Goldfinches and Fiber

It is winter, which is as it should be here.

2012-01-19T17:11:00.000-05:00

By which I mean it is cold (under 25F out of the sun) and there is snow (and significant ice) on the ground. It is January, and it should be this way here. Before the cold snap. I was worried by the swelling buds of lilac and magnolia. And then after it did get cold, we lacked snow, which was hard on plants and mice and anyone hibernating in the leafage, to say nothing of the tourist industry. We need people to come and ski and so on because the state is broke. The legislature is full of Tea Partiers, who may have mixed feeling about the state providing snow removal on the roads, or indeed, roads... they have lowered the cigarette tax and are trying to eliminate the Department of Cultural Resources. Doing so will disqualify NH for a bunch of Federal aid (The government shouldn't be putting paintbrushes in people's hands? Just guns?)... I am going to a hearing tomorrow in Concord to try to persuade that committee to keep their hands off my archaeologists.

It's too early in the day to drink.

I am having trouble with the picture a day thing. How many sunrises can I stand to post? It's not that my days are ugly or even uninteresting, but they are not very photogenic.

I signed up for a small online painting course, which gave me almost my money's worth just in anticipation and art supplies, mostly kindly supplied by my mother. Monday I start rather slowly... clear off half the table in the window (covered in beads, try to put them away tidylike) listen to podcasts while doing the warm-ups, eat lunch, you know... it's 3:30. Bang. Had to go buy food as should have done so previous Friday. Bought food. Bought power strips/extension cords because the living room, the bedroom, and the loom room all have perversely placed and a scanty number of electrical outlets. Talking a picture of the hardware store? No. Nor the supermarket, thank you.

Now it's dark, Doug is home, we had wine and knitting and badinage. Never opened the water colors. I considered taking a picture of the half-tidied work area with the art supplies laid out so bravely-o. Nah.
Tuesday, I make an early start, get down there by tennish, look at the workspace. It could be better. I could put just a couple more things away. At this point, we had the freshly lowered sewing machine table, the freshly raised cutting table, the ironing board, and the bead table. The futon was folded and covered with cloth and cats. I had realized even in the small amount of art the day before how much too tall the beading table was, so I'd been considering either cutting it down, too, or not having it. Since the cutting table was taking up nearly all the remaining floorspace, removing one table would be good, and the beading table was a) too nice to ruin by abbreviation and b) not mine but Doug's, I figured I would ask him to find it a different home.
At this point the phone rang. It was Nathaniel, a dear person who digs with SCRAP and is doing research for his PhD all over the place. He needed crash space. I was delighted. Thought it might be nice if he could get to the futon. Even nicer if there were room to unfold it into a bed.

I had to go into Concord for an NH Arch Soc meeting that night, but by the time I left the beading table was clear, the sewing machine table had moved into its place and was almost clear (the sewing machine doesn't mind living in its case), the power strips were in place.  Put clean sheets next to futon, adjusted cat, made it look homey. I have an insight that my life would be better if NOTHING was stored as a matter of course on the work surfaces, since they always have things that aren't supposed to live on them, on them anyway. Moved furniture around. Removed a bookshelf from my bedroom (not the books, of course. Tomorrow is another day, when maybe a comet will hit the earth).

  Went to Staples for printer ink (so I could, if I chose, print out the art class sheets, which might cut down on the web-browsing when I am supposed to be making contour drawings) and Lowe's to see if there was something like a tracklight fixture I could stick up and plug in (If I waited to wire it in, the Messiah would come first and sometimes it's nice NOT to have to have a big fat hairy deal involving holes in the wall. So lazy. So dark in half of that room. The working half. The sitting and reading or sleeping half has so many tracklights they actually warm you up, which, despite the energy waste, I am not replacing just yet. Winter, remember). Did not take a picture of the NHAS board or Lowe's.
Obtained such a light, and two water-hyacinth baskets to put on the shelf. Survived board meeting. Found Nathaniel. Had a Chinese dinner that couldn't be beat. Remembered once again that I need a nice sampler with my network password on it.

The next day I went into lab early and actually got work done on the inventorying of the glass-mounted boxes with the goodies in them. I left the lab a little after 5:30 pm to go to the Central NH Permaculture meetup, which was supposed to be less than an hour away in New London. I arrived in plenty of time, and didn't even get lost on the way home, which is always a nice surprise. The Meetup was for people who wanted to hear more about the permaculture movement; the college is offering a certification class this spring and Sarah told me about it because I had been grouchy when the Concord version had cost $50 (though that was two nights). One of the teachers in her certification class was giving to talk and he was fun and sensible and a good speaker. The room was full (about 50 people). It was encouraging. The Wikipedia article is pretty good, and offers a lot of links. I don't know if permacultural ideas can save the world, but they look like offering more hope than any of the other alternatives (ignoring the unsustainability of the current industrial and economic models, or paying attention to that and screaming a lot before thinking about something else seem to be favorites).

That being said, having hope is uphill and probably involves trusting other people.

This morning I surveyed the near-Hoarders condition of my house, and decided that what I really needed to do was to put up a birdfeeder. Found a bracket, screws, drill, drill bit, extension cord, ladder all in the right places (!!!!)  and put it up, and put all the tools away properly. Did not actually put the feeder in the right place, but since it was 15F and I was wearing pajamas, I think I might have done worse. (I am dressed now. I would never appear to my dear readers in less than clean, business-casual wear. Or not that you'll ever know, right? In fact I usually wear a prom dress.)

The post is for me to hide behind, so as not to scare the birds?

Then, of course, I had to get most of them out again, but the end result involves three brilliant fluorescent bulbs and decent light in the loom room. If you get bright fluorescent lights, you may want the soft yellow ones even if you think you would prefer the bright white ones (which are still warmer than the alleged 'daylight' ones, which look like maybe you're on a planet of Rigel or Vega). Even the mid range ones look somewhat industrial, like I should be drinking straight grain alcohol instead of a nice up of tea.

Look into the permaculture stuff. It might cheer you up.

365

2012-01-16T08:48:00.001-05:00

365, a set on Flickr.

This is the location of the Flickr set for my Photo-Nearly-Every-Day undertaking. Many of the pictures will be mediocre, because Apple hates me because I don't want an iPhone. Blame me for loving USCellular, it's my destiny!

It's (after) Christmas and I don't know where I am.

2012-01-14T16:29:00.000-05:00

This isn't quite true.

For Christmas I made, starting in about October (when I found the Catkin Quilt fabric and I decided to make it for my ex, who is fond of cats and bright colors): a quilt (it strongly resembles the one in the model, but has interesting fudged things and an extra border)

; two pairs of fingerless mitts; two Bandana Cowls (which are splendid); a false entrelac scarf for Doug; several tiny elephants, dispersed among the nations, about forty imperfect classical beaded earrings, waiting for perfection; a bracelet for Lisa; several pairs of simple earrings showing how much work I have before I become better at making decent wired loops; six batches of biscotti, two batches of fruitcake, one of World Peace cookies, and probably some other stuff I forgot. What you can do when you have No Job and are lazy.

My right hand is not entirely happy about all this.

I owe many thanks to Sarah, who asked if I needed her to hold a gun to my head to finish the quilt (I did, it didn't take that much but I was stuck); Donna, Chris, and Sue the Bead-It! goddesses; the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast; and as always, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And now, feeling directionless, I have begun making some of the Catkin leftovers into a quilt for Barb and Doug, which will undoubtedly eat up a lot of non-scrap cloth, too, because its accessory fabrics are so pretty with the main pieces, and hard to match otherwise. Doug has thoughtfully sawn the legs of the sewing machine table lower, and made pieces of plastic pipe to raise a cutting table to the height of the ironing board, which makes a terrible cutting table but was better than anything lower. The cutting table, like the ironing board, folds away, but the loom room is hard to navigate these days.

It's snowing. The only significant snow we have had this winter was in the autumn (yeah), and it lasted only a day or so. It has been cold enough to be hard on all the beings who could use snow for insulation, to say nothing of the tourism.

Meanwhile yesterday I spent reading Sepulchre, which held the attention and did not degrade my morals, even though it took place near Rennes-le-Chateau and usually anything with the word Templar in it makes me wild (not in a good way). The HolyBloodHolyGrail content was minimal, however.

So this coming year I am going to try the 365-pictures thing, which I will put a link to as soon as I get going. And I'll try to blog more, because it's a useful way to see what I am doing and what I think of it. Mostly right now I am thinking about my digestion, which is not happy with anything.

Actual fiber. Goldfinches are in eclipse plumage.

2011-12-06T10:56:00.000-05:00

I had a great time in California in September. Sometime I will blog it. It's warm and very different geography out there; they also have a lot more people around the Bay area than live in all of New Hampshire (and probably Maine and Vermont as well).

Meanwhile:
(Warning -- digestive oversharing)
I seen to have become gluten intolerant again. This is not surprising, but it's expensive and inconvenient. I am selling my soul to King Arthur Flour's Gluten-free mixes. They might as well have it as anyone. My gut is also unhappy when I eat anything very fiber-y ( a _delicious_ lentil stew with potatoes and onions) more than twice in 24 hours. I would not care as much if the unhappiness did not also include a spectacular itch.

My son has also quit eating wheat, rye, barley, oats, beer. I hope my vegetarian daughter remains able to eat the stuff. Celiac vegetarians have a really hard time.

Comparing blood samples from the 1950s to the 1990s, Murray found that young people today are nearly five times as likely to have celiac disease, for reasons he and others researchers cannot explain. And it’s on the rise not only in the U.S. but also in other places where the disease was once considered rare, like Mexico and India. “We don’t know where it’s going to end,” Murray says. “Celiac disease has public health consequences.” And therefore, it has a market. New York Times

And since it has a market, there are a lot more options than there were (Such as KAF being interested in my soul, not that it didn't already have it).

Enough about that.

Since October I have been crafting for Christmas. You really can knit more if you don't do other things, like reading, or eating (or drinking alcohol. Tea is okay, though it tends to get cold.). I cannot post pictures because there might be gifts involved. I can say, however, that the tiny kitted things of Mochimochi Land melt the stalest heart. I have no pictures because I keep giving elephants away. (Maybe I should make a white one?)

So for gift reasons I needed to look at Ravelry, and I finally fell through the rabbit hole. I had not understood how people wasted the hours there they described. Now I do. I made this for myself, in the middle of something else (that involved FOUR skeins of Noro, AND I still finished it in eight days), only I haven't seen it since Thanksgiving and a trip to Boston. I think it's with a muffler. I hope it's somewhere safe. And there is this, which answers the perennial question, "What should I do with leftover sock yarn?" Actually, of course, you should put it in a bag in your sock drawer to darn with, but no. The hexipuffs will also use up any of your spare time that you've carelessly not filled making tiny mermaids, Christmas presents, or gluten-free food.

Or beading. You would be right if you said I have not had much time to bead if I am constantly knitting. But the social interaction at Bead-It! is so good, I just dropped by, and the quietest of the three goddesses, Sue, had made... another thing I am making as a Christmas present. But this is a really lovely book, despite having not the best directions (knitting patterns are easier to write, but they also say things like 'four stitches added,' or '94 stitches this row,' which would be a help in beading, too).

I am reading Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. It's weird but not unreadable, particularly if you like entirely gratuitous Star Trek references. I also read Carrie Vaughn's Discord's Apple, which would be better if it were not a one-off (I liked the conceit and the characters very much), and The Unbelievers which was a gripper but kinda grim. And Second Sight, which falls into the Guilty Pleasure category, but it was tasty and I would read more Amanda Quick. But maybe not her alter ego, Jayne Ann Krentz. I liked the Victoriana. Try not to buy any of these from Amazon. We need the other booksellers, indie and chain alike, and Amazon keeps having nasty stories told about their labor practices.

I have not reacquired my desire to garden. The bees are still foraging on warm days, which we keep having. The weather now is like October ought to be, despite the 20" of snow we got in October.

Megantic 2011

2011-10-24T20:01:00.000-04:00

We had no trip to Canada last year because our friend Dr. Claude Chapdelaine was digging way on the west of the province, too far for a day's drive and long weekend. This year he reopened the place near Lac Megantic and a few of us were invited up. It is always pleasant on BiEre 14 (Pronounced Beer Quatorze. I once took a picture, but I can't find it...). This year they put us up camping outside a very nice cabin

I want a fancy screen door.

Minou

supervised by a charming, very old cat. They also had mean and painful mosquitoes.

The site was, as always, shady, bird-loud, and relatively mosquito free.

It's near where the river debouches into the lake, and it's lovely, though curiously pocked with plastic-lined pits.

They dig in sous-quadrants there, every meter divided like ours are into four, and those into four again.
You can see it to the right here. This allows them to get a bunch of people into a rather small space.

Diana, Colin, Dick, Claude, possibly Pierre,George
Joy, Laura
Tatum,
Pierre Corbeil, Abbie

Abbie was allowed to find a nice Munsungun preform (a probable point in the making that someone messed up and gave up on). Dick had to leave early, but we were allowed the presence of Francine, Claude's wife, who is awfully nice and whom we had not seen for years.

Claude and Francine

They have apparently given up on making us do paperwork, which is all right, since they still fed us magnificently. And the cottage was close to the actual Lake Megantic, so SCRAP got to go swimming there for the first time.

We sacked the Dollar Store and came home with flamingoes, throw rugs, small camping stools... foreign cheese, cookies.... it's a wonderland.

So, Field School

2011-10-24T19:25:00.000-04:00

Last August we did a small dig in Jefferson, NH, a setting to which I am partial for its beauty, its lack of poison ivy, and its name. Dick the archaeologist is partial to it because we find stuff. We found stuff during the small dig, and so we had field school there: Jefferson 6.

It's next to a B&B where people digging some other earlier Jeffersons (1-5, et al), and sooner or later the landowner wants to build a house. Meadow with a spectacular view of Mt Washington.

The supervisors were Heather

Heather supervised Block A

and, because we received some additional funding from the Mountain View Grand Hotel, Abbie. Abbie has only been around SCRAP since 2009 but we all think it must have been longer. She has taken to agreeing that she was there since 1987. She is 23 and at the beginning of the season she was unhappy to hear she needed to cultivate the Boss-quality of making people slightly uncomfortable when she was near them. By the end of the dig she was properly evil.

Abbie supervised Block B

The students were almost entirely women; in the middle two weeks, all of the students were women and we could number the guys (returnees) on one hand. Other than, in Dick's opinion, a great deal more giggling and a great deal less drinking, it didn't make much difference.

We camped around the same cottage as we did in 2004, down a precipitous slope off Rte 2.

Being in a river valley means bad cell phone reception. All summer we waited for the internet guy to come, but he was never able to deliver (his life got in the way, and we could not blame him). The tents were set up along the powerline that runs from Quebec to somewhere south, Boston at least.

The cottage has an adequate kitchen, a great porch,

and almost no natural light inside. The water runs, but it has a rather high coliform bacteria count, so we were advised not to drink it. We got water from our friends across the road from the site,

The pump at Pat's place. It was clean.

and from local friends who also turned out to have a high coliform count in their well, which might explain... . Well, clean running water is indeed all it's said to be.

Supplemental sanitary facilities, nearer the road, had better cell phone reception. At least, that was George's excuse.

The food was delicious. One week, we had strawberries brought in from Quebec, George's pulled pork, and a chicken and cherries dish made by Rose, who really thinks main courses are just a prelude to desserts. She made a tasting menu of five desserts: little cheese cakes, fruit tarts, tiny brownies... I forget, but it was an amazing week.

So we were excavating a site that probably had to do with the view (still amazing after 12,000 years, though now with trees) one might have had of caribou migrating into the Israel River Valley. We put multiple-square meter units around places where we had found things in test pits. All of these are carefully lined out on a grid, which maps onto the the state topo maps and the world.

Crammed for dear life under the shade at lunch...

...chatting and eating...

...or in some cases, napping.

We also continued to dig test pits, supervised by Mikey

Mikey on the right

Colin on the right. A visiting botanist saved our lives with Popsicles. Thank you, Page!

until he was forced to go on vacation, when Dick allowed Colin to take over. Someone bought Dick two more pop-up tents for the test-pit digging crew, by that time off in a world of their own. I mean more than usual.

You will notice (in the pics of Heather and Abbie, for instance) that the site was rocky. The rocks were large and frequent and the paleos tended to tuck flakes and things right under them. They reflected the heat (what they didn't absorb) to make the units into nice reflective ovens.

It was hot the last four weeks in particular. Very Hot. REALLY HOT, like one week it started in the 90's and worked up to 105, and not much better in the shade. The air was not clear and one day (forest fires in Canada?) we could not see the next mountain over. Our brains were melting out of our heads. Since we were in the mountains, it generally cooled down at night.

Clouds over the campsite

The natives rejoiced.

We were very glad when it rained, which cooled things off a little.

Dick and Abbie supervise B.

The six weeks each went faster and faster. The end of the first week, some of us went to Megantic for a long weekend (next post); Nathaniel went to Outer Mongolia. This is not a euphemism. I took pictures, which is my excuse for not finding too much. I am not bad at digging test pits, and in the units, I was several times surprised to find I had dug down to the correct level. This happens rarely, usually when the level is messed up. I redeemed my reputation when Jess and I dug, profile-drew, and backfilled a test pit, carefully supervised by Mikey, only to be told by Cindy (the youngest rookie, a smart-mouth of 15) that we had dug it in the wrong place. Mirror-image problem. I called Cindy a rotten kid for the next 48 hours, pleasing her a good deal. The rest of the time she was "My Young Apprentice," but she was not familiar enough with Stars Wars to get the overtones. Otherwise, she shows a great deal of promise. I shall follow her career with interest.

There were more science-fiction and fantasy fans (geeks) than SCRAP has ever had. Though I was way older and did not watch most of their TV shows, we had enough in common for me to feel at home. Not that I didn't already, since I have spent two to six weeks in Coos County in 1999, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2011, not counting the long weekends of Octoberfest since about 2005. I like the north, and the people I dig with.

Yes well

2011-10-24T13:08:00.000-04:00

Okay, I am going to get back into it. Life has been busy, in some sense of the word. After Gault, there was field school. After Field School, there was a minor site called Mercier, mostly notable for my getting a new camera: I am pretty sure it is this one.

Still don't have A Job. Health is good. I think I am going to have a root canal soon, or certainly a crown. Not ready for winter.

Number of cats, stable at four: Marten, Willow, Mal, and Wash. Kittens are now about a year old and bigger; tall, but skinny. Marten nad Willow still hate each other, but WIllow is less unhappy and sometimes looks relaxed.

House: Messier than you want to know about.

Doug and Barb: still very happy.

I am on Instagram as @Rhyolight. Instagram , a free photo sharing app, is fun. It is an app but you can use it on your computer. I subscribe to a weird writer named Warren Ellie, Sublime Stitchery, a feral embroiderer named Katie Kutthroat, a Whedonverse actress and fan named Felicia Day, and my son, among others.

I love my iPod Touch.

And most of you, although I hope I don't exploit you as much as the iPod.

Gault, Part 2

2011-06-21T21:45:00.000-04:00

The actual excavation at Gault is only part of the whole experience. It's a backbone, so it shapes and structures the rest, but backbones aren't everything. It was hot and sunny during the first few days, and windy day and night. They said it was never windy at night where we were, except that it had been for past six months. It kept some people awake. I was grateful for the breeze.

We arrived May 8, Saturday, and started to work the next day. On May 11, Wednesday, it was cloudy and slightly cooler, and rained half-heartedly during the day. I went to bed around ten, later than usual, and was cold enough to put on my sleeping fleece for the first time.

Shortly after I zipped into the tent, we had the most spectacular thunderstorm I have ever enjoyed. The lightening was almost continuous for what seemed like an hour -- more light than dark, with excellent thunder and some hail. I didn't want to risk my so-far secure tent by opening it, but peeking under the fly I saw hailstones as big as lima beans. The people watching from the house said they saw larger than that. It was amazing and occasionally I did wonder if I was going to become a statistic. Jessie had been in Louisiana during the bad tornadoes the previous month and told stories about teaching unprepared people to use weather radios. I don't know if they have sirens near Florence; you could not have heard them anyway.

I know I shouldn't tempt fate but I would love tenting through another such storm again.

Wednesday was Snowflake's due date. We thought the storm might bring on the calf. Nope.

Unfortunately I had a plastic tarp under my tent (it may be be protection from fire ants, but that was hard to tell since they weren't around much until after the rain, by which time I had dispensed with the plastic) and it sent the water through the floorcloth. On the plus side, although I could tell the toe of my sleeping bag was soaking wet, it did not wick and I slept toasty through the rest of the night.

In the morning I carried my gear to the garage/bunkhouse, and my tent itself, (four or five trips) so everything could dry out. Shortly afterwards I could not find my iPod for the rest of the day, and went into a fine fit of self-hatred and misery. (Insert many scenes of looking where I had already looked, in case.) Heather and Nathaniel were going to the supermarket 45 minutes away in Georgetown, and took me and my wetter stuff to a really nice laundromat. It was clean, airy, all the machines worked, had lots of seats, and WiFi. Heaven.

Once we were home, I repitched my tent (no tarp this time) and carried my now-dry sleeping bag back to it, leaving most of my gear sheltered in the bunkhouse. I didn't get to eat dinner until nearly 8:30 and was not really human until I went to bed. This involved finding my sleeping fleece in the living room, where my iPod had been hiding. I should not be so attached to a gadget, but it was a new one, my Mother's Day and birthday present for 2011, and I really like it. My old one did not take pictures. iPods (with the Audubon app) are wonderful for figuring out what bird that was -- you can check songs. I'd felt bereft and naked without it. And it was brand new. Foolish machine.

The next day we had rain in the morning, and went to the site just in time for Mike Collins to come and tell us we were on the edge of another severe thunderstorm. They had tried sitting out these things in the big tent over the site, but Buttermilk Creek had risen high enough they couldn't leave. So we went back to the house in time to watch it storm impressively again--though not so good as the night before. We were able to dig again in the afternoon.

After the rain, it was considerably cooler and drier, but the wind stopped, and the windmill that pumped our water just sat there. They had not been able to wash the dishes the night before; there would be no showers. Karen and I went to buy water at the gas station, which seems weird. The gas station had a wonderful convenience store with almost everything you might need and I was able to find some dulce-de leche fudge. (I cannot get the cowboy picture I took off my phone, but he was a fine sight in the fluorescent light and the snack-foods aisle.)

Since our arrival, I had suffered from Fat Lady's Thigh Chafing, aching all over (ankles, knees, midback elbows), and I Think My Right Arm May Detach at the Elbow (I still loved the hand pick). I asked myself if I should retire. I replied "And leave SHOW BUSINESS?!!?" At breakfast I had taken arnica. At lunch I took ibuprofen. At two, I just wanted to die (although my morale was still better than it had been the day before). I asked what I was saving the fudge for? To give me a 3:30 lift? Could I need one worse then than I already did? I ate it.

By two thirty, nothing hurt. It was amazing. It lasted well into the next day. The chafing announced it had turned the corner to Better. Did the barometer change? Humidity? Did my body finally get used to working? Was it the weather being the ten degrees cooler? No idea. Since I regard refined sugar as only slightly less toxic than Everclear, I would hate to think I'd been suffering from a shortage of fudge in my bloodstream, but wow.

I went birding after work, causing Donna to believe I was probably lying dead in a canyon (the majority opinion was that I was asleep in my tent). I encountered the cows' owners while I was staring at her and we agreed that she was surely very, very pregnant. They were hoping for twins; but on the other hand, Lily (now no longer resident at Gault) had had twins and been barren after that, and they didn't want the same thing to happen to Snowflake. Freckles's calf (whose name was officially Pumpkin Peach, which is what happens if you let a four-year old girl name you orange and white cow; we called her Vealette) had been trying to nurse off of her grandcow Mona (who looked very tolerant); I said maybe if the calf would try to nurse off Snowflake it would provoke labor. Howard said the calf had tried that the day before. I suggested Mexican food or maybe a trampoline; we looked at Snowflake and sighed.

She had a heifer calf the day after we left.

The birding this year was good but unsatisfying, as it always is. Most of interesting birds I saw were active in the heat of the day, as I was on my way to the portapotty, exactly when I wasn't supposed to go hunting after them. Although I only saw one painted bunting, there were several pairs of summer tanagers we saw fairly often, and there were cackles of hummingbirds fighting in the background of half-familiar bird songs. That was mostly mockingbirds and song sparrows and Carolina wrens, but also other birds that sounded exotic and remained hard to spot. I had only glimpses of scissor-tailed-flycatchers this year, both times from car windows.

There were cricket frogs playing chicken with our feet in the mud near the washing screens, some lovely Wodehouse's toads, skinks on the way up the slope to the Portapotties near the site, and some baleful watersnakes in Buttermilk Creek and the pond we pumped out of/back into for water screening. Mikey claimed a cottonmouth went after him but we figured it had been provoked.

No one found anything in particular spectacular, but being there was good enough. The first day when I was washing, I was washing some buckets from the below-Clovis level and I thought about Bernie in Doonesbury at Loch Ness. He wrote in his diary: "10 a.m. : I can't believe I'm at the Loch Ness monster recording site! So excited my temples hurt!" In the next frame; "10:25 a.m.: Nothing out there. Am considering taking a nap."

It was a bit like that. I didn't actually dig any below-Clovis levels (maybe next year; there wasn't much room), but it didn't look like I was missing a great deal of fun. First, I worry about screwing up, going down too far. (Though I am getting better at going to the right depth, which suggests practice makes a difference). Second, though the plastic trowels would make screwing up more difficult, I could just see myself breaking them and also taking FOREVER to dig a level. But they did find flakes while I was there and everyone that has been worked, incontestably, by a human, is another nail in the Clovis-first controversy and really cool.

Here's Jill doing her human fly routine to unzip a window:

The sediments were a different color and _packed_ with calcium carbonate concretions. When you have water running over limestone, you get lime in the water (as the electric kettle in the cottage showed. It reminded me of Kent). When the water stands long enough, some of the minerals in it get together and precipitate -- we had secondary iron deposits last year, little bright red stains. This far down in Gault, it had had a long time to get together under wet conditions, and some of the flakes in my Paleo level had CaCo concretions on them. Apparently some grad student had suggested that the concretions might contain an organic bit -- a seed or a piece of twig and these could be carbon-dated. A large percentage of the concretions they tested turned out, indeed, to have formerly live hearts, so we now save the concretions when we washed the buckets of mud.

I credit myself with a major step forward in the excavation process by suggesting that instead of dividing the CaCo from the chert in the one-eighth-inch screen, we just bag it and let them kibble it in the lab. This saved something over an hour for each one-eighth inch level (one of which occurs in every multi-bucket, mostly screened at 1/4 inch, 5 cm level). It really helped the system and kept people from sunburn and madness. And the science will be better. And the finds bags get sorted through several times at the lab, already.

What SCRAP does at Gault, most importantly, is to give it a longer, more concentrated dose of excavation than it gets most of the time: there is a difference beween the work of fifteen or so people, most of whom know what they are doing, for eight hours a day, for a week or more, and people who volunteer a couple of hours on some Saturdays a month. We also are in a better position to tweak their systems because we're there long enough to know them and be able to think about it.

Here's the quarry across the road from the house, not being worked at all hours like it was last year. it looks like an abandoned ancient Greek settlement, somehow.

And it is a bit like a party, or a good dorm experience. We carp about one another sometimes, as people will in a small, isolated group, but we look after one another and bring things to the attention of people who might like to know. I was very touched when Jessie came to find me to show me the edge of the storm, one of her favorite moments in weather. She made being from Oklahoma something really cool (and probably saved lives explaining the use of weather-radios to a naive audience in Louisiana, the week tornadoes were all over the Gulf coast). While she was looking for me she found a few other people who wanted to admire the edge of the storm, too.

One of the quietest people there was Will. He's been digging with SCRAP since 2006, and coming to lab fairly often for kibble washing and artifact-cataloguing. You thought he was grumpy but he was mostly shy and very soft-spoken. He took some really good photos, particularly his first trip to Gault in 2009 (I think). He had a good camera, which certainly helps, and a good eye, and persistence.This year he was a bit disappointed that we had missed the peak of the cactus blossom, but he managed to capture the summer tanagers and the elusive skink, and he had better luck than anyone else did in terms of finding projectile points (it was a slow year for them. Nathaniel found one, too, of course). He also took this lovely shot of the survivors of the expedition in Austin, seeking food.

Here he is finding broken Archaic points:

We spent a lot of time on the water-screens talking and enjoying the sun (it was during the months of rain every day in New Hampshire; we enjoyed getting some summer). He had some unhappinesses, but he was hopeful things would work out and looking forward to the summer.

He had a heart attack last Sunday, June 19th, and died very suddenly. I'll miss him, as will his daughters and a lot of his friends in archaeology and other places. I wish he had had more time to learn about his Indian heritage and the local history he loved.

And the work at Gault goes on. They are, like everyone, terribly short of money. You can buy tasteful merchandise here. You can read their newsletter here.

So then I went to Gault.

2011-05-30T08:33:00.005-04:00

Gault is a wonderful place, where the Plains Country meets lower, lusher environment and all of it overlies limestone. This means very sticky clay and the formation of chert or flint beds. The people who lived here never needed to take up agriculture until after the Europeans settled in. They had been rain-free since last September. Since we brought the snow last February, they were hoping we could change that.

Although they told us about the drought, it was still plenty humid. But the creek was barely trickling and in the field behind the site, the wildflowers were much taller than the grass: just a sea of Mexican Hat.

which does not show in the pictures, so you get a closeup with a butterfly. They said it had been too dry for bluebonnets at all that year, and we were most of the way through the cactus flower season, so the flowers were not as amazing as some years. And the chiggers appear to be returning to Gault. But as long as the rain held off, we had no fire ants. Little horrors were attracted to my water bottle, though, and I got several bites on my hand before I learned to bang it on the ground before using. Some kind of ants were also really alert in the site-tent, and you had to hang your lunch up or they would get into it amazingly quickly.

The first couple of days, it was at least 100 degrees. I don't do well in heat anyway. I got FatterLady's Thigh Chafing, which took six days to get better, possibly because it reacted badly to the hand cream I put on it. Eight-Hour Cream (the family nostrum for almost everything since about 1937) was better. I tell this partly because, after I was home, I found an anti-chafe substance at the sporting goods store, called BodyGlide. Even though the name speaks to me of sex romps, I am glad it exists and I hope it will work. Although the pattern of above-normal cloudiness and drizzle and below-normal temperatures continues in New Hampshire, and I may not need it again for a long time.

So I wandered around being stunned by the heat and trying not to wince when I walked. There was a small scorpion in the living room (we posed for pictures and then I put it out front). One of the campers the previous month had been attacked by an owl roosting in the back yard. I immediately thought I could cope with a Harry Potter scar, but fortunately the owl had calmed down. One of the cows, Freckles, had produced a sweet little brown and white calf who spent most of her time hanging out with her grandma cow, Mona. Snowflake was due to give birth on Wednesday. The MOST pregnant cow we had ever seen.

The site was in good shape, no flooding; they had taken the sand out of the deep and changed the corrugated pipe for a live sump-pump

2010

and made a proper six-meter unit there.

2011

They found things too old to be Clovis there when they originally dug that deep pit in about 2003, and that was why the site we have been digging was laid out around there; there is a reasonable chance the there was occupation all the way down. Gault has been working on a NSF grant to explore the levels below the (incredibly rich, populous) Clovis layer there, and because working in a six-meter pit is dangerous, we have been helping them open a series of meter-wide steps or terraces around that original findspot. The overlying sediments were extensively pot-hunted, but not so extensively as they had expected. While we yearned to excavate Clovis and below, we had had to do a proper digging job of the Archaic that kept turning up. Such as the oldest burnt-rock oven in Texas, which shouldn't have been there before the Middle Archaic at the earliest. The one in Gault, around which and on they have been working for at least two years, is early Archaic/Late Paleo. This distinction involves a couple of thousand years.

2011. Rocky mess at 6-4 o'clock in foreground is the oven.

There is a graduate student working on it. If he doesn't hurry, he'll find himself alone on a crumbling pedestal, since they want to go down at least another half a meter under it, and the squares around it are going faster. People kept trying to tell Nancy (the local supervisor/siteboss) that another burned-rock oven was turning up in the southWest, but she didn't want to hear it.

Since Mr. Collins hasn't had a chance to write up and properly publish his oldest finds, I give you a link from the Friedkin site, within sight of us just upstream. They had less overburden and less archaeology to do before they reached the exciting stuff.

Last year we worked on some of the late Paleo levels, and I notably hacked out a bunch of 2009 flood debris using a proper scary two-handed, over-the shoulder mattock. And we were there for two weeks, not one.

This year, over about eight days, I washed (using fire hoses and a tiny canal off Buttermilk Creek. A snake was living in our settling pond, and tiny frogs played around out feet) flakes out of buckets of mud from the pit;
hacked out some more flood debris, but Dick wouldn't let me use a big pick;
was Nathaniel's paperwork assistant (or 'bitch' as we call it) as he hacked out forty-six buckets of more flood debris in less one full day of work (he really needed the support; Bruce was his bucket-wallah).

Then I was able to go back to my meter and not hack, actually trowel, in actual Paleo levels. I found about thirty decent flakes, nothing exciting. The important part (as well as the usual-- trying not to over cut, and to record things as I found them) was not getting dirt on Jill.

Jill was originally from Australia and has a day-job to do with lobbying for health care. But she had taken an apartment in Austin for three months and was singlehandedly dragging Gault into the fifteenth century BC or thereabouts. She was very nice, even though Dick used her as the excuse why I could not use a proper two-handed, swung-over the shoulder mattock to remove 20 cm of unstratified grot. I became fond of my handpick.

Jill was sitting in the below-Clovis, digging with a plastic spoon (all right, a plastic trowel). It was taking her four days per 5 cm (mine, when trowelling, was taking only one day, which is on the slow side of normal). She was finding some very nice flakes (and occasionally more. but they wouldn't let us photograph the spaceship or the scale model of the Eiffel Tower). And even when I was getting dirt on her dirt, she was patient and polite. "I don't mind the dirt, just no flakes," she said plaintively.

derp - Minus

2011-05-27T09:34:00.000-04:00

derp - Minus

2011-05-06T17:24:00.002-04:00

I am sitting in at least today's location of the Earthly Paradise: my aunt's backyard. It looks onto a small lake, where in the hour or so I have been here, I've seen a common egret, a snowy egret, a Little Blue Heron, wood ducks mallards bow-tailed grackles doves crows cardinals bluejays some huge MF of a dove, and heard red-winged blackbirds and red-bellied woodpeckers.

We are in the process of finding out the password to my aunt's computer network. I am full of hope.

So after being pre-trip anxious for a week or so, I got ready to go. I mailed off most of my camping gear. I believed my children had absconded with both of my larger suitcases, and since I was trying to travel lighter I ditched my long heavy cot. I got a lovely foam pad that folds to the size of a large loaf of bread. I also started playing with my mother's old Olympus. It had a 64-kB chip in it, and despite being on not-very-HQ it takes much better pictures than my beloved point-and-shoot. But on SHQ only 8 pictures fit on the chip.

So I needed a suitcase and another chip. I had an errand in Salem and went to Rockingham Mall. I was wearing a t-shirt with a mammoth on it and ended up giving SCRAP's contact information to two people. I never think anyone reads my shirts. Also Sears was having a sale, so I found a suitcase for half-price. Then I found that Staples and Target do not carry xD camera cards, and Dick had gone home early. Nothing daunted, I got my nails done (if your cuticles were as bad as mine you would get a manicure before you went on a dig, too) and a 2gB xD card and collapsed into dinner with Sarah.

I was talking to Doug that night about suitcases and he remarked he had moved mine after the near-incursion of the raccoons.

Today, in Texas, I tried the old Olympus with the new chip and it appears it cannot cope with the perfectly good 2gB chip. So Dick will bring two of his old less-than 2 gB chips, since he uses xDs as well.

An extra suitcase and two extra gig of camera memory are surely good things, right?

And it was a relatively easy flight down and it is beautiful here.

No anvils so far, and "Queen of the Sun"

2011-04-13T10:29:00.001-04:00

With regard to the moon being in crud: On Monday I went into Concord to hang out at the bead shop. There was only one of the goddesses there, and first thing (at noon) there were a lot of different cheery customers. I explained to Sue that the plagues of Egypt or somewhere more emotional were afflicting my acquaintance, and she was sympathetic. I worked on my freeform netting bracelet. Shortly after the initial crowd thinned out, a nice woman about my age came in and described spending a weekend with her daughters, who were, on the one hand, very anxious and demanding, and on the other, officious and demanding. It was obvious the woman needed to have told both of them to do anatomically unlikely things some time ago, particularly after she described both daughters telling her she should break up with the man she had met in the bereaved cancer spouses group.

Later in the afternoon, another woman came in. Her son was going to the army induction center, and they couldn't find his father, who has kidney disease and a habit of signing himself into hospital without checking the HIPA thing that would allow his wife to know he was there. Son wanted to say 'bye for now' to his father, who, when tracked down, said "I told him to have a good day at breakfast, why would he want to say goodbye again?"
Her other son was marrying his sweetheart Friday and both he and the bride refused to say anything useful about the ceremony other than that they were meeting the JP at the lakeshore and their friends would assemble at the woman's house and walk to the lake together. Woman suggested a tent, perhaps, maybe some chairs? Her son said she was being controlling and hung up on her. Prospective daughter-in-law (who was not speaking to her own mother) was marrying in shades of black, grey, and silver. She complained that rather nice necklace offered by woman@beadstore had too many clear stones in it; woman was at bead shop to make a darker gray necklace. Both Sue and I had difficulty not expressing where the woman should have told prospective DIL to put the necklace. Woman needed to tell so very many people that, she could have got a deal on the necklaces.

And she kept quietly sobbing.

Meanwhile, as the snow lingers in the shadows (and some of the sunny places), the temperature in Concord hit 78 and the bead shop, on the south side of the street, went from 'how nice it is to have the door open' to "Maybe you should consider the air conditioning." Rather like a crock pot.

I had another project to work on after I finished my bracelet but between the heat and the suffocating vibes I lit out for Borders, where is was nice and chilly and I could sit far away from everyone and read Lee Martinez. Who is not as funny as Thorne Smith but made a fine mental palate cleanser.

A bit after six I returned to downtown and went to the bee event at the Red River Theatre. They were showing "Queen of the Sun," with a mead tasting beforehand and a Q&A with the president of my local bee association, the founder of Badger Balm, kid who had spent last summer with an organic apiary in France, and the founder of Moonlight Meadery. The mead was very tasty (it was technically melomel, being composed of fermented honey and fruit juices) and I may buy some. The red currant was _delicious._

You might think I would be putting this in my bee blog, but I think the movie is more designed for the non-apiarist. It presents a lot of beekeepers and some biologists discussing the collapse of honeybee stocks in Europe and the United States, with lots of gorgeous photography and enough background information about bees to make the issues clearer. The issue seems to be agribusiness, where bees are used as pollinating machines for monocultures of crops.

The film used the almond orchards as an example. The pictures of acres and acres of blooming almond trees going on to the horizon was staggering. It should have been beautiful, but the fields in which the trees grow are sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, so you have essentially a desert with almond trees stuck in. The 'migratory beekeepers' come from all over not just North America but, as American bees collapsed, as far as Australia to help pollinate the California almond crop. It's a perfect chance to mix in as many diverse diseases as possible ("a bordello for bees," according to Michael Pollan. Which is catchy but a bad metaphor, since only the diseases are having anything like sex. And the trees, I suppose).

To make this possible, the commercial beekeepers wrap the hives in saran wrap, forklift them onto truck, and drive to California. They mess around with the bees' life cycle (many are trucked in from the north and any adaptations they may make to the winter are shot), feed them high-fructose corn syrup * and then, after two weeks, wrap them up and truck them either to another orchard or back home. The commercial beekeepers explain this was what they needed to do to make money, and apparently the business involves millions of dollars and yet is still cheaper than keeping almond orchards in something approaching a diverse ecology.

If this only affected the bees on the trucks, it would be one thing--bad and cruel if you regard bee or bee colonies as persons--but of course these bees take their new diseases home with them. And spread them among the stationary hives and the native pollinators -- the bumblebees and the other wild bees actually native to the New World (or the Old World -- their bumblebees are in trouble as much as ours are) and as essential to the lives all flowering plants whether people need the plants for food or not.

The thrust of the film was not to explain Colony Collapse Disorder, but to make it clear we had been riding toward something like that for a very long time for a number of reasons:
failure to realize basic public health and the simplest understanding of regional diseases and immunities should be part of pollination policies;
the use of chemicals with complex and not altogether predictable effects;
people, not for the only time, deciding they could 'improve' a complex system that had developed over centuries, millennia, or epochs **.
And habitat destruction. You want to keep a messier yard, at least around the edges. But you already did that, because you like fireflies.

A harsher person than I am might object to the portrayal of beekeepers as nearly all funny men with cute accents (although they have a 3rd-gen NYC beekeeper with dreadlocks, a sari-wearing biologist, and an only slightly flaky entomologist (jeans, t-shirt) standing up for the women. And that dancer in the trailer, who of course is entirely typical).

I did enjoy the evening. Mr. White of Badger Balm had brought a stunningly beautiful top-bar hive with him for show and tell. As well as getting a chance to say hi to Troy of the Kearsarge Beekeepers Association, which sponsored the bee school, I talked to some strangers keeping bees in Candia, some friends of Sarah's I have met before, and someone once connected with the NH Dep't of Historical resources (whose husband was the real estate agent while I house-hunted here) and her friends. It really is a very small state.

I think I am going to switch to buying only organic almonds. Maybe, like 'dolphin-safe' tuna, we could have 'bee-safe' crops.

*The groans from the nutty crunchy independent cinema-going audience here were quite funny, even while I was groaning with them.

** Yes, I do mean deciding we could sort out the Mideast with a few good American soldiers.

a new week

2011-04-11T10:02:00.000-04:00

Usually Mondays are, well, not as bad as if I had A Job, but, you know? Today, it's a new week and I am hoping the almost uninterrupted string of godawfulness being endured by several of my friends will let up: filial mental health, spousal mental health, their own mental health, aftermath of breakup, parental mental health, academic difficulties, and yesterday afternoon, the sudden, expensive (bladder-stone related) death of my daughter's saner, younger cat.
I am afraid if I go outside an anvil will fall on my head, since that's what's happening to them, more or less.

We had a couple of nice days this past week, with sun and plausible warmth. The daffodils are coming up even as the crocus is blasting into bloom. Late, compressed spring. I have yet to hear a redwing, though they usually live across the road. The phoebe is building her nest in the usual place and I saw a butterfly. No other Native Pollinators yet.

Adulteration is such an ugly word

2011-04-03T20:01:00.000-04:00

Today is about three and a half months from when I made an attempt at apple peel wine, so it was time to bottle it. Doug handled the capper and helped me manage the siphon. The apple=peel vintage managed to be herbal yet vinegary yet alcoholic (Note to self: do not try this again. Just compost the peels. You are not a Norman peasant). Actually, I think it would be ideal for certain kinds of upset stomachs. There were also three gallons of dandelion wine from 2009 and 2010, and some rose petal. The rose petal didn't taste like much when I racked it, and it still didn't. So I mixed it with couple of pounds of honey, improving it beyond recognition, and it if it isn't too active I'll bottle it next week. To be properly traditional, I should use sugar of lead, or possibly wood alcohol, but we don't have the facilities for adulteration our foreparents did and we must just make the best of it.

The dandelion wine was much much better. I added a hint of ginger to one batch, which only made it taste 'hotter,' more alcoholic. Not really a good idea. I have one more gallon of dandelion with cherries in it (what was I thinking?) that we racked (decanted to get some of the sludge out before letting it settle once more before bottling). It didn't seem either awful or the warm, round, cheery mouthfeel of the basic recipe. Dandelion wine is labor intensive -- you have to get all the little green bits off the flowers before you cover them with sugar, and prepping the blossoms takes forever. But the basic dandelion recipe is probably worth the trouble.

We can drink it in September. Wine is one of those things like daffodils; by the time you get to drink it, it's so long after the initial effort that it seems quite easy.

Not quite April

2011-03-30T12:33:00.000-04:00

Snow is expected tomorrow night. It is sunny, but filthy cold. I can hear the wind sharpening its whatever that takes your hair off. I still have redpolls, whom I love, who may have decided that this IS Northern Canada and perhaps they will stay.

In three months, God willing, I'll be complaining about the heat.

I had my 7-week post-op and I am just amazingly fine. I am very happy with that. I am also trying to eat more vegetables and perhaps even exercise more. I am cautious about lifting things. Since the frost will never get out of the ground, I'll never know whether I can shovel decently.

Last weekend was Conbust. The weekend before that was Doug and Barb's wedding.

I have low expectations of weddings. I was worried the liturgy would be so bad my inner liturgist (who used to be Top Personality) would have a Level Seven Wobbly (or 'take a fit,' as they say here. Have a cow). Since, in my liturgy rating system, it is almost impossible to come out with a positive score, only losing a few points is pretty good (bells at the elevation, communion under only the appearance of bread, use of a deacon instead of lay Eucharistic ministers). Unexpected not-losses of points: short sermon, consecration of the hosts for the mass AT the mass; really pretty, not-overwhelming music/no one singing 'How Great Thou Art;' no mentions at all of birth control, abortion, the vocation crisis, or people with statistically unusual sexual preferences. I didn't come even close to losing my temper, which is, sadly, amazing.

The reception was buffet, tasty food, reasonable bar, comfortable setting (the head table was another table like unto all the rest of us and not on a dais), and really nice people. The music was just low enough that you could actually converse, as well.

Deb accused me unjustly of stealing the blankets the first night, at her house, so I got the bed at the hotel all to myself while she and Sarah shared. On the trip home, the Boisverts suggested a stop at Rein's Deli, at which I have wanted to eat since I was in college. But I am not often on I-84,, and when I have been I have been in a hurry, so I have just looked mournfully at the sign when I drove past. It was up to expectation. I had the Nova Smoked Salmon Salad and Potato Pancake Platter. The place smelled like the delicious half-sour pickles they give you while you wait for your food. Deb Boisvert and discovered that we had both spent the same chunk of our lives -- old enough to yearn, too young to drive -- in New Jersey.

Doug was away for the next week, on his honeymoon in Mystic Seaport, CT, and York Beach, ME. I prepared for teaching three small fibery workshops at Conbust and had performance anxiety. On Thursday I took off and crossed a small but valid continental divide over the Connecticut River, off New Hampshire's granite chunk of Africa onto Vermont's edge-of-North America limestone former-seabed. It was sunny, though neither green nor warm, and a lovely drive. A gas station just over the border had home-made pea soup, which fortified me for getting lost in Bellows Falls. At last I reached Saxton's River and DyakCraft. I picked up ten Cheap Sheep spindles and drove on to Northampton. It was good to see Grace and Debbie, although Grace was in MCAS hell (a special version for Special Ed teachers). Friday I did things in Northampton and was in a foul mood, which was sad because it was only moderately cold, sunny, and everyone was nice to me.

Conbust had originally suggested I give the needlefelting workshop at 9 pm Friday night, when all good science-fiction fans should be drinking and or watching movies, and I should be in bed. At my protest, they moved it to 6 pm Friday, an hour after the con opened for registration and while there were still long lines of people waiting to sign in. I was not surprised only to have one student, but she was delightful, and we had a wonderful time making Luna Lovegood's radish earrings. An ideal first project. Since the committee had also decided that an hour per workshop was enough (I usually get two), we had to move to the ConSuite and I demonstrated wet felting of small radishes in difficult circumstances (no hot water in the bathrooms, and the only cups they had were coldcups that did not fit under the spigot of the hot-water device (#ConSuiteFAIL)). And while we were there I taught someone else to needlefelt.

I went back to Grace and Debbie's in a much better frame of mind and watched the Bruins crush the Canadiens on the high-definition TV.

Saturday was lovely and cold again. I awoke early and took advantage of the excellent wifi by listening to New Hampshire Public Radio. I also read my e-mail and found out Diana Wynn Jones had died. She was a kind, funny, good writer of mostly YA fiction, not that any adult would fail to find it subtle and exciting, and I was sorry to hear of her passing. She would have approved of Conbust. And Gerry Ferraro, too, and the dust was rising in NH about the ghastly legislative budget proposal. It made me melancholy.

I had just about decided no one wanted to learn to embroider when the class filled up. Today's youth (one male person, the rest female) want to embroider baby monsters and kitties, not rocket ships or skulls. And they are fiercely determined to make things as hard for themselves as possible, as when several decided that they should fill a 1mm-wide line with 1mm-wide stitches, instead of following it in, say, 1/4" ( 3.5mm)- LONG stitches. I also discovered why DMC's Prism floss is so much cheaper than their good stuff: it is made of shorter-stapled cotton, so not only is it less shiny, it tends to snag more on itself and anything it can find. The students murmured in agreement when I suggested that all embroidery floss was out to get people, anyway. I tried to teach them Stem Stitch. Some of them invented Running Stitch and Back Stitch instead, but on the whole I think it was a success.

I went back to Grace and Debbie's and was exhausted. Later we watched two episodes of Bones and then someone dispatched the Red Sox, but it was pre-season so that was all right. We also went to a tapas restaurant, where they prepared very tasty Spanish bar food in minute, edible portions, and my table argued about the existence of God.

On Sunday I only had two spinning students, both male persons. One was nice guy I met on Friday night, who had enjoyed watching the needlefelting (and whose head exploded painfully when he heard about the existence of Kirk/Spock fanporn. Someone should really have told him sooner), and the other was a lutenist at various renfaires who wanted to know how to spin. After our hour was over, he and I carried on, and then I taught a passerby to spin who ended up buying a spindle (as had the lutenist). Not the best weekend for numbers, but I had a good time and I think the people who took my workshops actually learned.

I bought one of my friends a Grateful Dead bandana for her collection, got some lunch, and drove home. My cats are well, and Doug survived his honeymoon. I think we can be sure Barb is neither a honeybee nor a praying mantis, which is always a relief.

Right then. On my river in Egypt I have this excellent raft

2011-03-14T17:46:00.000-04:00

In other news, about ME -- I noted my six-weeks post op last Friday. I feel fine. I still get tired easily, but let's not forget I was not the Energizer Bunny before this surgery. I am hoping to be able to start using a shovel again soon ("6-week" checkup is a week from tomorrow), and I am reluctant to lift anything much.

The greater part of the snow has melted. We still have 4-6" on the ground most places, but the driveway is ice-free (and mud-enhanced, with a couple of excellent sinkholes). I still have a few redpolls, but the goldfinches are back (still in winter plumage); the Pileated is rattling a lot and the titmice are calling. Perhaps the peepers will start soon.

Marten and Willow are much more tolerant of the kittens. Wash takes complete advantage of Marten and fawns all over him. This afternoon Marten hissed while Wash was rubbing against him, and Wash ignored it. Then they played 'chase' up the driveway and back down to where I was. As I write, the sun has come out for the first time since at least Friday and I can feel my mood lightening. Mal is almost as tall as Marten at the shoulder and still less than half Marten's size. I guess the limb bones grow first, and then the vertebrae?

Doug is getting married to Barb on Saturday. Sarah and Deb Duranceau and I are are driving down to Connecticut Saturday morning. The following weekend I am giving three craft workshops at the Smith Science Fiction Convention: needle felting, spinning with a drop spindle, and introduction to hippie-freestyle embroidery. I have made a bunch of tiny skeins of different colors of floss and a bunch of iron-ed on transfers with simple designs (kitten, rocketship, baby monster, sugar skull, tattoo-style bluebird, and an anchor for non-fan types). Fortunately, hoops are cheap, at least the ones I got. For the needle-felting, I had intended to make a bunch of colors in fleece, and I have, but I can't see any rhyme nor reason in them. But they are bright. I need to make some more. And I have well-prepped roving to spin and Cheap Sheep on order for the spinners. I will recharge my bright blue hair as soon as I get home from Doug's wedding. If I wear one of these, I don't think people will think I am a furry, but will they think I am a scaly? a kaijusexual?

I suppose Daylight Saving Time could be seen as an industrial-era form of the Pancake Race.

It's always something...

2011-03-14T16:45:00.000-04:00

I was trying to count up the number of really serious things I could recall living through. I remember my mother cutting out the new president's newspaper photo in 1960 (that would be JFK) and saying she was going to send it to her mother (a Republican. My mother claims this is not true. How would I make it up?) and later I recall her telling me they were very very scared, which I am pretty sure had to do with the Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis. When I was seven, Kennedy was shot, which I remember very clearly; we went to washington to see the funeral. When I was thirteen, Martin Luther King was killed and about a month later, so was Bobby Kennedy, and these were terrible. So were the first shuttle blowing up (I also remember the Apollo capsule and Grissom, White, and Chafee burning), the big attack on the World Trade Center , and the second shuttle explosion. I can remember vaguely hearing about the first attack, and about the massacre in Waco. Flashbulb memories. Where were you?

I remember the first time I read a small article in the NY about some weird form of cancer that seemed to be affecting the city's homosexual community; I thought that was not going to be the last we heard of THAT, and I was right. I also figured it was too slow to be It, the End of the World as We Know It (although I gather if you were gay and young in New York or San Francisco, it was close enough).

9-11 was the first time people seemed seriously to believe the end of the world as we knew it had come; we had been let down by Y2K. I remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but I can't recall any emotional freight attached to them.

Katrina was different; those were MY people, Americans, and they were not well served. And if it isn't the same, it's coming back, one way or another, in the same place (which I understand why, but I also can't understand.)

It's not that there haven't been earthquakes before. It's not that there haven't been disasters among industrialized people before, and it is my own hard-heartedness that makes wipeouts in Pakistan and Turkey less shocking than seeing convenience stores and apartment buildings in Biloxi and Christchurch and Miyagi crushed, torn up, or drowned.

But this time there are nuclear reactors involved, and I really do feel like this could be it. Does everyone have an It they wonder if things could be, or is that a habit from reading science fiction? You can't read science fiction without having a thinkable idea of TEOTWAWKI; a lot of fans have more like a relationship with it, a bag packed, a skill set, a look for exits, a checkout for ambush. Some of it's simple paranoia, some of it's justified, some of it's escapism, some of it's cultivated ("Anywhere else has got to be better than it is here"). But we spend a fair amount of time thinking the unthinkable (like, what if you could fly? would you need wings or a jetpack or would it all be like telekinesis? And then everyone with blue eyes became werewolves?). By the way, there are these asteroids? They probably won't hit, or the supernova next door or...

Or you're a history buff: you have to think about the plagues, and read about Lassa fever and SARS, and wonder, particularly as it takes more and more different antibiotics to knock out a baby's earache. Or you read about bees, deforestation, climate change, population growth, the extinction of more species at one time that we have known of since the end of the Cretaceous... I mean, if you're a certain kind of green or lefty you have some difficulty being wholeheartedly optimistic. Denial lets me get around. I usually think the prevalence of depression these days has to do with the way we treat one another or are treated in order to make a living, and the forced obsolescence of perfectly good things, people, and ways of life. I wonder if some it isn't also the number of loud warnings that we are passing the point of any kind of stability.

Or if you study the decline of Rome. The end of industrial life, of this human civilization: we've been there, done that, come back.

But that time there weren't nuclear reactors involved.

I didn't use to dread logging onto Twitter.

Shrove Tuesday -- International Women's Day Fail

2011-03-09T09:14:00.000-05:00

I forgot to have pancakes. Now it will be my fault if Christ does not rise and/or the sun does not get stronger (cross out where not applicable)(ten points off if you giggled at 'cross'.)

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West

Every day is "I am A Feminist" Day. But I suppose it's like gay pride and every so often we should mention it.

I am single, overeducated, and own property. In the bad old days those were a recipe for a witch burning (hanging, pressing, whatever). However disappointed you may be in this country, it's better than it was and it's better than it IS an awful lot of places. Some of which our government props up. I suppose there are institutional systems worse than misogyny (or outright gynophobia) but it seems hard to believe that the worst of them would not be improved by treating slightly over half of the human race as well as if they were male (same legal rights. Same educational rights. Same rights to travel safely. Same vocational and employment rights. Same rights to dress comfortably, conveniently, safely). Oppression begins at home. Depersonalization begins at home. Thought control begins at home. You can suggest they begin in fear, or in books, or in houses or worship, but they can't be systemic if they aren't carried home.

These rights are, oddly, the same ones as ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities want. Many of them are male. You wouldn't think it would be hard to understand.

Snowing AGAIN, finally!

2011-02-25T11:37:00.000-05:00

It's been three weeks and two days. I know this because it's been three weeks since I had surgery. I spent time on the HysterSisters board again and LORD I am lucky. I don't hurt when I sit up or lie down -- the static state, not the motion of doing so. I don't have family that resent my idling. I am healing well and nothing is oozing.

Right, enough about that. Let's do chronological:

I posted Dramatis Personae last Saturday. The day before (14 days after surgery), I had Jessica to visit, a library-type who worked at the end of the hall where I last worked. She is now working for a for-profit and has a two year-old daughter named Charlotte. She was wonderful (Jessica was more than okay herself and brought me food). I haven't laughed so much in years. The kittens were fascinated by a pint-sized human and followed her around for an hour. She has cats at home and played with them very well. She also took their featherstick and rode it like a stick-horse, tried to play with the axe (her mother is just unreasonable), spent a long time sorting a pile of rhyolite pebbles, drew and wrote on pieces of paper, left the airlock in the wine alone when I asked her to, and was delightful. She also asked me to hold her. Kid has me in her pocket.

At one point Charlotte was wandering diaperless. Her mom was worried I would be mad if C peed on the floor. I told her it was okay if Charlotte did, but not if Jessica did. Jessica said that was a relief; some people try to hold Charlotte to the same behavioral standards as they do Jessica. Most unkind. Jessica is a LOUSY 2-year-old, but she does very well for a 30-something.

Meanwhile Jessica and I dyed stuff, made more interesting in that it's been awhile and I couldn't remember how. I knew we needed a roasting pan, but why? (I have remembered.) Jessica said "OH! What PRETTY colors!" and then apologized, I think for not being serious enough. Since that sort of comment is pretty much what makes up my internal dialogue, I told her that was the right kind of response. We both made cold-poured yarns that look like bruises, but were very pleased with some of our fleece (Mason jars in the microwave). I have to work on learning to mix earth colors.

Charlotte carefully unpacked everything in the kindling bucket: she found something to do that was safe, quiet, absorbing, time-consuming, and required no supervision. True, there was stuff on the floor. Her mother suggested she could put it back into the bucket. Charlotte dismissed this as fast as I would and went back to play with the toolstone. I offered to teach her to make and use a scraper but we had no caribou. I have not managed to tidy up the dyeing paraphernalia (of which there is enough that it needs an even longer word than paraphernalia); my kitchen is trashed. I crashed, giggling.

My two-week post-op appointment was the following Monday and the first time I drove. It was a t four, so I thought about it all and went to Joann's first. All I wanted was a piece of turquoise felt. They had that and a few other things....

So then I went and sat in the bead shop, where they welcomed me with open arms and were delighted how well I looked, and I began to bead a new strap for my iPod (Willow bit through my old oe; it is a very seductively tender silicon and I can't blame her). Then I packed myself up and went for my doctor's appointment. I appear to be doing just fine. Dr. Morgan asked for my e-mail address and forwarded the email she had from the pathologist of my extracted, bisected uterus in all its butchershop glory. I went home and crashed.

(If you are like me and find anatomy fascinating, you can see the pathologist's picture of my uterus and fibroids (which are amazing) here . The password is 'uterus' so I wouldn't squick out innocent passersby.)

I still get really tired. On Wednesday I went to archaeology lab and stood up in the wrong shoes for about an hour I sat and did some computer tidying. I was completely wiped out, ached ALL over, and my right knee has been more painful than my incision has ever been. So I took half a Vicodin. Mostly, though, my drugs are only Ibuprofen, which is always my friend.

So largely, I am animate every third day, inanimate the day after, and potter around on the third. Tomorrow is the last issue of Bee School. I have a deposit on a nucleus from Vermont, but I can't pick it up until the first week of May. We have a lot to do before that (electric fenced-enclosure) and I cannot even pretend that I won't fob all the work off onto Doug. I am afraid I am going to be mostly useless this year as far as archaeology is concerned. I do not like it. But I bend in the middle better than I did and while I am still on the overweight end of the scale, I look better.

Dramatis personae

2011-02-19T17:19:00.000-05:00

I should do this by age or something. Probably end up with proximity.

Human persons:

Doug: the dauntless housemate. He's ten years older than I am. We met in 1999, when I took up with

SCRAP, and dated for a couple of years. After I moved to NH in 2004, I lived with Sarah for a year; she moved to Canterbury and after some negotiation, Doug moved into the Kitchenette and the two bedrooms at the back of the house. He moved out for the year or so of 2007, and back just as Paul moved out. We get along very well, particularly now that we are not boyfiend and girlfiend. He plows the driveway, worries about the woodpile, tries to get me to exercise and eat wholesome meals and, unlike me, does floors. We share custody of Mal and Wash. Doug is going to marry Barb next month.

Barb is a visiting nurse who lives in Connecticut with her brother and her adult daughter Becky and four black cats. Barb is not rural. She and Doug are not planning to live together until one of them retires.

Sarah is about 23 years younger than I am. She is frequently mistaken for either my daughter or my

partner (everyone has been very supportive about it and it would save a lot of trouble, but neither of us swings that way). We met when I first worked with SCRAP and she was a lab supervisor. Since then she has gone into a more remunerative field in the region of non-profits. She is a teacher of environmental education in Laconia, and greener than most people I know. I helped ruin her life by getting her into the twilit world of spinning and dyeing. She lived here for about a year when I moved in in 2004 from Melrose, MA.She has two cats, one of whom is Special Needs. If you would like to adopt Twilly, please let me know.

Deb Duranceau, Deb D is another friend from SCRAP, about Doug's age, who lives to the south. Sarah and I are trying to remake her in our own images and she has taken up knitting more seriously recently. Deb also volunteered to become my Bee Partner, because Doug is often not around and I need encouragement.

Deb is the one on the right.

Dick Boisvert is the NH state archaeologist. He runs SCRAP. Dick is married to Deb Boisvert, whom we don't see enough of, but whose presence unseen or not has a lot to do with SCRAP's activities. Sometimes she participates and sometimes she affects Dick's plans, for, he tells us, he has no desire to find out what a divorce lawyer's office looks like.

I have two living parents in Boston, my mother and my father;

Clockwise: my dad, my mom, Ellie, Jenny, me and Asterix, Sam a few years ago

a son Sam (working at the Apple Store two blocks from my parents' apartment, engaged to Kimberly. They have two kittens); a daughter Eleanor (in grad school for Classics in New Jersey), and also in Boston, an ex named Jenny. She used to be named David. Things change. Jenny is English. My father is Texan. My mother is urban, from Chicago.

Sam and Kimberly, Jenny, my mom and dad, Ellie, her boyfriend Matt, and me

I used to have a contractor named Paul, who rebuilt The Loom Room and the Kitchen and lived here in theory for part of a year (2009). He moved out but left behind his daughter Katie, a high-school graduate who lived in the other upstairs bedroom for a year, until last September (2010).

Non-Human Persons or Characters:

Marten is a large neutered male tabby cat who has lived here since I brought him from the shelter in

2005 or so. I think he's about six and a half. He goes for walks with us down the driveway, but he doesn't like going into the forest. Marten arrived while Asterix and Obelix were still with us. They were great cats who lived to be 19 and 17, respectively. I still miss them, and Mena who was only 9 (kidney failure). Doug had a tabby named Digger who died about the same time; he blames tainted catfood. Then we acquired
Willow. She is a small tabby cat who really distrusts other cats. Sarah found her living in Canterbury Shaker Village. She loathes Marten and the other kitty we had for a while, Toby. Toby took to living under the porch until I took him off to live with Ellie in NJ. Marten was fond of Toby but being attacked by Willow made him sour, and he and Willow both hated Nigel, who was a lovely un-altered male who lived here for a few months in 2009-10. I hope Nigel found a new family rather than a coyote's belly. He disappeared during the 2010 SCRAP field school, who were camping in the front yard. After we had mourned his loss for a few months, Sarah told me about two kittens who needed a home,
Mal and Wash. They have forged a friendship with Marten and a detente with Willow.

An archaeological unit

SCRAP, the State Conservation and Rescue Archaeology Program that is responsible for running archaeology field schools every summer in NH. Which was the main reason I moved to NH. One does not get paid working with SCRAP, generally, but a bunch of us have been doing so anyway for a long time. As well as the four- to six-week field school Dick runs, there are sometimes others run by historical archaeologists along the same lines. You can get college credit for taking them, or sometimes poison ivy, or just hungover. It is a way of life. I love it. Sometimes we make road trips to dig with Dick's colleagues in Quebec or Texas. In the winter, on Wednesdays, we sort and catalogue artifacts, if were lucky enough to find any in the summer or the long weekend of Octoberfest.

The House: a large, 'contemporary' (a year older than Sarah) with eleven acres of glacial till, uphill in almost all directions, both ways, outside of Henniker, NH. One of my criteria for a house when I was looking for it was that I should be able to put a car up on blocks if I wanted to. I don't, but I could. I never have to rake leaves again.
The ground floor is largely open-plan, with a living/dining area (dark, because the previous owner put a glassed-in front porch onto the front of the house).
Off to the right, or the north, there is The Loom Room originally built by the previous owner around a concrete slab. Paul had to rebuild it onto the slab with dry foundations, and the loft in the room because the support beam had been sawn halfway through to make niches for the two-by-fours of the loft floor (It bowed more than somewhat). I sold Doug the floor loom, but I have two or three frame looms and really a lot of wool. It's a sewing, beading, whatever crafting area, and also the spare room with a double folding futon.
There are two bedrooms upstairs (one of them mine), and maybe three, or two and a study, downstairs. The small bathroom used to open directly onto the dining area; now it's a dogleg away through the kitchen
The one+study make up most of Doug's suite, along with
The Kitchenette. The previous owner made the Kitchenette out of a small, attached garage in order to offer his aging father a home. My mother claims the idea of living there is what killed him before he took residence. There's a three-quarter bathroom. One way and another, the Kitchenette is the sunniest, warmest room on the ground floor, and an incomparable view of the proximal portion of the driveway (the paved part).
My Bedroom is the sunniest, warmest room on the second floor. This makes it hard to get out of bed. It has a deck with a couple of bird feeders. I wish the bathroom were not ensuite, and opened onto the hall, because it's icky for anyone in the other bedroom to use it (to say nothing of what I think of people having to come into my bedroom in the middle of the night). The original owner (I believe still in the federal pen for drugs and suborning federal agents as well as local cops) was a lousy designer.

Several years before I bought the house from its second owner the four-car garage burned down, so I have a big concrete pad which uses most of the flat place they made when they built the house. There is a compost heap and some garden beds around the edges of the pad. I bought in some decent soil last year, making a huge difference in garden yield.

The Driveway actually runs downhill to the road, but the downhill is much less noticeable than the uphill on the way back. It's about a quarter-mile long and unpaved. The gravel washes out. The drive in places lies directly on the bedrock.

It's pretty in the autumn

So that's something to be getting on with.

I cannot think of a clever title.

2011-02-17T12:28:00.001-05:00

I may have used up my bloggish clever for the day, since I have just launched another blog to talk about beekeeping (Beeing Human) and allowed out of the closet the one where I started putting links to things that make me think of Stephen Colbert's children's book (about 1:25 into the clip). It's called Dystopic Fun and I don't have to behave very well there.

Also I am pretty sure Blogger is trying to gaslight me by changing the template every time I come to it, but I'm fine.

I really have cut down on the opium.

After I persuaded the little man and his boat to leave the kitchen, I tidied the rest of the place up a bit, so I was ready to go to sleep when my parents arrived and got stuck in the driveway.

My father has the racking cough so popular in Boston today, and both my parents were wearing city-person shoes (not the Manolos, thank God). My father, who is only 83, wanted to go dig the car out. Since they were visiting me in theory because I am laid up, I could not go and shovel it out myself. Fortunately Doug and his fiancee came and got stuck just ahead of my parents' car, and then Dick the archaeologist and his wife Deb (not the same Deb as the one I have been exploiting for healthcare and Bee School)(that one is Deb Duranceau, Deb D). Doug and Dick dug out the cars, and then Deb and Dick made dinner. They and my parents have met before, but it's had to get them in the same room, so I had pulled my weight as a poor convalescent to bring them together at the same time. It was fun. Deb had made a lamb dish with coriander and chickpeas and I am still enjoying the delicious leftovers.

They all left around eight, and I was too tired to go to bed.

Since then I have been more careful (or less busy) to have naps.

Monday here was in the fifties Fahrenheit, which means LOVELY. I think that was the day we had this year's 'January thaw,' a period of usually four or even five days above freezing the last week or so of January, during which the snow consolidates. One day was very nice, and not enough. I walked down and up the driveway (I did not get stuck or fall!). Mal and Marten came with me. It is fun to watch a dignified quadruped slide. Mal (former kitten, now maybe 6 months old? maybe 5?)was very curious about the nice weather and came almost all the way down to the mailbox. Marten (probably about 5 years old, also a cat) followed slowly after us. At first, while zooming down and up around me, Mal did not recognize him. When he saw Marten, about twenty feet away, he made a huge M-cat (huge for him. Mal is still about half Marten's size). Marten did a very lazy M-ish cat in response. Mal danced, ferocious yet cautious, in Marten's direction. When he was about four inches away he apparently got Marten's scent. He relaxed completely and greeted Marten with a friendly side-brush and rushed off again. We walked back up the hill and I lay down in a sunbeam in a dry place on the porch for a few minutes. I think I saw two bugs. Chickadees made 'Hey, baby' remarks. Spring is coming.

The next day was cold again, and so was yesterday. Not sure about today yet. On Tuesday I drew my act closer together and fetched the dyeing materials: the needle-felting workshops of Conbust are the week after Doug's wedding, which is only 30 days from now. So I recalled what dyeing facility I had, and put fleece into jars and into the microwave. It's fun. On Wednesday I did more, and only got a little on one thumb pink (dye acts very differently when it is exhausted than when it is not), and took a nap.
Around three, Deb picked me up and took me to lab, and Sarah came and took me to the Elegant Ewe (only needles)(honest), and to dinner and the supermarket (at last! Raisins for the oatmeal!) and Doug brought me home.

Well, we were tired, Doug and I both. I read a book for a bit. We wondered if we were hearing a mouse in the walls. The cats ignored it, told us to sit back down and pat them. I staggered upstairs, Doug staggered into his room. I turned off the hall light. A monster made crashing noises.

A monster made crashing, gnawing noises.

It was coming from the hatch in the linen closet upstairs.

See, on Saturday, Doug had put hardware cloth over the damaged gable-end vent in the roof. By Wednesday, the monster wanted out.

Doug said sadly that he did not want to get dressed and go out on the roof with the ladder in the snow and detach the hardware cloth.

We turned off the lights, we turned on the lights, Doug came upstairs, Doug went downstairs, the monster made crashing noises, I went downstairs, Doug went upstairs and brought the kittens, who wanted to see the monster (even the older cats were quite interested) downstairs into the kitchenette.

The monster almost opened the hatch. I suggested we open the hatch and let whatever it was out. The raccoons know their way around the house quite well. Doug pointed out that squirrels were not so reliable (I could see him thinking of squirrels leaping from the light fixtures). We wondered if we had a porcupine.

Doug opened the hatch. He identified a raccoon and sighed a lot and closed the hatch. It was now midnight, so he went to fetch the stepladder. The raccoon made 85% of the way through the hatch into the closet, saw me, and went back into the ceiling. Doug went out the second upstairs bedroom window onto the roof, while I held a flashlight and said encouraging things. He undid the bottom screws so one could squeeze out from under the hardware cloth, and he waited. Later he came back into the house and waited, but though no one tried to come through the hatch no one came out through the damaged vent either.

Eventually we went to bed. No idea whether there are monsters up there now or not. I mean, more than the usual ones who spend the rest of the time under one's bed.

Superfund site made safe

2011-02-12T18:23:00.002-05:00

AREA HOME DECONTAMINATED

Some of the victims of last night's murine contamination-home invasion horror

GOVERNMENT SENDS EPA TO SILVERWARE DRAWER

Technicians scan for any remaining traces of toxic waste

TROOPS REMAIN ON PATROL

Well, something like that. Both bleach and SimpleGreen were involved. What's interesting is that the breadcrumb reservation, the places where a smidgen of this or that might rest for a day or so before being eaten or recycled or trashed, the spice drawer -- all of these much more likely haunts of the mouse -- are, as far as our crack team can tell, untouched. We don't think they came to check out the world's largest Kombucha mother. Or that it ate them, but it's darn big for just being made out of tea and sugar.

Soon Doug will come back here with more opium but I have enough to get through the weekend.

I left the house today! DebD took me to get the ingredients for an eggplant hat (fresh, not Parmesan) for my daughter. Is there a word for people who prefer to wear vegetables, as well as eat them? She is not vegan, which is good, although I think the sheep and alpaca were at least fed and housed in return for their exploitation. Unfortunately there was also a really enticing magazine, so I cannot say I behaved all that well.

Then we bought catfood and cat litter. I am not having any difficulty remembering not to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk. I hope it gets better. DebD is getting over some long-term pain issues, so she's delighted to be the brawny one for a change.

This would have been enough excitement, but we went to Bee School. The president of the local society was speaking. He's a mostly chemical-free, queen-breeding beekeeper, also the youngest guy we have had so far and the furthest to whatever direction green is. I could not figure why I started yawning, when it was so interesting. Eventually I realized it was the first day I had gone without a nap since the surgery. Heady stuff.

Right now I am missing the annual SCRAP party. I like the people but I am glad to be home. I am trying to stay up late enough to actually go to bed, since 5:30 seemed too late to take a nap. And I think I will move back into my own room, warm though the kitchenette is. The cats will have to cope.

Have to admit it's getting better

2011-02-11T14:56:00.003-05:00

I must be recovering, I want to kill someone. But who?

THE SCENE:

People whom I love and respect are coming to dinner on Sunday, bringing food.

I am running out of opium.

I ran out of shirts.

I think that's the background you need, with a red herring or two.

THE ACTION:

So I did the laundry, thanking my life that this does not involve rocks and rivers, if only because it is zero Fahrenheit out there. With appropriate caution I hung the laundry on the laundry hanging rack and picked up a few things (Christmas cards. Maybe it's time to declare the 2010 holiday season a wrap*). I felt fine, so I decided to empty the dishwasher. We ran it on Wednesday and again, that doesn't seem to be pushing it.

I have five little white pills left. The prescription says to take one or two every three or four hours. I began breaking them in half a couple days ago because it's not my kind of stoned; I like to giggle, as on alcohol, and opium just makes me stare, and then hours have passed. Also because I am assured that it is costive (binding), and my insides want to be FREE, and not need to be pushed (because this will hurt and more importantly, undo all the surgeon's work to restore me to prelapsarian innocence). But at the same time, when I was taking half a pill every six or seven hours I got so I could not honestly say I was ahead of the pain at all.

So I call the doctor's office and they are surprised I think I will need more pills, which makes me feel like a) a junkie and b) someone who may die at any moment. The nurse is off asking another doctor because mine is away for the next week, I hope somewhere glamourous. But you know, you might have given me guidelines for when I should be tapering off, because if I were still following the discharge instructions I would have run out probably yesterday.

I still can't tell if I am hungry, tired, depressed, lazy, or on drugs. I try to eat and sleep but it's not easy to know how much of either, particularly when the doctor, whom I still rather like, has said losing some of the fat would be a good idea. And I am not really clear if I am hungry as I used to mean it. These days eating seems like a good idea but not, you know, exciting. I suspect the narcotics are dialing down my palette and appetite.

I am still moving around, tidying, taking breaks from the tyranny of the dishwasher, and I open two incomprehensible letters from my insurance company. The one I drove through the terrible snow last Tuesday week to get set up with the EFT with the new bank. Because my old bank, as well as being on Mr. Assange's hot list, closed its only branch within 20 miles, so I moved to a nice bank, right in my neighborhood, where they have been primitive and not terribly helpful.

Okay, the EFT apparently has not worked. Service Charge!

So I go to the online presence of my bank, which takes my username and password and says I must be lying and asks a security question: What street did you grow up on?

How would I know that? I strongly doubt they have ever asked me that before, because it's a complicated question I would have resented and not suggested they use as a security answer. I moved a lot between ages 6 and 13 and do you mean where did I live when I went to high school? Puberty?

Have I grown up?

So they locked my account. I phoned them and got the bank's customer service machine to call me back.

While I was waiting for them to call I put away the silverware. I have four cats, and yet there are mouse droppings among the silverware. Not just a few.

I have been in that drawer several times since the surgery and I think I would have noticed. Or wouldn't Doug have noticed, when he got me a spoon the other day?

Is there evidence of mice among the crumbs by the toaster? next to the cat food? by the stove?

No, just among the stainless steel. That I eat with.

The bank called and asked, cosily, if I could tell them what my last transaction was. I replied that I could have, if I could have gone online, but actually it was at least ten days and an episode of total anaethesia ago and I couldn't remember. She passed me upstream.

They did unlock my online access.

I am putting the contents of the silverware drawer into the the nice empty dishwasher.

It would be a bad idea to take all five of my remaining white pills but it seems fairly attractive.

POSTSCRIPT:

The service charge was from the old mess before I filled out the form; of course, it is important to go on sending confusing notices for three weeks, but okay.

I made hot chocolate.

* Ho, ho, ho.

I think I may be alive. Pretty sure.

2011-02-10T17:36:00.005-05:00

The brain cells have not been quick to catch up, but today I think I am mostly awake.

So I survived the fast with flying colors; most of the time I didn't even feel hungry. I just played silly games with the various iTunes libraries and tried to keep warm. I absorbed good wishes and that was a warm feeling of another kind.

Then Doug and I got up VERY early on Friday and took me to the hospital, where they were very nice. They took away my clothes and put an IV into my hand. My son and his future wife and my parents arrived, and Doug left and apparently I did, too, because I don't remember a thing until about four pm, in my room.

The surgery went well. They did not let me hold the alien babies before they sent them off to Area 51. But I am told a normal empty uterus is 80 grams (short pair of socks) and mine was about 1200 grams (smallish sweater). My innards seem to be working nicely again; I still love prune juice but my body is back to reacting rather strongly to it.

The visiting went very well; my family and my friends kept saying how delighted they were I was doing so well. Since I can't actually remember finishing a sentence I think they had low expectations. But I have not felt nearly as bad as I expected to most of the time and I was lively enough to enjoy the company. I kept thinking we needed to have get-togethers more often, but my parents and my son and Proto-Daughter-in-Law say surgery is not a good excuse. They all seemed to be as tired as I felt, which was heartening in its way, too.

The hospital was a really clean, modern place full of gracious people and an amazing menu. I wasn't exactly hungry but they tempted me with chicken marsala and pork tenderloin. Nice light in the room (they gave me a single). Lots of fine drugs. They did wake me up to check my vital signs but since I went right back to sleep it was not a problem.

I came home on Sunday, despite not having had one of every entree on the menu, and Deb Duranceau made me oatmeal and reminded me to eat. I figured out out that writing down the time and dose of each pill I took made it much easier to know when the next one was due. There are little pieces of paper with ".5 opium @2:00 >6:00" all over the fiber kitchen. I turned out to be able to get to the bathroom by myself before I even left the hospital, but staying in the kitchenette made it easier on everyone and it is much warmer than my bedroom. So much warmer that I have had all four cats, who have been fairly careful not to spring on or off my incision. They are concerned but not worried, and wonder when I will start offering them small pieces of butter again.

Monday and Tuesday I noticed that it was too hard to text and just about too hard to watch TV. Yesterday Deb drove me to have my staples removed (which did not hurt as much as it sounds like it should) and I noticed, after my day's second nap, that I could read again. It comes and goes.

I succumbed to a free sample and bought the Kindle version of Midnight Riot. I should be ashamed to fit so well into the demographic :"Even if you've read all of the Dresden Files/Sandman Slim/Felix Castor/etc. novels, you'll still find plenty of originality and cleverness here." But if my perfectly fitting means more excellent yarns with intelligent characters and smart-ass remarks I guess I am happy about it.

Fast fast slow

2011-02-02T18:31:00.005-05:00

Well. It's snowed really a lot. Doug wishes we had a real plowblade instead of a tractor front-loader, and he would also like one of those Carhartt suits. At least we can afford a suit. Maybe a real plow sometime.

So the surgeon wants a CLEAN work area, and at noon I ate two pieces of buttered toast and a brownie (made by Doug because he is thoughtful, sweet, and kind, and I think he quietly worries and wanted me to venture into the unknown with the taste of chocolate in my mouth) and signed off food. It's clear liquids until after the surgery.

I also drank a lovely bottle of magnesium citrate. Although I have actually had worse soft drinks, it was untasty even for those of us who like salt and sweet. I bet it was aspartame. (Nope, saccharin. Yeough.)

The thundery squelchy noises in my stomach almost distract me from being hungry.

Then we each took naps (separately. His wedding with Barb is about six weeks from now). I had three cats helping me sleep. I am not sure how I got up. Heavy snow makes me sleepy and more indolent than usual. I had been trying to make my old Apple desktop into a Media Center (a record player, actually), but perhaps it did not like the music because its logic board has expired. Instead of turning on with a nice rich tone, it went "HOOT HOOT HOOT!" I was saving the music to an external hard drive, so the effort is not wasted, but I still have a lot of compact disks. I have iTunes Library Manager, which works as it says it will, and allows me to segregate the Christmas music (do you _want_ 'Run, Run, Rudolph' in your general shuffle?) Putting the extra seasons of 'Castle' on an external hard drive frees up a lot of space. Fiddling with iTunes while Snowmageddon hits the Northeast is about all I have managed to do today. I feel guilty about the time Doug spends ploughing, but I don't want to do it myself. Bad Laura.

The kittens have become eunuch kittens. They do not seem traumatized in any sense of the word. I hope I have as little post-operative difficulty as they have. I asked the vet if I could have it done to me there, since they get such good results, but though they were willing to call in a Large-Animal Vet, they weren't happy about their antisepsis. But I would be more likely exposed to distemper than MRSA.

I have been conscious of how good my health is, despite wanting to be able to bend in the middle better. The rundowns before the surgery of all the ailments I don't have, and only a single previous surgery was a Caesarean (baby is now 26 years old). Pointing out to myself that everything is easier now than it will be for at least the next six weeks (six months, a year) has not made me any better at tidying at all. At least it looks like someone tried to clean up after murdering the Avatar-blue alien in my bathroom (but their blood makes such good hair dye. SO natural!)

I have a huge stack of books to read when I come home, and a fair number of videos (The Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth was on sale at Amazon). Donna the bead lady asked if I had enough projects to keep me busy while I convalesced. I think maybe so.

It snows here a lot.

2011-01-21T08:32:00.002-05:00

Thursday I met with the surgeon woman, whom I like very much (Dr Morgan) and signed papers full of cheering things that will probably not be a problem (infection, incontinence, death, you know). The main thing is that I don't get to have anything but clear liquids for 48 hours BEFORE the surgery, which is not going to have me in the best frame of mind (although I can have tea, but no milk). And even after I am all better she does not think I should lift anything heavier than 25 pounds. I am hoping this is something I can work on. First we shall get through the surgery, which several more women have told me is not great fun but they felt way better afterward.

After the surgeon I met with the mechanic, who replaced my windshield wipers. WHICH COST $40, and the labor was free. Holy CRAP (sorry, but you know?). I diagnosed the need myself. I figured that fact that one of them was split all along its spine could not be good, though there seemed to be nothing wrong with the business squee-gee side. The new ones are much better, oddly.

Before going to see the surgeon I made an appointment at the a local lawyer's to bring my will up to date, since my current one says I have a husband and one child.

By this time I was feeling poor and doomed (the old, fat, and politically frustrated may be take as read, ptc as the doctor pointed out that the two days on clear liquids was a GREAT kick-off for weight-loss. Thanks), so I went to the Coop and got food and some interesting clear liquids.

Then I went to the bead store, Doug's Christmas gift certificate burning a hole in my gift-certificate pocket. The youngest one made me tea. All of them made me welcome. They revitalized me. I played with a late Christmas gift for Kimberly for two hours and ruled out several design ideas, and rid myself of the potentially hazardous gift-certificate by enrolling in a class on bead embroidery.

Then I went to Borders and met Doug for dinner at the Japanese restaurant, where I ate endangered fish for the first time in a couple of years. And bought him a ski mask to protect him during his hours plowing snow with the tractor. Man is a saint. And crazy, but the driveway is excellent.

The awesomely nice woman at the bead shop (one of three answering that description) suggested a site called HysterSisters.com. They are a little gung-ho sparkly (all members are Princesses!!!) but the good outweighs the twee and commercial and the site rules would be funny if they were not so sad (Your username cannot allude to your children because a lot of women on the site are not going to be able to have any) (we won't discuss what I think of women who base their identity on their kids, if that's okay). And as usual in these things, reading other people's stories makes me realize my life has been and continues to be a PICNIC.

I also learned a useful word: rectocele, (ew. you don't want to follow the link)and here is an excellent picture:, only you need to at least double the size of my uterus. I would say my rectocele is moderate. And IT is apparently why they don't want me doing heavy lifting anymore. We'll see.
We are resolutely maintaining a good attitude.

I get my own morphine pump (or similar) until I can take pain medicine by mouth.

The kittens are getting bigger but they are still cute and even Willow doesn't hate them as intensely as she used to.

A modest proposal

2011-01-16T09:12:00.000-05:00

World Charter for Compassion

"The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.

Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others — even our enemies — is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women

• to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion;

• to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate;

• to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures;

• to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity;

• to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings — even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community."

Stuff I made at Christmas.

2011-01-14T10:47:00.002-05:00

I forgot that the shirt I embroidered for Sarah was supposed to be an addition to the picture of the other things (except for a dazzlingly ugly scarf, in a color she already had a handmade scarf from me of... never mind, she appreciated the thought...) I made in a burst of pre-Christmas industry.

Here we have the Poems mittlets for Kimberly -- a lovely American-made yarn with great similarity to Noro, only cheaper and not so itchy; the Cascade red Scrunchy Scarf for Kimberly's father Joel (he's my son's fiancee's father -- does that make him my husband-in-law?); the pillow case and the patchwork tea cozy I made for my daughter (the patches were leftover from the quilt I made her a while ago); the punchneedle embroidery I made for Doug (it might be him and me, it might be him and Barb; he makes a great friendly protective snowman, and he's not afraid of cute); and the tea cozy I made for my mother out of some fat quarters that were stacked next to one another in my LQS and smote me with their colors.

If you make a tea cozy, you put the outside together with the batting, and then sew the LINING inside out over the whole thing to the bottom, leaving a hole to turn it all inside out and hiding the seam. Chirality and topology and my head nearly exploded, yes.

It was all very well. I felt a little bad giving my mother a tea cozy and my father a corkscrew (one that worked, unlike the one he had). My mom prefers teabags and my father only has wine around for me, so I wrote "A Blatantly Self-Serving Gift from Laura" on both of them, and I did get them other things, too.

If anyone has a plum-pudding recipe they like, I need one. It is true that it only has to be a vehicle for the hard sauce, but I would prefer it to be more.

A final holiday note, though from a previous holiday:

Pan de Muertos (see, it has bones on top) is a perfectly delicious Mexican treat for living and dead alike. You can get a good recipe from Convivio Bookworks (write and ask, and you should look at their splendid little calaveras while you're on their site. Because I am a King Arthur Flour junkie, I used their Fiori di Sicilia and their crunchy sugar and I am looking forward to next November to make it again. Maybe in little rolls. With carpals and metacarpals on them.

And in other news

2011-01-12T22:05:00.001-05:00

So I have AMAZING fibroid (benign) tumors in and around my uterus that stagger ultrasound techs and preclude laparoscopy. They make it harder to bend in the middle and do weird things to my innards and are doing my knees no favors (like, an extra 15 pounds to carry). Except that I think details of gynecology are a topic for small, mostly female conversations, I am not embarrassed and I am, I think, excited. And appropriately frightened, since pain and inconvenience will be involved.

Naturally I hope to spread the latter around.

We are aiming for February 4 at Concord Hospital, which will mean I need to be dropped off at SIX AM. I am really sorry about that, Doug. The usual length of stay is two nights and then I hope to be home.

I have met with Dr. Martha Louise Morgan (associated with the Concord Dartmouth-Hitchcock center) once already and I like her very much. We are intending to leave the ovaries. The fibroids are too big and in the wrong place for anything but abdominal surgery. I think it will be along the same lines as the Caesarean that brought us Sam, 26 years later, but not with 9 months of bad sleep, 24 hours of labor, and a delightful non-sleeping baby and fluctuating hormones afterward. So it should not be any worse. It hurt and it itched and I got over it.

I meet with the surgeon person again on January 20 and I will not know more before that. Then I have a pre-op on Feb 2 at Concord Hospital.
I will try to keep you posted, you lucky people.

Laura

Snow

2011-01-12T18:17:00.003-05:00

Odd, really. Unusual this time of year? After I wrote up my Instructable and suggested the prudent person might scan their new wool (or floss, or fabric) buys as they bring them home, I had occasion to go to Northampton for the day. Sarah and I had lunch with Grace and Debbie and behaved sedately (as these things go) in WEBS. I was delighted to see that Socks That Rock have colorways named The Slayer, Spike, and Drucilla.
(top to bottom. I think the orange is for the hunting aspect?)

I do admire good marketing. I succumbed and bought Drucilla (whom I wish they had spelled correctly). I also bought some green silk-cashmere (it was ON SALE) and another green-multi colorway from Trekking. I scanned the other colors, too.

In a similar Sisyphean, or perhaps more Herculean (I am thinking Augean stables, here) line as organizing my DMC, I have started putting my not inconsiderably messy CD holdings onto iTunes. I have an external hard drive on my old Apple desktop, which is too old to upgrade but still has the best speakers I have ever owned. I am finding a lot of music I had forgotten I have, and a lot of empty cases. The CDs I find without cases only rarely correspond with them. I finally realized that I was bad at putting them neatly back into their cases and the pases back onto the shelf at least partly because there was no room on the shelf. As I copy the disks, I am putting them into a cardboard box to put in the attic (apparently if you burn the cds to your computer, you're not supposed to set the originals free or sell them). This will make one corner of the living room less awful, and as the kittens are in the 'poltergeist' stage of their development I won't be fishing CDs from behind the baseboard heating as much if they are securely stored. The computer also puts everything in plain sight, in alphabetical order, and I think I am going to like it.

In the meantime, however, I wish I could find "Guys and Dolls."

And I have finished half a pair of mittlets for my son, whose hands get cold because apparently the Apple store has only only door (no airlock), and it's in the John Hancock Building wind tunnel. I finished embroidering Sarah's Christmas present:
, Leafy Earth from Urban Threads

Fiber, really

2011-01-01T22:11:00.005-05:00

Hue, value, chroma. Okay, that's out of the way. I believe it has something to do with how much black, white, and purity of color, but, it's more axes to me and like chirality, I am not so good at it. I think about it partly because of sites like Colourlovers and partly because I am trying to organize my embroidery thread holdings. These are comparable to my wool holding, only much smaller in area, thank God. It's bad enough. Little DMC skeins everywhere.

So I have been doing the embroidery thing again, partly because of a need to have more sugar skulls in my life, and from there to Sublime Stitching and Urban Threads and Mr. X Stitch and partly because it was my first real craft. When I was about eight, my mom tried to quit smoking by taking up crewel work. She did not succeed in quitting smoking, but I was interested in stitching and she bought me some kiddy embroidery sets (polyester penguins in herringbone. I still can't do good herringbone). Sometime not much later she gave her friends a copy of Native Funk and Flash and I must have nearly worn it out staring before she gave it away. Around then I started my father a shirt, which I worked on at various times, letting him wear it in between.

And other stuff. I fell for counted cross stitch in about 1980, and pursued that (I also learned to knit and crochet) until a) my son was about 5 months old and b) I left my bag of threads and patterns on the curb one day and it was gone when I came back. I hope someone enjoyed the Beatrix Potter patterns. You cannot do them with a newborn unless you have a nanny or much more powers of concentration that I do.

So I sent out for ALL the DMC colors and organized them and didn't do much embroidery again until about 1990, when I did some ecclesiastical cross-stitch. Do not put smouldering incense in the wastebasket of the church you are using. When you burn down the sacristy, as some Ethiopian Rite Christians did to mine, you make bad, unecumenical feelings. It was a lovely Advent/Lenten stole in eight colors of blue and purple on ash-grey linen and it was about nine feet long. Perhaps I shall see it in heaven.

No, I am over that. Of course I am.

Anyway, I read in my entry of August 23, 2008, that I was asked to make Alice an embroidered tea cozy, so I promptly began a shirt about the Gault project (there are two blue chambray shirts in that Flickr set, one his and one mine. I need to record the one I made Doug). My shirt is about 2/3 finished, as far as the things I intended to illustrate, and I actually made half of a splendid weird tea cozy for Alice this past fall, only then I had Christmas and so on.

I had a bunch of things to craft, so of course I spent a lot of time putting that off and became serious about overhauling the whole darned embroidery stash. I have a fancy thread color card with real thread from about the mid-80's, and a supplement, but that's still missing DMC's latest new colors. Apparently someone there bit the bullet and rearranged their cards into color families, much more useful than the old way. They sell a photographic color card, or you can download them off the web. Then, if you are insane, or OCD, or avoiding housework, you can Photoshop each column onto a separate piece of cardstock, and affix ziplock snack bags (they're small, and they open on the long axis) to it, and be able to see what and where your threads are.

There are something like 75 colors of green alone. Whitish green, yellowish green, murky green, different intensities, different amounts of blue in them. A reasonable person would pick maybe 5 and let it go, but I have never been reasonable, and if you embroider trees or lawns or flowers... well, you point out, fine, but you can pick them by eye. And for self-generated projects you can, but I also occasionally like to do... kits. Other people's patterns. Needlepunch tends to come in cutesy Olde American Primitive patterns; sometimes I find it restful. Sometimes I don't want to make something up, I want CUTE or EASY or tattoo-flavored. And then, though I am ashamed to admit it because I am usually so damned snarky, I ... I follow the directions. And they ask for specific colors, so you need to be able to find specific colors. If you have an iThing (Phone or Pod) you can get a very nice DMC floss app called X Stitcher, and you can feed your need for tidiness by recording what colors you actually have.

I have made three Instructables: Organize your embroidery floss (first steps)

Making a color card (embroidery floss mostly)

and Organize an unreasonable number of embroidery floss

It takes longer to do an Instructable than you would think, despite an excellent interface. Working with me is always an exercise in patience and mislaid files. But I hope it will make thins easier for someone like me. I think I would have run across them.

What I sent out with the very few cards I send out

2010-12-30T13:06:00.001-05:00

Any year you walk away from is a good one, right? 2010 has been excellent.

I still have no job and am still getting by. I know unemployment is not uncommon and not something I should be desperately ashamed of, so picture me whistling nonchalantly. So very many people are NOT getting by that I am aware I am in really good shape. Enough about that.

Last year at this time,
A) Doug the housemate had moved back in after breaking up with a sweetie in Concord.

B) I had Marten, Willow, and Nigel in order of size and seniority, all cats.

C) I had the contractor’s extra possessions and his daughter in my house. (The kitchen is finished and works very well).

D) I had not touched beads in several years.

I visited New York with my parents (they gave me the only good mattress, the quiet room, and trips to the museums); I went to Boskone (a science fiction convention, good for me to be with My Kind); and my aunt graciously sent me to the dig in Texas, where there was snow. This year we are supposed to be going to Texas in May, which means probably no snow, but we get fire ants. Would prefer snow, but since May brings wildflowers to the Texas Hill country, it evens out.

I taught spinning and needlefelting at the Smith science fiction convention for possibly the fifth year in a row.

Doug reconnected with a friend from high school (in Pleistocene, Connecticut). Barb is a visiting nurse (in Trumbull, CT) and engaged to be married next March. They are not planning to live together until one of them retires. Since he is the World’s Best Housemate, I am hoping they both stay working for a long time.

We had a mild winter here, and I was able to work for MONEY!!! on a paleoindian dig in Keene. It was a lovely dig and we had baby woodchucks and a fair number of finds (mostly scrapers). They used the same suite of tool-stone as the people in Northern NH and in Quebec and it was pleasant to think of them as being related. There weren’t very many people here then, so they probably were. But Then lasted about a thousand years, we can’t know if any of sites was in use at the same time as the others.

Doug persuaded me to buy a truckload of topsoil, as the house is built on what a sensible science fiction fan would recognize as regolith: more or less ground-up bedrock. You cannot actually dig here, you pick at it. I bought a raised bed from Gardener’s Supply and spent the year being amazed and gratified. Not that I weeded anything again until Mid-July. We also had very hot, dry weather; but despite several kinds of neglect we harvested onions and tomatoes and parsley. Buying topsoil felt like a cop-out, but it made a HUGE difference. My compost heap was full of black gold, but I don’t produce enough organic refuse to jumpstart more than a meter or so.

Around the same time it was decided that the summer NH state archaeology field school would camp in my front yard and cook in my kitchen. People kept asking if I wasn’t afraid of the invasion, but I pointed out that the person in charge of people cooking (Heather) is obsessive about clutter and the place would be the tidier for it, and indeed, that was the case. Thanks to Sarah, Doug, and Heather, possibly the best friends EVER, we took all of Paul the contractor’s stuff to the swap shop.. And I got an empty uninsulated but glassed-in porch. There has been a pile of boxes in there since I moved into this house (hangs head in shame). There is now a smaller pile of boxes to one side of the front room (hangs head in shame), but sometimes I throw things away. My dream of getting like into the same room as like is closer to fruition and I can still walk around. Heather got all funny about the number of boxes of fleece, yarn, and beads she kept coming upon and in defense and gratitude I made her a necklace, and another for the digger who detail-cleaned my car. After the dig I reorganized my beads (perhaps I do have too many... nah) and was beading away nicely till the end of October, when Fear of Christmas came upon me and I had to knit and embroider. Almost done with that.

Having the dig in the front yard (and constantly cleaning the kitchen) was like having a party for a month. It was great. Doug put up two outdoor showers (I have an outdoor hot water spigot, or this would not have been a friendly gesture) and took empty bottles to the recycling center constantly. I taught about six people to spin and refined my teaching technique. Sarah came and did an indigo demonstration. The crew were lovely people, good diggers, hard workers. and I missed them when they left. They cooked, they cleaned and organized, they put pavers onto my sand-courtyard! If only the archaeology part of it had found anything at any of the various nice places we tried. All of them were places we thought someone would have wanted to live, but apparently not.

It was also the hottest season’s digging I can remember. No one passed out. We drank a lot of water. It is worth mentioning that those dryer sheets that don’t smell anything like Woodland Fresh DO keep horseflies away. People wearing them in their hats look silly, but much less so than when flaiing at horseflies.

The next week Dick took a few of us to a place in Jefferson NH, where someone wants to build a house. In two days we found more than we had the previous four weeks, and we know where the 2011 field school will be. Sadly, it is too far to have the base camp here again.

My house and my car are still definitely tidier than they were before field school.

The only sad note was that Nigel either took off or was eaten by something. I hope he found another human family, because he was a lovely cat, but Marten HATED him and spent a lot of time beating him up. Nigel had been coming home for shorter times with longer intervals away for a month or so, and stopped appearing at all during field school.

After the archaeological digging was over, I worked on the garden and began to double dig a long south-facing patch in front of a stone wall. I have high hopes for next year, at least until the deer find me. This patch has the great advantage of being visible from my bedroom, so I am more likely to maintain it than several other places I have tried to terraform. Gardening also put me in closer touch with the toads, leopardfrogs, and gray tree frogs I share the land with. We were also delighted to see spotted salamanders mating in the tiny frog pond, and the phoebes made nests on the back porch once again. I was also delighted by the presence of indigo buntings (at least two pairs), hairy and downy and pileated woodpeckers, both kinds of nuthatches, cardinals, bluejays, evening and rose-breasted grosbeaks, woodthrushes and veeries and I think Cooper’s Hawks. And bats. I love it here.

Katie the contractor’s daughter moved out in late August. We are working on getting her stuff out of that room.

The leaves began to turn in early August, probably because of the heat and the lack of rain, and the autumn was shorter than usual. No snow until just before Christmas, and nothing much until the last Sunday of the year, when we got a foot, with high winds.

In mid-October Sarah fixed us up with two charming kittens who had wandered into a friend’s garage just ahead of a fox. We named them Mal and Wash (after Firefly)They are now about 5 months old, now free of parasites except for the poltergeists. Marten is at least sort of friendly to them (they play together), although his catnip use has increased. Willow is becoming a little less horrified by them. They make Doug and me laugh a great deal. They have not climbed the Christmas tree.

I wish you all as much happiness and health as I and my friends and my family have been having.

raining, kittens, and the technological sublime in KindleSpace

2010-10-27T11:55:00.005-04:00

It's raining again. I am glad we did not have the extreme fun they had yesterday in the Midwest, but I am also tired of rain.

It's like November but not as cold and with more colored leaves, still hanging on. Yesterday it went up to 67 F and was sticky-hot and I had to turn on the fans.

I think this is a metaphor for how I feel, which varies among 'old, ill, ugly, fat, and doomed,[my God, you can get Pamela Branch again!]' 'stale, flat, and unprofitable,' and 'nasty, poor, brutish, and short.'

We shall not speak of that. There is tea, and downstairs there are kittens. Sarah is nothing but a dirty rotten kitten enabler, although I am standing absolutely firm that they are Doug's kittens (apparently by some unknown mother, poor creature). He is footing the not insubstantial vet's bills. The kittens wandered into the garage of Sarah's former office-manager's sister-in-law. Sarah's former office-manager and her husband picked them up (before the fox that was apparently following them, into the garage), fed them, and mostly defleaed them (warm water and Dawn Dishwashing Liquid). They are both male and were born probably around the end of July, so they are now about 3 months old. We named them Mal and Wash.

They are light-hearted, incredibly limber, happy to see us, affectionate to one another, and would like to be friends with Marten and Willow. Marten hisses and swats, though he will sometimes share the same room with them, and Willow just hisses and runs away.

The older cats are morose (though Willow is still in the amazingly limber class), under a cloud from being such (insert words) to Nigel, and only occasionally interested in people. I would like to tell them I love them just as much. Then Willow brings me another dead bird and I fall back on trying to be just and kind and faithful. Sometimes the older cats are jerks.

I had a great idea to be a Day of the Dead cheerful skeleton for Halloween, and I managed to save the sweatpants from the initial try--freehand, with fabric paint. Maybe next year. My dreams are too grandiose. I want sequins and puff paint and merriment.

I have a fall-back costume that I hope will come to fruition.

What I originally came on to blog about was the amazing stuff you can get free from the Kindle books.YOU DO NOT NEED TO GET A KINDLE.

I am lukewarm about reading them on my computer -- I am happy to get my newspapers on my Mac Laptop, but once I started reading on my tiny iPod Touch I was amazed to find myself hooked. I thought I would hate it. But it's not bad. I don't get eyestrain and I can hold it and turn pages in one hand. No more problems with the page-turning while I'm flossing my teeth.

Jules Verne, Jane Austen, Balzac, Kipling, E. Nesbit, apparently the first hundred years of Punch (which I would like someone else to read and base thereon an amusing steampunky fantasy series with witty people). Mark Twain, Andrew Lang's colored Fairy Tales, Gibbon... enough to do odd things to your style but wow!

YOU DO NOT NEED TO GET A KINDLE. All you need to do is go to the Amazon Search-> Kindle Store -> and put in the author's name.

All kinds of great stuff, and some recent things the publishers are promoting or perhaps making some kind of error on: I got Richard Kadrey's _Sandman Slim_ for free, and sometimes there's Neil Gaiman. There is an RSS feed for top free sellers. At the moment Diana Gabaldon's first Outlander book is there.

At least the free books mitigate some of the instant gratification damage you can do online otherwise.

Trendy design Nerd 1 -- The Stainless Steel Sharpie

2010-10-02T08:10:00.004-04:00

Yeah, I gather some people have lives too complex to spend coolhunting the Internet. Some of the rest read NOTCOT, which is a lovely site but has TOO MUCH. I may not have a life but I like to eat at least once a day, maybe wash, you know? There are many other fine blogs and sites conglmerating nifty stuff. Thinkgeek will sell them to you for a mostly reasonable price. But once in a while I find myself the envy of my friends and then I shall pass the word on.

Such a product is the Stainless Steel Sharpie (Sharpie.com is down, or I would have linked there).

I found out they existed because way-cool science fiction writer William Gibson (who ought to be made out of bulletproof nylon and brushed titanium, but who seems to be rather a sweet guy) had a new book come out and one of his fans gave him a stainless steel Sharpie. He tweeted about it. I figured that if he liked his, it was cool enough for Dick the archaeologist.

I hope they will make it in 'ultra fine', which is what most people would call 'normal.' SCRAP uses the ultra-fine on artifact bag tags and the allegedly 'fine' (which is kind of bold) for marking other stuff. For the moment, Dick's image as a frighteningly au courant executive is secure.

Less hot, thank heaven

2010-09-20T13:10:00.005-04:00

I have been reproved once again about the blogging. Will try to do better. Unexamined life has lots of toast in it. Pretty good, really.

House: Parts of it are still clean.My car, which one of my digging guests detail-tidied for me, is still clean. Even my Tupperware cabinet is still organized. I had a shot at my bedroom and the bathroom up there. The bathroom is much better, but the bedroom has devolved into chaos again.

People and cats in house: Nigel has not been seen since the second week of field school. I miss him, as he was the light-hearted one. I hope and hope and hope he has found another family rather than become part of someone else's biomass; he was showing up less and less often because Marten as beating him up all the time. Hard. Marten and Willow are fine, except she is too thin and he is too fat. They are sweetly sycophantic and wish I went outside more.

Katie the teenager has moved into Concord. I hope she is well; unlike Nigel, she Facebooks sometimes,but she has left a quantity of junk in the other upstairs bedroom. She knows what happens to abandoned property here, but I suspect she is waiting for 'life to calm down a little.' I tried to tell her life didn't usually get any calmer.

Doug is still here, and an excellent tenant and good friend. He is getting married in March but says he and Barbara will not be living together for at least three or four years, when one of them retires. There are all kinds of things that many of us have said, but whatever.

I am still here (and more like Marten than Willow). My health is decent and I need a job, etc. We won't discuss that.

The forty-foot garden is almost half done. I became severely sidetracked looking for 'before' pictures and have so far had no luck. Digging it involves sifting the excellent driveway gravel out of what appears to be a construction trench (we are running along the edge of where the garage was until it burned down in 2001)(well before my time)dumping in the imported loam (of which I still have a lot left; it's wonderful) and mixing some of the sifted mostly-sand back in. It goes slowly, since it goes so much faster when Doug and I work on it at the same time and he persists in having a life.

I have been doing beads.

. I am working through this and this. More as it developes.

Hot

2010-08-09T12:22:00.004-04:00

Field school was a fine time. We found almost nothing in several different places. The people were hardworking, charming, friendly, I wanted to keep them around for another month. Since then some of us did a four-day, very humid dig in Jefferson, NH. Sometimes it rained there, but we were dry. We found several more flakes and so forth in four days than we had in the previous four weeks. I don't know why the paleopeople were so shy of camping in central NH. I think they probably were here, since they were in the north and the south of the state, and I hope we find them sometime.

This is my favorite picture from field school. We record the soil colors to record the different layers, either from geology or human activity. Geology, in this case.

Effects of field school: I taught about seven people to spin (spindle) and I made a change in the way I teach them. Now I am all about learning to draft first, and it seems to be a very successful method. Justin and several other people particularly Luke were bored and put bricks in my courtyard patio. It worked very well. Colin, who put himself through two years of college making chainmail garments and jewelry and trifles, was at a loose end watching people spin so I gave him a pair of pliers and a small sack of rings, and he made me a fab Inca Puno bracelet. Heather, while helping tidy my house, made several acid comments about people who have too many beads, so I made her a necklace. All these have made me more interested in spinning and beading and chainmail again. I wish I had gotten the picture of the six people spinning, and also one of the tents in my front yard. (thanks, Jessie!)

Although I was indeed home, I ignored my garden and had to do amazing weeding. The cilantro just bolted from the moment it was planted. I have a modest, proof-of-concept onion harvest, and the strawberries and the asparagus now that they are finally mulched are looking quite hopeful for next year. Not only did the Sungold tomato plant flourish, but the volunteer tomato I let survive among the cilantro stalks has also turned out to be a Sungold. They are little yellow cherry tomatoes that taste amazing, and apparently reproduce truly from seed. The Romas are tiny, dry, dropping, and afflicted with blossom end rot. It's from insufficient watering and not enough calcium, so I will concentrate the eggshells in the tomato-proposed patch for next year and try to do better on the watering. The other two varieties are developing slowly but well enough, The Cherokee Purple is an unsettling color but tastes fine.

I am very pleased with my plastic raised bed from Gardener's Supply. I bought the metal corners several years ago and have been trying to find locally available cedar planks ever since. I finally gave in and bought rough-sawn hemlock planks, which needed the stroke of Doug's loving circular saw to fit in the slots (light dawns: that's what rough-sawn means. I knew that). I am inclined to prefer wood to plastic, but the plastic one was so easy.

Right now I am trying to make another set of flowerbeds (and I will certainly grow vegetables in them, too) against a stone wall near the site of the vanished garage (burned before I ever saw this place. Left a big concrete pad where I could cook eggs on a sunny day). This involves digging, sifting the driveway gravel that has migrated there out of the mostly sand, adding soil from the big pile, and stirring the sand back in. It is not all that hard but it is very hot work and today, for instance, I could feel the wavy infra-red lines rising from the ground as I walked. So I am decided not to try until the sun is off that part of the yard, around five. I will be able to see this bed from the house, which should be an incentive to finish and maintain it.

The raised beds with real, bought-in SOIL (as opposed to the naturally-occurring glacial clay and crap common to bulldozed eskers) has made a huge difference, like I can enjoy gardening and things actually grow (besides the well-adapted raspberry-like thing that catches your ankle and lacerates your hands, Oriental Bittersweet, and crabgrass).

And I need work, but when's well over 80 F it's hard to want to be digging and I have no confidence of finding anything else and blah, blah, blah. I am bored with being depressed; it's better than it has often been but I want a lot of things I don't have and which are not for sale, anyway, although Sungold tomatoes are a great comfort. Here's another one:

.

I had already decided to leave the patch of raspberries behond the asparagus patch, but this was another good reason.

To begin with

2010-06-19T08:50:00.006-04:00

Camp Jefferson is in session. Heather got the last things out of the glassed-in porch (hereafter The Mess Hall) and vacuumed it on Sunday morning. It stopped raining finally Saturday evening so Doug was able to cut the grass; he finished the showers about 4:25 in the afternoon, while people were pitching their tents. I was still stressing out so I made food. But everyone (there are 14 tents and a VW MicroBus and a camper) has been really really nice and terribly responsible about not wearing their digging boots in the house.

The cats are not in favor. Even this weekend, with the body count down to single digit, they won't come out on the porch and be cooed at. Only the very patient are vouchsafed a vision, or I should say a tactile: Kaitlyn from a couple of years ago got to rub Willow's ears for a long time.

The first week of field school they found almost nothing, but their morale is still good and apparently they are good at the shovel test-pits. Next week we will be going to a state forest where George believes there is good reason to hope they will actually find something.

The pronouns are confused because I am not sure who They are and who We are: several SCRAP people have been digging at the site in Keene, which is a contract operation. I did some STP's there in April and helped find the kind of flakes that define Paleo sites in New Hampshire. Then the Phase Three began and we had four units (open square meters connected to other open square meters). I dug there for four weeks and at various times worried that my arms would fall off. Sometimes just from the elbows down, sometimes not. My frozen shoulder became all better but has gone a bit backward, but I am able to do my own pony tail again.

The excavation at the site to be known (to generations of Paleo wonks to come) as Tenant Swamp. I found a few tools, but none of tasty scrapers nearly everyone else did (whine, whine). Although I did find possibly the first biface on the site. It was made out of the worst grade of rhyolite we'd ever seen. But there were pretty things around, almost all of them scrapers rather than points.

The soil was so thin that the trees had trouble holding on in a stiff wind, so some of them were canted backward or forward. See the link at 'I love this place.')As they grew after these events, they corrected their slant, producing some lovely curves (sometimes more than one in a given tree).

There were also four or five baby woodchucks, BrownCreepers and Red-Breasted Nuthatches feeding their young, a bunch of other birds mostly in the aural background except for a White-Crowned Sparrow with attitude, open white pine forest, relatively few bugs,easy-sifting dry sandy soil, and generally really friendly decent construction guys. It was an idyllic location, not harmed by some unusually cool weather.

I love this place. Soon it will be part of a new middle school. We felt better that it was not to be a Wal-Mart. They say they are not going to affect the swamp itself (right, because playing fields are so environmentally neutral). We doubt that we got all the individual hotspots (which may possibly mark the places where people were tenting (or whatever kind of small shelters they used); four meter-hotspots on an eight-meter grid, what do you think the odds of hitting them are? I know this is a very decent habitat. We found some evidence of drinking in the '80's but nothing to indicate anyone lived here any other time. I imagine there are ghosts of illicit beers and lost virginities here, and it would have been a fine place for either. The soil is very thin and the tall trees have amusing bends in their trunks from different episodes of nearly being toppled by wind and then pulling themselves more strongly into the soil, like people trying to walk and balance things on their heads.

I wish I were religious enough to think that loving and trying to see and appreciate a place makes any cosmic difference after it's gone. The huge tree I worked under most of the time was about 75 years old (I counted the rings, but there was too much sap on the outer couple inches to see clearly). If the site is a twelve-meter strip, that tree was 3/4 of a centimeter. How long will the school last? (Here's a link to make you smack your forehead, not exactly an answer, though.)It seems harder to see a place built on and blotted out that has been left alone for so very long. The woodchucks are on the swamp-facing slope, so they have an excellent chance of getting away and starting decent woodchuck lives*; they are about half-size, now.

* I know, ravaging your vegetable garden and eating your petunias for fun.

Bloop. Glug.

2010-05-11T20:52:00.003-04:00

So one puts in some tiles around the firepit (now I have to sink the rest of the second ring around, which seems to have a 6:4 ratio to the first; if the first ring was 24, the second will be 36, and the next 54; it's getting expensive) and there are dandelions everywhere. Time to make dandelion wine! So I picked them and spent a day trimming off the green part (it is said to make the wine bitter) and the VERY NEXT DAY there were just as many dandelions. I picked them again. This time I trimmed about half of them (we had a spell of 80+ degree heat and everything was too hard) and found that I could just pull the yellow off the blossom after the flowers had spent another day sitting in the measuring cup. Much faster and less fiddly than using a knife. And the next day... there were even more dandelions. I made a third batch and that is enough, even though I have now drunk the last of the 2008 batch, and 2009 is waiting for me to bottle it. I have now actually removed (in bottles) about half of the gallons of wine-on-the-way occluding that corner of the counter, and the three freshly added gallons of dandelion '10 are gurgling away. I am supposed to bottle them after 6 months, not 18.

My father decided he did not want to drink commercial root beer, as he is unhappy about drinking corn syrup. I got a book. We had all this black or sweet birch that Sarah was kind enough to cut down and then cut up (out of the driveway, and the twigs into 2" lengths). I boiled about a gallon of twigs in about one and a half times the same amount of water almost swooned form the smell. It smells much nicer than wintergreen, to me, and adding sugar to it made it delicious. I wanted to drink it all. But I added more sugar (my dad has a sweeter palate than I do, and carbonated needs more strength of flavor than still) and then a tiny amount of yeast, stirred it all up and capped the bottles. 48 hours at room temperature is MORE than long enough to carbonate the bottles. I put them into the refrigerator -- since one is not using the yeast to make alcohol, just fizz, you want the fermentation to stop before the yeast eats all the sugar--and waited a day. It's not bad. I used bread yeast, but I may try ale yeast and see if it leaves less of yeasty niff. In any case, I shall try to make an extract so my dad can mix it with soda water, since explosive bottles are scary things to drive to Boston.

Sarah is trying to get me sassfras bark. In immoderation it's not terribly good for you either, but it's supposed to be closer to the taste of root beer than the birch. I have never been able to make much difference between root beer and birch beer anyway. But it was very cool to boil twigs and make something that smelled that good.

If anyone needs a kombucha mother, let me know. I was reading this and had a failure of making my own vinegar (I think the problem was the same reason the wine was so bad; I had not fermented it enough to make a decent amount of alcohol, so there wasn't much for the vinegar process to work on. Then on a whim I bought kombucha drink at the co-op and found it a) delicious and b) exactly like drinking really nice vinegar. So I got a kombucha mother and have been fermenting sweet tea. If you like tasty sour, try it. I've been mixing it half and half with fruit juice. It's fizzy and delicious and very easy. I don't know if it will save my life or cure cancer or anything (I hope I don't need that anytime soon) but live fermentations are pretty much a good thing for the body, it has practically speaking no alcohol, and it tastes great. And wow can it build up ahead of steam in its bottle.

So the floor here is sticky and Doug keeps mopping it.

I have been working on a decent vegetable bed, one to contain actual soil, in the sense of organic matter rather than variations on rocks left behind by the glaciers. I have not finished the second one yet. Filling the first one (half about 12" deep and half maybe 16"), with a mixture of imported loam, the sifted and de-rocked native crap, and the contents of five years' worth of haphazard compost-heaping (black gold, it was amazing) was a lot of work. I hope I get some results. I think it would make me happy, if I were a plant. In the pretty cool raised bed thing I got from Gardener's Supply, I planted soybean 'Envy' for edamame, some cilantro seedlings, some basil seedlings, some cilantro seeds, and some garlic and onion sets today. When I find the right tomato plants, I will get them, but the NH frost-free date is not for another week and it has actually been quite cold. So no hurry. The raised bed thing is dark green polypropylene and has nothing the can be put together backwards or upside down, which meant even I found it pretty delightful. I can see one spear of the asparagus I planted coming up. It never rains any more. I use leaky hose.

The salamander tadpoles seem to be developing, slowly, in their eggs; the leopard frog tadpoles look like they will be sprouting legs any minute. There are blackflies, though not all the time; the same with mosquitoes. But I can also hear the wood thrush and yesterday the hummingbirds arrived.

That went fast...

2010-04-30T19:49:00.002-04:00

April, I mean. It snowed most of the day Wednesday, but did not stick much here. Today was in the 70's. It's hard to feel secure or put away one's Polarfleece nightwear.
I got paid for digging more days than not in the past three weeks. I found some flakes in one place and really a lot of nice agricultural dirt in another (behind a Big Ugly Damn brewery, which made me insane with scents of hops and malt... smelled better than the beer ever tastes). I hope there will be more digging. It's fun, painful, enjoyable, great exercise (I think working in archaeology to get in shape for field school is supposed to be backwards, but we all know where my heart is) and they send me checks in the mail, with which I buy mulch and few, a very few perennials, honest.
Briefly in better shape, I dug a garden bed last Sunday and started another one yesterday, and Doug and his girlfriend Barb finished sifting the one I was trying to rehab, and I moved some plants around. Pictures when it's mulched.
While putting off working on the second flowerbed I weeded the other neglected bed on the far side of the front steps. It now looks like someone went over it with a particularly nasty herbicide, but it was just me. Pictures when it's mulched and has some live plants in it.
And in the courtyard, I have been setting patio tiles a few at a time, buying them a few at a time (along with mulch, which I need more of both). When I bought the house there was a decrepit aboveground pool. I removed it, and there was a lovely 17' circle of deep sand. It's had a firepit thing in the center for a few years now. Pictures sometime, perhaps.

Have I mentioned that the archaeology field school is going to be based here in June and July? Twenty people camping in my front yard? Heather will be here or there is no possible way I would have agreed. But where she decrees order, there WILL be order, and I am trying to prepare the way for her.

This means there is some point in having a garden, as I will be here to water it. And to making the whole place look less like an abandoned building. Doug persists in having a social life, which cuts into my exploiting him, but he assures me he will cut the grass and hep me generally clear areas inside and out. As Paul the contractor left a lot of his stuff here, most importantly where I hope people will be able to eat (the glassed-in porch area) I have agita and am trying to get people to take it away. It's wrong to throw other people's stuff away. And yet it's also wrong to dump at someone else's house and disappear. I think I would rather have a problem from expecting people to be responsible human beings than a problem from expecting them to be schnorrers. But mostly I want people to be tidy and rational and bring me nice things to eat. It's good to dream.

Amphibians do it vernally

2010-04-06T22:34:00.003-04:00

It has, as I may have mentioned, been raining a lot. Finally, it got sunny on Holy Thursday and hotter than hell on Easter Saturday, when my parents came up to help tidy a garden or so. One way and another, we ended up trying to repair 18 months of neglect (I didn't garden last year, at all) in the heat of the day. My father, who is a bit like me only not as fat or menopausal, and I just about had heatstroke and crawled off to die. My mother, who is a lizard, kept trying to rally the troops until she got tired. They left and as the sun set gently to one side I started shovel-and-sifting the former mint-and-oregano bed, which last year went to more grass than usual and the delphinium died no reason after 4 years of apparent happiness.

Anyway, more digging needs to be done. I also received a big pile of loam, probably ripped off from somewhere full of endangered species (although it had no apparent human body parts, as sometimes happens. Honest). I have tried to use the soil around my house, but the fact is, my house-lot was bulldozed into an esker and I don't have much soil. And Enthusiasm is thinner on the ground than it used to be, so I will do doubtful things in pursuit of my own tomatoes. If Gardeners Supply would send my damned raised bed kit and Doug would ever stay home and be exploited I could get more done. I have been working, mostly driving around from one elementary school to another, which cuts into my spare time.

So today, after I drove for about five hours, I was pulled over to be told nicely that I had forgotten to get this year's license tags when I got it inspected. I know one year I got the tags and forgot to get it inspected. At least I was not speeding. Nor was the policeman upset when I explained that I hadn't seen my license since I was carded in Massachusetts at Conbust. It could have been worse. But I was not terribly happy. It is an expensive ticket.
But I was happier whenSarah called after an intense board meeting to say she would be coming over with wine. I made macaroni and cheese, and Sarah ad Doug and I watched last night's Castle. Afterward, Sarah wondered if either of us would go for a walk and look for salamanders even though it wasn't wet enough. It had rained all day in southeastern Vermont, and it was drizzling here on and off. It was largely off when we left.
Halfway down the driveway, we came across a spotted salamander and Sarah proclaimed her night made, possibly her year. We ended up seeing four spotted salamanders, 13 red-backed salamanders, four Eastern red-spotted newts, 16 peepers, and a wood frog.
Then I said, before we went inside, we might as well look at my little pond in the back yard. Where there were at least seven spotted salamanders Doing It, several wood frogs in compromising positions, and a newt looking for action (I assume). It was very fine. We were all pleased. Doug was proud that he had dug the littler pond by hand (about 3 square feet, as opposed to the maybe 9 square feet of the one we tried to make with a tractor) and I was still delighted, as I am every time I see anything swimming around (except for the mosquito wigglers. Who are already out there, too). There was already a ball of someone's spawn there from a couple of days ago; I hope that some of these unions bear fruit. And eat mosquitoes and perhaps blackflies.

I hope you can reach the pictures, which are in Sarah's Facebook album.

I tend to think Big Night was a couple of days ago, when it was raining hard and Doug swore it was over 50 degrees. But there was evidently some action left. Last year I noted it as being April 3. It was a fine time and the only casualties we noticed were two unlucky peepers. I am lucky to have frogs and people who make me go out and enjoy them.

Today's fiber is by Manic Panic

2010-04-03T09:55:00.003-04:00

My hair is blue again. It was in honor of Conbust, where I also forgot to wear my Coraline shoes. It was MUCH bluer than last time, probably because I left it on too long, and has only now calmed down to a sedate, lifelike blue that doesn't make me look too pale. About the time I dyed it I read a remembrance of Andy Hallett, who was green on _Angel_, that recalled him standing in a parking lot in full makeup asking people if they had 'a problem with visible minorities.'

This stuck in my mind. I am still definitely an older chunky white woman, but the blue hair sends a signal. It made the body language of people in the Conbust parking lot just visibly relax ('she's not someone's mother causing trouble, she's going to the con,' I assume). Teenagers hanging out in front of the Twilight display at Borders, a Gothy proprietor at the local sex toy emporium, some perfectly normal-looking women my age, and a bunch of elementary school students all wanted to say they loved my hair. I was really touched by the elementary school students (one of whom asked if it was my real color). They were so short, and so polite.

Maybe blue hair is liking having a puppy; anyone can talk to you about it. I like it. It's good to show some of the weird on the outside and this only threatens a few people. Who were already right to be frightened of me. I'm still not nicer.

springiness

2010-04-02T06:49:00.002-04:00

It doesn't seem to be raining. And indeed, it did not rain yesterday.

I got home from Texas. The following Monday I began working at a non-profit where Linda works, helping get out the spring mailing. They do woodcrafts and adventure camping and wilderness expeditions for kids and their hearts are in the right place. I cannot say the same about their mailing list. So I have been working there several days a week. It is 30 miles (Concord is about 20) from here, driving through not very much, some of which has rivers and creeks. They have been very excited lately, and every time they start to recede, it rains again. I have been spared any flooding, though Dick's wife tweeted about the difficulty of explaining to a house-guest why he could not flush the toilet: the septic field was flooded.

As always, I loved spending two weeks digging, with people I love dearly or at least like and don't have to feel too weird around. The weird only came up when I asked if anyone else there read XKCD and no one, not the high school-students, not the techier grownups, had any idea what I was talking about. Making an archaeological version of the BoomDeYada song was out. I felt the Digital Divide almost as keenly as I did a couple weeks later when I tried to explain to the NHAS webmaster why it might be worth having an RSS feed and the rest of the board listened with indulgent uninterest. My head exploded (if you're reading this on a blogreader, you know what RSS feeds are. If not, why not read the nice explanation here? RSS Feeds? A Feedreader?! (about a third down, middle column)).

Conbust: Last week I drove to work (45 min), and from there to Brattleboro (45 min), picked up the order from the printer's, and back to work (45 min). Then I drove to Saxton's River, Vt. (theoretically 45 min, but more like an hour and 15 when you take the wrong turn toward Cambridgeport (and why is there a Cambridgeport in western VT? I thought I left it in MA)).
In Saxton's River I met with Tom Diak, formerly half of Grafton Fibers but now the woodmaster of DyakCraft. I collected a flock of a dozen Cheap Sheep spindles and a FiberShip spindle (spaceship variation; Tom thought I needed it as I was going to a science fiction convention. The evil thing forced me to buy alpaca. It's very happy now).
Then I drove (a bit over an hour and a half) to WEBS, umm, Northampton, but since Linda Diak Does not deal out of Tom's wood-turning shop, I needed fiber. Never mind that I would never have wasted a gram of Linda Diak's delicious colors on beginners and I really needed generic Romney. I behaved fairly well and only bought Cat Bordi's latest and an ounce of alpaca and some markers (and a lot of Romney). Around now I realized that for the second year in a row I had forgotten to bring the sponge thing into which one needlefelts. Since I was teaching a needlefelting workshop, this was not good. I could not face driving to Hadley (30+ minutes) and decided to stop at the con on my way to Grace and Debbie's, which was PERFECT and very heartening (EVERYONE there reads XKCD). My workshop was either on Sunday or Saturday at 4 pm, which meant I could go to Grace and Debbie's (7 mins) and crash.

My spinning workshop had five students, which was perfect. Then I drove to Hadley, got foam after I located the well-hidden Joanne's, picked up some food, and bought seeds at the lovely garden center (2.5 hours, including asking for directions twice). Back at the con, I took a friend's naalbinding class. She was trying to teach the York stitch to about ten people, including at least one with a learning disability. Without diagrams or teaching assistants. I'll learn it sometime.

I persuaded the nice woman knitting in a corner of the corridor floor that she could sit in the room we were using for the crafts track and it would have chairs and a light. It was her first con and she had not learned how to live at cons (An it harm none, do what ye will, where 'harm none' implies 'not vandalizing the elevators') . The needlefelting workshop went very well; it is possible to have idle conversation while needlefelting, which is not true of Beginning Spindle. The knitting woman, Kate, watched us needlefelt and ended up paying the materials fee and going off with a set of needles, sponge, and colored roving, and I think we all enjoyed it. Objects varied from an elephant plaque to a Sith Lord sigil and a Hebrew sign indicating the direction of the Temple Wall. Everyone can needle-felt. My former neighbor Cindy appeared, too. It was a fine time, and in Northampton, sunny.

I spent Sunday (raining) hanging around with Grace and Debbie, made them some artisan-bread-in-5-minutes-a-day (it gets very flat if the second rising (40 minutes) lasts for four or five hours. But still tasty). While we were in town, I ran into Robin, the SheepThriller I last saw at Birka Market. She had Kate from yesterday with her, because there are only four or five people in Northampton and of course they know one another. I left for home around 7 pm. I was listening to a Patrick O'Brian book-on-iPod and overshot the Vermont exit, so went home the way I had come via Bellows Falls. When it is dark it is not very well signposted, so a 98-mile trip took 130, and about two and half hours instead of one and half.

And then next day I drove to work (raining), and back, also on Tuesday (raining), when I had to race home to get Katie and take her to work as her car had collapsed, and on Wednesday I went to Concord (raining), and yesterday I went to seven of 17 public schools in Manchester (dropping off leaflets) and home in time to take Katie to get her repaired car, and to Concord to have my taxes done (five hours, almost all in the car). Now I am putting off either going back to work or back to the other ten schools in Manchester, and that's why, I contend, I haven't done much with the Gault pictures so far.....But as I said, it didn't rain yesterday. I may live.

Back to winter

2010-03-13T08:02:00.005-05:00

I had a fine time at Gault. Really. I got a new trowel, trowel in the sense that an AK-47 is a handgun. The Lesche Digging Tool , variously referred to as 'Clark's murder weapon,' 'the Trowel of Mass Destruction,' 'the Silver Dagger,' is very good at clay. Liz and I both
went home Tuesday night and ordered one (through the very-slow-but-way-better-than- nothing MiFi of Rich; since it was slower the more people on it, I mostly stayed off). This did not mean my arms didn't feel like they might fall off, and since I returned home, there has been doubt about my knee.

But now that my car starts I am in much better spirits.

Some things I learned:
1. Do not quit your aspirin/ibuprofen regimen just because you quit digging.
2. Do not drink more than 2 bottles of Midas Touch even if it tastes harmless (and, BTW, much better chilled. I think they have cut down on the saffron, a mistake).
3. Tea is probably more important than beer, but sometimes scotch would be better than either.
4. It is not summer in Texas, not even a New England summer, in February. Or really March, either.
5. So ALWAYS heed your housemate when says to take your thermals. I was very glad I did.
6. Also probably to the little voice that warns you not to try t bend the earpiece on your glasses. Fortunately, Dick had duct tape available while we waited for our ride from the airport.

Things to do this week: Blog or otherwise write up my trip.
Pay my taxes.
Get new glasses.

Once more, with Texas (and without fire ants?)

2010-02-18T09:48:00.002-05:00

I appear to have been a little tired last year. All of it? Anyway, here's the link to the rather cursory blog regarding SCRAP's field trip to Gault last year. It was slightly better than the one from March 10, 2008.

Because I am ashamed, and so I will not feel obliged to go through all of the background again, I have posted an essay and a bunch of the pictures from the 2009 trip (which took place in early May. Early May is when it becomes beautiful in New Hampshire, and though it is also wildflower time in Gault, and Painted-Buntings-fighting-like-kung-fu-NBC-Peacocks time, it is also fire ant time. February will probably not be fire ant time, or even snakes-coming-out-of-hibernation).

If you go to YouTube there's more, not by me, though my nose and voice show up in this one. Notice the heavy clothing? That was in March. We're going this year on Sunday, February 21.

Right now I am putting off packing or tidying my room, very successfully.

Tumblr allows one to send posts by one's phone, in audio. I am hoping to call a post in or so; These will show up in Facebook, or you can put the Tumblr link in your RSS. Tumblr will also show you when I update this blog.

In other news: Nigel's head is all healed up. He pretended to be mostly okay about the antibiotics, but he sure made himself scarce for a few days.

Lonely no more (God Bless You, Mr. Boskone)

2010-02-17T09:46:00.007-05:00

I felt bleak last week. Moaned and whined. Then for whatever reason (tired of feeling like the weirdest person in the room) I checked to see if there were a science fiction anything happening anywhere nearby, and there was Boskone in Boston, where I have a LOVELY older couple who look after a pied-a-terre for (my parents think it's their apartment). Warned by the story of the guy in a flood who says God will save him, then refuses to be rescued by a boat or a helicopter, and drowns, saying "GOD will save me" (God says "But I sent the boat and helicopter...")I figured I should go.

I won a pair of sneakers from the Coraline movie last winter and I have been saving them for a special occasion. I found a blue long-sleeved T at the feed and grain store and stamped very subtle stars on it, and dyed my hair blue. This was fun. I have some partially blue towels and a bluish bath/shower thing now.

My parents were charming. My father picked me up at the bus station and observed mildly that my hair was blue. I remarked that it had been a Photoshop accident. My mother said it suited me. We watched the Olympic opening ceremonies and wanted more Francophone content and fewer women with pianos. The effects the lighting person produced were amazing. It was still too long.

I went to Boskone for the first time in many years (like five?). It was once a rowdy con with lots of TV and movie ties-in, although its association with MIT has always given it a turn toward harder science than, say, Darkovercon. They ran aground and were exiled from the Boston hotels for a long time, but they are now considered to have rehabilitated themselves. They got a Boston hotel into the distant port-convention center area, and the con is now mostly book-oriented. There were relatively few costumes, but several people liked my hair.

I went to a panel called "The 'Suck Fairy,' and Other Horrors of Rereading." It was a good discussion of what happens when you reread a book you loved the first time and then the racism, the ideology, the sexism, the heavy-handed message, etc., appear). A woman from Randolph, NH (it was on her name tag) sat next to me. Randolph has a population of about 330 on a good day and is mainly notable for a motel with a shop selling wool yarn (sic) and a quietly spectacular PaleoIndian site where I have had the great joy to dig. Because there are only a few people in the world, she lives across the road from it. It's weird enough to meet another science-fiction fan from NH, let alone one older than I am.

Then I tried out a panel on retro-actively inserting story changes into serials, but I was not far enough into the comics they were discussing, and then what turned out to be a not interesting enough one-person panel about researching if you want to write fantasy. Might have been better if she had been less relentlessly specific about pattern-welding, though since she was writing a sword-smith it made sense. I ended up at a very funny panel about 'what series should have zombies added to it next.'

Then I went and ate at the very, very well-stocked (if you like bread and things to go on it, but they were also aiming to feed the gluten free and the vegetarian) ConSuite buffet,and looked at books, and watched a woman with a spinning wheel explain the mechanism to two engineers, who were fascinated. And I talked to an iPod Touch fanatic, which was informative.

Then I would have gone to a panel about revamping Asimov's Laws of Robotics, (nearly all attending were men) but I got bored, and went to Fantasy: Getting Away from the Traditional, which was okay (nearly all women), and then I misplaced my knitting and fretted for awhile. Then I went a panel on 'the Heroine's Journey:' something new, now that women are living in larger numbers past the age of child-rearing, and also having careers and money and stuff; and a reading by
Lois McMasters Bujold, whose new book about Miles will be coming out in November.

I tried to meet the person I was supposed to meet for dinner, but she got stuck in Rhode Island, so I went and checked Quincy Market (Chowda Company= not very good chowda, sadly). There was a free shuttle from the hotel, so I went to wait at the bus stop with the other people. One of them was a friend of a friend with whom I had gone in 1985 to get my ears pierced. She barely remembered this (she was getting a second piercing in one ear, to be edgier -- this was A LONG TIME AGO, when double pierced was still a little weird), but she recalled the Japanese lunch beforehand and that my infant had been refusing the nice Japanese miso-and-tofu baby food and preferred to plunder my tuna rolls. "Yeah," I said. "Now he's 25 and works at the ----- St. Apple store."
"I know someone there," she said. "He's named Sam." She is friends with his fiancee.
"Blond? Hair down to there?"
"Yep," she said.
"That's him, the baby who was eating my tuna."
Her jaw dropped impressively.

Cyclical

2010-02-07T15:52:00.002-05:00

Last ('09) January 12 I recorded that Marten had a small infection on his back. It got all well. Yesterday I dragged Nigel to the vet with a fever in his ears and a lump the size of a quail's egg over his eye where Marten, almost certainly, had whacked him. I think they get bored in the winter.

The wound was three days old and not getting better, and I figured being a one-eyed black cat would be a bit much (he already looks Eldritch). Sarah was here. She left her glasses at home for the first time in her life and came in contact lenses, which did not respond well to being stored in boiled water overnight, and ripped across. Sarah can't see very well. But she managed to help confine Nigel (who wasn't sick enough to go gentle into that good vet's, not at all, kthx). By 11:30 I had, instead of a pirate cat, a Zombie cat with a shaved area over one eye dripping blood and pus. He looked awful and he was like to go into shock, poor baby. Sarah and I were not much better (except nothing had been lanced. No dripping).

Then I drove Sarah to Canterbury, where she was reunited with her optics.
Then we drove back to my house and her car, and she went to visit her mother. I baked bread--the second set in 18 hours, as the first loaf got kind of black when I forgot about it. This did allow me to take a couple small loaves (of great beauty, I must say) along with the Mostly White Stew (see Dec. 12, 2008, note at end, and don't crockpot it; the artichokes fall apart) to the SCRAP Party.

The room is always too small and the crew associated with the OTHER dig (a Contact-era thing on what they call here the Seacoast) tended to clump outside in the hall, but we eventually mixed and talked to one another.

There were at least eight crockpots going, so next year I will perhaps bring a salad. But most of the crockpots were mostly emptied; my friend Abbie won Rookie of the Year, which I really support since I think I want to be Abbie when I grown up (she's short, blonde, intelligent,funny, and 21). The Avocational Archaeologist of the Year award was split among the four people who helped Dick put up and then break down Octoberfest, which is actually kind of fun.

Right then, it's Fore-Spring

2010-02-05T11:38:00.000-05:00

We went to New York. It was good. Not only did we fail to need to kill one another, we often enjoyed one another's company.

Our hotel and my father, looking like a Hopper painting LBJ photo

My mom had found a hotel that gave us two rooms (I could go to sleep!) for $149/night. My parents had the one on the street side and were not happy with the noise or the mattress, and though the hotel had a $10/day internet scheme the room was in a nearly dead zone. My room was quiet, my bed was fine, and we had a microwave and a tiny fridge so I had proper early morning tea. I loved it.

And my parents liked the Danubian exhibition, which, as well as being small but choice, was free admission.

Funerary figurines. At least they were from a grave. LBJ
We regretted not taking more pictures, since we didn't know they were allowed as long as they were not with a flash. Although the NYT article has an excellent slideshow, they left out my favorite bowl. It had a little naked clay couple in the bottom of it.

We ate simply. My father is allergic to gluten and my mother doesn't do dairy, and the smell of the pizzerias we passed wafted unanswered. The price of NY restaurants was breathtaking (a very nice unspecial lox and onion omelet was $12.95, but two eggs any style was $7.95) and the portions were too big. But it was tasty, and I like the Bialy very much. Something like a cross between a bagel and an English muffin.

We went to the opera, as my mother loves the opera; my daughter imported herself from New Jersey and joined us at Lincoln Center. I am not much for concrete structures and I missed the gorgeous pseudo-classicism of older concert halls, but it was not bad inside despite having no murals of half-naked people.

Swarovski crystals are always welcome. LBJ

The opera itself was Stiffelio, a strange tale of jealousy and maybe forgiveness among the 19th c. Protestants. This had an unfortunate effect on the costumes (black) and all of us wondered why Verdi thought it had been a good idea to write. I thought a couple of zombies would have helped a lot, or some poisoning or an elephant. Apparently you are allowed to have opera without any of these. I am told they sang very well. I don't think I am made for Culture, at least not High Culture.

The Silk Road Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History (why here?) was okay, but for me it exemplified many of the stupidest tendencies of modern museum-ship. It had a couple of interactive things (mostly broken machines to 'stamp' your 'passport;' some much better perfume amphora to smell) and a lot of 'gee! look!' kind of commentary. But they were trying to describe a long stretch of caravan route over several hundred years, and as a result I had no feeling of any place at any time, and it was bit like generic Orientalism, which was almost certainly not what they wanted to do. On the plus side, my father had never heard of the place and said it was a decent introduction. I'm a history snob, I guess.

But the book store was great, containing several of my favorite books in a very select sample, and I bought The Mind in the Cave.

One way and another we ended up at MOMA without time to look at the museum properly, so we did the tacky but satisfying thing and went to the gift shop(s). They were overpriced but delightful, and now I know where ThinkGeek gets some of its stuff.

We were very lucky with the weather; I have been so very cold in New York, and although it was sometimes a little breezy, it was mostly above freezing and sunny, very walkable. I love New York. I was sad not to see Beckett (LOTS of police presence, though, and nasty murder on the TV)or Mia but it was pretty cool anyhow. It started to drizzle as we made our way to Penn Station.

I like travel by train. I took the bus from Concord to Boston and back, and that went very seamlessly as well.

Then I came down with my father's cold and had to sleep all last week. It was a fluent headcold. My brain was on hiatus; I have found great comfort in punctuating the Castle transcripts at the Dustjackets wiki. And the transcribers say they are delighted since they are just trying to get the damned things written out and to hell with the hyphens and commas!(shocking.) They are otherwise really fine internet friends. Since I have been trying to finish a regular plain-vanilla (except for the soapboxes, which taste about as good as you would suppose in a vanilla confection) police procedural fanfic, the wiki has been useful. I am not going to defend fanfic right now, but of course I wouldn't feel like it if it weren't several rungs down from pulp fiction. But it feels good and leaves no marks so I am doing it (and at least I'm not a furry). (You should look at the link in the previous sentence, it might weird you out or it might make you give the Smile of Recognition).

And last week I went to the SCA market in Manchester, but my cleavage would not behave and I felt like this. I behaved well and only bought a cup and a bowl and a book.

And now I must be human, as there is the SCRAP party tomorrow. Every year lately we have it in the NHDHR office building, which has no possible sightline for a decent photograph, although it does have heating (which is why we no longer have it in the much more picturesque State Library, which does not have heat on weekends). There will be food, and I must make some.

And finally, on a seasonal note: I survive every winter hanging onto Groundhog Day, or Candlemas, or Imbolc, when I KNOW the light will have improved, and by Copernicus, it has! Still light at 5pm, the analemma is making it hard to sit by an SE window between 8:30 and 10 am, and this morning a chickadee made the first 'Hey, Baby?' call of the year.

cold with a lack of focus

2010-01-11T10:15:00.004-05:00

I miss Christmas. I still have a little fruitcake left (and half a pair of socks and a late-arriving mittlets) but the fine-pointed guided missile of purpose that I was in December is no more.

Tonight we are expecting the first snow in a couple of weeks.

Marten watching us in the driveway.

Doug and I decided Paul was never going to get the stuff out of the kitchenette. Doug wanted the space. I wanted him to have it. In a burst of energy yesterday, He and Deb and I rearranged Paul's stuff into a disused portion of freezing porch (safe from rain and snow, however) and Doug rented a steam cleaner and did the rug. Today he is moving furniture in. Katie continues to live upstairs. I hope she gets a better job soon.

Marten from inside the house. With orchid cactus.

Right, the sun is coming out. Between four to eight inches tonight, for sure. Yesterday it was about 45 degrees F and delightful.

My parents, who are either saints or have decided my company will provide an alibi of some sort, are taking me to New York City for three nights. My mother wants to see an Egon Schiele exhibit. I want to go to the Old Europe exhibit at NYU. Any other suggestions?

Looking ahead

2010-01-01T13:36:00.003-05:00

With an actual rent-paying tenant, things are much better here. I still need to want a job.
And following that, to get one. And not get depressed over my lack of qualifications. I can do lots of things adequately. I hate the whole 'selling' myself thing really a lot, and feel people would do well to get a more recent model. With a better operating system and a slimmer footprint.

The main effect of my holidays has been an actual desire to see more of my family and friends more often. Amazing.

I still need to do serious, I-am-not-a-hoarder tidying.

I want to work off some of my fiber stash, and spin, and some of my yarn stash, and knit.

I want to write more. This would involve losing the url for MahJongg.

Really, I want to dig more holes.

Christmas

2010-01-01T11:54:00.003-05:00

It was excellent. We had, at dinner: Sam and Kimberly, Kimberly's father Joel;

Lisa and John;

Ellie and Matt;

my mom and dad;

Doug;

Jenny my ex

and me.

My mother points out that no one took pictures of her. (She took all these pictures.) She's right. And no one got a picture of Lisa and John together, either.

I am in charge of plum pudding at Christmas. I make a gluten-free one and take it with me to the ex's house. Where, and previously at Melrose, I have made minor grease fires in the oven (though not for the previous couple of years, to everyone's disappointment) with the Yorkshire pudding (no relation). This year, there was a HELL of a lot of smoke because the fire was in a part of the oven you could only see from across the kitchen... .

"Dinner will be ready when the smoke alarm goes off"

Anyway the plum pudding: we set it afire with booze. I was out of brandy, so I stopped on the way down and noticed there was 150 proof rum for only 2$ more than the 75 proof, so I got that. The oven fire had made the ex a little more nervous and control-issued than usual, so she was not listening and preheated a CUP of rum, poured it over the pudding and set alight before I could get her attention. Pudding flames did not quite reach ceiling. Nor _quite_ melt table cloth, which was still an excellent wick and provided flames around the plate of pudding as well as on it. But it was very impressive.

Looking Back

2010-01-01T10:36:00.005-05:00

I was starting Arwen? I don't even remember... oh right, I gave the yarn to Alice. Good call. The Radiance Cable Jacket is unfinished. I think it made me look fat.

New Year's Truth 1: I look like a manatee. They say that the fibroid I have is not causing any trouble, even though it is now larger than a grapefruit. It cannot be blamed for my umm, bottom. On the other hand, I don't obsess about my diet. I hope to eat more vegetables in the New Year.

I made Christmas socks for my father and Katie and almost finished the ones for my mother. And they were on size 3's (well, not Katie's, which are half acrylic because she is a severely-affected teenager. She still lives here, in theory, but not since it snowed very much. Depends on what happens to her license, too) and done in honest Sock-weight. Ellie's are somewhere in limbo; I have not seen her sock since Thanksgiving. (Oooh! It turned up!)

I made about five of the Noro scarves (finished one this evening that I found carefully tucked away). I gave about four of them away, two at Octoberfest, as well as the one I made Knitting One Below, and if only I could find that book in this dreadful, interesting house I would make another. It is very satisfying to give people warm things when they are cold.

I made some most unpalatable wine and am scared to try again, although I am going to be more severe with my specific gravity. The vinegar wasn't much good, again, perhaps because the original must had not fermented enough. Was it too cold? was the yeast no good? Was the must dreadful? I did label everything I could find in the basement. Some of what I could not identify was delicious. Trying Kombucha this year.

The FLUXX deck I bought Grace and Debbie in March, I gave them in December. Someday we shall play it. I also bought myself the FLUXX Stoner deck, though I continue to be stuffy about people my age who smoke much dope (nasty realization of the year. I thought I was cooler than that) and don't know anyone in the state who would think it was funny.

I Do have a kitchen! I love it. It has lights and counters and more cupboard space than I know what to do with. Sadly, I have not yet fully unpacked the boxes o'Stuff that appeared in my living room when I moved out of the kitchenette. But I am cooking again fairly often, particularly in an effort to make regular meals with Doug. Because Paul, having moved himself and Katie in in June (he had no work they needed a place to live smaller than the house he was renting), moved out in November, shortly after Doug moved out of now-ex GF SarahC's house. Doug is my tenant again! And I will be kinder to him He is a wonderful housemate and a good friend, and I hope he has fun with his friend in Connecticut but doesn't move there. Paul is living with a girlfriend somewhere else. 'Paying tenant' was never a good description, but he did build a couple of closets. Katie sort of lives here, in that she has stuff in the spare bedroom, but the condition of the driveway and the condition of her car have not been a fortunate combination.

Nigel is definitely tired of the aggro here, but since Willow is happier when she can dominate Doug, he gets some better times. Marten chases both of them. None of them will go outside for more than seconds when it's below 40 degrees F. Wimps.

four teacups

2009-11-22T08:32:00.004-05:00

This one, my daughter turned up. It is very practical, as she and I differ in our estimation of the proper amount of milk for a satisfying cuppa. Sadly, the price is breathtaking.

This one is very pretty, though it enshrines a low standard of tea prep (loose tea would look less attractive and also less iconic).

There is also this one, which is 16 oz but is melamine and not microwave-safe, a deal-breaker.

And this one: which seems to be almost the same as this one, except the latter is cheaper and comes with a latex sleeve, albeit one with a coffee bean on it. I could cope with that, and possibly turn the sleeve inside out. It is available at its higher cost at the MFA gift shop in Boston. I wish they made a larger size.

not bad

2009-11-14T14:12:00.004-05:00

So Doug decided he needed to move out of Concord. Since Paul was never here, I asked him to consider moving his stuff out. He is, bit by bit. So far it as been AMAZINGLY angst-free. I still have a pet 18-yr old, Katie, but she isn't any trouble and will watch "Castle" with me.

Mind you, all of Paul's stuff is not gone, and there is one strip on the outside of the house I wish he would finish, and Lord only knows who will plow this winter. We'll see.

I am, at least for the moment, employed. All this time I have not done any contract archaeology, which is when you work for an outfit who helps whoever is building something comply with state or federal regulations. The main reason is that I was certain I was in completely inadequate shape for it. This may still be true, but there is a sort of local firm who was desperate for people to help dig test pits before the ground freezes. So for two out of three days last week I was the youngest on a crew of three, which was funny. I may be the youngest on a crew of five or six next week, as Vicky Bunker is persuading as many members of SCRAP as are at loose ends or retired whom she can to come dig for money. I said I hadn't been paid for Archaeology since the Reagan administration, but I think I left Canterbury before he was inaugurated, so it may have been Carter.

We are making sure there is nothing important in places along an existing line of huge power poles where they intend to sink more power poles. Two of the three days last week were idyllic, with some sun and t-shirt weather -- sifting and shovelling into the screen warm one up quite nicely. Yesterday it was more sullen and cloudy, but it was still not too cold and not raining at all. Heaven. There are pictures here.

I am in a position to say there is nothing there important culturally, but the wintergreen and sweet fern smell very nice. As well as the usual birds I have seen a brown creeper, an ominous-looking hawk making an ominous squawk, and a surprised and very lucky red-backed salamander.

You may have heard of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day? Since my daughter mentioned it sometime last year, I have become very spoiled and live on this stuff (a couple of years before that Ellie and I stopped showing signs of gluten intolerance. It's been a very great joy to eat and make bread again). They have a new book out, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with recipes for partial whole wheat (about half the flour is whole wheat, okay? not a paradox) and also for gluten-free bread. I wanted to what the GF bread was like, and it was quite tasty and a little strange looking, though I imagine if I practice I'll get more confident messing aoround wiht the recipe. It contains 4 eggs. Even I, with my notorious lightheartedness about refrigerating eggs, feel dubious about having raw egg batter sitting up to two weeks in my refrigerator. But Herzberg and Francois are not careless people and no one seems yet to have been poisoned.

So if you take some of the dough and roll it out (ideally between two sheets of parchment paper or two of those silicon cookie sheets), and spread it with sauteed garlic and lots of chpped parsely, you can roll it up and let it rise and it's delicious. If you have something not unlike a bunch of chickpeas cooked with garlic and onion and whathaveyou, you can dump a spoon of it onto a sheet of the dough and re-invent samosas or calzones or Cornish pasties. Just let it rise half an hour or so first.

It makes great lunch for digging with.

October, really? (food and archaeology)

2009-10-10T11:18:00.006-04:00

The wine making continues to go bad ly the latest batch is not too grapey, much, but it has a nice bitter metallic taste that ... well, perhaps the wine to have when you've already had more than one. Or maybe four.

I bought a $40 dehydrator (we will rush past the one I got on Ebay for $15, which worked when I got it and for about 5 minutes afterwards). I bought it because I envied Sarah's dried tomatoes. They taste like a jolt of a really good summer day. I made some, and they were good. The dried apple slices, I am telling you, are very very dangerous. They taste so good.Then you realize you have ate a) half a dehydrator's worth in one sitting (36 hrs depending on how thick you slice them -- I like them about 3/8" raw and dried to bone texture); b) all the fiber you will ever need; c) you need a bathroom. But they taste so good.

Then I made beef jerky. I used Alton Brown's recipe. I did not use the liquid smoke, and I halved the red pepper flakes. It was SUPERB. The next batch I used round steak (I think, something cheaper that looked unfatty) and off-brand Worcestershire sauce, and a large glug of vinegar, and it was pretty darned good. The worst problem s the smell of Worcestershire sauce (TM) makes me drool almost uncontrollably. Jerky tastes really good with dehydrated tomatoes, which is why I have none left. It is not a way to cut down on your sodium. It probably isn't very cheap, unless you were eating a good deal of the packaged stuff (and the homemade has fewer nitrates and you have some idea where the meat has been).

It's delicious. People at Octoberfest ate it up. really.

(What a clever segue to archaeology!)

Octoberfest is a five-day weekend at the beginning of October when, for the past seven years, we have gone to the Potter site and dug up stuff. Last year we mostly dug dry holes (50 x 50 cm shovel test pits), trying to find limits of the site. It was still better than real life, but kind of boring. This year we dug more on the blocks (meter or more rectangles, trowelled in 5 cm. levels over a 50 cm quad) we started this summer. I found hardly anything. This was okay for a couple of reasons. Most saliently, I actually dug for perhaps 20 minutes, all told. I did a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing getting people's names on their timesheets and taking pictures of stuff. It was a good year for stuff. Since I found a fluted almost-finished point last July I am feeling less like I have to find EVERYTHING, and watching the Quebeccoise girl find a point base was pretty soul-satisfying. Pictures are up on Facebook of some of the people.

It was cold. Not really really cold, like the year some of us set fire to our gloves trying to warm our hands over a Coleman lantern, but at times brisk. It was not often sunny. I would have been warmer had I had the brain cells to dig deeper into my duffle bag, but I was fine. The Octoberfest hoodies were one of Dick's best inspirations ever. We were warm (as long as we didn't get too wet) and we looked really scary.

So it's October? (Personal junk)

2009-10-10T11:05:00.003-04:00

Okay, I'll try to do better. It is possible unemployment is doing a job on my morale. In fact, it is. The Army sends me spam every morning. I don't think a 53-year old chick not in the best of shape is really their favorite, but perhaps I should take them up on it. They are in portsmouth, an hour and a half away. Monster alternates between sending me jobs for people with three years of banking experience (I have none) or a high school diploma and no police record (actually, I have neither of these either) in towns seventy miles away that will last for a month.

People I respect with actual fresh useful job experience in real fields are also having trouble and I feel bad about a) feeling bad and b)not having solid experience and qualifications (like the Army, perhaps?). And being fat, divorced, 53, and pointlessly verbal. And kinda bitter sometimes.

My health is pretty good, as is that of my family, my cats, and my friends. Except for cats, I wish I had more of all of these (one of the things that worries me about my mental health is that I DON'T want another kitten. This is like, mature. I don't trust it.).

Paul and his daughter are still my tenants. Paul still does not have any construction jobs and is holding things together with his referee gigs. His daughter is counting the days till she can move out, which will unfortunately include getting better jobs. Living with a teenager is somewhat softened by not being related to her. Human beings have a rough time navigating toward adulthood (just look at me). It can be tiring for those around them.

I should be more worried

2009-09-08T09:18:00.003-04:00

Okay. Paul can't get a job, so he can't get Katie a car. Or pay rent.

Katie has two jobs, which pay together slightly more than enough to fill the utterly inefficient gas tank of Paul's truck.

On the plus side, it's early autumn. Sarah is in the midst of Putting-By the Harvest.
Here is a vignette from last week:
I was talking to myself when Sarah called and said she was leaving work early and would appreciate company while she made peach butter. I went to Canterbury. Sarah's entire apt REEKED of basil, which was kind of nice. There was raspberry vinegar soaking in a bowl on the table, a bowl of measured pickling spices, several jars of cranberry mustard, a bowl of sliced green tomatoes to become chutney and a counterfull of canning jars (no eye of newt. She likes newts). Oh , and a sinkful of blanched peaches waiting to be peeled.

It was great fun to watch. I finished a sock and made the instep of another sock and spun for a couple of hours. She put a slew of little jars of pesto into the freezer, peeled the peaches, sliced the peaches, figured out the she needed to have weighed the peaches since her recipe was by weight rather than volume (she had 2 and a half recipes of Amaretto Peach Butter), put the peels into a huge pile of to-be-composted (including the bodies of several huge basil plants. She got them from someone who grew it to look nice in big pots but who hated pesto). Measured sugar and water and started the peach butter, got the bread dough out to rise, whipped up some simple pea soup, and asked sadly if I knew how to get the labels off jars. Beer people use bleach and water and she found soaking them in that for awhile and then using steel wool produced a desirable result. I warned her her nails and cuticles would be toast. But she was delighted because she been buying pesto in cute little jars for a year and they were canning weight jars and she had despaired that she would ever get the labels off. She had about 20, which meant she had enough jars to put up the green tomato chutney and the peach butter without begging jars from her mom.

Then we went across the road and scrumped apples. "Scrumped' is the British term for doing to fruits and veg. what you would be doing when you 'poach' a rabbit, and she loves the word. She estimates she and her friends have scrumped about 200 pounds of fruit from one row of peach trees.

We went to one apple tree and she and I had 3 shopping bags full of large cooking apples in about ten minutes. These were only the low-hanging fruit, from a tree that is not pruned or fertilized or sprayed or anything. They are lumpy , some of them, but not all that bad-looking. Another person from the village was there and got about another bag of the same apples because he and his wife have been coming to the same tree for ten yeas and it makes the world's best pies. He believed it was called Wolf River. We met two very old lesbians who were scrumping herbs. The moon rose, huge and very picturesque. Another person with some authority in the village showed up and suggested we would need to weigh the cars to assess how much we owed for the apples, but he was only joking and had been telling people to pick the damn peaches already for weeks. Sarah had been feeling guilty so she felt better, and I explained to everyone that she had bootlegger's springs in her car. Since they were all Very Old, everyone but Sarah agreed this was a great idea for smuggling fruit. Sarah had not heard about bootlegging springs.No appreciation for our nation's heritage.

We went back to her apt and she put most of a jar of aging applesauce on her fruit leather sheet on the dehydrator, and I finished the jar. Then I got to scrape the bottom of the peach butter pot when she transferred it to a smaller pot with a thicker bottom, and told her my secrets for removing burned-on from pans (soak for 12 hours, then scour with lots of table salt and a scrunched up piece of tinfoil. Knowing this means I am very popular at field school, where the pots are cheap and the cooks are doubtful).

She baked the bread and eventually we had pea soup with homebaked bread and home-shaken chive butter and I ate too much and staggered home.

The next day Miranda (I have a new boarder from the same organization as gave me Rob and Bryn last December) and I made a vast amount of pizza, while she made the first from-scratch pie of her life (a thing of perfect beauty) and I put more than 5 pounds of strange-looking apples through the food processor to make apple wine. Today I am hoping to make an apple tart for the official opening of the 2009-10 Archaeology Lab Season, and also to dehydrate some apple slices. I have a gallon bag of dehydrated peach and gave my parents a bag of frozen peaches (I still have one and half bags in the freezer and two gallons of peach wine).

I shall write more about the socks mentioned in passing but I need to go make an apple tart.

Domestic disorder. And hummingbirds.

2009-08-19T08:04:00.003-04:00

I still haz it. It's complicated. At the moment it is not only too hot to cook, but also too hot to try to do the kind of 'find a place for everything and put it there' cleaning that is necessary from a) tearing up the kitchen (and the downstairs bathroom, and the dining area) and b) moving out of the kitchenette (and there is plenty of 'normal life wear and tear' in the loom room and the study area and and and...

The previous downstairs bathroom was a small, ill-designed room with a non-functioning showerstall and a toilet placed so that no one ovver a size 8 could feel comfortable there. Because of the way the house is built, the placement of the toilet and the basin was foreordained, so the new version has the toilet and the basin clinging to the left wall. It's now all very white, "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste" (guess what image I can't find on Google?) white, and I think I will put an ancient wall-painting on the wall. Started out thinking dolphins, pondering Ancient Egyptian garden, trying not to make tacky pun and do Minoan Throne Room.

We shall not speak about the garden. But black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's Lace look great, and as an archaeologist-type I like having th house surrounded by luxuriant jungle vegetation.

ONe of the few things I have been faithful about is bird-feeding. I have at least two resident Indigo Buntings, and at least four (probably more) hummingbirds. The hummingbirds are mostly this year's chicks, the size of medium shrimp, and they talk a lot. They chirp when they fight and they mutter themselves afterward. Here was an odd interaction from last week:

The males do a kind of territorial/mating thing wherein they make big (like 12+ feet) arcs back and forth, with aeolian effects from the feathers. It reminds me of watching the big swinging Flying Boats from carnivals. The other day, a male (I am pretty sure he had a red throat) was trash-talking either a young female or a young male at the feeder. But instead of the usual diving and open dogfighting, these two were flying no more than a yard from one another and the feeder. It looked like they were flirting, and even more when the aggressor did a few passes of modified Flying Boat, with an arc only a yard across. Then the one on the feeder, instead of another mildly evasive manuever, lifted up from the feeder perch and sat on the aggressor's beak. Looking smug. She and the sat-upon bird stayed in the air for a moment, falling slowly onto the porch, and after the one on the bottom had flapped a little the one on its beak let go. But they went on sparring for several more minutes.

I love them. I'll miss them when they go south.

Not dead, no, really

2009-08-18T16:35:00.003-04:00

Though I will be if the heat doesn't break. If only because I don't want to cook because it's about 85 in here and I have no food. (oo! Granola!)

Actually last week I made Ugly Instant Cobbler: take some so-so peaches and cut them in to a bowl. Add granola to taste or texture. Add date sugar and top with yoghurt. Here's how it becomes ugly: microwave it for a few minutes. The yoghurt curdles. The whey soaks into the granola. The peaches poach a bit. The date sugar enhances whatever peachy goodness they have. No cooking vessel to wash. No fat unless you count whatever they put in the granola.

I went to field school. I got the coughing crud. I had to go to bed at eight pm for most of two weeks and could not join in the beers at night because it seemed to make me relapse. This was boring. My block was the only one on the dig with psychodrama (well, we had the most, anyway). My block went crazy and found enough scrapers to make me almost blase. I found a fluted point, which really does take some of the 'I wish I ever found anything decent' pressure off. I am trying to make a narrative. An illustrated one becomes too large to e-mail almost at once. Flickr, I suppose?

Only before I could make the narrative I wanted to get the photos in some order, since the last year or so Dick has decided it would be fun to have pictures of the relatively important finds as they are found, ideally in situ with a signboard. These take place before the object gets a bag number, and way before the object gets a catalogue number. And even once I became diligent about keeping a photo-log (phlog?), I was apparently on crack. I know this, because I have the pictures and I have a copy of the phlog. And except for the few times I frightened one of the diggers into getting me the bag number it's hard to figure out which picture goes with which object. Even if you have a signboard with all the coordinates, if you don't have the list of bag numbers you're lost.

This became an obsession. Now, of course, I want to alter the very fabric of space and time itself and get the photo numbers into the computerized database. We'll see.

2009-06-23T18:59:00.002-04:00

It didn't rain today, but we have only seen a scrap of blue sky in the time we've been here. We're afraid someone stole the mountain across the road from the cottage because we haven't seen it. And the grocery store had a big fight with its landlord, who wanted too much rent, so now it's closed and we get all our food from a SuperWalMart. And the only tortillas they have are wheat. This was particularly poignant since I was making Cheap-Ass Chicken Enchiladas, containing only the finest not-homemade foods (Rotisserie chicken, boughten tortillas, canned enchilada sauce, and pre-shredded cheese. We had salsa, sauteed onions,chopped lettuce and tomatoes, cilantro to garnish and coleslaw (homemade, I suppose, in that I only had a dreg of salad dressing and stirred up the rest. My team (Andrea and Casey) were GREAT and all of us are exhausted.

Other than that things are pretty good. The place we're testing is testing out sterile (two flakes in about 25 shovel test pits) and tomorrow we're supposed to open up some larger (Multiples of square meters) areas. It will be a different kind of hard work. Today I was teamed with a really nice 17-yr old girl (Erin) who worked quite hard. So did I. The first STP had about 20 cm of nasty hard stuff with rocks and the second one is much softer but has a pile of (40 years ago) bulldozed upon topsoil on top. We've gone down 90 cm and keep getting perfectly obvious signs of not being very far below the real surface. We hope we'll finish it early.

North of the Notches (Dig Day 1)

2009-06-22T05:28:00.004-04:00

It's still damp. My tent never condensed a puddle on the floor before. There are about thirty people in camp, and the second session promises to be larger. We believe (oh dear, it's 5am. and I don't know what I was going to say. Tea alone is not enough....)
Anyway, it is the field school and we are once again in the Mt. Washington Valley.

Well, I survived the first day. And so did the 20 or so newbies, who learned how to do paperwork (while the other 8 or so of us tried to lay out more grid in the area we cut the trees off of about three weeks ago. When the bugs were worse, and I am glad they are not quite as bad). Then Dick gave teams of two newbies an experienced person and we tried gently to teach them how to dig a 50 X 50 cm. shovel test pit. We were in an area we were fairly sure was free of artifacts, and I had hoped we would confound him, but no one found anything. Tomorrow we'll start real digging in the area where Dick laid out 25 STP's on new grid, with extra roots.

Tonight we had delicious pulled pork. Tomorrow I and Andrea and Casey make chicken enchiladas, assuming I can move tomorrow.

Gathering rosebuds while I may

2009-06-16T21:42:00.003-04:00

Actually, petals, to make some kind of rose petal wine. And mead, ideally. Like dandelions, it's a labor-intensive ingredient, not least because what I have in ABUNDANCE is the US Soil Conservation Services's little Bad Seed, rosa multiflora. It's pretty and heavily-scented, but invasive as all hell and the roots break steel plows. And the flowers, though many, many, many, are small, about an inch across. Five little white petals.

I have a considerable amount of floribunda roses (though nothing compared to my holdings in Oriental Bittersweet) and so I went halfway down my driveway today, with a plastic bag and three protective cats.

I took the precaution of putting White Mountain Blackfly Repellent on my neck with a paper towel. It worked fairly well, and my hands didn't stink of citronella/peppermint/whatever. I figured this was important, since I don't want to brew White Mountain Insect Repellent Wine (would it work if taken internally? Could I get it to come out of my armpits?).

I had some pruners, too, but it became obvious that the easiest thing to do was not to pick or snip the flowers, but just to pull the petals. Even though it's a pernicious weed, I felt bad pulling off two or three buds as well as a potential rosehip with every flower. Various things eat the rosehips (thus spreading the pernicious weed, but they're hungry) and I don't like unnecessary cruelty. It also occurred to me that removing the non-petal bits of the flowers was going to take just as long as it does with the dandelions, and pulling the petals off while leaving the stamens and pistil and sepals on the bush was not all that difficult.

In the meantime, two catbirds hurled invective upon Marten and Willow. I saw the upper half of a hummingbird territorial display and heard lots of bird-cursing from two or three of them, too. Crows chased a pair of red-tailed hawks overhead. The bird with the very long melodious song (a whole bunch of phrases. Probably a warbler, it's been here invisible for three summers now and I still don't know what it is) sang, and the ovenbird and the yellow warbler, and it could hardly have been more pastoral. I picked for over an hour until I was tired of picking and hungry. The cats and I went back UP the hill.

I picked out the last calyxes (calices?) and I measured them and came out with a scant quart of petals. I need two quarts for each gallon of wine or mead, so less than a quarter of the quantity I would like. I shall have to be diligent tomorrow. They didn't seem to smell like much, despite the WHOMP of rose-fug around the bushes. Since I had less than a recipe's worth of rose petals, I couldn't make the brew up. I stirred a cup of sugar that I'll need for the recipe anyway into them. An hour later I had the best perfumed sugar ever. I am psyched. More petals tomorrow.

2009-06-14T20:50:00.002-04:00

See, if I post regularly you will know that my interests in life are very basic.

Will the Indigo Bunting come to the feeder before I get out of bed? (It depends on whether leaving the bed to refill the feeder, then returning to it, counts. The raccoon empties it every night. So I don't put much in. I think the indigo bunting must have nested around here. This is the first year he's stayed more than a week.)

How about the hummingbird, the rose-breasted Grosbeak, and the Red-Breasted Nuthatch? (Yes. And blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, cardinals, goldfinches, chickadees and titmice. The Evening Grosbeaks are scarce lately.)

Do I feel this way because I drank too much or do I have allergies to all the tree sex going on? Or am I in hell, except with good birds? (Allergies. Haven't drunk that much. Not on a dig.) (Hell has polyester sheets, not 300 ct cotton.)

Will tea help? (Well, YES. Duh. Have more.)

Is there catfood? Do I need to make more bread? Does the laundry need dealing with? Is Paul the contractor likely to come today? ('usually' to all.)

Do I need to go to Concord? Do I need to go to New Jersey? (Sometimes.) If New Jersey, do I need to plant anything first so it doesn't broil on the deck? Are guest-type people likely to arrive? If yes, are there clear paths on the floor, more than one place to sit, and some kind of food to offer them?

How many cats do I have? (Three. Holding steady.)

Is it still raining? (Usually.)

Paul passed his energy auditor class with flying colors. He will have a steadier income, which is good. His daughter, Katie, (last child at home) graduates from high school this week.

We're all clear that Paul, though a fine figure of a man and reasonably literate, is not boyfriend material? It's not that I need to defend gay marriage or the Endangered Species Act ,or in fact the whole liberal agenda, at dinner or anywhere less formal, it's just that there's no point in dating someone to whom it would be necessary. Because neither Paul nor I would have enough sense to shut up and enjoy the moment. He thinks it doesn't matter who's president as they are all venal and useless.

They are going to be my new tenants, so I have been facing facts and trying to integrate myself into the new kitchen (AKA the real kitchen. Sooner or later, just 'the kitchen.')

The kitchenette is small and white with a breath-taking view of my driveway (and trees). It has one of the small fake-log gas warming stoves (it's a fake woodstove, for heat, not cooking) so it is actually warm in the winter and may be insulated from the rest of the house with a simple door. It was great spending the winter there, even if the kitchen-aspect was on the primitive side (tiny fridge, almost no counters, not much storage). It and my bedroom are the only rooms in the house with generous natural light. If a paying tenant with carpentry skills were not a fine thing, I would resent leaving my little decently-lit womb.

Today Doug and Sarah both came by and I moved the crucial furniture out of the kitchenette. Not that the kitchen is done. I moved the toaster and the electric kettle to the real kitchen even though there's no real place for them, and moved the couch and the chair into the living room, which is still full of the dining table and some surprised-looking bookshelves. Home Depot says it really, really will get the countertop here. Paul says he really, really will finish off the wall behind the counter I do have. The kitchenette, still full of a carboy of wine and another of beer, plus vinegar bottles, looks like someone moved piles of books and unopened mail off of surfaces and onto the floor. Strange. I am trying to remove one thing every time I go in there. The bathroom isn't finished either, so I am going into the kitchenette-area bathroom fairly regularly.

I'd like to say when I come home from my first week at the dig, everything will be done, but I no longer have formal hope, just a dull doggedness. I am tired of having my house messed up. Only been a year....

The cats aren't sure what to make of it all. Being in the living room does allow us to keep a closer eye on any raccoons who try to sashay in (and one does, sometimes more than one). The small one who raids the birdfeeder was there in broad daylight again today, and she seems to have full umm, raccoon breasts. Therefore she is a nursing mother (raccoons don't get man-boobs, do they?) and I resent her eating birdseed slightly less. Only you know she will teach her young about birdfeeders.

It only rained a few hours today.

Though I bought two splendid oven gloves to avoid getting any more scars on my knuckles, I just burned my elbow taking bread out of the oven. Bonked it on the oven door. Maybe a hazmat suit?

This time next week I will be in Randolph and thinking about going to sleep in my tent.

For the record

2009-05-28T17:40:00.002-04:00

My friends with the biopsies have had good news. Hers was benign and his was encapuslated and nothing bad found in his lymph nodes.

It has been raining for three days and I am wearing what I was wearing last winter and lit the woodstove this afternoon.

a placeholder until I actually catch up.

2009-05-25T19:43:00.005-04:00

Lets' see. Tuesday, May 5, I flew to Dallas, where it was immoderately humid and not all that hot, but I still thought I might die. My aunt and her housemate were kindness itself and I saw the new Michael Caine movie. It is good acting and one unforgiveably funny moment (you can forgive the movie, but not yourself for laughing, a lot) but maybe I was not in the mood for old age and death and Youth's Resilience. They did a fine job but it seemed nothing new.

Saturday I flew to Austin, which from Dallas is possibly even a little shorter flight than from Boston to New York. It was really, really hot and bright. Thought I would succumb to heat prostration. Nearly did while just putting up my tent. Collapsed in the unA/C, Internet-free, equipped with adequate but uncomfortable furniture, and thought it was a pity to come so far, to such a lovely place, only to die.

While I was calling my parents (my cell phone worked actually fairly well) a scissor-tailed flycatcher came and did aerobatics in the sky, catching flies and looking more like one of those phoenixes in Chinese restaurant art than anything I have ever seen. I had known about S-T Flycatchers but only ever seen them sitting, looking overdressed, on telephone lines. I am here to say they may possibly be the best thing ever.

Was on an interesting dig with tolerable weather (no snow this year, no rain, either) and a bunch of people I really like for ten days. I did not die; in fact, I think I did just fine. More to come, I hope.

Flew home on Sunday, May 17, to be met late at night by Doug at the Manchester Airport, and at home by delighted cats.

Returned to the bosom of the Interwebs, I was happy to hear that _Castle_ (ABC, 10 pm Mondays, starting again in September, but you could do worse than to check it out on iTunes). I was less pleased to hear one close person was awaiting the results of a biopsy and a less close, but still good friend, had failed his and had the full prostate cancer surgery. 'But he's only in his 30's,' I said, 'he's barely older than I am!' (Pause.) Well, that was the case 20 years ago, yes, and now I doubt if he's much over 55. I hope both of them will be all right.

Scratched fire ant bites and slept a lot. We will not speak of the amount of _Firefly_ fan fic I read, but there's still another 130 pages of titles to go. I am being selective, for all the good that will do. I also made a batch of dandelion wine (it is labor-intensive: I watched 2 Middleman, 1 Better Off Ted, and an episode of Castle while I prepped just over half of the dandelion blossoms). I also bottled my cheap-and-fast Malbec, which still tastes too grapey but, unlike the last two batches of Zinfandel-in-a-box, will be drinkable. I have done some extensive research to make sure.

On Friday, May 23, I got in the car and drove to Northampton, MA, where I stayed up late talking to Grace about theodicy. God isn't looking too great, Obama notwithstanding.

Then I picked up Miriam (aka The Dread Pirate Roberts; she has been in my Smith science fiction convention spinning class twice) and we went to the MA Sheep and Wool Festival. We both behaved ourselves, and I saw: MamaCate, Robin, Mary Pratt (Tiffany bought a fleece), Tiffany and Katy, Robin, Marcy, Cindy Baehr, Cheryl and Sherrianne (?) from Doug's guild, Etherknitter, Deana,Jess (I know her face, I'm bad at names), Kristen, Leslie Wind... a generous helping of people I haven't seen for two years, what with missing both NH Sheep and Wool two years running now, and MA Sheep last year.

Then I drove home. The cats were relieved.

The next day I got up early and went to Concord, where I succeeded in packing most of Bryn (community organizer from last December?)'s worldly goods into my car and took them to her new place in Brighton. She did the heavy lifting and I watched her stuff and my illegally parked car, and talked spinning with strangers who wondered what my drop spindle was. Then I had lunch with my parents and went home.

Today Deb D came to visit and the weather was lovely. Paul continues to work on the bathroom; we wait in joyful hope for the second coming of the counter, since Home Depot LOST the first one: and Marten thinks Nigel needs a lot more polish before he's ready for the big time (that would be why they had a dust-up, right?).

Pictures of the dig to follow. Sometime soon, honest. Before the next one, anyway.

It's a wild life.

2009-04-27T16:29:00.005-04:00

I boiled a chicken, stripped the bones and boiled them and the skinny cartilaginous bits to make chicken stock. This, of course, coincided with a heat wave. I was very happy with the temperature between 60 and 70. It was at least 95 on Friday. It hasn't been quite so hot since and the daffodils are holding up nicely.

So, chicken soup: I strained it and wanted to offer some to the cats, particularly Nigel as he is a vacuum cleaner. I put it on a plate on the porch and forgot about it. At night, Marten scratched at the window and said he wanted to come in. I went to the door and there was ALREADY a kitty there eating the chicken, a nice BLACK and WHITE kitty with a PLUMY TAIL. The not-really-a-kitty kind of skunk-kitty. Who, fortunately, was not too bothered and left. Marten ignored him.

That was last night.

Saturday Sarah came over. Because of her job in a nature center she has some odd habits and some odd things in the back of her car,, to which she has added carrying a stuffed (roadkilled) bobcat. It has a lifelike pose, just a little taller and a little longer than Marten. Willow thought it was awful. She crept up almost to it, her tail fluffed, but changed her mind and slinked away. Then Marten showed up. He had no interest in it until he saw its face, when he fluffed up. Sarah, who claims to be a nice person, bumped the bobcat with her hand. It fell over and the two cats fled ZIP!!! under the cars.

Nigel touched noses with it. He's either quite intelligent or quite dumb.

Sarah's cats still hadn't gotten over it after a couple of hours of it being in their home.

Sarah's cat Abbey upon meeting "Bob"

The sink is now fully installed, the last piece of counter is ordered, and the stove is in process. After many calls to GE, we established that the adapter for liquid propane had actually not come a) installed, or b) in a plastic bag in the oven. It's now on order. I may actually move everything into the kitchen soon. Some of it for the second time. Whatever. It turns out that in hot weather the kitchenette is not nearly as attractive as the cavernous, cooler parts of the house, which will be an incentive. I had never spent any time here before last fall.

And now for some anthropology.

This is supposed to be a fiber-arty blog, with birds. The person who writes it, however, is not ashamed of being a science fiction and fantasy fan (maybe a touch defensive, but not ashamed). Fanfic (the Wikipedia entry is quite good, too) is a basic human desire, to take the good stories and add to them, maybe put yourself in. In Greek every two-bit village had a hometown boy who went to Troy, whose stories may or may not have been folded into the Iliad and the Odyssey. In mediaeval Europe, there were the tales of Arthur and his knights, who may have started out post-Roman Britons, seasoned with some magic cups from Wales and spiced up when the French got in on the act and put Lancelot in. Pre-literate fanfic, oral tradition, eventually met up with publication-- which can be immortality or zombie-fied stasis (The Once and Future King suggests that not all oral tradition is dead, along with new versions of Beowulf from Seamus Heany, Neil Gaiman and friends, and John Gardner). It's very hard to keep a good archetype down, and some stories are too good to leave alone.

By the late 20th century the archetypes were all over the place on TV, but no itinerant minstrels to promote them. (This was after movable type, but before plain-paper copiers.) There were expensively self-printed zines available, sometimes with COLOR! if you knew where to look, sometimes for sale at science fiction conventions, but years would pass between chapters in a serial. The writers, always an unreliable lot, had to be herded, and editted, and the editors had to come up with a substantial sum of money (this was before 'yuppie food stamps' and hedge funds). I was particularly impressed by one friend of mine who couldn't afford the $25-$45 for the zines in the Robin of Sherwood fandom. So she had poems published in all of them and got complimentary copies.

I survived high school writing pretty bad Star Trek fanfic (this was before there was more than one kind of Star Trek. Or more than a couple of Star Wars movies, either, thank God). It wasn't great art, but it was a good place to go and as the years passed it caused occasional self-discovery (like when I noticed how fed up my character was trying to pass for Earth-normal. I was living in England at the time. Alien angst, how interesting.) It is possible I may have written fan fiction about other TV shows, as well as original fiction. Eventually, mostly because of Katherine Kurtz, I fell in among some other literate fans and felt a little less freakish. (This was before, above all, before the Internet. You're not alone any more. Whoever you are. Even if you shouldn't exist.)

So one grows out of things, not enough to deprive me of some strong opinions about what constitutes Star Trek's canon (my God, there are articles on _everything_ on the Internet!) (and no, I won't be seeing the movie unless there is some STRONG recommendation), but I never had the hankering to write about Buffy or X-Files, even though I had strong convictions about some of the plot lines and how they ought to have gone. I haven't (skritched) it no more.

And for awhile I was TV free and snotty about it. And the Internet struck again. Then last week, for various reasons probably along the lines of 'idle hands,' I happened to Google 'Fanfic' the other day.

O Brave New World! or possibly, Holy CRAP!!!

I haven't delved too deeply, but have a look at this: http://www.fanfiction.net/ There is fan fic about comics? about songs? about TV from the 70's _and they are still writing it as of this month? Alias Smith and Jones only lasted about three seasons, for goodness sake! and there's 90 stories or fragments up! More than Thirty-five THOUSAND Buffy fics? M*A*S*H? Teletubbies? Fics about Bill Nye the Science Guy? Mammoths having "Ice Age" sex?

If we could harness the energy of the inner and outer teenagers who write this, we could end world hunger.

But we'd still be hungry for stories about people we know and love and who, we know, would NEVER act like that. But they might.

In which I lose all my elitist cred

2009-04-17T22:29:00.002-04:00

Television.' I don't watch it. After the 'meh?' ending of Buffy; after the God-awful stringing along of the last season of the X-Files... particularly after I moved to New Hampshire, where a cable connection would cost $2600 to run in from the road... true, there is something called Satellite TV, sadly not broadcasting news from the Lunar colony...

A couple years ago Paul the contractor got all moved with pity and installed an aerial, only the VCR was stuck on 'safe mode' and as God is my witness I could only see PAX TV. These things, they don't inspire a deep desire for connectivity. I 'watched' the presidential election on various radio and tv feeds on my computer. Sometimes I would watch DVDs on my computer. Then my son, the media fan, sent me a link to The Middleman. It was good (and of course, it was cancelled, but you can get it on iTunes or as a DVD). I also knew my daughter was watching Battlestar Galactica online.

Then I discovered Hulu.
So I idly started watching Dollhouse, which is so-so, not awful. And Kings, which is pretty maybe not too good, but I like the in-jokes with the Bible. My mom was watching Better off Ted (ABC) and it made me smile, particularly with the screaming. ABC suggested I should watch 'Castle', which involves Nathan Fillion of Firefly and snide remarks and intelligent humor. I really like it. ABC also thought I would like "The Unusuals," which is no "Castle" but is all right, and "The Motherhood," which was stupid. I don't think watching people being stupid is funny. But still, I began to feel that I was accepting everything they offered, in my terrible sensory-deprivation, not-enough-social rural idyll.

Tonight I tried to like "Parks and Recreation," which has the nice woman who was SNL's Hillary Clinton. Oh MY GHOD. Wanted to laugh. Did NOT happen.

So I still have some faculties of discrimination.

And a pair of red-breasted nuthatches and the return of BamBam the yellow-bellied sapsucker. I do like spring.

we continue the great slog forward

2009-04-10T16:14:00.004-04:00

It is a good day, when you have a nice cup of hot tea. Less when you pour half of it over your chest and a shirt you have just said is your favorite. Washer. Dry shirt. I haz them, so it's still a good day. And I am still trying to get the Kitchen-Aid Behemoth ready for Craigslist. It's nicely made, all its surfaces come out for washing.

Perhaps on Monday Paul will be able to figure how they go back in, because I am baffled. Also the second shirt got all wet. Could be worse.

I did not awake to a unicorn in my garden with a golden horn, but to a messy object chewing over things in the grass---shoots of something? Slugs? wormses? It was a porcupine, probably the one who was around three years ago as a Por-cutey-pie (my daughter's boyfriend said so) and took a chunk out of the porch where the road salt had sat. I see it once a year or so, and I tell myself the prickles are distinctive.

The are rodents, like Jabba the Chuck or beavers; like beavers, they walk on flat feet. I suppose the snuffling for things in the grass might seem Porc like, but they look more Spiny Bear to me.

First light

2009-04-06T19:12:00.003-04:00

Now, possibly, I am cooking with gas! Wahoo!

Progress IS taking place in the Kitchen That Time Forgot. I was ogling my cabinets and asked Paul the contractor if people usually stared at their cabinets covetously. He said they often did when they had had to wait ten months for them.

There is still a lot of finish work to do and and one more counter to come. I am also waiting for him to finish attaching the sink (a new leak appears in the system every time he thinks This Will Be the Day).

I am trying for clean lines, crisp intuitive ergonomic organization. They (who do you think?) try to mess with me. This spice rack in a drawer, for instance? It is about 3mm too tall to fit in a standard kitchen drawer if you actually put the spice bottles that come with it into it. I was particularly happy that it did not come with jars filled with herbs and spices of unknown age and provenance. Anyone interested? It comes with two sets of labels, some for things I don't use (chervil? Celery seeds?).

The kitchenette is still somewhat too small and I will not regret the literally 18"X18" of counter it has, even with two microwave carts. Or the dwarfish fridge whose door I suspect of not sealing, with the automatically icing mini-freezer (in some time of great wealth, I hope to replace it). But it's a nice room and the cats and I have been happy here. Until I find a tenant, I can go on using it as as a sitting room.

Today I have been cleaning the previous fridge, a Kitchen Aid Behemoth (Superba) too big for the kitchen and at least ten years old (new more efficient smaller fridge for me), hoping I can find someone who wants the old one. Periodically I try to put something away in the new kitchen, but an immense, Lazy Susan needs assembly in a crucial cabinet. I remove things from the dining room table (on, under, and around), now occupying prime real estate in the living room, blocking me from the swift and an important bookshelf. Things I haven't used for ten months I can probably get rid of. How many thermos flasks does a person need? Must I use flatware? Should I retain the corn stickers? Why is everything covered with dust?

In brewing news, I was ready to bottle the cheap fast red but I turned out not to have enough bottles. Went to the Dump, sorry, recycling center, only to find that they had apparently just emptied the glass hopper. There was nothing. Since then it has been raining a lot and you would think people would be drowning their sorrows; I'll go back tomorrow. Drinking more myself would not help, since I am fond of a very cheap Shiraz in a box from Fish Eye.

We see almost no deer now that the snow has gone. But we did see a woodchuck scurrying under the former chicken hut. It was the size and roughly the same shape as Jabba the Hutt. Even if I had decent soil and a better work ethic, I wonder what the chances of a successful garden crop would be?

So last Wednesday Paul confided that his son had sent a text message to his girl friend and, as sometimes happens, it had sent itself to the person previous on the list, so Paul received "Dear Peggy, I really can't deal with you being pregnant. Are you sure?" Paul and I had a long and interesting talk about relative goods (if he were not an intransigent libertarian he would be quite tasty in many ways) and what he was going to say and how he hoped his son would bring the topic up.

April Fool!

I told his son I would kill him myself.

Paul and his son came by today to explain that they could not do kitchen as they would be fixing both Paul and his son's trucks. His son had driven his truck into his father's truck's rear end, messing with Paul's bumper and puncturing the son's oil filter, at least. We are lighting candles for the trucks' well-beings.

Still soggy, but with frog spawn.

2009-04-06T09:24:00.011-04:00

Last Friday, April 3, was Salamander Big Night. It hasn't rained properly the last three years in early April, but the first spring I was here it rained all day and into the evening on April 8 (There is a blog entry with decent pictures but skip the prose).

Sarah, who is having crazy times at work, in a good way, called in a state of high excitement and pointed out that it was well over 40, had been raining all day, and would into the night, so she was coming for Big Night. This year I did not have debilitating cramps and it wasn't raining as hard as 2005, more of a light mist. We walked up and down my rutted dirt road for two and a half hours and saw (unsquashed) 27 peepers,

a woodfrog,

a greenfrog, four spotted salamanders,

and a red-backed salamander. (Squashed: three peepers, three woodfrogs, a couple of greenfrogs and one spotted salamander. Cars. And the traffic was quite light.) We also saw innumerable rocks, twigs, and leaves masquerading as amphibians. One of the sticks turned out to be the red-backed salamander, a species who are entirely terrestrial and had no need to go gallivanting to the nearest vernal pool. I think this one wanted to know what all the excitement was.

I took a video of a pool full of woodfrogs a hundred yards down the road from my driveway; the picture isn't much, but I hope you like the sound.

sogginess in the Spring

2009-03-30T11:00:00.003-04:00

It could refer to my knees and ankles, or a pile of newspapers in a water source, but I mean the air and the ground are about equally damp and squishy today. I know I should be glad it isn't freezing solid (or, like Fargo, flooding AND freezing solid), and I am, but it is not raising the heart or the energy level. Or maybe that's the effect of three sleeping cats.

Marten had an upset stomach the day he went for his annual vaccinations and he was more miserable than I have ever seen him, keening (though he is normally almost mute) and hiding under my feet on the way home. So I drove home in sockfeet because I didn't want to crush him when I clutched in. He was not himself for two more days, but now he seems himself again. Nigel is continuing to be a delight, but he wants someone kitteny to play with, because Marten thinks he is a pipsqueak. I do not think I should get a fourth cat, because they cost money and I should also pay attention to creeping Cat-Ladyhood, which can sneak up on a single woman in the near-woods. On nicer days we all go outside and take walks, even Willow.

This is not a nicer day.

There are crocus and mini-iris and snowdrops. No peepers I have noticed yet. We have gone beyond 'mud-luscious' to 'amazing ruts in the driveway.'

On Friday, I made my yearly trip to Northampton to teach spinning and needle-felting at the Smith science fiction convention. I missed my daughter, who had mixed feelings about graduating and leaving Smith, too, but I found I still knew a bunch of people and since at least two of them will still be there next spring, I will probably go again. I also really like spinning and spindles and I don't do enough of it. And science fiction fans, who find it perfectly reasonable to wonder in the middle of a conversation about spinning, _why_ the Greek-style sword is shaped like that. (It was a wooden version, along these lines, for sale and a thing of beauty. I don't know whether it would have to be peace-bonded at a convention, but you could probably give someone a nasty bruising scalp wound.)

An eight-year-old girl with her family from Virginia suggested several more science fiction conventions I could go to when I announced I needed more of this. She and her sister were wearing matching velvet half-cloaks, being steampunk (think Victorian with a heavy Jules Verne overlay, and extra gears and rockets) with their father.

Another person told me she had never heard grownups discussing science fiction before, and another wondered why so many people looked down on it. I tried to explain that there was a time before lots of paperbacked books existed and that it had mostly been small pulp magazines until about 1964, but since I have never understood why 'everyone' in the 'real literary world' thinks science fiction is the lowest form of life except maybe for slasher porn, I wasn't much help. (I am not sure I believe in 'everyone' or the 'real literary world,' either. But I have heard about them.)

But science fiction cons, despite the posing-as-weird-(they-wish), the unwashed, and those in chain-mail bikinis, feel like home to me, so it was good. ConBust was actually quite clean, relatively unweird, and mostly appropriately dressed.

WEBS is selling some really nicely prepared 'domestic wool' (looks like Romney) in several natural colors for 99 cents an ounce. I behaved very well and only spent $18 there, and half that was for needles. It turned out I needed the extra roving I had bought, and the con was charging a materials fee for the spinning class, a great idea I had never had before. The kitchen store has moved next to the comic book store, which could be a bad conjunction for me the next time I go, but I behaved and bought a hostess gift from the comic book people (for when I go back there Memorial Day; I don't think Grace and Debbie read this, so I can say it was a FLUXX deck; and a spice jar holding drawer rack for the kitchen I sincerely believe I will one day be using. It has many drawers. I am hoping t=for the almost empty counter look, so I am giving this a shot.

The cats don't approve of all this gallivanting, but I do. It was beautiful in Henniker on Friday and in Northampton on Saturday, t-shirt weather... someday again, I hope.

2009-03-09T18:05:00.002-04:00

Black cat update: He seems to be named Nigel, which means 'Small black thing.' It's also a form of the name of a rather weedy minor male character in Terry Pratchett, who nonetheless has a hero's heart. He is sweet and wants much head-scratching. I am not altogether sure how the litter box issue is working. He also sleeps most of the day and wanders around at night, looking for a party or his relatives. But he is living inside the house and shows up for attention and a huge amount of premium kibble. The other cats are not saying "What a charming playmate," exactly.

It snowed again.

Paul finished putting lights into the kitchen. If it ever becomes a real functioning kitchen (I know, wanting the sink and the stove to be hitched up is just another way to waste energy and water) it will be better lit by a great deal than the old one. Perhaps by June. It's making more progress now with him working on it.

And also

2009-03-06T17:17:00.002-05:00

Since my remaining patience is being tried it's a good thing I started the short term wine kit. It turned out that my local brewing shop, Kettle to Keg, carries the brand that I have been successful with. I also picked up a better siphon. This kit will be ready to bottle 4 weeks from when I started it, and though they would prefer I waited 6 months to try it, a month will do. It's a Canadian Malbec. If that's possible.

Around the same time I got my next step into fermentation going: I had bought a bottle of Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar a couple of weeks ago (the local food co-op has it). I poured about a third of the bottle into a clean jug and added most of a bottle of undrinkable Zinfandel. It is finally beginning to have the symptoms of acetafication; something like an oil slick is forming. It doesn't smell any more like vinegar than it did, but that may yet happen. Today I gave the matter a great deal of thought and some Googling and have taken several of the small bottles of really-not-very-good stout and put them with some more of the unpasteurized vinegar in a half-gallon jar by the stove, and after awhile I hope to have malt vinegar.

Sarah and I have enticed the Black Kitty back into the house and he feels thoroughly betrayed. He ran straight to the rather camouflaged cat exit, only to find I had shut it (admittedly, after the cat had gone). Sarah is now feeding him tuna fish. i don't eat tuna any more because I admire them and they are not farmed and so on. But if it's here, at least that fish will not have died in vain. Now Cat's rolling on his back and eating tuna out of her hand. Very good at taming people.

2009-03-06T15:10:00.002-05:00

So I went to the feed'n'grain a week ago to buy eggs and there was a sign up from an elderly woman on a fixed income with three cats. She had just taken in a pregnant stray, and, oddly, wanted someone else to take the cat. (They have found an obliging vet.) I said that she should call me when she needed a home for a male kitten. Wendy, behind the counter, whipped out three pieces of paper. "Here, black male 5 months old. Or here. Or here -- no, she hasn't popped yet." So I called the black male's owner, who assured me he was a love and litter-trained (yeah, maybe) and she just had too many cats. And a Caesarean and a week-old baby boy. He (cat, not baby) is good about litter boxes but had no shots and was not altered (owner seemed confused as to what I might mean by altered).

Sometime later, I arrived at the house. The owner had 'Tucker' (Tucker is the name of a dog belonging to a friend of mine; it is not a cat name to me) in a catbox, pulled him out and puts him in my arms. A very nice cat, slightly fluffy black with semi-plumy tail. She says they like him, they just have too many cats. ("I'm 24 and well on the way to being a crazy cat lady.") His sister, Freckles, is from a different litter, but Betsy, their mom, has never been a good mom and both litters were mostly raised by Sally, their grandmother, who had been just coming off a litter when Tucker's litter was born and she nursed them after Betty ran off. His and Freckles's fathers had been wandering toms.

Tucker had been rather feral as small kitten but after he was got at by the two rat terriers who live in the basement, he came to live in the house and was just a love.

That's not counting the two dogs upstairs, one of whom has been sent outside for considering biting me. Very protective of the baby, Maleina explains. Other dog had to stay indoors as other dog had mauled goose and killed goose's mate.

Would I like to meet the pony? I met the pony, the rescue pig ( a Tamworth, trodden on by mom, with unusable right leg; the size of a coffee table and looks like a wild boar without tusks. Friendly, polite), and the remaining goose. Maleina, had sewn the goose back together after dog had left her for dead. Goose looked fine now.

So I took Black cat to vet, and he was very calm, like not hiding, and passed all his tests and got his first set of shots and I was in yuppie-shock about having too many cats, not fixed, no vaccines (despite being inside/outside).

Better living through contraception.

After 6 days, he was still sitting with his face squashed into the space FARTHER under the stairs and only coming out when no one was there, unless I offered him tuna. When he came out, he was friendly and charming. So far he has been pooping and peeing on the futon in the spare room.

Yesterday, tired of spending time on my stomach under the stairs, I carried Cat (possibly named Emile) to the other end of the house where I and cats spend most of our time, waiting for spring and the contractor to finish the proper kitchen.
(I still sleep upstairs in my rather chilly bedroom and cats join me to watch bird feeder and glom cat treats.)

I was thinking he could live in the 3/4 bathroom, though it is the only one functioning on first floor, while learning the way of the kitty litter box. And he would be closer to the rest of us, becoming used to noises of life, NOT acting institutionalized with face squished into corner.

This may not have been a good decision. But he was not using the futon for the purposes for which it was intended (and he wasn't using the litter box at all).

He reacted to the bathroom as though he had at some time been put under the shower. There was a lot of reaction. The glass, but fortunately tempered glass, doors of the shower stall fell out of their frame and then the frame fell on my head, while Cat was using me as a place to kick off from in wild dashing around small bathroom. I do not blame him and the holes in my face are small. I am confident of putting the shower stall back together, which would be nice as upstair bathroom is only minimally heated these days.

Marten and Willow were not impressed.

He was under the couch in that room (the kitchenette/sitting room) when I went to bed. No one else fits under the couch. It would be nice if he used one of two litter boxes at hand. I am not looking forward to going down there but since it's not sunny today it's cold here and I am getting hungry.

Later: well. I thought he was under the couch.
Later yet: he is under the front porch. I went out to see the sun attempt to set and there he was. He was not going to be enticed inside, though. At least he is staying nearby.

He may be named Schroedinger.

Snow, but with redpolls and wine kits

2009-02-24T08:40:00.004-05:00

We had three weeks without snow. It was strange at first, but I became reconciled to it. Marten and I took walks.

Then we had six inches of snow and a couple more and then about eight; it compacts and sublimates (and drifts) so it is not an even coating. But there's a good solid six inches on the driveway and Marten tells me I am on crack when I suggest a nice perambulation.

I have been fortunate enough to attract a second flock of finches; the first was ALL pine siskins, which was quite fine. They are irrupting like mad, apparently. I love them; they are tiny (stare at the smaller finches long enough and hummingbirds seem a little less ridiculous) with amazingly needle-nosed beaks for removing seeds from pine cones.

But I also like Redpolls and Birdchick was taunting me with hers, so it was with added delight that I realized my monochrome (almost) though lovely siskins had been augmented by sparrows dipped in raspberry juice. This is the usual description of a house finch, or maybe a purple finch, but in the gray of winter maybe the respberry juice is half frozen? It was quite startlingly bright. And goldfinches, who are in civvies for the winter, though quite lovely themselves.

There are more squirrels to be seen, red and gray and very tense. I don't blame them, there is a hawk spending a lot of time around. The deer were out during the day last Saturday as well; Sarah spotted four or five through my kitchenette window and there was one, possibly doomed, wandering around on Rt 106. I hope they don't eat my azaleas this year, but I am still struck by the pure, maybe completely ditzed-out, look of inquiry on their faces. None of the pictures I can find seem to show their focus, all ears and eyes... and maybe no analysis of any kind. At least they don't chew gum. I do not expect to like deer as much as I do, since I know there are usually far too many (and not enough wolves). But it is hard not to feel for them this time of year, and they look so polite. You would be amazed how much noise they make when they are in a hurry.

I spent much too much of yesterday putting my Radiance Jacket sleeves into the body. I have to do the non-button band/collar and it will be done. I hope it looks less tatty when blocked. Give me a nice halo-ey worsted to hide any number of flaws, particularly the putting together parts. And this is fundamentally a warmer-weather, slightly dressy sweater. It's never going to be warm enough here. Get real.

So maybe I'll make some Coraline socks (I do not need a blue sweater that will show, I suspect, every bulge of my fat), with holographic thread (this link has some nice Coraline pictures) and duplicate stitched stars instead of appliqueed cloth ones.

My original impulse to blog was related to a wine kit I am making. I have had great success in the past (drinkable) with Vino Vida and not so much with this kind, but I don't know if it's them or me. Twice. A kind of hideous uber-grape flavor. (I am making vinegar, now.) The failure, expensive in both effort and money, has made me inhibited from trying again. But I have had a kit sitting in the corner for two years (and fortunately, a spare sachet of the right yeast) and I decided to give it a shot. This was a more expensive kit, with oak chips and toasted oak powder (re***MARK***ably sludgy) and I mixed it up last week and have been enjoying the change of smell from Welch's to something more sinister. Yesterday I transferred it to the secondary fermenter. It made absolutely no more mess than killing a pig (probably. Definitely less noise. Not that I have killed a pig, really, in or outside). Only I would not have killed a pig in the kitchen.

The carpet needed replacing anyway.

And now, reading farther, I find this fancy-pants wine would like to sit, bottled, for six months or better yet a year before I try it. This will not be a tolerable solution to my need for a low-cost tipple anytime soon, the more since it is at least a month off from getting bottled.

Time to go through the sofa cushions for change and off to Kettle to Keg.

the loneliness of the monogamist knitter

2009-02-17T19:15:00.003-05:00

We have to get a better word. I am not married to my knitting. As such. Even it occasionally screws me over or supports me... no.
Anyway, I have knitted ONLY the Radiance Jacket since January 12 and there is no doubt I am in the home stretch. It's like pulling teeth. I thought getting out of the sleeves and back to the back would help. It hasn't, much. It's still a good pattern; maybe if I hadn't broken the rhythm of the repeat by doing the sleeves... only I would still have had the fiddliness of the fronts. Should have skipped to the back.

I have a little cute bag kit based on the Egyptian sock that I bought from the Spanish Peacock (it's not on his site. Does anyone know of a Carol New?), and a skein of Dream in Color In Vino Veritas and a new (to me) book called Knit One Below.

I want to knit something else.

I want to be Fiscally Responsible. I don't want more of the woolen equivalent of subprime mortgages (mind you, the properties in the Loom Room are fundamentally sound, they just need development...I should not be allowed to visit yarn shop or a fiber festival for about about 8 years). I would like to see a sweater instead of a pile of parts and neatly rolled balls.

I hope I finish soon. I keep zoning out and finding I have been listening to the book on tape (American Gods with my mouth slack and unfocussed eyes, which is fine for listening but my hands are still.

Right. It's not even very many stitches per row.

now yer talkin

2009-02-10T19:37:00.001-05:00

Which creature of the night are you? Your Result: Demon Your raging id needs no chemical incentive to break out into a fiery orgy of destruction. When you're not burning, you're brooding. All you need is someone to point the way out for you.
Werewolf
Incubus/Succubus
Cthulu Spawn
Vampire
Ghost
Sorceror
Which creature of the night are you? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

My Political Views
I am a left moderate social libertarian
Left: 5.91, Libertarian: 1.54

Political Spectrum Quiz

Of course some might same these say the same thing.

Phenology

2009-02-09T08:24:00.003-05:00

On January 28, I first heard chickadees this year discussing the possibility of getting together over coffee. On January 29, there was a woodpecker drumming. They are all overly hopeful.

However today I saw two squirrels chasing each other, despite having to cross vast stretches of icy tundra where a hawk could nail them. Sex is a fearful thing.

Yesterday it was in the 40's. Perversely, it felt much colder outside than the windless day-before-yesterday in the 20's. Much melting took place; I know this because the snow on my deck is now some 4" below the level of the concrete-filled bucket in which the feeder-tree is planted. Previously about the same amount above it, which made flling the feeders much easier. I gather the raccoons are asleep somewhere, and for whatever reasons any squirrels (gray, all them, so far this year) that come here eat only a meal once in a while and do not plunder or ravage.

The remaining snow on my deck, about a foot, is as dense as the styrofoam protecting computers or stereo components in their shipping boxes; I walk on it without leaving any impression or getting my boots snowy.

Fore-Spring

2009-02-08T15:59:00.002-05:00

Not a moment too soon. I want it to be warm enough to sit on the porch. It isn't. It is warm enough in the sun to enjoy the heat and have little flashes that I think are 'wanting to garden' or 'wanting to do archaeology.'

Marten is getting fat, so he and I are now walking the length of the driveway and back. Two days running, now. He doesn't really like going out of sight of the house. He tried to go snowshoeing with me, but I got out of sight several times (I fell over several times). He was managing to walk onto top of the slightly crusty 2+ feet of snow, but I was not. He, who is practically a silent cat, yowled until I staggered into view and then yowled until we went home.

So we are walking the driveway, which seems fairly flat going down and noticeably uphill going home.

It has not snowed much in probably over a week.

I need a Job.

Meanwhile, I am probably 4/5 done on the sleeves of the Radiance and making progress.

I went to see Coraline on opening night. Other parts of the country (perhaps it was only Portland OR, where the studio that made it is), there were lines and throngs. New Hampshire, while practically perfect in every way, is deficient in fans. The cinema was maybe half full. We liked it, and though it was pretty scary (I am too long out of the game, but I would guess most 8-year olds and up would be fine) at times it was mostly good. The fact that all the things in the movie were three-dimensionally real (pruning shears. Knitted gloves. Snapdragons.)made my miniature-loving self very happy. I wish the museum exhibit would travel closer than Portland.

In fact, I think I would have gone so far and said it was Quite Good if I were not a literary purist. I understand why the director had to add a character (I only understand grudgingly, but for me a movie about a girl talking mostly to herself and a cat would be autobiographical) and most of his other touches. While The Lord of the Rings was coming out and all of us Faramir (and Sam) fans were spitting nickels and even larger denominations, I decided it was like different versions of big oral-tradition epics, where it would make perfect sense for different places to have slightly different versions (like ones of the King Arthur cycle where Lancelot got put in, or the Grail). Even Star Trek has various canons (not going there unless you ask, while offering alcohol). So I manage not to be haughty about all the places it varied from the book, or not too haughty, and I enjoyed the movie (except for one gratuitous kick at the cat). The 3-D was excellent. I had never seen any 3-D movies before; mind you, I didn't notice that ViewMasters were supposed to be 3-D until I was about 15. But the hummingbirds and the dancing mice and all of the credits were lovely.

Since I am internet-stalking Neil Gaiman (no more than about twenty thousand others with me, and apparently no one is ruining his life IRL, so I guess we are all well behaved) the movie finally coming out was a big deal. His blog and that of his assistant, Lorraine, and the craft and design blogs have all been following Coraline-movie a fair amount. Then Neil Gaiman won the Newbury Medal in the middle of the movie tour and I practically had to sit and fan myself following him and Lorraine around their preparations. Lorraine also has a number of cats, and NG has a Dog, and the Birdchick is their beekeeper, so there is quite a bit to follow. They live in Minnesota where it is even colder then here. Coraline in the book lives somewhere indeterminate, probably England, where it rains and is misty, but at one point the sun comes out and she stares at beauty of the cat's fur in the light, just as I have been noticing Willow's.

Enough with the winter.

Newbury Medal!

2009-01-26T12:01:00.002-05:00

I was rabbitting on about this book on tape I couldn't turn off? It won the Newbury Medal today! Among the reasons Neil Gaiman is so lovable is that his second thought was to remember not to swear like he did when he won the Hugo. He didn't think it would be cute to the children's librarians.

2009-01-26T11:23:00.002-05:00

So there.

It's cold (was -2 this morning), barely enough snow to insulate the perennials, but warm in the house, at least this part of it. I have now moved the little table out of the kitchenette and moved a couch in. I thought the couch was a loveseat until I saw it outside the living room, when it became obvious that it was at one time a pretty classy thing with brocade upholstery. I was lucky to be able to get it past the refrigerator. Its springs are shot, now, but it's MUCH more comfortable than the floor; now when both the cats are asleep in the sunbeams, I can join them. There are also two chairs, so I will always have a soft option without disturbing Them. They are not getting along very well, but the hole in Marten's back has healed up.

Yesterday Doug, his GFSarah and a mutual friend, Debitage, came over, postponed from last Sunday. Doug is removing the small loom piece by piece from the kitchenette (which, along with the demands of that number of guests, facilitated the insertion of the couch). Last week Debitage and GFSarah missed out on a pineapple upside down cake and a cauliflower cheese pie (with potato crust). This week I offered apricot-pine nut biscotti and Mark Bittman's No-Holds-Barred Fish Chowder. The latter is a fine but bland recipe (onion, bacon, not enough salt, fish, potato, thyme and milk and cream), and I would have used Old Bay Seasoning if I could have found it. Chipotle Tabasco Sauce, however, was wonderful. It took me several minutes to figure out what was missing before I recalled the Tabasco, but the sense of delight and mild burning were perfect.

The Radiance Cable Jacket continues nicely. I had expected to get more done in Boston watching the inauguration, but someone had to look things up on Google ("How old is Aretha Franklin now, anyway?" "Where is YoYo Ma from?") to keep the peace. I could have survived listening to it on the radio in my TV-reduced home, but it was much more festive with other people (the cats DO NOT pay attention to politics, it's hard enough to get them to watch The Middleman) and my parents cared. It did seem as though the country could have made Inauguration Day a public holiday, though, it's only once every four years (usually, thank God). it was strange to leave my parents' apartment, where I had been watching the same thing as many millions of other people, and go outside to feel connected to no one at all.

It was fine as spectacles go, though I saw no actual auguries (if someone messing up the Oath of Office were going to be an omen would it not surely have happened in 2005?). The Obamas are a wonderful-looking family who managed, in what must have been a sleep-deprived, stressed-out coma, to look really happy and healthy, and long may it wave. Here's a link to Garrison Keillor's column, which says it all well.

Persistence

2009-01-12T10:19:00.002-05:00

I have now started the Radiance Cabled Jacket (which I still think of as a sweater) three times. The first time I think I had bewitched (not in a good way, strives to find synonym for buggered) cable pattern by about the second row, and although I had done a gauge swatch and been responsible about my multiplication, a size 48 was something like 64 inches. So I did more math and the second time I pulled it all out (after 7 rows of five panels, I understood the cable pattern, but it had taken some visible fudging and there was an infelicity in the garter stitch border)it measured the same around as the sweater I was wearing. I knit loose.
Anyway, Sarah was here for the snowstorm (8", maybe 19 cm , fluffy) and gave me a good example (and a nicely knitted Flower Basket fichu) so I pulled it all out AGAIN. After she left, I finished listening to the audio of Coraline and started listening to the audio of the Graveyard Book. I have an unwholesome attachment to Neil Gaiman, at least I would if I could. He has a nice voice.

But now I have the garter stitch border and a whole pattern repeat of the jacket and no mistakes, and no desire to do anything else but knit (since I can't get Neil Gaiman into my clutches and offer him fruitcake).

Which is bad.

I thought I was going to have to spend this morning taking Marten to the vet, and that may yet happen. When I left for New Jersey he was in possession of the cat condo Ellie built, which I recently moved into the kitchenette. When I returned it was Willow's, and Marten had a hole in his back. Watching the intensity of the yoga he had to do to lick it would have been fun if I had not felt sorry for him, and my experience with cat bites (Shenzi and Asterix and Pangur....) made me worry he would get an abscess, something I thought would NOT be good that close to his spinal cord. But it's healing nicely today and Marten has been feeling lively enough to knock over the cyclamen (the equal and opposite reaction to a large cat is considerably more than the that to a small cat). If it continues clean I shall be glad. But I shall still have to act like a person and get out of here.

Maybe just half another repeat...one chapter of the Graveyard Book...

2009-01-09T16:35:00.002-05:00

Things are not bad, exactly, right now, and I am not alone in feeling the new year has not brought as much Newness as it might. As Paul told me last week (this would be Friday the 2nd) when I remarked that the radiator pipe bursting in the living room on not even nearly the coldest night so far seemed like bad luck, "No, it's GOOD luck because it's not 16 below and your house won't freeze with the furnace off."

Which is true, of course, and you would be pleased by how little damage a centimeter (2.54") or so of water on the living room floor can do. A few paperbacks were ruined and most of a ream of paper. The floor tilts toward the part of the basement designed for things to drip into, and it did.

A copper pipe with an aneurysm is a strange thing, but there it is. I had just come back to Henniker after a Cultural day in Boston seeing the Assyrian exhibit at the Museum of Fine Art (The Assyrians made really good giant stone strip cartoons with cuneiform captions in small enough fonts they must have expected people to be seeing them quite close up. And they must have expected a fair number of literate viewers, or at least literate tour guides. I was unhappy to see they practiced canned hunting and had 'lion hunts' that began with letting the lions out of a cage). I came in through the kichenette and had a small glass of wine and I was really looking forward to going to bed, when the sound reached me as I walked toward the staircase of running water where no running water should be.

The cats were quite excited and thought the soaking rug was way cool. Marten rolled on it.

I thought it was really nice of Paul, the contractor and plow-guy who sometimes works on my kitchen redo, to come out at 11 pm. and show me the cutoff again, and to fix the radiator the next day. My daughter has suggested killing him, and I can understand that point of view, but it's mean and leads to bad habits* and would not really get the kitchen done.

Anyway, the floor is not ruined and honestly the living room is not much messier. I am not traumatized but I have to admit going up to bed includes a portion of apprehension it never used to. Bad enough with the wolves and burglars under the bed to worry about.

Since then I have returned Toby and the Only Beloved Daughter to New Jersey, which pretty well killed this past week, and I have decided to spend some time working with the easier (if there are any) knotwork cable designs in Viking Knitting, because apparently I cannot do Arwen. I know I have weaknesses (chirality is involved) but I don't seem to be able to read even one damn line without messing up. Maybe Sarah will tutor me. She owes me, because if she had not run out of frog Tree Heather at almost the end of her scarf I would not have stopped at WEBS in Northampton.

My self-control was sapped. Colrain in Navaho Red is very nice. The cable looks easier than Arwen's.

*If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.--Thomas DeQuincey

Reflections

2008-12-31T16:49:00.007-05:00

Not really. I am a trifle opaque today, and more likely to absorb than reflect anything. Yesterday's batch of fruitcake came out very well, and when it stopped snowing I went to the Post Office to finish my gift giving and send a few people a few things.

I looked over most of this past year's entries, and I am not surprised to hear that this is the wettest year on record, and that was before it snowed today some five more inches (light and fluffy).

I need to expand my social life, and of course, Get a Job. This next one, ideally, will not involve standing too much, working with the more than normally insane, in an office of often fewer than one other person (and I'm not sure I was all there either), being forced to wear pantyhose, or selling anything I don't like. None of these necessarily apply to my former place of work, I'm just saying what would be nice. And if it turned out to be eligible for the federal definition of 'employment,'and therefore 'unemployment,' as apparently a 501 C3 religious organization is NOT, that would be nice too. My office paid unemployment insurance; it was somewhat of a shock to hear that wherever it was going, it wasn't to me.

If everyone can manage to remain as healthy in 2009 as they were in 2008, we will continue to subsidize the facial tissue industry and be doing very well.

It is not yet quite time to look over the amount of knitting I did this year, but I am at least five scarves and a sweater better off than I was last year. Here are two of them:
.

The one on the left was intended to be a nice quiet 2-color Noro Silk Garden k1,p1 scarf, and like all the ones I have made, came out more unsettled than I had in mind. I do wonder whether anyone not already a knitter is as fascinated by the color play as knitters are. The ones I have made are weird.

The one on the right is the K1P1 2 color Rowan Tapestry (sheep wool and soy silk), and it is less blue than it appears no my screen. One person suggested she found it deprssing. Even I have described it as a mix of the colors to be found in abandoned, half-drunk* day-old cups of variously cream-enhanced coffees, but it is at least tranquil. If I had more confidence of finding a wearer I might like to try the soft blues and browns; this was the soft grays and browns. I also worry how much the Rowan will pill; but it was soft and lovely to knit.

I think I will spend this evening on restarting Arwen for the New Year, though I am well along in another Noro Kureyon in browns and whites and off-white. The cats want it to be summer. I think I will have to settle for it being January. Could be much worse. I am wishing all of us improved economic outlooks and morale; refreshment from the election news in a stream of quietly encouraging political stories; good health, good friends, good times.

*'half-drunken' didn't work either. I think they were half full.

And the bedpost was my own!

2008-12-27T09:24:00.005-05:00

So then it was CHRISTMAS EVE. I arose and finished making plum pudding and then fruitcake (this batch made 36 muffin-sized, perfect for taking to people's houses and easy to eat) and then I wrapped. and then I had a cup of tea, and then I wrapped. And then I was going to have another cup of tea, but it was three pm and I had intended to drop fruitcakes off at the deli before it closed at four, to say nothing of arriving in Boston by about two pm. Or three. Four at the latest.

I got the last dishes washed and the last package wrapped just before three-fifteen and drove as quickly as seemed feasible. I reached the deli at ten to four, just in time to give fruitcakes and serious "Merry Christmas!" wishes as they were taking off their aprons and closing down. Then I drove to Boston, which I reached about half-past five, just as the OBD, her boyfriend, and the ex were also arriving at my parents'. All of us seemed tired.

My father makes cassoulet for Christmas Eve. There seemed to be more bacon in it than usual; delicious. (The OBD has a small meat-free dish). For dessert, we have sweet chestnut puree with whipped cream, and then we try to open presents. People seemed pleased with their gifts (I was, certainly), even though my parents received Smartwool irregulars instead of handmade socks.

The daughter and I staggered off to the ex's, where the OBD talked Toby out from under the bureau. Apparently he and my ex's cat Shenzi are both omega kitties; when they encounter one another, my ex says, they compete to see who can get away fastest. It isn't quite that bad.

Christmas Day dawned. Toby made sure we were awake at a reasonable hour (Shenzi is more decorous). My ex put the roast beast into the oven and we had tea and mince pies and fruitcake for breakfast (my ex thinks about 500 mini-muffin sized mince pies came out of the oven this year. Next year, my ex threatens, mince pies for family only. Except that people like the daughter's boyfriend's family look forward to them, and everyone at church).

My ex has a new electric mixer, one that does not spray Yorkshire pudding batter all over the kitchen. This is my Christmas Day job; I supply the plum pudding, the hard sauce, and the Yorkshire pudding. My plum pudding is based on the Fanny Farmer date steamed pudding only with no nuts and a lot more fruit and using gluten-free flour. The Yorkshire pudding gets made in three batches--one gluten free, with beef fat, one regular flour with vegetable oil, and one regular. For the second or third year I disappointed everyone by not setting the oven on fire. We set off the smoke alarm a couple of times, but nothing too exciting, and the Yorkshire pudding ALL came out well (the gluten-free does not rise as it should, but neither is it gummy or puck-shaped). The plum pudding slumped as it came out of the basin, but everyone thought it tasted better than usual. This may have been the effect of very successful hard sauce (flavored with Jameson's instead of Christian Brothers). While making the Yorkshire I had a wicked case of nostalgia and thought I would have to go cry in the bathroom, but I has been given chocolate and it pulled me through.

My parents brought a neighbor and my ex invited two friends from church and Lisa arrived ON TIME. It turned out that she and one of the friends from church had been friends several years ago when they were both involved with Harvard. We ate a lot. No one keeled over. It was a very fine holiday.

Lisa and I got back to NH about eight pm (I think) and sat in a gentle stupor. She got herself up early and we had pleasant conversation ("Have you found your power cord?") until she left in time to get to Manchester Airport. A sit was not snowing, I think she made it. I have a headcold and spent Friday not doing anything and today, Saturday, I am not much more ambitious. Finishing the second-to-last Noro scarf.

Another Christmas and everyone lived. Success!

And I still have power!

2008-12-27T09:14:00.005-05:00

So then....
Sunday, the Sunday before Christmas, my mother called and said it was snowing an inch an hour in Boston. Not a good shopping day. In NJ, it was 35 and cloudy, eventually even sunny. The Only Beloved Daughter needed to go to the mall. It was surprisingly navigable, with parking places and everything; apparently the bad day had been the day before, when there were lines going out of the stores. We were lucky; lines were short, fast, and cheerful.

On Monday the OBD and I drove back to MA, only she had lost her wallet earlier in the month and had no driver's license. The traffic from the exit to Shoppers' World in Natick stretched back to Framingham. It was an awful warning about the hazards of consumerism. We had Toby with us, which was another reason the OBD was not taking the bus (the bus and the train will not take animals even in crates)(don't get me started). He was reasonably brave and sat on Ellie's lap or hid under her seat. My ex met us at Riverside and accepted the cat. We cut through Lexington. The snow there was really impressive; it had been plowed into 4-foot berms and was still stuck all over the trees and drifted up against the walls of buildings to about three feet in places. Snow always looks more severe in towns than it does in the country; there are fewer places to put it and it takes up a lot of space, completely fouling the ecology of parking places. And making driving slower, which was all right since I could crane my neck and exclaim.

I dropped the daughter at her boyfriend's house in Woburn, and skipped over to visit Alice in Winchester. Where we found Ellie's computer in the backseat. Since she has two papers due, we went back to Woburn though in the interval it had become Rush Hour and Rt 3 was slow...a ten-minute there-trip from Woburn became an hour-long back-again-trip to Woburn. Ellie's boyfriend's mother suggested we wait out some of the traffic by sharing their pizza, and it was delightful. Around eight pm, Alice threaded me through some back roads to avoid the Burlington Mall traffic, which was, according to Alice's iPhone, formidable. We reached my house about a quarter to ten. Paul my plow guy had come through, although it was not as much snow in NH as there had seemed to be in Lexington.

I have known Alice for it will be 20 years in September; she's 23 now and a much more interesting conversationalist than she she used to be, in fact a more complicated and gracious individual in a lot of ways. She is annoyingly gifted in the clothing-design ways, possibly something to do with being a math major and a computer science grad student. She earned the cats' eternal gratitude by shovelling off the secondary front door steps, so they can make a circle: from asking me to let them out through the kitchenette, through the plowed driveway to the proper front steps Paul shovelled out of kindness, in through the cat-enabled other front door, through the house to ask to be let out through the kitchenette... they hope somewhere the weather will be better.

Sometime in the last week or so, the dynamic has changed and Marten is gratuitously beating the daylights out of Willow. It has become any more serene.

Lisa and I had lived intensively in the kitchenette, and though all the dishes were washed the room was pretty well trashed once again. Alice and I managed to find enough space to sit and barely, to bake. This involved things like putting the food processor (for almond-meal) on the floor and upsetting the cat in front of the fire. Alice earned my eternal gratitude by chopping two pounds of dried fruit. At last, I made fruitcake, and plum pudding. At least up to the crunch time, the Psychological Moment, the point of No Return where one adds wet to dry. Then it was time to forge into Concord for lunch, a trip to the LL Bean's outlet (irregular Smartwool socks for half-price), The Elegant Ewe, and taking Alice to the bus station.

For some reason, possibly the driving the day before, I was tired. But I needed to go to the Co-op (gluten free-flours) and the utterly delightful deli (I bring wine). I have not bee to the deli latel because I know it is an easy place to spend too much money, but I like the staff and they are kind of me. I must have looked really awful because the manager was concerned and Jen behind the counter made me a small baguette and blue cheese snack. I felt life return to part of my brain. I finished my shopping and went home, where the cats explained that they are tired of winter, I usually like winter but I am not feeling as cheerful this year as I did last; I think the romance of five days by flash- and lantern-light has taken some of the edge off of my insouciance. Also, I still need a job.

it IS better now

2008-12-27T08:19:00.002-05:00

I appear not to have mentioned that I got my power back at 2 AM on the Wednesday, Dec 17. (That would be five days of powerlessness, which, at that, was better than than the poor sods in Fitchburg, MA, and actually also better than many people in NH. NH had 95% of its power back by Christmas Eve, only to have it go out again in Manchester and some other little hamlets).

The return of the electricity was a great relief even to an indifferent hostess like me. I had promised God I would vacuum if I got the power back, and I spent three hours cleaning ONE ROOM (the kitchenette) and it still looked kind of full. But I made it to the Manchester airport without getting lost (I have learned there's "Next Right" that isn't actually the Next Right) and it is always good to have Lisa. We bought wine and went to Daniel's and stayed up too late. The next day, Wednesday, we went to Concord and shopped. Lisa wanted funny socks to send to her friends in California. We reached the shop of the Society for the Protection of NH Forests not long after four and did not leave till nearly five, wondering whether her grandmother needed a wrought-iron key rack with chickens on it or truly funny nightshirts. Then we went to the Post Office, where the line went very quickly and they believe Lisa's presents would make it CA before Christmas. We went home and stayed up too late.

On Friday, it was forecast to snow; I gave Lisa the car and she went into Concord and exercised and did work. I knitted until I finished the Rowan Tapestry Noro-style ribbed scarf. I started a Noro scarf (#4) that I hope would be sort of plausibly discreet and guy colored. I did not make fruitcake. When Lisa got home, it had begun to snow and she did not make gingerbread. We did not stay up so late because we appeared to be tired.

Saturday I drove to NJ . Lisa did, indeed, make gingerbread before we left, which smelled wonderful. It was supposed to have stopped snowing around midnight; it was still going strong when we pulled out of my driveway around noon. (See previous post.)

from the thinterland

2008-12-21T10:38:00.002-05:00

I am in New Jersey (291 miles, 6 hrs 26 minutes. In Google's dreams, baby). It took two hours to leave my snowy (10") driveway, get to Manchester Airport and drop Lisa, and get back to Route 93. It was not until Danbury that the traffic felt secure enough to speed up to a steady 50 mph. I didn't think the traffic were being stupid; there was slush and spray ad it was unsafe. You could tell going 40 or 45 was a good thing because there were no obvious spin outs and death-crashes. Took a long time to get anywhere, though. And I may not have made the best choices at some points, but on the other handn I was never lost either.

So I reached Piscataway in about ten hours, and it was at least a change from being home feeling anxious (I think intense snow a any deadlines at all(I don't want to miss Christmas) makes me vaguely unhappy, which is a pity because it really is pretty and as long as I have electricity I am greatly blessed). And soon we will have pizza which is better here.

The Mt. Kisco exit off 684 is a terrible place to get gas, as it turns out the gas stations are MILES off the road and has only expensive attendant-driven gas stations, but it has a KICKASS United Methodist church which this picture does not show up its weird wonderfulness, although I may have just been tired.

There is a good oldies station in New York (FM 104.3)a) but they are SO WRONG about the best Christmas Rock and Roll of All Time #3 being Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time even if it is a vicious brainworm, and b)it fades out well before I get to Piscataway.

Quiche for breakfast. I should come here more often.

for some values of normal

2008-12-19T11:13:00.003-05:00

The power came back on at two in the morning on Wednesday!! I flushed the toilet out of sheer joie de vivre! As of eighty-thirty, the internet was still having difficulties, so I will go turn the router off and on a few times after I have drunken my freshly made hot tea and perhaps had a shower! It's italics time all over; well, over all but about 80,000 of 400,000+ households. For whom it may be after Christmas before they get their power back.

I did not mention that my parents had obtained me a little pack of four Coleman four-Double A-battery lanterns, which looked like toys or lights for pagans wishing to set up a circle in an area of high winds (four colors). They also gave me a package of 32 AA batteries. I was pleased but surprised to find they were really good and each gave as much light as my reliable Czech railway lanterns. And no chimneys to clean, no fear of inadvertently spilling kerosene and provoking a fiery disaster (Not quite as romantic and not so easy to know when one is running out of fuel, either). But I was surprised how lighthearted the lanterns made me.

So soon I will throw away a few things from the refrigerators and --

oh yeah, so far I have something over three inches of white fluffy snow with more and some freezing rain to come. Gibber. How winterwonderland for the visitor from California.

Now it's Friday. The snow (10" - 14") is not supposed to start until this afternoon, and it's supposed to be over after midnight, and Paul has promised to come plow me out so I can go to New Jersey. If it is completely Apocalyptic (Fimbulwinter) we will see if we need to send in a ringer from MA. And something else is supposed to happen on Sunday, and I am supposed to get back on Monday. I feel the weather is getting out of hand. And Christmas. Could we just take a deep breath and a few days off?

Pictures:
Some of these (there are a lot of black and white photos here, no captions) are just lovely, the trees and fences in snow and some of New York. I am not as much a fan of the chimneys, but I can see why he liked them.