Survival by Lists

With my departure date just a week away, it seems my days are governed by lists. Not only my own lists, but also those sent to me via email by my good friend Jane, who will be driving one or the other of the two vehicles down in Nevada. Jane's lists seem so much more interesting than mine - they include items like a "Swiss Army knife with the full array of dental and surgical tools. That rib-spreader may save our lives." Yikes.

I should talk. "Investigate snake-bite kit" is one of the items on my list. Though it is somewhat reassuring to know that only a very small percentage of snakebites in North America are actually fatal, there are a couple of times when we will be waaaaaay out in the middle of nowhere. Survival, it seems, depends on getting to a hospital with anti-venom within two or three hours... If our vehicles break down, or one of our drivers is bitten while I'm somewhere out on the trail, or I am bitten after falling off the horse onto a pile of snake-sheltering sagebrush and have to ride two hours to find the drivers... Well, "Investigate snake-bite kit" remains on the list. Here on Vancouver Island, we have little need for such items in our first aid kits, so this particular task will remain on my To Do list until we hit the Nevada state line.

Ok - I haven't forgotten about the old blog... really. But, wow - another action-packed month- working on the first round of rewrites for The Battle for Carnillo, working like mad on organizing the Great Pony Express Adventure in Nevada this September (including setting up a cool literacy/fund-raising initiative where sponsors can purchase books that I'll give out to students in Nevada and British Columbia), and, of all things, helping my extremely talented father (E.Colin Williams) re-touch a mural he painted in Chemainus fifteen years ago. Now that was a cool project - visual artists see the world quite differently to anyone else... And, yes, it really is hard to keep your perspective when you are working a few inches away from a wall that is fifty feet long.