had one of those experiences over the weekend. For some unforeseen reason, our kitchen sink stopped draining. Normally, a clogged sink is something relatively easy to fix, especially for someone like me, who spent over thirty years in the construction field. While I was a painter, I had for a short period of time, worked as a plumber’s helper, and had seen enough clogged drains fixed that I knew my way around.
I went to the tool shed and retrieved a few tools and started right in. First step, remove and clean the p trap. “Yes, I thought.” The p trap was clogged so once it was cleaned; I put it all back together. To my surprise, it still didn’t drain. Okay, onto the next step.
I went to collect the snake and began cleaning the lines. When your snake had fifty-feet of line, why stop at twenty-five feet? Use the whole fifty-feet. When that was done, I put it all back together confident that I had solved the problem. Guess what? It still didn’t drain.
Okay, this was starting to get irritating, but I pulled it back apart and re-snaked everything. I was determined that I was going to win this challenge no matter what. I snaked all the cleanouts not once but twice then put everything back together. Then, I stood there like an idiot staring at the water coming from the faucet as it ponded in the double sinks without draining.
Judy finally got tired of watching me trying to clean the lines and called a plumber that one of our pastors recommended. I on the other hand took a break and walked to our mailbox to collect our mail. I told a couple of our neighbors what I had been doing for most of the day, and got more advice … which I followed. What good is advice if you don’t follow it? I pulled the drain on the garbage disposal. Guess what? It was clean and had nothing to do with our problem. At that point I had to admit I was beaten. I waited for the plumber to show up around ten Sunday morning. He saw the problem and went to his truck to get an old fashioned plunger and fixed the problem in five minutes. He was a real nice guy and Judy paid him sixty-dollars instead of the fifty is asked.
Me? Yes, I learned my seventy-five year-old body isn’t in bad shape, but it still doesn’t work as good as it did thirty years ago. And, regardless of what I might think, I really don’t know everything. Next time I run into a “fixit” problem, I’ll call an expert and watch them fix it in five minutes, after I’ve wasted several hours trying to fix it first.

http://majormitchell.net/blog

Yesterday I was asked by a fan on Good Reads where I got my idea for my next book. I truthfully said I didn’t know. It was just there. That’s the way it has always been, from the time I was a small child to now.
I was the youngest of eight children. My older sister and brother got married young and started having children, so the house became small when my mother started babysitting their children while they went back to work. If I wanted any peace I had to go somewhere and hide. That meant I spent a lot of time alone. I quickly became a day-dreamer and made up a ton of stories inside my head. And because the local theater mostly showcased westerns, a lot of my stories were, of course, westerns. I took the place of John Wayne or Roy Rogers. I always killed the bad dudes and got the girl.
The town I grew up in was a ranching community, so it was nothing to see real working cowboys downtown. Most of the kids in my classroom at school lived on ranches and had 4-H projects raising cattle or sheep. Living within the city limits, I raised a pen full of chickens which I chose not to enter in 4-H. We did get fresh eggs and ate a lot of chicken dinners though.
One of my favorite spots was an old China berry tree that grew beside our house and had a perfect sitting area about halfway up into the foliage. On nice warm days I’d climb the tree with a fist-full of comic books and spend hours alone with my comic character friends. Other times, I’d strap on my Red Rider cap pistol and wipe out a den of rustlers. It became serious when half the kids in the neighborhood grabbed their cap guns (girls included) and we’d have an old fashioned shoot-out in the middle of the street. I learned a lot in those days.
Where did I get my idea for my next book? I’d have to say from life. While my books are more serious, and wordier, a lot of them came from the games we played. I was able to study the actions and reactions of the other kids on the block. I perfected day-dreaming to an art while inside the classroom. What was going on inside my head was a whole lot better than the words coming from my teachers. Yes, my next story came from life.
http://majormitchell.net/blog

Bad Data

There’s a line out of Zane Grey’s novel “Riders Of the Purple Sage” that stuck with me when I first read the book some years ago. Lassiter is telling Jane Withersteen that the older he got, the stranger life seemed. I am finding that is certainly the case with me. Life, or people around us, can act real strange, especially when things get tough to deal with, such as buying all the toilet paper and paper towels inside the store. Now, I hear on the radio that we’re in a serious meat shortage. So, I guess if you have a large freezer you’d better buy all the meat you can ‘cause you never know when you’re going to eat your next pork chop or hamburger. I’m just waiting to hear what new thing I’m supposed to be in a shortage of and how worried I’m supposed to be.
It really is strange the way people react when put under a little pressure. Just the mere prediction of the devastation the virus could inflict on humans for instance, causes some people to act as though the end of the world is at hand. I caught a little of this on the radio. Only in this case they were trying their best to explain why the number of sick and the dead was so much lower than what they had been predicting. Really? That’s not hard to explain, unless you’re not telling the truth in the first place. The truth is they fed a bunch of bad data into their computers and got a lot of bad data back. Those numbers were what they based their predictions on…bad data. Try telling the public the truth once in a while and see what happens.
I’m not saying we should throw all caution to the wind and live like nothing’s wrong. There is a virus and it’s making some people very ill and killing others. But I am saying that most problems could be solved by allowing people to reopen their stores and run their business without going to jail or being fined. After all, this is America and most Americans are pretty good at solving problems by themselves when left alone. Maybe we should give it a try.

For those of you who live on the west coast, do you remember when the weather stayed fairly normal? Oh yes, we did have winter where you wore a sweater or jacket to the high school football games, but you could attend the game fairly certain that you were going to stay dry. And you had a drawer full of shorts, tank tops and tennis shoes in the closet. The weather cooperated with us. We even had two drive-in theaters where I grew up, and if you had a pickup truck, you could sit on lawn chairs in the bed of the truck on warm nights and enjoy the movie. But it seems that’s all changing. Now days it’s kind of a guessing game. The weather has been changing quickly, on a moment’s notice---something like what we Californians used to joke about Arizona. “If you don’t like the weather this morning, wait awhile. It’ll change.”
I took my dog Molly for a walk yesterday to the local park. It was around 4:00 pm. It had rained a little in the morning, but nothing to get excited about. At that moment there were some dark clouds hanging around, but the sun was shining and we seemed to have plenty of time. We got to the park and Molly immediately began sniffing the lamp post and fire hydrant. About then, I heard a strange noise of something hitting the street. It wasn’t rain, for I knew that sound pretty well. It took a few seconds to realize it was starting to hail. Yes, there was still some sunshine, but it was starting to really come down. That’s when the dog decided she didn’t like getting hailed on at all. She took off toward the house with me in tow.
About then I heard a different sound. I was wearing my straw cowboy hat you see in most of my photographs. In case you’ve never gotten caught in a hailstorm wearing a tightly-woven straw hat…it does have its own sound. The hail wasn’t large enough to hurt either of us or the hat, but it did get rather noisy inside the hat. One of my neighbors thought I was nuts and told me so as I passed his house.
Today the sun has been shining most of the day, although the prediction is for more rain on the weekend. That's okay.…as long as I can duck back inside the house if the rain turns to hail.