I'm going to go throw up now.

So The Jake, as it turns out, is arthritic. I ended up having to cancel his original vet appointment because I got stuck in Tucson, but he was doing so very much better that I didn't reschedule it right away. His limp has all but disappeared- in fact, may have disappeared completely. I needed to pick up his heartworm medication last week, though, so I dragged his hairy belligerent ass over there with me and had the doctor give him a look-see. Arthritis. The vet had even noted "arthritis' in his chart over a year ago; apparently he was able to physically feel it in his legs. So there you have it. Captain the Jake is thickening with age, including his bones. You'll be happy to know that the glucosamine / aspirin combo is really doing the trick; Jake is falling asleep on things and eating food lying down and sitting for hours on one butt cheek like a Jake half his age.

Okay, here's this other thing. I've written about our love of a local little mountain town called Crown King quite a bit over the years. Specifically here, here, here, here, and here. Randy and I have been spending long weekends in Crown King for years; there's a single "hotel" up there with maybe eight "rooms", and at least once every July or August Randy would look at me through the heat waves blasting up through our family room floor, and he'd mouth the words Crown King. At which point we'd both bound out of the house to drive the two hours north on a treacherous mountain dirt road until finally emerging into a thick canopy of pine trees and the sweet, merciful sounds of things not drying up and sticking to other things.

We'd always talked about how much we'd love to have a tiny cabin up there in the woods, something really small and manageable, something ridiculously inexpensive and quirky that we could fix up. We also always managed to talk ourselves out of it because cabins by their very nature are expensive. But then we found a cabin that wasn't expensive. An inexpensive cabin. A tiny, manageable, quirky cabin so very, very inexpensive it was like an engraved invitation.

So we bought it. And couldn't believe our luck.

This was last August. We've been working on rehabbing it steadily since then. And I've been taking photos and making notes of the entire process so I could share the whole thing here once we finally finished. Last weekend we hauled the very last piece of furniture up the mountain, and this weekend we'd planned to drive up to do a big final house cleaning and take a bunch of "after" pictures.

But then a fire broke out in the mountains. A house fire. During which a propane tank exploded, setting a pine tree on fire. Wide-eyed witnesses say that was it, that was the beginning of the end, that it took maybe fifteen seconds for the fire to jet across five hundred yards of spruce pine and underbrush, cutting across the mountain like a... well, like a wildfire.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/nation/2012/05/others-leave-ariz-town-wildfires-size-triples/617311

The Gladiator Fire is now pushing 6,500 acres. It's approximately four miles north of our tiny, almost-finished cabin. The town of Crown King is a myriad system of rugged dirt roads nestled inside a natural bowl in the mountains (hence the name Crown King; the Bradshaw mountain peaks surround the town like the peaks of a crown). This topography makes it next to impossible for firefighters to try and fight the fire from inside the town-- if the fire makes a turn toward the south, it will essentially turn the town into a giant trap. For the last few days the wind has been blowing toward the north at 40mph and this is good, this is blowing the blaze away from homes. If the wind shifts, however, or even stops, the firefighters speculate the fire's next natural move would be to double-back on the town and potentially wipe out everything.

I'm absolutely physically ill thinking about the ramifications of this. The thought of losing our little place-- this tiny little retreat that we busted our ASSES to fix up over the last year-- is nothing compared to the thought of losing the entire town. I can't even wrap my mind around it. So I'm going to go ahead and post a bunch of photos I'd taken over the last year, hopefully in some semblance of order, just so they're here and not just trapped on my phone.

These first shots are of the cabin right after we bought it, before we changed anything.

This is the back of the cabin. That boulder is massive, apparently too massive to move, so the original builder just said fuck it and built the house around it. How awesome is that?

I don't even know if I have a picture of the front; the entire thing hangs off a hill on stilts, so from the ground you have to just point the camera up and you can't see anything but deck railing. When you see the deck, that's the front of the house.

Okay, the front of the house from the ground looking up. We spent last Thanksgiving up there assembling IKEA furniture and acting like we'd never seen snow before. 

Again, taken right after we bought it.

There's an amazing little "workshop" behind the house, too, it's like a little playhouse. We toyed with the idea of putting bunkbeds in there and making it a bunkhouse for kids, but then I realized that sleeping in a ten-foot isolated room in the middle of the woods is actually on my Ten Fucking Scariest Things In The World list, so maybe we shouldn't throw my six-year-old nephew and five-year-old granddaughter in there.

The original kitchen.

There was an antique stove here that the previous owners took with them.

From the kitchen looking into the living room. (The whole house is kitchen, family room, two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom. It's about 800 square feet.)

The living room looking into the kitchen.

Stove in the family room.

Back wall of the family room. The deck is outside the window.

Urinal!

One of the first things we did was rip out the carpet. And pull up the kitchen tile.

And get DirecTV hooked up because please.

Randy ripped out... all of this.

The next step was trying to wheedle people into helping with the "heavy lifting". Randy's kids were all gung-ho, but we basically had to beg cabinet, appliance, and flooring people to come up. It doesn't translate well into photos, but the foot path from the driveway (a driveway so steep it's only traversable via four-wheel drive. And if it's icy? Either take your chances sliding down or don't try leaving, fool) up to the house is so unbelievably steep and treacherous... I'm not even sure what to compare it to. It's essentially just straight up mountain climbing. You get out of the car after a two-hour trip and you enthusiastically tackle the path to the house, only to discover when you get to the top you legitimately need to sit down for a minute.

We moved the sink to where the old range was and vise versa, so that's the new "sink" you're looking at.

And that's where the new range will go.

Refrigerator and microwave.

From the living room.

Next came the flooring. After a lot of researching and consulting with Chris (who knows about such things), we decided on an imitation wood product made of vinyl; the floor is so extremely crooked we knew a true wood product wouldn't work because it wouldn't have enough give to it. And we really didn't want to put down carpet if we could help it. So with the kids' help, we brought up a trailer loaded with fifty fifty-five pound boxes of vinyl flooring and we unloaded it all into the shed in the driveway. I remember thinking how much it was going to suck to be the flooring guy; he was going to have to move ALL of these boxes up the Path Of Slidy, Rocky Death and into the house. I remember thinking this in the selfishly gleeful way people privately think things when they're asking to be smited by the Universe.

The following weekend, the temperature dropped about forty degrees, no joke. The flooring was scheduled to be installed on Monday, and on Saturday Randy and I were headed up just to make sure everything was cool. But on the way we remembered that the instructions on the flooring clearly stated that it needs to "live" in a room temperature environment for 48 hours before it's installed so it won't contract or expand or otherwise get all fucked up. So Randy started a fire in the living room stove, and he and I carried every single one of those fifty fifty-five pound goddamn boxes from the garage up to the house. In the snow. While it snowed on us. I was wearing cowboy boots, the traction equivalent of wearing Jell-O shots on my feet.

Holy shit, though, look at that floor. The floor might have been the most significant milestone for us, not only because we'd agonized and debated over which material would be best for the job, but also because we'd been spending weekends up here and we were tired of popping air mattresses on carpet staples and bleeding all over everything when we tried to walk to the bathroom barefoot.

After the flooring was in, I was really sweating the appliance delivery. I literally didn't think it could be done.

Those guys routed themselves through the middle of the forest and cats-cradled that shit UP, yo. Took maybe twenty minutes total. Maybe. Unreal.

The same guys who delivered the appliances also helped us unload our trailer full of IKEA furniture. I had originally planned to have all of the furniture delivered by IKEA, if possible, so I grabbed a copy of the delivery specification sheet and ran through all the fine print. It looked like they really would deliver it to us, provided we signed off on some extra fees and a damage waver-- a DEAL as far as I was concerned, since I still had the imprint of a fifty-five pound cardboard box in my hip bone. I called the delivery company, gave them the zip code for Crown King, and was reassured that yes, they WILL deliver to us.

"Look," I broke it down, "This is wilderness. This is an hour of bad dirt road followed by twenty minutes of worse dirt road. And when you get here, you start climbing." I was just trying to be as up front as possible-- the only thing worse than not having the furniture delivered would be having the furniture delivered as far as the driveway. The company ended up sending a dude in a car to check out the situation and yeah, no. No fucking way. (As an aside, the nearest Home Depot is like 45 miles away, and they have a framed photo in their break room of a box truck with both axles ripped off. It's a reminder that they don't deliver to Crown King.)

So the appliance guys helped us out. You know. For money.

Countertops and sink. Those are Formica tops that look a lot like granite.

The kids, excited, got us cabin-themed gifts for Christmas:

My friend Stacy is a phenomenal artist, and I had seen an amazing painting she'd done of a highway exit sign. So one day when the clouds were particularly painting-y, Randy and I stopped on the side of the highway and I took this picture of the Crown King exit:

Which Stacy turned into THIS, HOLY SHIT:

(Stacy, I swear I'm going to take a better picture of it than this; I just haven't taken the SLR up there yet on account of I don't want to carry it up to the house because it's heavy but I KNOW I can get a shot of it that does your work better justice provided it doesn't burn to death in a fire.)

Plus I had a piece of stained glass made to fit the bathroom window above the toilet:

So yeah. We hung towel bars in the bathroom complete with fresh towels. The IKEA double beds are sitting up there now, made up with clean sheets and quilts and this tiny pillow of a Sasquatch:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/91259554/ready-to-ship-your-own-personalA couple weekends ago we hung Randy's prize boar head that he shot when he was twelve.

So yeah, you know. The boar's on the wall, so it's pretty much home.

Do me a favor and keep your fingers crossed, would you? For the safety of the 600 men and women up there fighting this fire, for this hundred-year-old mining town, and for our poor tiny little house with its deathtrap of a walkway. Because I haven't even gotten to tell you about Mothra yet, the neighborhood pterodactyl, and that's a story I'd really like to tell.

Captain The Jake Addendum:

I've gotten several comments and a couple of emails encouraging me to take Jake to the vet, and I just want to make sure everyone knows I'm totally taking the situation seriously; just because I'm sort of making light of it here doesn't mean I'm not 1000% on board with a vet visit because I absolutely am. I love Jake's vet- plus his office is literally across the street from my house. I'm not exaggerating, if I walk to the edge of my front yard I can wave to that guy. I'm not going to right now because he's pretty busy and he gets tired of me doing that, but I could.

Jake, however, haaaaaaaaates the vet. He had a traumatic experience there once as a puppy and now his chart is marked AGGRESSIVE and he has to be forcibly muzzled. I give him little doggie Xanax beforehand but it doesn't help very much. His eyes still swell up and he shakes for hours afterward. It's rough.

So while all advice is very welcome and encouraged (keep it coming!) my thinking in waiting goes something like, hey, let's try the simplest solutions first, and if in a couple of weeks there's no improvement, then we'll take him to the doctor. This is not completely unlike the time I had what felt like a flaming hot lava fireball perched inside my ribcage, but instead of pancreatitis or a peptic ulcer or an actual volcano, it turned out I just needed to stop eating full-fat Greek yogurt by the five-pound vat.

Randy and I want to keep The Captain healthy and happy as long as we can because we honestly don't know what we'd do without him. Randy talks about having him stuffed when he's gone, but I think that's too creepy. I personally think we should have him animatronically controlled like that gorilla from Showbiz Pizza; we'll put him in the corner of the family room and he can fake play the Rock-afire keyboard a la Fatz Geronimo. I think it's what he'd want.

EDIT: Not more than five minutes after I hit "publish" on this, I read a follow-up comment from Kate on the last post about her sweet Aussie's diagnosis with bone cancer. Jake now has a vet appointment on Tuesday. I'm gonna ask if they have any brochures on posthumous animatronic control while I'm there. You know. For levity.

I still don't have the heart to tell Jake he's not an actual Captain.

Captain The Jake has been hobbling around on a stiff wing for a few weeks now. He's getting older, after all, and god knows he's not getting any thinner. About a month ago I started adding liquid glucosamine to his food, and this week I started giving him 300mg of liver-flavored aspirin a day, too.

It seems to come and go, though, and it doesn't seem to be causing him any discomfort, so for now Randy and I have opted for a "discuss it constantly" approach. We both made the rookie mistake of reading The Art of Racing in the Rain, so when I say we discuss it constantly, I mean we discuss it constantly with the dog. If you haven't had the pleasure of open-mouth sobbing all over this tome of enlightenment, I heartily recommend it- particularly if you already have a pet you consider half-human and you're looking to upgrade his status to Sicilian prince.

Both of us finished it and, once our corneal blood vessels had reconstricted, we sat down and had an hour-long heart-to-heart conversation with The Jake. I spent a lot of time awkwardly explaining "sarcasm" and how "fat-ass panda cow" is really sort of a compliment; Randy mumbled a promise to never splash him from the bathtub again and negotiated a slight increase in rotisserie chicken skin rations.

So yeah. That's where we are. Each of us interrogating the dog while trying to outdo one another in the comfort department. Randy keeps thinking of things Jake might like to sleep on, so now our bedroom floor is like a hopscotch myriad of random soft shit. It looks like a four-year-old child lives in there with a drunk caretaker.

I continue asking Jake if his leg hurts, reminding him that he can't stand the vet so maybe he should stop being a big faker. Sometimes I get a little passive-aggressive and mention that SOMEone's leg might not be all fucked up if SOMEone hadn't flown out of a four-story window like a blind squirrel tripping balls. But then Jake gives me a lick on the knee and strolls outside- sometimes with a tiny limp, sometimes not- and he lowers himself with a grunt into a puddle of sun on the patio. And I watch him. And he watches me. And he's thinking, "Yeah, she's not wrong about that window shit, that did not help."

That seemed to snap him out of it.

Randy crawled home early from work today; the crumpled note he handed over from his accountant instructed me to please excuse the bloody sweat and the tears of spinal fluid, that's to be expected, just keep him hydrated and away from anything sharp, high, or loaded.

I did the most logical thing I could think of- I carried my comatose husband out to the car and I drove him to IKEA.

He likes the vignettes. Something about 542 square feet of living space really seems to calm him down; he may storm in all red-faced and puffy but he always leaves with a triumphant fistful of tiny pencils and a solid plan to move into an upcycled storage container.

We had just finished pretending we lived in a 253ft studio apartment in Helsingborg when we noticed one of the neighboring displays was off limits and cordoned off with caution tape.

I nudged Randy. "IKEA murder," I whispered.

No response. I couldn't tell if he was tax-relapsing or if he'd convinced himself he was actually studying tiny architecture at Linkoping University.

Either way, this was necessarily the next step:

Crimp those edges, baby. Oooh, yeah, you know I like my top lattice weaved.

Holy shit, it's been another month. Oh, hey, to the day, look at that. Let's pretend like I planned it that way. (EDIT: Not to the day. Threes look like eights, I guess, time to see my eyecare professional.)

I'm still driving back and forth to Tucson every day. Likewise, I still have eight-plus hours of A Dance with Dragons to listen to, but I guess I reached my fantasy recitation threshold or something because I can't bring myself to turn that shit on in the car. I just can't do it. It's almost like a hundred and forty-two hours was enough or something, weird, right? So I'll either have to make time to read it myself with my own eyeballs and one monotonous mental voice or else I'll just read how it ends on wikipedia. Fin.

Since I was here last, I started and ended an unfortunate adventure in audiobooks: I downloaded like seven Stuart Woods novels for absolutely no logical reason. I've never read Stuart Woods and never had any real inclination to read Stuart Woods, and since I've made this particular mistake before, you can probably go ahead and guess how it ends. CLUE: Wonderfully.

Nope. So I start listening to these books and the narrator is reading the protagonist, Stone Barrington, as a 1940s "film noir" detective. Which gets tiresome. These books are set in a relatively modern-day environment, but every time I hear this guy's voice I picture some dude standing in a dark rain wearing a trenchcoat and talking around a cigar. Not to knock the narrator's talent, since he's obviously a multi-faceted voice actor; In the event that another male character finds himself in a dialogue with Stone, that guy is always Russian. And god forbid there are three guys in a scene because Guy Number Three is then necessarily forced to be a Transylvanian vampire. So you might be involved in a scene where a lawyer is having a conversation with a New York cab driver and a cop, but what you're hearing is Sam Spade talking to Yakov Smirnoff with occasional interjections from Count Dracula.

I don't even want to get into how the female characters are voiced OR written because it's just too fucking horrible for words. All of the female characters are narcissistic sex fiends who force the protagonist into bed (or car or bathroom stall or large armoire) literally ten minutes after the initial handshake. And the (many) sex scenes read like they were written by a thirteen-year-old boy, you know? Like, he uses the word "penis" a lot. "Testicles" make a regular appearance. And judging by the context, you're not left with any kind of confident impression that Woods has ever actually HAD sex before. At least half of all sex scenes start with Stone dreaming he's having sex, only it turns out it's not a dream. And I'm not talking "passed out with a head injury" asleep, I mean "dozed off with last month's Esquire in a chaise lounge" asleep.

First of all, how fucking asleep do you have to BE? I've never actually woken up from a leisurely afternoon nap in the sun to discover that oh! wait! That wasn't a dream, there's actually A DUDE INSIDE OF ME RIGHT NOW. I was just resting my eyes for a second and now I'm naked and in Stage Five of a sexual encounter. AGAIN.

Likewise, at least half of said sex scenes end with a sex-starved female begging for a fifth go-round while Stone shuts her down. The female is typically "kneading his penis" as this conversation takes place. She has also been known to "stretch" it. I don't personally have a penis, but I've been around the block a few times and I'm pretty sure penises aren't made out of pie crust dough. For what it's worth, Woods goes out of his way to avoid dealing with the female genitalia at all. When he absolutely can't get around it, you can almost picture him covering his mouth and whispering, "down there," while furtively pointing.

When the women aren't stretching, kneading, or begging, they're busy making horrible decisions for Stone to clean up. Insurance fraud. Murder. Lying about paternity. Gold digging. It's one hundred and ten percent infuriating. And yeah, I listened to like six of these idiot books and I have absolutely no defense. I finally shut the door when two competing female characters were attempting to wheedle a reluctant Stone into a threesome.

Oh, and here's the other thing: Even if you happen to be down with Humphrey Bogart hanging out with Vladimir Putin and The Count for three hours while periodically getting his penis and testicles stretched and kneaded by vapid, evil whores, you still have to find a way to overlook the UNBELIEVABLE glaring errors in plot consistency. In one book, a female character gives birth to a daughter- in the next book, it's a son. The same female character has long blond hair- fifteen minutes later she's a brunette. Fifteen minutes after that, she's blond again. There's literally a scene where two characters are gazing into their coffee cups after dinner, and the NEXT LINE has one of them sipping wine from a wine glass. It's so far past lazy, I can't even deal.

So in summation: I highly recommend Stuart Woods' "Stone Barrington" novels if you enjoy predictable mysteries written by a mysogynistic and overly-masturbatory fourteen-year-old boy with short-term memory loss. Moreover, I highly recommend you listen to said novels if you're into Casablanca or the Kremlin or Count Chocula.