The Kid Who Walks Through Walls

The reason for those two fleeting days of Mongolian cheesemaking experiments is getting big and strong fast. We may never have another chance to make eezgii -- which is a little sad because I think I screwed it up on the first try. Do not let your eezgii hang for more than two hours, and unless you want your bosgooson uurag sweet and super-mild, add the salt while heating the colostrum. Now back to the kiddy ...

Chiquita may have been a little early and weak to start but she is a bouncy healthy girl now. This morning I decided to let everyone out while the weather was nice. Ish. In less than an hour Joy (the mom) was happily browsing in the front pasture with the other two goats -- not a care in her world -- and ... there was no kid to be seen. Also no bleating.

I assigned my trusty assistant Gromit -- whoops, Ronan -- to go find Chi. Which she did fairly soon. Chi had probably popped under the pasture gate, crossed the foyer pasture to the milking parlor and had wedged herself between the wall and the hay bales and gone to sleep. Only problem being that she could walk through the pallet walls without much effort and then be out in the dog-patrolled area. So before we could have another at-risk kid knocking about the place I let the dogs out the front door and the kids in the back door and everyone home at the time time had a nice little snuggle session with Chi until it was time to pull Joy off the pasture before she ate too much too-fresh grass.

Bosgooson uurag, and while we're at it, gloria palletorum

The wee nanny baby is standing on her own four feet. The bosgooson uurag is hanging to drain and I found that by the time it self-curdled (whey cool! self-curdling cheese!) it had reached pasteurization temperatures, which was good because milking in Joy's stall instead of the milking stand presents some challenges. Here is a picture of the bosgooson uurag (remember to put two dots above all four "o's" -- and let me know if you know how to pronounce that).

And a bonus picture that Ronan took some time back of morning light from the front door. I'm calling it Gloria Palletorum -- the glory of the pallets.

As eezgii as pie -- what to do with colostrum

Joy's udder is huge and she only has one dinky kid. So why waste the colostrum? I started looking around for colostrum cheeses and found these two handy recipes from a vastly cool website promoting Mongolian nomadic life. I'm going to try the bosgooson uurag first and then the less easy eezgii. For the curious this website is detailed and involved and goes far beyond dairy products -- but probably exceptionally handy if you keep Bashkir ponies for dairy purposes. Or camels. http://www.mandal.ca/d/Dairy_products.html

Here are the recipes:

Bösgöösön uurag

The colostrum secreted for a few days after parturition. This milk has a high protein content and produces a thick, cheese-like substance when heated, which can be sliced and eaten. The colostrum is collected in a special container, which is then suspended in a pot of water that is heated to a boil, taking care that the boiling water does not spill into the container of milk. The milk can also be heated by steaming. The resulting product has a sweet flavour.

Uurgiin eezgii

Eezgii made from the colostrum of cows, sheep or goats. The colostrum is boiled and caused to separate, then continued to be heated until the whey has been boiled off.

Back to work

I haven't written much about writing in this blog allegedly about writing and rural living. Today, though, I go back to my fourth day at my new job (more on that later -- or not) and back to co-teaching the creative writing elective at the alternative high school. This term we're doing poetry. After feeling actively thwarted and nearly defeated by -- uh, hmmmm -- certain processes within the school system, I am gathering up a little emotional momentum as I pack the books Olive and I will need for the class. Whether we get much writing done is one thing, but we will get some "enrichment" in.

The plan for today is for the students to each write a catalogue poem. AKA, a list poem. Part of the rhythm and structure is provided by this repeating phrase:

If I were a _________,
I'd be a _______________,
because __________________________.

The first two parts is where exploration comes in as I have brought in books on native plants; horses; birds; art by Michelangelo, Brueghel, and Goya; Chinese characters; saltwater fish; knots and splices; mushrooms; and weather. We will also wing it without books on such possibilities as tools, geometric shapes, land forms, architectural structures....

The "because" part is where the students work on "unpacking". I've noticed that the teens have a tendency to compress all their thinking and description into single words that are often so general as to convey no significant meaning. Words like: awesome, cool, hella.

If someone writes:

If I were a mushroom,
I'd be an amanita muscaria,
because they're so awesome!

That doesn't really tell you much about what's going on in the writer's head or even anything identifying about the mushroom if you don't know it. (But, yes, this species is a favorite among high school writers.)

But if someone writes,

If I were a rock,
I'd be malachite.
It emits a poison gas when cut -- don't mess with me!

That at least is telling you a little something about the rock but also about the state of mind of the writer. (It also shows the writer how s/he can play with the suggested rhythm of the poem, breaking it and reintroducing it, to manipulate and maintain attention.)

But -- wow! time is getting on and for now, I gotta go let the ducks out, milk the goats, and head off to work.

Tis also the season for demolition

Last year on the day after Christmas we tore up the kitchen floor. Unlike the last kitchen floor we demolished, we only had to go down to the bare dirt in half the room. But also unlike the last kitchen floor, it was winter this time rather than the height of summer and we never had to pull out the old sill plate and prop the house up with a car jack. Ah, the memories. Asbestos dust, respirators, dust masks. Dry rot. Boring beetles as big around as my pinky finger ...

[Photo: This was our door to the kitchen and the outside world. Stella, our wood cookstove, turned out to be fully up to task of keeping us warm as long as the temperature didn't go below 25 degrees F. The kitchen's wall-mounted cupboard sat on two potting tables in the dining room. The refrigerator was at the other end of the dining room table. The chest freezer spent most of 2010 in the front hallway.]

It seemed to me that 2010 had been a slow year -- after the kitchen achieved a usuable state (NOT a finished state, that still hasn't happened), at the end of January. It took nine months to finish fencing the front acre and half for goat pasture. But we did tear the carpet out of the new 10' x 12' pantry (previously Peach's transition aviary and before that a bedroom) all in one morning. The shelves went up in the afternoon. All of this came much to the surprise of the teenagers who slept through the pounding and cling to the mistaken notion that people are supposed to relax on their birthdays, holidays, and weekends.

This Christmas break Matthew finished the goat fence and put up two trims boards in the kitchen. But all in all its been too much of a holiday. All this sleeping in until 7:30 is getting me down, although Matt seems none the worse for making it to almost ten o'clock once or twice. The dogs fill the house with narcoleptoids (drowse-inducing pheromones) and try to inspire us to lay around sleeping like they do, but how can we do that when every time we want to sit for a moment by the fire we have to shove, pry, drag, and otherwise forcibly evict from the couch or the chair a previously happy dog.

The house meanwhile, has achieved a state of maximum clutter (even for us) because we are preparing to expand the teens' room out into another section of the house and all that stuff had to go somewhere. This made now as good a time as any to implement another plan I have, which is to install floor to ceiling bookshelves in the sitting room and thereby get a look at what really is under all the Pink Chablis carpeting (ack!) in preparation for tearing it out some other Christmas holiday.

We started by taking down our fabulous tree. Then we shoved all the other junk lying around into other corners of the house and tore into it. And lo! Below the carpet lay an oak floor. One that previous owner of this house used as a dropcloth. I say, we may be uncivilized and gauche but using a hardwood floor as a plasterers' and painters' tarp definitely the wins the Yobbo Prize in my book. Which also makes yobbo the word of the day. It's Brit-speak for lout, yokel, hooligan, idjit. "Yob" for short.
But that's just my opinion. I am sure that, should this house survive us living in it, the next inhabitants of the Fujiko Farm manor will also spend a lot of time on many projects shaking their heads and wondering: why on earth did those yobs we bought this pit from do this that way???

A low-key way of getting a tree

Hard to write this piece while we're still waiting to know if Jay's seventeen-year-old son is going to pull through, and what the situation will be when Ben regains consciousness. But here goes ... cognitive dissonance ... 'tis the season.

* * *

"Did you get your tree yet?" my dad asked.
"Yeah, but I'm not telling you how. I'll send the story to you."
"You stole it," mom said.
"Hey! who ratted?"
"No one," she said. "I just figured."

* * *

Well, I don't know, was it stolen or wasn't it? Our next door neighbor said we could take any trees we wanted on his property. As in whole Douglas Fir trees sixty, seventy, eighty feet tall. In a year or more, we never got around to it. Matt complained that the trees were too wolfy to be worth the bother. Knotted and limbed all the way to the ground. Difficult, even as firewood.

Then it got to be near Christmas and we merry procrastinators still didn't have a tree. I was leaning on the goatshed door waiting for Joy to finish her food and studying the treetops in the neighbor's yard -- a yard now pretty much owned by Bank of America, foreclosure date, charmingly enough, February 14. When I saw one I thought would do nicely.

Matt also said it wasn't worth climbing a tree and cutting the top out of it because the tops of firs are rangy and you can take ten feet of a tree and only have three or four side branches. Oh, but not that tree right there. Right next to our neighbor's music studio. That tree had already lost its crown a long time ago and had a bushy, forked top.

Thus, in a moment of weakness, Matt was bullied into helping me get the tree this year. All the other years, Matt and Ronan got the tree together or Matt brought the tree home as part of some forestry job he was doing. Matt insisted on doing a proper professional job of topping the tree, despite that the thing so limby, I couldn't have fallen out of it if I tried, Matt insisted on doing a thorough job of it. He harnessed both of us up, complete with fliplines, safety ropes, prussock knots, everything but spurs. He also, gallantly, carried the saw up with him. I should have protested and brought the saw up myself, but it was just as well: there were so many tight spaces to squeeze through between all the limbs and the tree was soppy wet and slippery -- "Greasy," Matty called it -- that by the time I'd pulled my way up fifty or so feet to just below the spot I'd be sawing, I was already tired.

[Above left: at least one of us was partially dressed in seasonal attire. That would be Matt, in his seasonal oiled "tin jacket". My low-budget version of rain gear is having another set of clothes to change into when I'm done.]

Ronan was our groundman. She held the rope that she would use for lowering the topped treetop down to the ground. I put in a face cut. Matt helped with the back cut, turning one arborist's handsaw into a momentary misery whip. Then we pushed the top out of the tree and ... watched it hang up in all the branches about ten feet below.

Getting me and the Christmas tree down was more work than climbing up. My lowering rope kept binding in tight crotches and I had to swing out onto other limbs and dance around and jump up and down to get the Christmas tree to dislodge and fall to the next level of hanging up. But eventually it was on the ground.

We three happy tree poachers dragged our kill to the front deck where we trimmed it. When we got it inside and up (tied to hooks inbedded in studs in the wall to keep it from toppling over), I realized that the tree was not just a tree with two tops. It had bunches. In fact, it was a tree cup.

[Right: Tree cup. And a photo of a dog experiencing cognitive dissonance. Beta had just returned from an all night 12-mile hike with her previous person. Her she is back in her own house where she usually goes straight into the chair nearest the cookstove. But she feels guilty because she was so happy to be with Olive all night. Now she's back with both her favorite people and her best friend (Sophie, our other dog) and she doesn't know what to do with her feelings of divided loyalties. I gave her some counseling and invited her up into her favorite chair and pretty soon she was over it.]

It was such a beautiful tree cup that Ronan said she didn't want to put ornaments on it. Which is why we hung our presents as the ornaments -- our symbolic fruit would actually be harvested at Christmas, and then filled the big bowl at the tree's center with all the objects too heavy to hang.

[Here we have Ronan wearing her festive "Don't Talk to Me" shirt and looking like an elf with attitude.]

I would really like to get a picture with all seven or nine of us around the tree, but Pat is already gone visiting down south and the four teenagers in our lives are hard to track during the holidays. We've gotten the goats taken care of: they got a new pasture for the holidays. The dogs have our neighbors' too long leftover turkey to garnish their dinners. Now what can I get for the skunks under the goat shed?

And sometimes there is nothing you can say or do

I thought about my friend Jay and his son, Ben, and his wife Renee when the little thrush plopped into and back out of our lives yesterday. Sometimes it's so easy. Sometimes even a stressfest like our goat, O'un, being pronounced "brain dead" seems like it was so easy ... only one week later and she was back. Not just back, her personality was back, too. When we nursed O'un back to life one blackberry leaf and knotweed sprig at a time I wondered what brain damage would like in a goat. But we never found out because O'un was exactly the same. The leader of the herd. A pushy matriarch but sensible for a goat, certainly no more stupid than before her near-death experience.

But then other times there is nothing you can say or do to heave things back into alignment. You can just wait.

Last Saturday my friend's son collapsed in front of him. An artery had burst in his brain. All week his parents have lived in a hospital netherworld and I have gone about my ordinary life of getting Ronan to school, doing a fundraiser for a Cambodian orphanage, going to another fundraiser for our river's watershed, milking O'un, doing whatever, I waited and wondered how things were going for Ben and his parents. On Friday I learned that eight hours of brain surgery on Tuesday fixed the arterial problem but Ben had yet to regain full consciousness.

Now I've been told by the friends-of-Jay grapevine that Ben has pneumonia and that they are having difficulty getting his temperature down. His parents wait helplessly there at Riverbend.
The family's friends wait helplessly wherever we are. Seven drops of water and a little snuggle time over a warm heart are not going to be enough to fix this. If there is a magic blackberry leaf for Ben, we haven't found it yet. We just wait. Tell Jay and Renee we're thinking of them and ... and ...are afraid to say anything else for how lame and helpless it all feels.

If you know Jay or have seen him play at the Art of Everything or at the Axe, he is posting any news there is to his facebook page from the hospital. Text messages or e-mail are preferred over phone calls. I don't know what else to say.

Seven drops of water, three poops later

I was talking on the phone with my co-teacher, Olive, setting up a time to do a work session on issue two of the The Mirror, when I looked out the door and saw a little bird sitting on the doormat with its wings spread. It was mouth-breathing.

Hung up. Picked the bird up. Gave it a drop of water from my fingertip. It swallowed. Gave it several more. The little thing kept swallowing. Good.

Got Ronan. Sat her in the chair by the fire with the bird on her chest. Fed Ronan tea and leftover cream puffs from the Watershed fundraiser last night. Ronan said, "It pooped on your shirt." Great!

Ten minutes and two poops later (one in Ronan's hand) and the bird was ready to go outside. Ronan opened her hands. The bird sat there for moment soaking up the morning sun, then flew off across the garden and up into a young fir tree.

Nice to have an easy fix sometimes in amongst the complications. Now on to making cranberry and walnut chevre and thinking about my Oregon Quarterly essay submission -- due January 15th. haven't started it yet. Oh, right, and then there's that magazine issue to publish. Isn't that what I was doing when this started?

Having a bit of a hard time maintaining focus lately, as you can see.

Mirror - Chimera

Still catching up on past adventures ...

Last year Olive Delsol and I co-taught a creative writing class at Kennedy Alternative High School on a volunteer basis. The first term was mostly free-writing and Olive and I working to come up with prompts that would engage the students -- and coping with how the class was almost never the same group of people. For the second term we decided on a curriculum of reading and writing our way through the early history of storytelling (fables, fairy tales, myths, and legends). That term was also when we "teachers" spent a lot of time learning how to keep the class on an even keel while our students coped with their often tumultuous lives. For the third term the class decided to produce Kennedy's first ever literary magazine. Many deadlines were blown and Olive and I kept reminding ourselves that the students were working mostly in the dark, having never produced and held in their hands a final product like we were making. In the end it all came together: 48 pages of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and lots of art funded by ten donors in our Cottage Grove community. During that same push to deadline, Olive and I found out about a grant four days before it was due; we wrote up our proposal, hand-delivered it with at least 20 minutes to spare, and later received $2000 to continue our class next year and produce three more issues of the magazine.

About the photo: the first issue of The Kennedy Mirror was called The Chimera because of our myth and legend work. Also a chimera is a fabulous creature of disparate parts (such as lion, goat, snake) that can spit fire. Five students made the parts of the chimera and its fireball.

My story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

I don't know why this achievement is so hard for me to talk about. Or why writing the bio blurb requested by the editor/publisher nearly crashed my brain's hard drive. But I'm all better now.

The story was purchased in spring of 2009 and appeared in the May/June issue of F&SF. If any of my friends and family reading this want a copy of the magazine, let me know, and I'll send you one. The local bookstore ordered fifty copies and we've gone through almost all of them. One or two can still be found, and if we order another twenty copies then Gordon Van Gelder will have reached the break-even point right there in terms of making make back what he paid me.

Loki's magic gumball

Our eldest daughter, Shaura, and her partner, Neil, arrived from Sheffield, England, a week and half ago -- tired, cranky with each other, and both recovering from recent visits to the dentist. They got past the tired and cranky quickly but the legendary problems of British teeth were not so easily vanquished.

Shaura had recently had a root canal; Neil had an abcessed tooth pulled the day before takeoff. Shaura did fine. Neil's abscess continued to fester and he developed dry socket, too. Both are painful and possibly life-threatening because of the close proximity to the brain. I went online to see what we could do and found a little bit of advice and much admonishment to call a dentist as soon as possible. Things weren't looking good. Besides that seeing a dentist on an emergency basis was beyond the financial capacity of all four of us combined, we were heading into the 4th of July weekend.

Improvisation was needed.

A friend volunteered a few Vicodin, which we split in half to make them last longer. I took the one piece of not-stupid-sounding advice found on google for abscessed tooth (put a tea bag on it) and combined it with my experience with honey. Honey is my favorite method for avoiding trips to the emergency room for stitches and other forms of medical torture -- I successfully reattached a nearly severed fingertip with honey and I still have feeling in it, too.

Honey is antiseptic and a growth stimulant. Every wound I have treated with honey has healed extraordinarily fast and with little or no scarring. Little cuts and burns that I can't be bothered to treat take much longer to heal and leave scars that last for years because I scar rather easily.

So, I combined the abscess-drawing property of the dry, powdered, black tea with the healing powers of honey by cutting the end off of a rolled up tea bag then wrapping it in a patch of gauze soaked and slathered in honey. Neil put the "gumball" in the empty socket at night and once or twice during the day. The tea, we found, kept the gumball in place (we'd tried just honey and gauze before I found out about the tea). Before the weekend was over, the abscess had drained and the socket was beginning to fill in with new gum-flesh. Despite that Neil was present when I cut my fingertip (he was helping me butcher a goat), he seemed as surprised as he was pleased that the gumball worked. But I trust that since he says his Facebook photo of himself with Peach the scrub jay perched on his shoulder makes for great storytelling at the pubs, that his gumball cure story will soon be up there in his favorite recountings of his adventures in the wilds of Oregon. (Unless, that is, he or Shaura has a close encounter with a mountain lion while she's doing her Vision Quest. She's going "up on the hill" as I write this.)

One final note: Neil says he thought the 1/6 teaspoon of tea in the gumball made it a little hard to sleep. This may have been jet lag, but if you have any concern about this, you can try finding decaf teabags should you ever need to try this remedy.

It takes a village to graduate a Tanner

Also beginning in late February Tanner and Alicia moved in with us. They are students at the high school Matt works at. I volunteer there, teaching creative writing. (We won't go into the details of the whys behind their moving in, but contrary to jokes among the staff, we don't plan to take on two kids every year. The house is full up for now.)

At right is Alicia, catching up on some English homework, while Tanner does math.


After settling in, Tanner suddenly decided (in May) that he wanted to graduate this year after all, rather than after fall term -- a decision that required piles of work to be done: 180 pages of math worksheets, plus 28 hours logged on a computer for more math, two books read and two 4-page reports written about them, among other assignments. There was absolutely no way he could do it all without a set schedule that portioned all the work out into one small mountain to be summited each night. We all pitched in, including Ronan, who supplied us with math formulas for calculating percentages over and over again when we couldn't remember them from one problem to the next. Although Tanner likes science fiction, reading is not something that comes easily for him, so I did a "Story Time" every night for an hour or so to get those books done. I intend to pick "Story Time" back up and make it a regular family event ... starting maybe after graduation. Which Tanner is going to!! Saturday! June 12!!! He's not the only one counting down the days. [Above is Matthew taking a shift at helping with math.]

Tanner also has his first real job interview today, in just a couple of hours. For Oregon Woods. He wants to do wildland firefighting this summer (if it ever stops raining). He's all nervous ... and clean, and shaved, and dressed neatly. It's so cute. (Man, this is the way to have teenagers -- get them after they've done all their crazy rebellious stuff. ... or so we hope.)

At right is a picture of Tanner helping make pizza for dinner. Between rolling out crusts, he drew a picture of an oak tree in floor on the new stainless steel counter. He was taking a picture of his artwork.

Alicia is at least two years away from graduating. She'll be doing independent projects from home next year, studying writing, sewing, gardening, auto mechanics, math, and art -- for starters. We both hope we can make that work for her.

Haiti Benefit

Did this really happen this year? The benefit in late February seems so long ago. It was held at the Axe and Fiddle, so many bands playing in seven hours that we had to move each one on and off in about 45 minutes. Began with the Coyote Singers native drumming group -- which could be heard for a block down the street -- and ending with Fijian bluesman Inoke Baravilala. Other friends made Haitian style food to serve to people. There were raffles, etc.. Next time I think "Well Matt and I could send a hundred dollars to Haiti or we could spend a hundred dollars to have a benefit and raise more..." I need to remember the 60+ hours of coordination that went into it. But Partners In Health got over $1000 and everyone had a good time. Can't get the beautiful flyer made by Ivan Delsol to upload, possibly because it's a pdf file.

I've been planning to have a second benefit for Haiti this summer, specifically for the cinema school that was leveled. Show films from and about Haiti and from the film school. May wait for my daughter to get here from England with her partner so I can dragoon them into helping.

Floor is done -- on to the next thing

Been a long time and many adventures and misadventures have happened fast enough to keep me from keeping up with this blog. I'm trying to post a few updates in quick succession now.

Here is our kitchen at its worst. To the left of Kyle is the little orange heavy-duty jack that was all that was holding this side of a two-storey house up. We were reallly lucky that this particular part of the winter was mild. With just a double layer of blankets closing off the kitchen we were able to keep the house toasty warm with Stella (our cookstove) going morning and night.

Kyle DeBord here always comes to help out when we have gnarly construction projects that are two big for us.

Over two months after we started we finally had a floor and soon after that we could stop living with a refrigerator parked at the end of the dinner table -- although sometimes this was a handy location for it. Here is Ronan getting her only chance to skate on a smooth surface a country girl is ever likely to have. Even the paved parts of the Weyerhaeuser logging road are so rough that skating on them would jar even a young person's teeth loose.

Five months later we do have a sink and several counter- and cupboard-like items installed but the trim still remains to be done. (I say it this way because everything we've put in the new kitchen is easily removable, even -- or especially -- my gorgeous steel sink with both basins deep enough to get a five-gallon carboy under the faucet.) I never seem to have the camera on hand during the two seconds every few days that the kitchen is clean enough to have its picture taken. Nor have I had any time lately to brew beer or make wine, which was the whole point to the deep sink.

You Know You've been unemployed too long when ...

you turn in a proposal to teach a fiction-writing class at the local community college wearing the same clothes you milked the goats in.

In my defense I will say that Olive (my co-teacher http://blogs.myspace.com/aeonnow) and I finished writing the proposal the day it was due and I thought I was just dropping it off at Lane Community College office where it would be put in the director's mailbox until she arrived at work. I didn't know her hours, but I knew she worked some evenings. When I handed the envelope over to the receptionist, she said -- before I could escape: "Can you stay? She wants to talk to you." Uh oh.

I looked down at my shirt, a long-dead leftover from my last professional job. It had been patched with silk-screened swatches of reproductions of another friend's art. But still more holes awaited new art. The whole bottom of the multi-coloured flannel shirt had come unhemmed and I had stopped the unraveling by painting a border in black acrylic along the edge. I hastily zipped my jacket up to cover it. The jacket, though a red fleece, had some soot smears from the woodstove and many bits of hay and seeds that had worked their way into the fabric and won't be coming out until they dissolve in the wash some distant day. However ...

You know you're in Cottage Grove when:

none of this matters and the director greets you by name, never casts so much as glance at your clothes, tells you that you did your homework well in preparing the proposal, and gives you not just a handshake but a double-palmed handhug at the end of the discussion. She also said (from looking at the attached supporting materials) that she would love it if I were to offer a feltmaking class.

Oh dang, I was going to throw in a link for Cada's art but I have to load Joy into the truck for a trip to the vet. Later --

The Nightmare After Christmas -- A Fujiko Farm Holiday: Part 1

The festivities started on the Solstice with the First Annual Solstice Mud Wallow at Dorena Reservoir -- but I'll get back to that in a later post. Maybe. If not, use your imagination on that one. On Christmas we exchanged gifts and then went to some hot springs, steamed ourselves for a couple of hours and then found a Chinese buffet that was open and feasted on sushi, crab legs, and many other things. We didn't notice the fried frog legs until we were too full and limp to feel adventurous. The next day Ronan and I raced off the coast with Valerie and Bruce to do some impromptu whale watching. I'm not sure those wispy things I saw in the binoculars were whales' spoutings or just wave spume. But it was a bright sunny day at the coast (whereas Cottage Grove was fogged in), so it was plenty of fun whales or no whales. The first picture here is the remains of a sign warning people that the breakwall is not designed for walking on, blah-de-blah, proceed at your own risk. The next photo is of Ronan proceeding at her own risk. (Or that would be the next photo, but it got deleted.) We tried to make it out to the very furthest point but the tide was coming in and getting doused, ducked, or drowned by a sleeper wave would have put a damper on the dinner (fish and chips, of course!) that we were looking forward to having, so we turned back after scrabbling two-third of the way out. My hip joints felt plenty exercised from clambering up and over all those boulders.

Then on Sunday the real fun began: we started moving the major appliances out of the kitchen so that we could tear up the floor and have a new one put in. By somebody else! Yahoo! We won't be laying the tiles!! I may just have to pull up a chair and watch the tile layers work; it will be such a treat to not be doing it ourselves. ... But WE have to tear out the old stuff and get it ready for them. And then after glorious relief of watching someone else work, I will get the job of applying the wax. Knowing our house and its many mysteries and pitfalls, we figured that tearing out the old floor would make up for any guilt we might feel for not having the thrift and spine to lay the tiles ourselves. Last time we tore out a kitchen floor -- the one in the "apartment" side of our house, we found that there wasn't anything solid underneath it. By the time we removed everything that couldn't be saved, we were left with a big patch of dirt with some water pipes running across it and the outer skin of the two outside walls. That job took one month of working every day to complete. My housemates are extremely patient people.

There kitchen wasn't small because it had room for a dinette in it. Our kitchen is on the huge side, a "farm kitchen" at 14 feet by 21, approximately. The first day all we did was get the buckets of bulk foods, the carboys of wine and cider, the two freezers and the fridge moved out and stowed in the back bedroom, the entry hall, and the dining room. We stopped early ( at 4:00 p.m.) and went to Tom and Lila's for a potluck and as much wine as we could put away without having to deal with a hangover the next day.

Later as I was looking at the now-vacant half of the kitchen I suggested to Matt that we tear up that half of the floor first, put down the plywood underlayment and then tear out the side of the kitchen with the counters, the sink and the dishwasher. I suggested this because I thought there would an open crater in the house that would be belching cold air up into the house. I hung a sheet and a blanket over the doorway to the kitchen, both to stop (or slow) the draft and to block most of the demolition dust from getting into the rest of the house. Much to our surprise and relief we discovered decking under the particle board. The decking has made this project much less of a nightmare than it could have been. Ah, but other trials awaited us .... To be continued.

odds and sods

Ah well, so much for getting back to posting at least once a week. Here are some of the things keeping that goal as an aspiration rather than an achieved done deal. Some of these odds-and-sods are from back in November.

NaNoWriMo. (Google it for more details, and you might understand why I don't have time to throw in links or to edit my sentences down to reasonable sizes.)

I've joined NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) because (being slow) I finally figured out what it was for: forcing yourself to generate a complete rough draft to an idea without stopping to fix everything and therefore never getting past the first few chapters. The goal for NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month of November. I am assuming it also means that your novel should have at least a semblance of a beginning, a middle, and an end and not just be 50,000 words of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Although I hear tell, that repetitions of something like this can fill part of the middle ... whatever it takes to keep you going.

Me, I'm at 37,212 words as of this moment and I have a comfortable 12 days left to get the remaining 13K in. I'm not counting Thanksgiving as a writing day. My success thus far is entirely predicated on cheating. The first 12K where the first couple of chapters of the novel, which I had written well before the summer when no writing happens. The next 14K or so came by cutting and pasting already typed sections from a file of notes and scenes. While cutting and pasting I envisioned and wrote the last paragraph of the whole novel, so victory is nearly assured. Jai ho! I have the ending already! Plus, if I absolutely fall down and get swept away by the holiday, mushroom hunting, quinces, wine making, working on a "found art" sculpture project with Ronan that involves frequent walks along the lakeside ... I can always - on the morning of November 30th - paste in the 31,000-word prequel to the novel, which although a stand-alone novella is intrinsic to the story and will have to be placed at the beginning of the book, when there is one. And I will have more than hit he 50K finish line.

Peach update. (Photo: "Peach is Gone". Ronan thought this was the most appropriate photo from Peach's last visit to scroung off our table. He's the gray blur there as he shoots back out the door.)

Attachment parenting really does raise healthy independent children, even when you least expect it. Peach went everywhere with us during his formative days, ate at the table, sleep in or next to our bed, had free reign of the house while learning to forage, and then started going outside for longer and longer periods of time. At first Peach would drop by to terrorize children, defend territory, taunt cats, score some treats from mom (mostly mealworms and organic goatmilk mozzeralla, what a life!), and have a bath in a pie plate full of water provided for his convenience. Now he doesn't even say hello or acknowledge that he knows us. The only way I know Peach is still alive is I because they two scrubs jays he moved in with are still flying around as a flock of three -- and, yeah, I fancy I recognize his voice even if he refuses to recognize mine. Some friends of mine chided me about the about empty-nest syndrome and said "Kids have to leave home some time and make their own life." To which I thought, yeah, and where did my kid go? He moved right back in with his other parents! I've raised someone else's Boomerang Baby! Scrub jays, though, often allow last year''s kids, both sons and daughters, to hang around and help with next year's kids. They learn more about life and get better it, making them more likely to succeed when they do strike out on their own. I don't know if mom and dad scrub jay were aware of Peach all along -- they certainly could hear him carrying on in the house -- or if they recognized him by other means. Possibly the "other means", because Peach was attacked, just once, by papa Jay shortly after he started going outside.

Soft landing for Mushy Processed Peas.
Photo: A very young Mush! plays with Ronan's "Pet Shop" toys.

Sometimes I forget that Mush! has two names: Mush! as in the sled dog command and Mushy Processed Peas, because Ronan loves the whole name and notion of Mushy Processed Peas, a British culinary favorite that comes in cans labelled with those very words and a painted illustration of something that looks like a pile of baby poo. Really, I thought we had gone to far with raising Mush! I wasn't sure she would ever figure out how to be a duck after hanging out with us, sleeping next to the bed, and watching "Bones" with Ronan and her cat. But the same open door policy that worked with Peach is working for Mush! At first I would put her outside with the other ducks and she would ignore them. When she was done exploring the world, she would potter down to the house to come in and get fed and take a nap under the dining room table or near wherever someone was studying or working. Then she started staying out all day, but hanging around outside the door at lunchtime. Now, she doesn't want to be fed extra because it means coming away from the flock for a moment.

NaNoWriMo, again. I did my 50,147 words by November 29th. And wrote the end scene to the story, too. Still vey much a rough rough rough draft, but I got it done. Now I have a novelette to finish by Tuesday evening and an essay to write for an Oregon Quarterly contest that ends January 31.

Deep freeze. Only one burst pipe so far and it was on the outside of the house. Been without hot water for three days, without running water at all for one day. But we have Stella (our cookstove) heating potable water for us and water to flush the toilets coming out of a dounspout. We're working on getting the water back on at this very moment. Gotta go!

Photo: Ronan with the giant ice beer bugs we keep melting and tipping out of the goats' water buckets.

speed wedding

Matty and I had our wedding a few Sundays back. It was a speed wedding. Like speed dating, only different. I think I got the whole thing wrapped up in under three minutes, between Matt packing his sandwiches and his rushing off to work. I can't remember what job he was going off to do, but I do remember it was a Sunday because I recalled as I got the wedding (ear)rings and came down the stairs that Saturday, not Sunday, is the typical wedding day. Oh, well, I wasn't going to wait another week; I could very well have lost the earrings by then and besides, I'd just cleaned them both in hydrogen peroxide. The wrong day of the week was fitting, too, in our -- or at least my -- general wrong-headed approach to life.

How did this start?

My own marriage was a bit of a bust. It was a seven-minute legal ceremony at the registrar's office in Carlisle, United Kingdom. Being over seven months pregnant at the time, I was not of sound mind. I don't remember what I promised or even what day it was. Was it May 23? 25? Or 27? All I remember was that the music that I chose from a list of seven-minute selections was "Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity" from Gustav Holst's The Planets. In May of 1998, I was in marooned in a small town (2000 people and nine pubs -- at I time when I couldn't drink) in a country that I had lived in for less than two months and my only friend, a crazy archeologist from Leeds, nearly got us all kicked out of the registrar's office when he threw a fit, even if it was a well-intentioned fit.

As for the after-the-legal-proceeding party, I christened that "the endurance picnic." We went to a stone circle called Long Meg and Her Sisters. It was really cold and windy -- we're talking northern England, it may have gotten around to sleeting. After enduring all I could of watching the guys get loaded, I went to the car and lay down and waited for it to be over while Matt and the archeologist and a couple of the young sons of some friends of Matt talked and smoked and climbed the standing stones.

All in all, I admit, I have sometimes, for seconds on end, fantasized about having an official wedding (since a wedding and a marriage are separate actions) as a sort of do-over of the whole commitment experience. My good friend Katie thought a wedding would be fun. I like parties, at least in theory. But ...

among other quirks, I am unable to wear any jewelry other than one gold ring in my left ear. Matt could maybe wear a wedding ring. Hard to say, though, since his last wedding ring stayed on less than an hour or two before he lost it when someone overturned the raft he was in. He never saw the ring again. Besides jewelry is a work hazard for Matt. Between our two records, neither of us saw the point to spending money on the things. But ...

Matt had mentioned that he would like to start wearing earrings again -- unlike me, both his ears are pierced. A few days later, I looked over at the statue of a Harpy that's next to my computer and noticed she was holding up my one gold earring. I remembered that my mother was keeping the match to it -- so that I wouldn't lose it. I called mom up and asked her to send me the ring. I joked to Matt that we could finally have wedding rings and that I would get (or find) a nice stud for his other ear, or maybe Ronan would lend him one of hers. Best off all, this earring was nicely designed by some goldsmith in Italy: pull hard on it (or get a branch caught in it) and the earring will just unlatch and come off -- way better than having it tear through your ear lobe. So, now we've got the rings, but ...

a wedding and a reception are also separate actions.

I've been to a heap of weddings lately: five in the last five years as opposed to zero in the preceding twenty. Much as I love the people involved, I'm not great at sitting still or paying attention for very many minutes, so I've always thought that the reception was the payment offered to friends by friends not just for your wedding gift to them but for your patience sitting through their lovely and lovingly crafted ceremony. So I got to thinking about how I don't really care much for weddings and how I care way Way WAY less for fussing and planning and spending money on stupid things like dresses and flowers and - ohmigosh! - the sleeting gobs of annoying details that go with weddings of which I have been able to remain blissfully ignorant.

And I thought: Sorry, Katie, no wedding -- but maybe I will come up with a reason and a trouble-free way to throw a big party someday.

I also thought: I am pretty sure I never liked those vows I couldn't remember. But I also didn't intend to spend hours, days, whatever, thinking of the perfect handcrafted vows. Quickly, I rousted Ronan, our best man/maid of honor/ring bearer/flowerless flower girl out of bed, grabbed the audience (Mush! the duck) and carried her downstairs (the audience/duck, not my daughter, who does stairs fine on her own). I gave Ronan the box with the freshly cleaned earrings in it, spun Matt away from the counter and sang the tune of "Here Comes the Bride" as fast as I could. I skipped from there straight to my vows, which were: "I promise to look out for you and second guess you to the best of my ability." Matt answered with: "I promise to look out for you and not to second guess yo--"

at which point I reminded him of how much I need someone to second-guess me sometimes, so he amended his vows to:

"and to try to keep you from doing stupid things." I put his earring on. He put mine on. He grabbed his thermos of tea. I sang that "Wedding March" song really really fast. We kissed. Ronan smiled. The duck twittered. And ...

I forgot the date. It doesn't matter, because ...

I do all my measuring of the length of our relationship from the day we met. It's a day I can remember: April Fool's Day, 1991.

P.S. Our best man/maid of honor/ring bearer and flowergirl also turned out to be our photographer. Perhaps it was the time constraint she was under, but all the pictures came out blurry. She said the digital camera was twitchy, I say she must have - somehow - already had too much. Above left (way above) is the happy couple. Above right is Mush! looking very attentive. We forgot to tell Mush! it's not appropriate to wear black to a wedding. Another nonconformist in the family, oh dear.

P.P.S. Matt's students at Kennedy Alternative High School think his wedding earing is cool. They noticed it right away.

P.P.P.S. My housemates were offended they weren't invited. How could that be? Even my mother wasn't offended. The wedding was at eight in the morning. "Did you really want me to wake you up for a three-minute wedding?" I asked. That settled them down.

website for hikers detained in Iran

Hey there everyone, I'm back from the Spirit World of Sun Dance; Hambaleceya; and a very busy June, July, and first part of August; and a sleepover on Dorena Lake aboard an 18-foot sailboat with three tweenagers and a week-old duckling (the duckling came along as our expert swimmer and also because it's imprinted on Ronan's ankles). I hope to be posting entries again soon, but in the meantime here is my tiny part in helping people get or stay informed about Josh Fattal and his friends. Josh was a coworker of Matthew's at Aprovecho and is a member of our community in Cottage Grove.

The link to a wesite the families of the hikers have created to help with the international negotiations is www.freethehikers.org

The families would appreciate it if you visit their website and also go from there to the associated Facebook page. Thank you.

empty nest -- not quite

My apologies that this entry is a bit dashed off. We have to go get the year's strawberries picked and processed and Ronan and her friends have a sailing lesson with Dean in the afternoon.

We did get an aviary of sorts rigged for Peach. Just in time for the big fundraising party we held for Megan http://cheekymonkeyzine.blogspot.com (The party was a success, allaying my fears and exceeding my expectations. With the additional benefit of a lot of left over beer in the keg that I enjoyed giving away almost as much as I enjoyed drinking it.) Peach's aviary is in the back bedroom that I am planning to make into a pantry. She took to the room right away. Even put herself to bed in it one night when we were up past her bedtime playing a board game called Wildlife. After a considerable time spent playing T-Rex with the plastic figurines, she settled down to thieving money from the bank and defacing the currency. (Again, that's my girl! No respect for the value of money.) She also helped me annoy my fellow players in a closely contested game by taking the money due them from the bank out of my hand and delivering it to anywhere but the hand of the other party. Then, just as Ronan won one roll before I really should have, Peach disappeared. I found her on the wire shelf unit she prefers as a perch, all sleepy and meditative the way she gets after dark. Several days ago we opened the window in the aviary room and took the screen out. Ever alert to novelty, Peach flew to sit on the windowsill right and sat there looking out for some time before flying back into the rest of the house to ask for food, steal pencils, and harass me when I'm talking on the phone. Although she's a sub-adult now, Peach regresses to a toddler when I'm talking on the phone. Hopping from hand to foot, pecking at toes and fingers and the phone receiver, fussing and screeching. Ronan, who has been experiencing some silbing rivalry and jealousy with Peach, has taken on the job of doing predator practice with Peach, chasing her around the house and trying to catch her. It helps Ronan relieve her frustrations about her spoiled little sister (who is now older than her), who messes with her things and appears to have cached an accessory to one of Ronan's Pet Shop toys that she had only just bought that day with her chore money. She hasn't hidden that item in any of her usual spots, either. These days I have to check my shoes before I put them on for stashes of blueberries or rocks and sticks. Matt in particular has to protect his ears from being used as convenient holes for caching mealworms. Anway ... on Wednesday evening Ronan chased Peach into the aviary room. This is "base" for Peach so Ronan broke off the chase right away. Soon Peach went to sit on the windowsill again and after a few minutes of thinking about she flew out and into the cherry tree. For the next hour or so while I made dinner Peach sat in the cherry tree basking in the sun, often with her eyes closed, her beak open, and her wings held open and drooping. I occasionally called to her from the open windon so she would be sure to know how to get back, but she acted like I wasn't there. We had dinner. I fretted but figured this had to happen someday and still thought she might come in at roosting time. After dinner I saw Peach explore the ticket the cherry tree is in and find her way up to the top of the holly tree where the nest she had fallen out of probably still is. I'm not sure if she had an encounter with her biological parents but as I was sitting outside talking with my housemate, Pat, Peach flew into the workshop and let us know she was back, and ready for dinner. I got her some food she flew up to the upstairs balcony so I went in the house and out onto the balcony. Peach came to my shoulder and I took her back in and she's been ignoring the open window ever since. For now. Rather like sister Ronan, Peach is a thoughtful person who prefers to study new situations and then ease into them rather than fly off half cocked. More on the sibling rivalry: Ronan likes to steal Matt's tobacco pouch out of his shirt pocket. Peach clings to his suspenders while she works at liberating pencils from his pocket that she night then stash in his shoulderbag. Both kids are picky eaters and both make quite the fussy at being given something they don't want or no longer like, but only Ronan gets bent when I make a point of how much the other sister likes my lasagne, or pancakes, or bread.

Pictures: Peach on the teapot - all grown up. Peach checking the dirty dishes for yummy treats. Peach working out String Theory. Last picture is Peach messing with (and on) her friend and admirer, Jay Seeley.