Waurika, Oklahoma, which will be having it’s annual rattlesnake roundup this weekend, will also host the Western Writers Roundup at the at the same time. The Times Record News online site put this paragraph in its list of events:

WESTERN WRITERS ROUNDUP April 12, Chisholm Trail Historical Museum, Waurika. Ninth annual gathering of published authors residing in and/or writing about the American West. A chuck wagon lunch served at noon. (580) 228-2166.

I don’t know if there will be an upcoming abundance of snake stories or not; on the other hand, I don’t know how many writers will even leave the Chisholm Trail Historical Museum.

Here’s an idea: since the theme is snakes, maybe the town should host a lawyers convention instead of a writers roundup. JOKING . . .JOKING.

Yes, this is very sad; the little green car had a simple fix for the transmission fluid – a hose replacement. But, guess what? The brakes need expensive attention, so I am letting it go. I may bring it home and sell parts on Ebay. 1976 300D Mercedes-Benz. It could give life to other old soldiers out there plugging along. I am sad.

I haven’t looked up the population of Coffee Springs but I think it is small and I am going to have to hike around to get a lay of the landscape, but I did find one fellow who is writing a blog and he lives in Coffee Springs. He calls it Tladotse’s Weblog and one of his posts contains this paragraph:

Well it is another great day I am alive and kicking and on this side of the turf still. I also feel reasonably well today and not too many aches and pains. So that is a plus. Not too much is going on at Coffee Springs but it is a happy place and I don’t find very much fault with it.

That seems like a good attitude to have. Of course, I am the complaining type and everyone knows how I get so frustrated with myself and Indiana.

I’m off to see what this place is like – the one that is happy and doesn’t have much fault with it.

Aw, now I’ve come on something sad, and article in Time.com about small towns dying. I grabbed this paragraph from it:

For many a little town across the U.S., the basic economic resource was the railroad. Competition from trucks has made short-haul, small-load freight uneconomic for railroads, and many small-town stops have been abandoned. The Central of Georgia used to stop at Coffee Springs, Ala., and the town made a living by ginning and shipping cotton. But the railroad ripped out the tracks that ran through Coffee Springs, and today weeds grow in what used to be busy streets. “We’re going nowhere,” says a longtime Coffee Springs resident. “There’s nowhere we want to go.”

Things are lively in Coffee Springs, though, and tempers heated up last December.

I have transmission fluid coming out from my engine area and I decided to get under the car and figure out what was going on, since the car is becoming quite frankly an eyesore – but I love it. Still, it is due to have its brakes fixed and I don’t want to spend that kind of money if the transmission is going to be expensive.

So, I put on old clothes and slid under the car and stared at dirty greasy things. I got out from under the car and started it . . . then I sort of got a little bit back under it and saw the drip seemed to be coming from a certain area.

I wiped that area clean (after shutting the car off) and then turned it back on for a few seconds to see if I could narrow my search area down. Well, I think I did. Then I get this great idea to put tape around the tube/hose that looks worn and is leaking and see what happens. Okay. Nothing leaks.

I go and get transmission fluid and put it in; fortunately the pour point is on top of the engine and Thank God I remembered to get a funnel. I put the fluid in, could shift and everything . . . and then my patch started to leak.

But, hey, I didn’t give up. I did it all over again. This time it leaked more. I am going to have it towed to the shop.

I don’t know how many times I got under that car and out from under that car. A lot. I also got dirty and after a while I realized I was lying in transmission fluid. My hair was in the stuff.

I showered but my hands are pretty black still and my hair feels really, really funny.

I really tired hard and failed, but it doesn’t feel so bad. I think there is a fix out there that I just haven’t thought of yet. I did consider super glue, but that is probably better not tried.

This week they should be coming, the coupon cards for my mother to get two converter boxes for her antenna connected sets. I applied for them on January 31st, and according to the schedule, they should be mailed out today or in the next couple of days. Yes, mother lives in a no cable zone. She does not really want to get a satellite dish and she reads a lot anyway. If something really, really big were to happen, she could come down here. As it is, I do her internet searching for her. She likes it that way.

Usually I wait until the last possible moment to meet a cut-off date or deadline, but when it came to Mother and these boxes, I was right on it. I think they are easy to set up . . . and we have duct tape. Oh, I guess we should have purchased electrical tape. That was a joke. But if it weren’t, I’m sure we could find some in the drawer of the old Hoosier cabinet where buttons and screws from decades and decades ago reside.

The website (official) I used to apply for Mother’s converter boxes is HERE.

I am not complaining, but I have noticed that when spring comes round, birds are loud. It has finally dawned on me where the word atwitter came from, as in, “The tearoom was all atwitter.” It is not unpleasant at all – just a sound that was missing in the past winter mornings. I think it started off with one bird chirping right outside in the shrubs by the windows. Now, those shrubs are alive with the sound of music. Oh, look, there’s a bird in lederhosen! I have not looked at the weather prediction – I am hoping for at least some cheery sun as I continue to scrape my way though the layer cake of dirt, leaves, more dirt, and rotten leaves that were caught beneath the snow this year. There are occasional other finds as well, such as a wind-caught soda can that was once entombed, unknown, in an edge of the driveway mound of packed snow and ice. Then we have been working away at things in shady areas which have only bit by bit been released from the ice – errant pieces of firewood for instance. Leaves are everywhere, in every crack and crevice where a late fall wind blew them and an early snow trapped them. But, while working on them, I looked up at the maple and saw those reddish buds against a blue sky. What is so fascinating is that in a month we will have leaves ON THE TREES and fresh mulch and grassy areas cleared of sticks and twigs the occasional dropped knit glove.

A while back I was looking around at stuff about Oklahoma and stumbled upon the Waurika Rattlesnake Roundup which is actually going to be this coming weekend. I wrote a little post about it then and as April came around, I remembered it was coming up and decided to revisit the website. I saw that James White and the Outlaw Handlers were going to be putting on a show – a “continuous” show. He sounds interesting and I guess he has been doing this snake business for a number of years – as in decades. I found one article about a Sharon Springs roundup in which he appeared, although then the group was known as the Fangs and Rattlers.

I don’t know much about what they do, but I think he puts a lot of snake tails in his mouth . . . and the rest of the snake is attached to each tail. I think I would be too nervous to watch. Actually, I don’t know if I would feel compelled to go if I lived close enough . . . When I was little and we would go to a zoo, I always wanted to visit the reptiles first. Was that because I was so frightened of them I wanted to get it over or because I wanted to look at something which could freeze me with terror.

I think the fact that they don’t have legs bothers me the most – the fast, fast slithering and the head and upper body being able to spring forward in the blink of an eye. I guess arms on a human could snap forward and punch me in the nose pretty fast, but I don’t think about that for some reason.

I can’t remember not knowing about the Rudyard Kipling stories of cobras and the days of ropes that could be pulled to summon servants and a murderer putting a poisonous shake through the hole in the wall so it could crawl down the rope and bite a sleeping person. See, I am upset enough to write run-on sentences again.

When my grandfather was farming and they cut and baled hay, my uncle said there would always be a rattler in one of the bails . . . that was his least favorite job on the farm – helping with the hay bales. Rattlesnakes are scarce here now – although a hundred years ago when my grandmother moved into a house by a lake, the family discovered a snake nest in the cellar. One big snake crawled up into a wall and stuck his head out a hole in that wall. My grandmother used a broom to keep hitting it back until someone came, got a shotgun and blew its head off. Wait a minute – they fired a shotgun in the house? That seems odd. Well, desperate times lead to desperate measures, I suppose.

Maybe I would be drawn to the festival as I am sometimes drawn to watch scary movies. I might have to duct tape myself to a wall for that weekend to keep me from going. Yet, I live in an old house with a fruit cellar – what if a snake gnawed a hole in the wall right where I was taped? Oh, Lordy!

Now I am thinking that these Oklahomans just go out around where they live and find these snakes for the roundup. So for me, if I lived there, every day would be snake day. I would buy a shotgun, maybe two . . . and wear boots . . . and not sit in the grass.

I am a wimp . . . or Indiana Jonesette – Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes? I hate snakes!

Now that I have done a little exploring of the town and learned a little about things there, I have the urge to check in and that resulted in my wanting buttons – the kind you wear on your shirt or jacket. A company operating with an Albin, Wyoming address makes them – I want to think of a neat idea and put in an order.  First, what would I put on my buttons that I would give away?  They are only one inch in diameter so it can’t be a novel, but it should be something original and, well, novel. Now I have a project.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the name of the company is Grade Three  Merch.

I am kind of curious as to where the name came from, but I’ll think about that later.

Okay, I first happened on Thermopolis, Wyoming and it was just a little town, so I thought, “Gosh, I may have to look hard to entertain myself here.” Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw Yellowstone and gave the name Thermopolis a second thought. In my mind, I had been seeing the Spartans at Thermopylae – then thought thermo and Yellowstone. Hot spa place, I wondered.

Well, they have a slick webside – “Home of the World’s Largest Mineral Spring.” They have a Dinosaur Center there, as well; so I am going to look for another small town in Wyoming. I guess I’m not in the mood for the tourist attractions.

Let’s try Albin – I found it right up against the eastern border in the southern part of the state. And here’s a  fact:

Distance to major cities:
Cheyenne : 41 miles
Casper : 194 miles
Denver , CO : 141

(They do have a missile base, though, and it’s really close.)

I’ve been doing a little aerial exploration and I think there is one paved road going through town – is it Main or Broadway? I should have known – it’s Cheyenne. Then I see a length of road one block long coming off it to the south. Not much here, I think . . . but, ACK, I’m in it up to my eyeballs, now. Well, that’s okay; there are interesting stories everywhere and I like looking for them.

They don’t have cell phone service in Albin (and you can read the article in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle Online ) because they don’t have a tower. You see, Albin is right along the Union Pacific train tracks – if they were near an interstate, they would have a much better chance of getting a signal. My mother lives in a little village but part of my grandparents’ farm was sold to the state when the Toll Road came through. That baby comes out of Chicago and heads all the way east. She has great service.

I keep getting off the subject here and maybe in doing so I can of experience Albin. It’s a group of houses with the high plains all around them. You do have to turn inward there and ponder things – I suppose a person there talks to the other people (120 total) there and then he/she tells it to the countryside and listens to see if it talks back.

My granddaughter has been watching Alvin and the Chipmunks and I’m starting to think of the town as Alvin. Oh, but, gosh . . . I would never have expected this:

University of Wyoming electrical engineering student Julie Sandberg of Albin received the Scholar of the Year award from the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC).

Sandberg was notified for the honor at the recent annual ACEC meeting in Washington, D.C. The award includes a $10,000 scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year and a trip later this semester to the association’s 2007 fall conference in Maui, Hawaii, for the official presentation.

Sandberg’s family resides in Albin, a small farming community 42 miles northeast of Cheyenne. She says her greatest support comes from her family, including parents Terry and Joanne Sandberg, sister Lori, also a UW College of Engineering and Applied Science student, and grandmother Bertha Sandberg.

“All the people in Albin are more like family than friends,” Sandberg, says.

(You can read the entire article HERE.)

Hunters Trace Kennel is in Albin; they breed award winning Golden Retrievers. Uh . . . they don’t list a cell phone number that I can tell, but they say the best way to reach them is email – that would be Internet satellite, right? Probably. But I think they have cable TV so I’m not really certain.

And just when you start to joke around, you click on a topic and find tragedy:

ALBIN CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL, ALBIN: Candace Yuill (11) and her brother, Brett Yuill (8), were killed when an oncoming snowplow veered into the path of their school bus on an icy country road. The impact peeled off the right side of the bus, flattened the first four rows of seats on the right side ejecting both victims from the bus.

A future NASA scientist, top dogs . . . and tragedy. Life is the same everywhere.