Not quite April

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

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...

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.