A little adventure

This morning I went out to the car to get something and I discovered that the key was in the ignition, in the "on" position, and naturally, the battery was dead. Paul had gone somewhere with the truck and Jenny was at work in Jackson, so there was no handy way to get a jumpstart. But I saw a couple across the street visiting with "Bud," who lives there, and I thought, "Maybe one of them would give us a jumpstart." So I walked over and introduced myself, and explained our problem. Sure enough, Juan, who was talking with Bud, said he had a portable power pack made just for giving a battery a boost and starting a car. I wouldn't even need to get out our jumper cables. He said he would get it and meet me at the car. Which he did. In a few minutes he was there, and I was surprised to see how small and compact the power pack was. It was a "Type S" power pack, which I see on Amazon selling for $80-$120, depending on what model you get. He hooked it up to our battery, and "wham-o" - the car started right up. Amazing! He said the digital read-out on the pack said it used only 3% of its charge to start the car. That's remarkable. I think we are going to get one. He said it keeps its charge for a long time. A handy thing to have in the car on a trip!

A power pack like the one Juan used to start our car. ************************************ Today was otherwise uneventful. I took a little walk after supper with Ellen. After we got the car started, we went to the P.O. to mail cards and then we drove to Etna for ice cream cones - just to charge the battery, of course. I have started to read a new book - Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. Ellen just finished it. Peter Matthiessen is evidently a very well-known author, but he is not familiar to me. This book was written fifty years ago and is considered a classic. It describes his trek with a friend into the Himalayas in search of an almost mythical animal rarely seen - the snow leopard. But the book is about a great deal more than that. It is more about Peter's inward journey, a spiritual journey dealing with the over-arching issues of life and death that confront him in the natural world around him, and a very personal journey occasioned by the death of his wife a few months earlier. Along the way we learn a great deal about Zen Buddhism. He also describes the world around him, both the macro-world and the micro-world, in beautiful, detailed, inspired prose. I have made a good start on it - and I can see that it is going to be very gripping. And, in addition to Matthiessen's beautiful prose, I can Google place names and see photos of the things he is describing. Is that a violation of the implicit contract with the author that one assumes in reading a book? It may be. But I'll do it anyway. As he hikes out of city that is his starting-point, Pokhara, Nepal, he passes below Mt. Machhapuchhare. Here is what he says: "Now Machhapuchare rises, a halo of cloud wisps spun in a tight whorl around the pinnacle. (Unlike the other peaks of the Annapurna massif, Machhapuchare remains pristine, not because it is impregnable - it was climbed to within 50 feet of its summit in 1957 - but because to set foot on the peak in forbidden; the Gurung** revere it as a holy mountain, and the Nepal government wisely preserves it in mysterium tremendum." ** "The Gurung people, also called Tamu, are an ethnic group in the hills and mountains of Gandaki Province of Nepal. They live in the Mustang, Kaski, Lamjung, Parbat, Dolpo, Syangja, and Dhading districts of Nepal, with a population of 522,641 people as of 2011." Here is what Machhapuchare looks like (but in the photo, without the halo of clouds):

Mt. Machhapuchare, Nepal.