April 30, 2005
My back feels better. I think I'm over the worst of it. Very nice out. The Palo Verde trees are starting to bloom and their bright yellow flowers really add a punch to springtime on the desert.

After a bike ride with the dogs, I bit the bullet and went out and pulled cholla out of the wheel well of the ‘49 Ford, where the packrats had made a home. Flushed everything out with water then poured Mad Coyote Joe red chili powder all over the engine interior.

All the while I was worried about the hanta virus (I've got two friends who have lost relatives to this rat-turd-borne disease). It didn’t help any that one of the magazines I bought yesterday was History Today, an English pub which had an extensive article on the Black Plague which by the latest estimates wiped out 60% of Europe’s population. And the culprit? Infected rats and fleas carried by boats to every civilized port as the pandemic methodically ravaged every country where shipping had created a new capitalist society. Depressing to say the least. Rats!

About lunchtime I realized I would probably live so I had the leftover Rock Bottom club sando. Thought quite a bit about the bad service I got there and wondered if it had any effect on their staffing, or attitude. Probably not.

At about one, I got to work in the studio and reworked, or finished off, depending on your point of view, several paintings. One of Curly Bill and his two satellites, and another of Doc Holliday finishing off Frank Stilwell in the Tucson train yards (yes, I’m still working on that!). Got a good handle on a close-up of Doc and a half-naked soiled dove behind him. Good reference. Unfortunately, I bent over to pick up some papers on the floor and wrenched my back, even worse than before. Kathy put a vibrator on my back as I rolled on the floor in pain. Very discouraging, since I thought I was out of the woods. I was just picking up paper! It wasn’t like it was a bag of cement.

Decided to make some tacos at about four. Kathy joined me and we drank beers and talked like kids ("Where’s the limes?" "I've got your lime right here Baby." "Big talk for a man with a bad back.")

Speaking of ridiculous talk, Robert Ray stuck his head in my office on Friday and was telling me about an editorial cartoonist he heard being interviewed on NPR and how the guy was saying that newspapers haven't figured out what talk radio has, and that is, being controversial doesn't lose listeners/readers, it gains them. I asked Robert how he thinks that applies to us and he said, and I quote, "We should have had the tophead on this latest issue of 'Was Geronimo Hosin' Lozen?'" Too funny. I laughed all day about that one. How does he think of these? And why didn’t we have that top head? (the actual tophead was "Lozen: She Fought With Geronimo")

"What I value more than all things is good humor."
—Thomas Jeffersonn