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.

Wind turbines: they won't just kill birds and bats

Having my own much more happy goat and bird adventures over the last few weeks, I just now got a moment and enough memory to look up this article. here it is for interested parties. Thanks go to my parents for telling me about in the first place.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/21/archipelago-wind-farm-goats-deaths

Peach: The Teen Days

Peach is a full-blown teenager now. I'm doing the best I can at my usual style of mostly child-led parenting.

Peach graduated from the basket nest to a cage a week or so ago and now doesn't want to be in the cage. I've laid newspaper down under her favorite roosts (she loves Matthew's clothes-drying racks) and let her play when the cats are away.

Like most teens she wants to get around on her own, now. No more perching on shoulders (much). We concerned parents (all three of us) let her. We cringe as she heads for a parking spot and just hope she doesn't crash. When she does we fish her out from behind the couch and she's off again.

Peach has become a picky eater. Before she was just a gaping, squeaking hole that accepted any nutritious offerings. Now ... Peach turns her head as the food is coming towards her so she can get a look at it and scoots away if she doesn't want what you've got. Soaked cat food is o-u-t these days. Cooked egg yolks are not favored. She still likes whites sometimes. She likes my bread a lot. (That's my girl!) Soaked in goatsmilk, please. Also fava beans and raspberries.
Earthworms are great when she's hungry. When she's not hungry but just yelling for no good reason she takes whatever you give her and holds it in her mouth. Last week she would spit it back into my hand but this week the cheeky bugger looks askance at my hand, sidesteps down the branch (or dowel) and then spits it onto the floor as though to say, "Don't even think of giving me that again."

Peach is learning to use her bill. For all kinds of stupid things. Like humans teenagers she believes that mouths are for oral fixations, parents are for food. Last week she would peck on anything that did not look like food: the rod she was sitting on. The wooden arm of the chair. Her feet. the metal wire of the cage. Today for the first time after several session of foraging practice that seemed to go nowhere and while I was ignoring her, Peach flew to the dining room table and instead of asking for food she started gulping down the rice and crumbs I hadn't cleaned up off the tablecloth yet. An untidy house can be a help in raising a jay.

Sometimes when I would be watching Peach try to eat the armchair or not know what to do with a worm that wasn't perfectly positioned in her mouth for her, I would think, am I a failure or is my kid slow? But then I would hear drifting in through the kitchen window all the shrieking teenage demands coming from the top of the holly tree and I would know that the other jays weren't faring any better at getting their teens to seek gainful employment. At least I'm keeping up with the Joneses, in Jayland.

You may be thinking "What happened to the aviary idea?" Well, it pretty much went out the window. Along with the some of the other advice online at bird rescue websites, such as "feed your baby scrub jay chopped mice". Forget it. I'll dig worms and buy her mealworms but I am not catching and chopping mice for her. An aviary was going to be a lot of work keeping her happy in it and cleaning it up afterward and I got to thinking about how we raised Webster and Eggbert - they just hung around with us until they took off for longer and longer periods and then forever. I guess I'm going for the improvise-as-it-comes method.

Peach has gotten way better at flying in the last few days: she showed off a tight aerial u-turn just this morning. She may soon be able to hold her own against a cat, even in the house, should she encounter one. We're still keeping the species separated, though, because Peach spends an unnatural amount of time hopping about on the floor yelling at passing feet, especially during "hoppy hour," which is around eight o'clock in the morning and again at eight at night. While her desire to perch and observe from on high is a demonstrable jay trait (her parents spend a lot of time hanging out on the disused TV antenna on top of our house, getting a break from the kids, no doubt), this floor thing doesn't seem like anything a real jay could get away with. Considering how active Peach has been, I really don't understand how the jays in the holly are learning to fly without winding up on the ground. Although maybe that is what is keeping jays from running the world.

Raising Peach has been a fulfilment of one of my many lifelong dreams. I always wanted to have a corvid, if only temporarily. They're so smart, chatty, and (so I've found) fairly laid-back and easy to take care of. I am also cured now of wanting to find a baby crow or a raven. Once Peach hit her adolescence, she got pretty prickly. Her claws were no longer comfortable on my skin, but a thin shirt was sufficient as a buffer. Not so with the claws of the larger corvids. One would have to deck oneself out like a falconer for those guys.

I have some nice pictures of Peach begging for food at the dining room table and wrestling with a hanging thread on a throw, but for some reason my camera is not speaking to my computer today. Maybe later.

gazingstock

The word of the moment is "gazingstock". I wanted an obscure word for "miracle" to post as the next "word of the week/month/whatever" and this is what I found. The "stock" part only made it more appropriate since O'un is our gazingstock.

O'un is doing grand. She is alpha goat again. Not quite as obnoxiously pushy as she often was before. When she rams another goat out of her way, you can see that she's not putting her whole heart, soul, and weight into it.

For anyone wondering where the "Fujiko" in "Fujiko Farm" comes from, here is a picture of Fujiko with thunderheads. Fujiko is also the mountain (hill, really) pictured on the blog's header when you are at lokikohall.blogspot.com. Fujiko's real name on a map is "Shortridge Hill" but I think that name is dull and the mountain is peerless. There is a way to write Fuji in Japanese - as in Mount Fuji - so that it also reads as "no two" (without peer). Because my hill is little, especially in comparison to Fuji, it gets the ending "ko". To me this all adds up to mean "Little Peerless One." If you click on the picture, though, it should get a little bigger for you.

I'm still pretty scatteredbrained from the last few days. So I'll just close this by saying Ronan's favorite snack food of the moment is a glob of honey wrapped in rose petals from the scented roses. She would probably suggest you try it, but she's at school today. O'un's favorite food today is Japanese knotweed. We have not yet remembered to get some knotweed when it is young, but it supposed to be very good food for humans, too.

There is probably something I'm supposed to be getting out of this besides stressed out

O'un, a.k.a. The Resurrection Queen, has just had her third trip to hell. Her third near-death experience. Her third Vision Quest. The rest of us have had one rough last couple of days.

Just after we sold O'un's half-sister Venus and Venus's two kids, Oun became listless. She had no appetite that night for her grain. The next morning I saw that she hadn't touched the fodder in her manger. She was lying down staring into near space with an "I've lost the will to live" look on her face. Was she that attached the Venus? I wondered. Her belly was swollen and no sounds were coming from her guts.

Matt and I pumped some molasses and yogurt down her and got her out of the sun (where she had chosen to go lie down) and back in her stall. Soon after she was drooling. The vet said he couldn't come until five o'clock. Five o-clock! It was a long hot day. O'un went from being able to stand and walk to lying and staring. To drooling. To sprawled over on her side with her open mouth propped on the pallet wall of her stall, saliva draining away. When the vet got here, her temperature had gone from normal to over 106 degrees. She was super-dehydrated and in nearly complete metabolic failure. Matt and I had to drag her (she was still to heavy to lift) out of the stall area and into a shady part of the pasture with her head and chest aimed uphill.

After his initial assessment and a shot of banamine and because O'un was mouth-breathing and didn't respond to her eyes being touched, I asked the vet what he would do if she were his goat. He said he'd put her down. I was just about to say do it when Matt said, she's been like this before (when she was owned by other people). All the way like this? I wondered. This bad? I couldn't remember her mouth-breathing, only the stargazing and how terminal she had seemed before making her amazing recoveries. Matt insisted on the herculean measures. I wondered if we were torturing her.

The vet's first attempt to tube her failed. He couldn't get the tube down into her stomach. He went for IV rehydration, but he exhaused his chances on the right jugular before he could get it and the left jugular thrombosed soon after the drip started, she was that far gone. The vet and his intern put the rest of the fluid in subcutaneously. We got her into a better position and the vet was able to get the tube down her for more fluids and propylene glycol. he warned us, "they usually die right after I take the tube out. Something about it just tips them over."

O'un didn't die. But the vet was sure that her cranial nerves were already deteriorated and that she was essentially brain dead. Flies could walk across her open staring eyes.

The vet told me to get her into a frog position buttressed with hay bales for the night. He said he thought she had maybe 10% chance of making it until morning (and I was pretty sure he felt he was exaggerating by at least nine). Ronan and I got the hay bales in place and then set up four more to make a bed for me out in the field next to O'un. As I brought all my gear out: the sleeping bag, the quilt, the pillows, I kept thinking that each time I approached her she wouldn't be breathing anymore. And it often looked that way until I was right on top of her; her breathing was very shallow.

Shallow, but the breaths kept coming. At 10:00, Ronan walked out with me to "tuck me in". I woke up several times during the night to reposition O'un because she had scooted herself out from between the bales. Around one a.m. she bleated and her head was up instead of flat on the ground. Despite the fear and stress, I couldn't help but enjoy as I always have a night under the stars. I listened to the frogs and looked at the Milky Way, petted Charm (one of the outdoor cats who was so happy I was sleeping outside and was defending her position against all other cats). I saw two shooting stars with long tails in the low Southeast. The tops of my pillows and the sleeping bag got sopped with dew. It was a lovely night. Later, in the dead of night (about 3:30 a.m., when even the frogs are too tired to croak), the partying down at the lake cranked up (pun intended), but I the rest of the night had been so lovely that I didn't begrudge the idjits their noise as much as I used to.

A beautiful Saturday dawn came with sun rising far to the north of Mount Fujiko, and from 4:30 on I couldn't wait until 8:00 when I could call the vet and ask what to do next. Things still didn't look good. I'd only gotten O'un to eat two mustard leaves. It was a loooooong time until 8:00, but I kept busy with the usual chores plus the preparations for getting Ronan and Matt ready for the Row River Cleanup canoe trip. We didn't all have to stay home, and it's a rare thing for Ronan to spend a whole day with her dad. Despite all the hubbub, Peach, the scrub jay, still got some quality shoulder time in. (Peach is sitting on my shoulder now as I type. She loves shoulder perching.)

Finally I called the vet at 7:59 and he answered. He sounded very reserved when I told him my name and then amazed and frankly puzzled when I said O'un was still alive, now what? He said I could drive up to his office in Pleasant Hill and he would leave some medication in a drop box for me. I asked if we had somehow pushed O'un over the edge by cutting fresh fodder for the goats that had contained rather a lot of hop clover. He said that could have done it because it was rather rich food, but he couldn't say, even Venus's departure couldn't be ruled out as a cause of the whole cascade. He thought, though, that O'un was just a weak goat who had been ruined and compromised in the past and that anything could have triggered the ketosis or bloat into acidosis into enterotoxemia that was his guess for what was wrong with her. His advice was that he had brought more goats back from the brink with just blackberry leaves than with anything else. So that's what I did. All day long: cut a bucket of blackberry leaves. Feed O'un. Feed Peach. Do something else for about thirty minutes. Then cut more blackberry leaves. Check on O'un. Hold the water bucket for her drink out of. Feed Peach. Drive up to Pleasant Hill for the goat meds. Feed. Feed. Feed. And occasionally thing: wouldn't it be great if everyone had a "magic pill" that grew as a weed all over the place. Every prickly leaf seemed to make O'un stronger.

By evening we let her kids see her and she tried to stand but still couldn't quite manage it. Today (Sunday) her eyes are bright and engaged. We can't say if she's going to ever again be the same pushy, butt-headed alpha goat she was last week, but I think she might be standing up some time today. We'll see if her milk returns, too, although her kids seem to be doing okay without her at nine weeks. Matt's pretty sure she's going to dry down permanently.

What am I thinking I am supposed to get out of this? Besides the realization that we nearly killed O'un this time ourselves. Besides the realization that O'un apparently NEVER loses her will to live. Besides that I should not have mistaken her strange strength and ability to come back from devastating conditions (in which her organs have failed and her intestinal walls have all but dissolved) for overall good health: O'un, we now know, is as tough as she is delicate. I shouldn't have bred O'un this one last time ... although I am sure glad that we have a girl from O'un. No, none of those things so much.

What I am trying to get myself to learn is that again and again - and in just the last twelve months I've seen it happen three times - critical situations that I thought could not possibly turn out well, did. I watch myself making reasonably intelligent, logical deductions from the information at hand ... and coming to pessimistic conclusions that were wrong. While I don't want to take this too far into mindless hope and become someone who causes needless pain and suffering for others by not letting them go when they need to go, I really want to learn to adjust my heart and mind to allow for and encourage intelligent hope.

I have an uneasy relationship with hope. I have often joked (with serious intent) that hope was the last creature out of Pandora's Box because it was the worst and most climactically terminal disease. I think that humans have used hope - in something better always coming around the corner and then in something better coming in a life after this one - to destroy the only Paradise we know for a fact exists (when we're not busy transforming it into hell). For quite some time now I have lost hope that humanity can evolve into a species that does not destroy the world. My main source of hope has been that we do not have any means of escaping this world and going off to destroy another one. I still don't think I can address that ultimate problem with hope that I have, but I can try to use the lessons of Webster, O'un and even Peach here, to help me with the smaller daily hopes that can sustain me as a happier more highly functional person.

Today I can say, as I did when I woke up next to O'un and looking over the valley at my beautiful mountain: "Thank you for another day in Paradise."

water and 24 hours of cuddling

That's my t-shirt slogan: "Water and 24 hours of cuddling will fix almost anything." It's been proved right for the second time. With Peach here, pictured on her second day with us. (No, I have not made it into a t-shirt yet and probably never will get around to it.)

The first time this axiom bore out was when Sophie, back when she was our new dog, mistook an escaped gosling for a chew toy. I thought Webster was a goner and was trying to ratch up the courage and stomp on her when Ronan woke up, found out what was going on and - of course - disagreed with my intended course of action. I was feeling weak and willing to let her try to save her despite that I thought Ronan's efforts were most likely going to prolong her suffering. We forced water down Webster at regular intervals and wrapped her up on old shirt so that she could be strapped to Ronan's chest for warmth. For most of the day she looked terminal. We had a Cottage Grove fashion show to go to at Centro del Sol and Gosling-in-a-Sling went with us. She was a sideshow sensation at the event and was starting to look a little better. By the next day I figured that if she'd made it 24 hours without snuffing, then that was a very good sign. Soon after she was eating and drinking and making the usual waterfowl mess. Later she rejoined her brother pestering people on the porch by gnawing on the edges of their book or begging from their plates and supervising any job that involved power tools. Those two geese would come running whenever a chainsaw, drill, or even a jackhammer fired up. Our only guess about this behavior is that a migrating flock of geese must make a LOT of noise if your up their amonst them with the wind in your feathers.

Then on Thursday morning one of the kid's next door dropped off a baby bird hoping that Ronan could save it. He'd found it inside the house, so a cat must have carried it in - an action that usually involves some crunching down on the body. Ronan was having a sleepover with her friends in a tent and before they came to take over I looked at the baby bird, saw it was a scrub jay, and thought that at least it was a good species although it didn't look much better than Webster had. Ronan and her friends worked on rehydrating the bird and naming it Peach (this last was a longer process than it sounds). And that was about it. But after a day of being fussed over by Ronan, Vesta, and Hazel, I was taking the bird around with me on errands in Cottage Grove while Ronan was at gymnastics class and the little thing ate some soggy cat food and then shoved its butt up to the top of the knitted purse she was sitting and started wagging it fast and hard over the side. I was mentally prepared for the little green sack of poo that ma and pa scrub jay are supposed to be able to grab in their bills and fly off to drop somewhere away from the nest, but ... I fumbled the toilet paper. Now I can tell you that the little mucusy parcel comes pretty well wrapped and can be picked off a hand towel folded in the bottom of basket without breaking and squishing shit all around. But the main point to telling you all that was that we had achieved poop! Yay! Stuff was going in Peach and it was coming out! Her chances of surviving just went way up. When Ronan got out of gym, I made the announcement "We've got poop!" and she grinned and clapped her hands.

We're now on our sixth day with Peach and she is starting her practice flights. Mostly from shoulder to finger. She has her knit purse (knitted by Vesta) for short trips, but most of the time her knitted nest is in a larger basket that contains her diaper kit and food bowl. Jays are hardy things and not picky eaters, thank goodness. Peach has been dining on worms; soaked cat food; hard-boiled eggs; defrosted berried; homemade bread with toasted pumpkin, sunflower, and sesame seads soaked in goatsmilk; and a little bit of buffalo - supplemented now and then with a sprinkle of powdered nettles, kelp, and nutritional yeast. She sleeps a fair bit, which is great. We've learned that bird parents have more spare time that we might have thought (she eats every half hour), but we're still kept hopping. I am really glad she is a slacker species. Barn swallows get up at 4:00 a.m. and are the last birds to go to bed at night around here; you can hardly tell them from bats sometimes. I've heard its pretty hard to hand raise barn swallows. Whereas our jay will sleep in until six or so and is ready to snuggle up for the night at eight.

Peach has been a fledgling on the go. She been to town couple of times, been to the pub, and gone on a hike on the Martin Flume Trail out past Bryce Creek. If we can keep any cats from eating her as she continues her practice flights and moves outside to a halfway house (an "aviary" made out of a tent with newspapers spread in the bottom and some bushes dragged in) and them from there back to the great outdoors and the open sky, she may stick around to be a garden pest (so Matt thinks) for years to come.

(Sorry it's been so long since the last post. It's been very busy here. I have so many posts in my head I could fence a good-sized pasture: Cleveland's Lakeview Cemetery and the Hazerot Angel, shampooing goats, making pasta, the rest of the kidding season, picking my spot on the hill for a four-day vision quest in July that I've been preparing for sinc elast year, and all the posts about writing (rather than rural living) I've been meaning to write. This is not the best time of year for writing - a thing which can sometimes make me rather frustrated and blue. And now I need to go see what needs watering...)