#Whole home Tucson drinking water filters | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dcnativegal · 5 years

Text

In which Jane turns 60 in the desert

Thursday, July 25th, 2019 was the first day that we were all together, everyone present. On Wednesday, my cousin Targ (a nickname created from “Margaret”) and her mother, my aunt, my father’s only sibling, Mary Lee Lincoln McIntyre, had arrived in a rental car from Eugene airport and checked into a cabin at Summer Lake Hot Springs. My sister, Elizabeth Lincoln, drove my kids, Jonah and Clara, and two of her kids, Yuuki and Makoto, and her husband Jim, up from Reno, arriving just after noon. My cousin, Julie McIntyre, drove with her son, Shayden, all the way from Tucson, AZ. Valerie’s youngest, Arden, and his partner Maggie drove in from the Willamette Valley, and Valerie’s sister Karen arrived on Thursday from Chiloquin. Karen left on Friday, having to prepare a sermon for Sunday, so by Saturday morning, this was the assembled crew:

We had a more serious portrait shot but I tend to prefer the ‘act goofy’ photos. I look like a zombie, well fed after the apocalypse, Valerie is simply laughing. Mary Lee, age 86, is clearly game for anything. Yuuki is doing a pose. Maggie is blowing bubbles. Everyone was a good sport.

Months ago, realizing I was headed to the end of my 60th year on earth, I decided to invite the descendants of Ruth and Henry Lincoln to the Oregon Outback, Great Basin, High Desert land of Paisley to celebrate the fact of my existence. Not all could come, but a surprising number did. And the two relations of Valerie who were easily able to join us, got to meet more of my peeps.

That Thursday, we enjoyed a Mexican themed dinner, accommodating the vegan and the beef-eating, the gluten free and the ‘organic-only.’ Since July 25th was the day I decided would be my designated birthday with everyone as my captive audience, we played “Vertellis.” It’s a Dutch card game that’s pretty simple: four rounds are organized into individual and group questions. I picked two categories of individual questions: Looking back on the year, what was good, crazy, interesting… and, looking forward to next year, what do you plan, hope for, find challenging? Everyone picks a card with a question, and you answer as honestly as you wish when it’s your turn.

I highly recommend https://vertellis.com/ for gatherings of people you don’t regularly see, especially around holidays. The answers can be hilarious, revelatory, and touching. When Valerie drew a card about picking something from the past year that she regretted, she told us: “I should have bought that primer bulb for the weed whacker way sooner!” Ever the practical gal, that Valerie! Clara hopes that the immigration hearing goes well for her husband, Jose. The answers spanned quite a range, and helped us to know each other a little bit better.

Why do we gather relatives only for funerals and weddings? Or for old people’s 90th birthdays? Why not age 60?

I did feel selfish about the whole thing, off and on. My family had to spend money on the flights, the rental cars, and then the cabins at Summer Lake Hot Springs. My friend and coworker, JD, and his husband Joey lent me their RV camper, so 4 of the young’uns could sleep in that for nothing’. There were 4 Lincoln/McIntyre/Matteuccis and 4 Lincoln/Frey/Saitohs in each cabin. There was a lovely symmetry to the housing. The inside of the cabins has a southwest, rustic feel:

They are not air conditioned, and it was quite hot during the day, although as we say out west, at least ‘it’s a dry heat.’ Here in the desert, it is also very dusty. Thank goodness the temperatures cool off at night to around 50 degrees F, and there’s almost always a breeze.

There are the fabulous hot springs pools, too: here is the pool house at dusk, run through a filter:

We managed to escape the heat by going to the swimming hole in the Chewaucan River, which I’d never been to. The water is cool but not freezing, and clear, so that I could sit in a shallow spot and pick out flat rocks for Clara to skip. Even my aunt went, situated in a camp chair, safe from the water, and an elderly chihuahua named Uddha came, too. He stayed well away from the watery fracas.

Valerie and Uddha

Mary Lee and Uddha

Someone stacked rocks in a lovely sculptural way:

We spent Friday schlepping to Picture Rock Pass to look at the petroglyphs, and then to Crack in the Ground, where I’d been wanting to go. That place is magical. Aunt Mary Lee sat comfortably in the shade on the picnic bench while the rest of us went one way or another, deep into the crevasses. My cousin’s son Shayden is a confident free climber and scaled all the way to the surface. We breathed in the moist, cool air and reveled in curious rock formations.

Shayden at Crack in the Ground

Where did this fern blow in from? Way to the west? I salute you, brave, flying little fern.

Looks like a path in the Holy Land, or a Roman ruin….

“Crack in the Ground is a volcanic fissure that formed at the western boundary of a small graben underlying the Four Craters Lava Field. The Crack and lava field were recently dated at about 14,000 years old. The fissure is about 2 miles long and 70 feet deep, and disappears into lake sediments at its southern end. Therefore, this supports an interpretation that Lake Fort Rock rose no higher than this level in the last 14,000 years.” http://www.fortrockoregon.com/Crack.html

Although impressing my family with the gorgeousness of high desert Eastern Oregon was deeply satisfying, the best part of the visit was the conversations. Family lore was reviewed by Mary Lee, who lived it, and Elizabeth, who brought a copy of a bound books she had made of her genealogy research on the Lincolns and the Smiths (my mother’s side.) Jonah was asked about The Future of Film, and Makoto shared that he’s looking forward to his semester in Japan where he can improve his Japanese and get a bit more feeling about the land of his father’s ancestors. I didn’t actually have any deep conversations. I felt a little bit like a bride: everyone’s gathered here to see me (and my beloved), and my job is to play my role and make sure everyone has enough seltzer to drink, and a comfy clean pillow. It was enough to create the event of gathering: I hope to continue conversations with my sister, cousins, and children by phone with more depth now that we’ve seen each other in the flesh.

The family came in from Brooklyn, DC, Philadelphia, Virginia, Delaware, Albuquerque and Tucson, all very urban places. The empty expanses, and the star lit night sky, will surely stay with our visitors. Arden, Valerie’s youngest, was a firefighter in Lake County and knows a lot of cool locations, like the dry Loco Lake. He took the youngest generation to check it out on at least two nights. I was too tired. But from the photos, it looks like yet another spooky, otherworldly piece of the Oregon Outback.

Yuuki is the most photogenic creature that ever was, and was beautifully lit at Loco Lake by Jonah.

Beautiful Clara, and Jonah making Alkali Angels??

Apparently Loco Lake was a highlight for the youngest generation.

For the oldest traveler, Mary Lee, I think the best part of the trip was just seeing everyone. She’s lived and visited most of the planet, and reared her three children in New Dehli and Lebanon. She knows world history and writes plays about strong women, including Eleanor Roosevelt. She survived being widowed in her early 40s, and again in her 70s. She loves Italy, travel in general, gems, and her children and grandchildren. She loves me enough to deal with flight delays and dusty heat. She is amazing.

I was born in the evening of August 15th when Perry Mason was apparently just starting on TV. My father had just turned 30 two weeks before my arrival, and my mother was just 23. My mother passed away when she was 55, and my father after 7 years in a nursing home following a devastating stroke at age 69. Neither lived long enough to know my life as a divorced lesbian, and would have wondered at my choice to live in Paisley. Hopefully they’d have come around to my being gay, and as long as I have a job and am self sufficient, my father would have relaxed about the move. He’d also loved all the gun-toting, horse-riding republicans and he’d have adored Trump. Mom would have romanticized the First Nation people, and asked me about all the churches we’ve tried in our futile search for another St. Stephen’s. In any case, their daughters, myself and Elizabeth, are doing fine, and so are our five children. Mary Lee has 5 grandchildren, too. The 10 great grands of Ruth and Henry.

Ruth Turner, the descendant of slave owners. Henry Lincoln, cousin to the Great Emancipator. In that tension lies most of American History.

One thing that I reflect on as I think about the descendants of Ruth and Henry, is that we are committed to the social good, and to the arts. My sister is learning Healing Touch for working with animals and humans. Cousin Julie is an expert on pollinators, working against all hope for the healing of the environment with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her sister, Targ, is a middle school guidance counselor. Brother Andrew McIntyre, who couldn’t come to Paisley, is a professor of acupuncture. Yuuki is an artist, exploring gender and the biracial life as a Japanese-American hyphenated human, with courage and sass. I’ve been a social worker for 33 years, now psychotherapist to the bruised and broken-hearted of Lake County. My daughter Clara is in charge of a tutoring site in Prince Georges County for at risk Latinx youth, using her bilingual skills to bring children and grandchildren of immigrants more opportunity through education. My son Jonah makes music videos in Brooklyn, living in what Beverly Tatum Daniel calls the borderlands where cultures complement, challenge, connect and stimulate each other. I asked him recently why he only dates women of color, particularly women of the African Diaspora. He says, they can relate to being of two cultures. Since he grew up white in a non-white world, he feels like a code switcher, too.

We are all in our own way, justice-seeking.

The other part of the birthday extravaganza was letting people give to me. Receiving. Valerie had been reading a book called, It’s Not Your Money, by Tosha Sliver, who’s an amazing writer using humor and an ecumenical lens. I started reading it, and found this prayer, which I inhaled into my heart for the awkwardness of receiving all the love of my family for my birthday.

Here I go, headlong into my 61st year, giving with complete ease and abundance, wildly open to receiving.

#birthday crackintheground paisley toshasilver

0 notes

dead-palette · 7 years

Text

Jeff the Killer, New Beginnings

Hello there, I'll be using you to talk about the situation I find myself in. See, my name is Jefferson L. Killian, but you can just call me Jeffry. I'm 22 and recently moved from Tucson Arizona to Alton Utah with my mom, dad, and stupid adopted kid brother Liu. I like Yu gi oh, Roblox, and rap music. I'm actually thinking about starting a soundcloud to do yu gi oh parody rap battles. Or I was, before the bad day came. Now I'm no sure of anything anymore.

It all started a week ago when we moved into our new house, so Y2K had not hapened yet. I didn't want to move but my mom got a new job on a public access kid show writing. Her idea was called super puppet friends. Anyway, the new house was in a nicer neighborhood than our last one. I can tell because I saw married couples wearing sweaters tied around their shoulders. My parents forced me and my 14 year old brother to go to a new church. I wish we could go to normal church, sadly we're Mormon. When we got there, some men in black greeted my parents but I had to look after the kids in the daycare, INCLUDING my super adopted brother. The daycare was in the basement, and ugh, the smell. It was like a new kind of poop smell that was clearly poop, but like modified in a lab. The genetic code of this poop wasn't meant to occur naturally in nature.

So I surveyed the room. In the middle were a group of kids playing Beyblades in the middle of the room. They were playing Beyblades in the middle of the room in a hulahoop, not the officially licensed Metal Fusion Beystadium by Takara Tomy like my brother uses. My brother ran over and started playing took out his Burn Fireblaze Pheonix metal beyblade. I saw one black kid using a Twisted Tempo spinner, and another using a Diablo Nemesis Metal Fury. I hated Beyblades so much. They all yelled "Let a rip!".

One boy ran up to me and complained that they wouldn't let him play because he didn't have his own Beyblade. This boy might have been patient zero of the genetically modified super poop experiement. He had what I assumed what chocolate pudding on his face and nose, and did have a cowboy hat on. The whole time he whined he was itching his butt, really using his red shorts to get in their. I told him to wash his hands first. He then went to the near by drinking fountain and rinsed his hands, only to dry both of them by itching his butt again. This redirection must have changed his train of thought.

Over to the left area of the basement was kids playing with lego. If you didn't know, the plural of lego is lego, not legos, but I bet these stupid kids didn't know that. A few of the lego were officially licensed by the Lego Group of Denmark. The rest were some christian knock off legos. Like noah's ark themed bricks and the naviety scene. These lego bricks symbolized the death and rebirth I'd go through to become the man I am now. The one Ninjago toy that was officially licensed, Kai, symbolized the power I'd WELD.

Over to the right area of the basement there was some kind of some leaking pipes. The leaks were flooding the floor on the right side of the room. But no one seems to take notice of the leaking pipes and the wet floor. Besides dookie kid who would ocassionally jump up and down in the water, sending small splashes of putrid water of to the left area of the room, where the lego kids were playing at. Near the back of the room, opposite me, was a child having an intense game of pocket pool. Focusing my eyes, it was Randy, a boy my age. Randy had a skatebored at his feet and his hands in his pockets. I wondered if the strange curve in his back was natural or if it came from how good his game of pocket pool felt. Randy wore a black trench coat and a fetching white ascot. His hair was qcouffed in a manner that made him look like Joseph Smith if he was a school shooter. His skatebored had tight wheels on it, and it's underside had a picture of Dark Link from Ocarina of Time on it. Randy also wore a nametag that said Randy Anthon of the LatterDay Saints. That's when his eyes connected with me.

I wore white hoodie. I like to wear white to show off my positive attitude toward life. My hair was pure black and unqcouffed. My body has numberous scares from cutting myself. My pants WHERE black to slim my legs. I never liked my legs, too leggy if you ask me. Anyway, Randy gave off an aura of malice. I could just tell he had something to do with the Anthon Forgeries that made Mormons look like fools years ago. If not for that slip up, Mormonism might have been mainstream by now. But I couldn't let myself get distracted by that at a time like this, in this hell hole.

That's when a Bishop came down stairs with a cart full of snacks. The Bishop wore a red bow time and red suspenders, a white dress shirt and black dress pants. His haircut was dorky with disturbingly even bangs and ginger-y hair. His ears were big and magnifient. He started to introduce himself to myself and my adopted brother liu as "Bishop Bob Backlund." But then he started just yelling at me. He wanted to know why the pipes were leaking. I of coursed had nothing to do with it. But he wouldn't listen and blamed me. He pushed me on to the floor and told me to serve the the snacks if I wanted to stay a Mormon. Then he left.

Randy was laughing as he walked out of the room with the Bishop. I was so made, but I couldn't have my Mormonism revoked. My parents would be pissed. So I served the snack. The snack was either goldfish or vanilla wafers served in white coffee filters. And every child also got a can of warm ginger ale. But the Ginger ale was Canada Dry. My old Mormon church had Verners Ginger Ale. I couldn't deal with all this change.

Once all the children had snacks, they all resulted to their activities, getting goldfish and waffer crumbles everywhere. I started watching the children playing with K'Nex because I didn't have any paper to write Roblox raps. While all of the K'Nex were officially licensed by the K'Nex Industries Inc, many pieces were missing making the hole thing sad. They did have the K'New Plane that you got from Pizza Hut. My mom actually directed the Pizza Head commericals for Pizza Hut, so I had all the Pizza Hut K'Nex until we adopted Liu from China. I also got lots of Muchtown meals.

But while my attention was focused on the K'Nex, I missed some awful happening at the other area of the room. When I noticed, time slowed down. It was clear that this would be the defining moments of my life. And it didn't turn with a whimper, but a bang, of horrorific bang. A bang that would turn me into a harbinger of evil. Gone was the pure Jeff that believed in truth, justice, and the Book of Mormon. No, I would become death, bringer of evil. It was cowboy hat boy. His pants were down. His small small little boy penis hanging out. He was standing over the puddle, his vibrant red shorts around his ankles getting wet on the floor. Scattered around him were gradually softening goldfish, turning into puff balls. His back was arched in an all too famaliar way, a sign of inpending doom. Behind him was a trash can placed flush against the wall. His hands, far above his head and clinche into granite fist like victorious vice grips. That's when he yelled the incandation that brought to earth to a stand still. "LET A RIP!"

A shotgun blast of solid yet wet shit erupted forth from his prepubest bum and hit the wall without loosting any elevation, then shattering and recocheting on impact. Bit of wet poop landed on everything and everyone in a circular reverberance zone. The remants of dookie that stuck to the wall began to loosen and fall, hitting the rim of the trashcan but falling to the floor. This happen as a second burst detonated even louder and more sour sounding than the first. Now a mostly liquid napalm that traveled two and a half feet to the wall in a constant stream, that in turn back splashed landing mostly on the red shorts.

Then came Revelations 17:12. "The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast." And these ten horns were ear deafing farts, the kind of piercing ordanance sounds that give soldiers life long nightmares. With my ears ringing and my mind boarding on insanity, a pee stream was unleashed from this tiny little man. A pee stream of a perturnatural nature, seeming to come from no where as it was impossible that it sprung from such a minuscule vessel considering the sheer literage of the urine in question. Whats more was the smell, the pee, not the poop, but the pee smells worst than anything I'd ever smelled. One might imagine puking, but the smell had such a tartness that it oppessed the heaving I was feeling in my gut. As my hearing returned, I heard the boy say one word with a blank expression on his face.

"Help"

That's when the Bishop returned and blamed me for the poop. It was so unsafe. He told me to clean it up. He handed me some cleaning supplies and sent all the kids home. I tried cleaning the trash can with bleach and ammonia and it burned me, turning me into a monster. I went broke into the Churches Musuem and stole the Kitchen Knife of Latterday Saints, the knife destine to end the Beast.

Afterwards, I broke into the inner sactum of the church where Randy, Troy, and Keith were all drinking ginger ale from the glass bowl of reformed Egyptians, one of the 3 scared objects of mormonism. I stabbed all three of them and drank from the bowl. Now I can read every langauge. Tihs made me Jeff the Killer, New Beginnings. Now go to sleep children of Abraham.

#creepypasta #creepypasta OC #OC

4 notes · View notes

kenneth49-blog1 · 7 years

Text

Conserve Water & Conserve Life with Rainwater Harvesting System

Earth is the planet that has been blessed with water availability, thus having life on this planet. Water is the most precious element for survival, without which we can't even imagine the life here.

In urban lifestyle, daily usage of treated water is more which further raises the cost of living. These water supply systems in urban areas, whole quantity of water is to be treated for drinking purpose and water consumed for drinking is only 1%. Water is needed for purposes such as toilet flushing, fountains, car washes, cleaning home floors, public buildings and watering plants. So to makeup with water demands in today’s world, we should use our resources more efficiently. Rainwater harvesting being cheap and friendly to environment can solve many of our problems.

What is Rain Water Harvesting?

It’s a technique of collecting and storing rainwater into natural reservoirs or making infiltration of surface water before it is runoff from surface into subsurface reservoirs.

Methods to Harvest Rainwater:

· Surface runoff harvesting: surface rainwater caught by preventing its runoff. This water is passed through aquifers, recharged by using appropriate methods.

· Roof top rainwater harvesting: In this type of harvesting, rainwater is collectedfrom the roof of the house/building wherever it falls. It can be stored in a tank or can be placed intoan artificial recharge system.

Need to Harvest Rainwater?

There may be many reasons such as:

To prevent soil erosion

Water conservation for various usage

Arresting decline of ground water

To improve water quality in aquifers and artificial recharging systems

Since rainwater harvesting leads to water supply which leads to food security

Advantages of Rain Harvesting:

Rain water is priceless gift of nature, so save it for future.A drip can destroy many drops.

It has low cost of maintenance

Reduces monthly water bills

Free from impurities/chemicalsso can be used for gardening and irrigation purposes

Disadvantages of Rain Harvesting:

Quality: Quality of water is doubtful, it may be polluted with dust, air pollution, insect etc. it must be purified properly,if to be used for drinking purposes.

Installation Complexity: A complex and tedious procedure. There are tasks like installing pumps, filters which require a plumber.

Reliability: Rainwater harvesting includes only rain as a source, one cannot be sure of rains, making water collection unstable.

If you are interested in making use of free water, you can contact EcoSense Sustainable Landscapes for its Rainwater Harvesting Tucson solutions.

#rainwater harvesting #rainwater harvesting tucson #custom landscape design

0 notes