cold with a lack of focus

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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.

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

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.