Well, the DP grapevine hasn’t failed me.

Dennis called yesterday, and JR had called him and said that yet a different friend of his was up in Anderson yesterday, and told a good story about watching a gray Dodge get pulled out.

So I called Big Jeff, and asked him if he’d got his truck out.

“How’d you know already?” I guess he’d just got home and hadn’t called anyone yet. Heh. Small towns are good for that. The grapevine is faster than the speed of sound!

It took a couple of hours, two four wheel drive wreckers, and cost him a huge chunk of change, but he got it out with only a little damage to the rear bumper. That’s OK; bumpers can be fixed. Trucks that slide down the mountain can’t though, and he was one chain tied to a stump away from that. It had swiveled around in the night, and the nose was pointed straight down and the chain was taut.

And it seems that I picked (with my usual instinct for getting it wrong) the wrong day to go up. I should have gone yesterday, when the big deer decided it was the last minute, and were moving. The friend that ratted on Jeff got a big five pointer, and saw bigger deer harvested. Hell, I’d have been happy to either see any or get a small one. The freezer’s bare.

Did you see the eclipse last night? I thought I’d heard talk about one a couple of days before, so I thought I’d missed it. But I was home cooking dinner (I know! The shock! I was afraid I’d forgotten how.) and glanced out the dining room window to see the moon with a big chunk out of it. Later on, the shadow wasn’t so distinctly round and I thought I must have been seeing clouds over the face of the moon. I should know better than to second-guess myself, because it was an eclipse, and it was pretty neat.

Oh man, and that was such a good dinner too. Lamb chops and Brussels sprouts. I haven’t cooked much at Cowboy’s house this summer, what with the not being there much and the roping until nine or ten when I am. I think sometimes he’d like a girlfriend that didn’t like the horses, but he’s stuck with me. It was nice to feel like a family again, but getting back into the swing of cooking every night is going to be tough. I really got it together last night though, and made a beef stew to go in the crock-pot this morning. I know, scary!