Happy Birthday 2014

Just a quick note to wish the new year a happy birthday!

Here's some un-asked-for advice, as is traditional for this time of year:

Adopt healthy habits so that you can feel better inside your own skin. Set health goals that aren't abstract, driven by fashionistas or that rely on stupid numbers, like being able to walk on your hands or do the splits.
Make good financial decisions so that you don't feel guilty or afraid all the time. If you're already trapped in a corner, go to the library. Seriously. There are all kinds of resources there.
Appreciate the other beings in your life. The awesome thing about appreciation is it gives to others and feeds your soul at the same time. They don't even have to appreciate you back for it to work. It's like magic.
Feed your brain. Look what doing the same things over and over again does to animals trapped in a cage. They lock into repetitive movements. Caged too long, and the brain doesn't know how to escape its training. Like the polar bear released from a tiny cage, it'll pace the same square over and over even after it's set free.

I hope everyone has a great 2014!

Almost Isn't the Season Anymore

A gorgeous Christmas Eve morning. Brilliant sunshine, a bit of mist on the river and between the hills, and the rain-soaked landscape has a diamond glitter to it. It's going to be one of those days when our goats and chickens will be out playing and chasing each other, and the dogs will be basking in the sunlight as if they're on a beach in 80 degree weather.

I'm not sure what to expect at work today. Panicked shoppers picking up last-minute things? That's a fair bet. Big crowds? I'm hoping not. That'll stress everyone out. Crazy driving? I pray people will remember that they're controlling thousands of pounds of deadly steel, and that you can't negotiate with physics or hit reset in the real world. Will folks be relaxed and ready to enjoy themselves after weeks of preparation? That would be sweet. And for everyone who doesn't celebrate Christmas, I hope that you'll find reprieve from the beautiful madness that burdens this time of year.

Well, maybe after the post-Christmas sales are done, and the return lines shrink back to normal.

Assuming the weather doesn't get dangerously playful.

Soon we'll say farewell to 2014. Are you ready to take stock of your year, and make your plans for the future?

Peace, joy, love and all good blessings upon you. May your day be bright.

Words and Rain

The rains have come.

I've been working on a particular book cover for a while now. It's making me crazy and stretching me to the limits of my abilities. It seems like every time I start to work on it, I run into a problem that I'm not sure how best to solve, and I end up watching a bunch of You Tube videos on Photoshop to figure out how to fix it.

The deck is all shiny. The rain-cleansed wind is pushing, pulling, making me want to explore. Beneath the trees next to our house, the air is full of the scents of ripe grapes, clean, musky mulch, and wet hay.

I've been copyediting too. I start to get involved in what I'm reading and I have to stop, go back, and look hard at each individual word. It's really hard to copy edit, and I'm not as good at it as I want to be. I know I'm missing things. I just have to keep going over and over and hope the stuff I do miss, everyone else will miss too as the story transports them into other worlds.

I've missed the clouds. Later I'm sure they'll feel gloomy and heavy, but right now they remind me of silver jewelry, campfire smoke, early mist on a mysterious lake, of winter days spent curled up around hot apple cider or hot chocolate.

The rains have come, and like the wanderlust the weather brings with it a drive to write. But I can't write yet, except for a few stolen minutes during breaks and lunches at work. I have this cover to finish, and copyediting to do. I have tomorrow off. I hope it rains. I want to get up early and write, and hike in the rain sheltered under an umbrella that the wind uses to play tug-of-war with me, and write some more, write until I can hardly keep my eyes open.

Summer's Cusp

The crickets and frogs sing through the cool evenings, and the morning mist parts to a glorious golden glow and frosted blue sky. The heat of summer never quite rises beyond the embrace of a warm bath. Impatience paces beneath the languor of easy weather with easy, flowing clothes and bare feet and sun hats. The hours of daylight have already begun to huddle and bow before the coming winter. Gardeners feast amid the overgrowth, ignoring weeds and the delicate touch of powdery mildew on pumpkin leaves, that autumn pest that comes with the vanguard of cold winds, the sooner twin of frost.

It's so warm and exquisite I can hardly imagine what's coming, but time's river flows and it's pulling me, the landscape changing around me as I'm drawn from summer into autumn. Autumn is opening her eyes, and she smiles that knowing, seductive smile. What games we'll play, what work must be done in preparation for the Cold Queen and her retinue. Better to get it done in advance of her arrival, for working beneath her heavy gaze is harder work than is made in the comfort of autumn's arms.

And I want autumn to rise and dance, even as I grieve at summer's passing.

Autumn Work

The weather forecast promises a wee bit of rain soon.  I dunno.  It's clear skies as far as the eye can see right now, and warm and beautiful.

The air has that autumn bite to it.  Makes me want to wander, explore, hike, get stuff done in the garden ....  The natural cycle of things makes me restless.  Is it a deep instinct written into my DNA, to either migrate to warmer climes or batten down the hatches for a long winter?  I can't say either way, but it feels good.  The grapes are getting sweeter every day, and the akebia fruit is starting to darken from a pale green to a deep, dusky purple.  The apples are ripe.  I still have tons of pears on the trees.  Though this year was kind of a bummer as far as the veggie garden is concerned, the arbor and orchard didn't fail.  In fact, they're better than ever.

If you're a gardener, now is the time (or past time, if it were a normal year!) to get out there and clean up stuff like crazy.  The work done now is work that won't have to be done in the spring.  Put fresh mulch down, weed, edge the lawn, prune trees and shrubs, and make everything tidy.  Note to self--put away all those tools still laying around before they're covered in snow.  A rake in the face kinda puts a damper on that first fun walk through fresh snow.

It's also time to start stocking up on winter supplies.  Rice, flour, sugar, butter, etc. will go into dry storage or the freezer.  If we're snowed in, we want to have plenty of stuff on hand.  I used to have lots of canned food too, but it actually takes up a lot of room, is usually over-salted and over sugared, and it's under-nutritious.  Better to keep the raw materials around.  This year I'll probably add a big bag of frozen sausage patties and frozen chicken patties.  That one year we were stuck for an extended period, they really came in handy and unlike the rest of our frozen protein, could be cooked without thawing.  I'll get those last.  The things that keep the longest and are the least expensive I'll get first, and I'll do it in installments this year instead of making one big trip.  The one big trip thing is fun, but sure hurts when it all gets added up at the register.  And this year, I won't forget a nice big box of hot apple cider packets and two big containers of hot chocolate mix.  Yum!

Happy Autumn Weather, everyone.  I hope your last days before winter are as beautiful as mine are.

Spring bliss

Why I love spring in the Pac NW:

Storms, especially lightning storms.  They're rare here and seldom have ground strikes, so I consider them lovely rather than something that's terribly hazardous like they might be in other parts of the world.  

Those sudden, blustery winds and downpours followed by sun and rainbows.  If they're fast and hard enough, sometimes I can smell the ocean in the westerlies.

The contrast of dark-bellied clouds and bright blue sky.

Glorious heat to bask in one day, sweet coolness the next.

Flowers everywhere!

The first flights of bees at my tiny heather blossoms and pussywillow blooms.

Daylight stretching and opening up so fast it seems unreal.  We'll be gaining over an hour of daylight in a single month.

New leaves.  Bright greens, yellows, pinks, reds, purples, sometimes draped like lace, sometimes sharp and clean, always beautiful.

And I love spring fever.  Even the goats kick up their heels and dance in the field.

I love spring.

Gardening with Friends

It's seed ordering time!

Yep. It's that time of year when I stop leafing through seed catalogues and actually go downstairs, get online and order what I want.

I've got about an acre of veggie garden, and I still don't have enough room to plant every single seedling that comes up all viable and beautiful from each one of those packets. If you've got gardening pals, you might consider putting together a group order. Everyone puts together a wish list, brings it to a seed meeting, and negotiates with everyone else so that they can split up packets as much as possible. It costs less, and everyone will have more than enough. Why bother? How about this: Maybe you have only enough space for five tomatoes. Seems kind of silly to buy 25 seeds, and be stuck with just that one variety, when you and your friends can pick your three favorites and everyone gets a few seeds of each.

An alternative is to learn about seed storage. I do okay in the seed storage department, but it's a real science. The more you learn, the better chances you'll have of seeds not just sprouting but actually becoming thriving plants. There's still the issue of having to buy in to whole packets of each variety of thing, which can be expensive, but at least you'll be able to have the same sort of garden each year and learn more about how to grow it better. Of course if you chose your varieties poorly, that may mean making the best of an iffy thing. Or you can toss the loser seeds and keep the best ones.

But it's more fun to garden with friends. Check out your local gardening clubs. I found a whole bunch of them in the newspaper without even trying. And Google is your friend, as always. Even if it doesn't seem like your sort of thing, it doesn't hurt to do a little snooping around. You never know. You may discover that there's a local turnip society. It can be nice to know that you're not the only person in town who loves turnips.

A Deeper Shade of Gold

I had a busy couple of weeks. Guests from the Denver area (hi Marc & Diana!) and work and all that kind of thing, plus I was sick for a couple of days. Luckily (sort of) I didn't have to call in, so I didn't miss any work days.

The weather shifted from hot to normal Pacific NW summer, if there is such a thing, in this last little stretch. The earth is dry, perfumed with scents of hay and hidden dew when I weed. The chickens are growing fast--not getting bigger so much as stronger and they're having trouble peeping like chicks when I come out to feed them. Soon their baby voices will be gone forever, but I'm not sad about that. It's cute, but I find the soft clucks they make charming, and I love waking to the roosters crowing.

Speaking of roosters, so far we have just the two, Henry and a still-to-be-determined Wyandotte. The Wyandotte won't crow when I go out there, so I only see his neck stretch and his wings flap from afar. Henry will crow any time he feels like it, and he only protests a little when I pick him up. It's hard to tell if he likes getting petted and carried around, but at minimum he's learned that I won't hurt him and that he'll be able to go about his business again as soon as I set him down.

Fun times. If there's a hint of sadness, it's because I smell autumn most mornings these days, and it feels too soon. And yet, I'm anticipating that wonderful, soaring longing I feel that we call The Wandering that autumn brings.

It's been a very short summer, one of the shortest we've had since 2002 (or was it 2003?) I remember complaining about the wet, cold June. The talk around town is that we'll have a really rough winter this year. I wonder if I'll finally be able to try out my snowshoes. The girl has, but that's because she went snowshoeing on Mt. Hood with her grandma. So far, local conditions haven't called for them ever since I got them as a Christmas present, a present that I couldn't receive until after we thawed out. Of course I didn't need them anymore that year ....

Time to make lists and lay plans, and to plant onion and carrots to overwinter. Mother Nature won't wait and neither can I if I'm to have half a hope of spring leek soup.

Winter Thirst

New Year's Day coming up, with a whole new year to look forward to ahead. It's not quite time for a recap, but I do look back with a grin on my face on my DH's homecoming, Ireland, high school plays, the master's class, and other fun stuff. The grim stuff is there too. It all mingles together into the potluck stew of life.

My stress level is really high. I'm hoping this will give me lots of creative energy to draw from. Yeah yeah, I know, stress usually kills the muse, but I killed my muse and ate her a long time ago, so I'm on my own anyway.

Stress has given me fun dreams, including one last night where I'd started taking fencing lessons from my kids' instructor in a huge underground gym that was partially sectioned off for tennis. In the dream I was super flexible. I could do full splits and lay my body flat against my leg at the same time. I woke up all inspired to work out rather than write, but I'll manage to manipulate that energy over to writing somehow.

The icy wind pushes cars around on the freeways and the wind chill is pretty interesting. We're dried out, parched even, and what little standing moisture we have near our house is frozen solid. It's easy to forget to drink water in this weather--the sensation of thirst is suppressed--so I plan on keeping water and tea near at hand while I write.

Ice, a fire in the hearth, tea and big dogs curled up in the living room. Sounds like a cozy winter. The only thing that keeps it from being a completely classic moment is that I'm working on a laptop rather than being curled around a book right now. Later. I've got some books I'm really looking forward to: Oxygen, The Forever War, Machete Season, The Company, some history books relevant to the Masks time period, and Chosen by a Horse which promises to tug on all the heartstrings I've got attached to mustangs. Reading and writing. It's a good life, but if I had a holiday wish, I'd wish for gainful employment that has health insurance benefits. Well, I take that back. I'd wish for a great future of health and happiness for my kids. I can handle a challenge or three.

Or maybe they could stand for challenges too.

I don't know! Fine. No wishes. It's too complicated. Have a Happy New Year. I'll see y'all on the other side of December 31, 11:59, if not sooner.

Staring out the window, wishing

Looks like Kat is going to be fine.  She's had an allergic reaction to something, possibly a penicillin shot or a pain killer shot from when she was messing with her incision.  She's on mild, low-dose steroids and should recover nicely.  Partly thanks to the meds and partly thanks to a draw of fluids from the lump to check the contents, her lump is a little smaller already.

I'm feeling better too.  My voice is almost back to normal and I had enough energy to go out in the rain and put nets over some plants the deer decided needed pruning.  The plants are fine, so far, mostly, but another hit and they'd be pretty sad and might not even recover.

I get weather reports twice a day--once in the morning, once in the evening--a forecast that looks at the weather every few hours out a couple of days.  It looks like the rain will trail away but I don't see any sun as of the latest forecast.  Ugh.  My question is, will we ever warm up enough to make planting the tomatoes and peppers in the ground worthwhile?  Maybe they'll just be in containers in the greenhouse until July.  I've got grasses and herbs to put out and the ground is like sludge--it's better to wait to plant until the soil drains and becomes friable again.  The slugs are rampant.  They love this weather.  They can be out all day and night.  The birds are miserable.  They've got to be having a tough time raising hatchlings in this.  The goats are annoyed.  The dogs are sullen.  We haven't had a river walk in ages.

The second year after we moved here we didn't have good enough weather for me to plant a veggie garden until June.  Back then I didn't have very many perennials and so the garden was a wash except for some strawberries and zucchini.  Thinking about that makes me feel better about the conditions this year.  No matter what happens we'll have a great perennial ornamental garden, heaps of herbs, grapes, elderberries, blueberries, currants, rhubarb, and even if they're just stuck in containers all season, peppers and tomatoes.  I bet I'll even get some nice zucchinis again.  They always produce, even in a short growing season.  Looks like the peach trees, unless the rain makes them mold and mildew to pieces, will have fruit and we always get some apples and pears no matter how bad the year is.  I guess I don't have that much to whine about.  Besides, the weather is a godsend for some people.

So here's me looking at the bright side of things.  I'll try not to be too much of a little kid, forehead braced against the window, staring into the rain and wishing.    

Black Angus in the Dark Woods

I was picking through the remnants of devoured (the bulbs, by voles) tulips, making them into a nice bouquet, when The Sea of Unconditional Love alerted me to ... are those Newfoundland dogs?  No?  Black ponies?  (No no no I mean the animal kind of black ponies!)  No?  

Aha!  Black Angus.  

And here I thought I'd have a quiet evening sipping Navan and writing.

I'd tried to get goat feed earlier but the feed store was closed by the time I got there, a fact that's particularly annoying because I had nothing, no alfalfa, no grain, nothing that would appeal ... well, now that I think about it, I do have peanut butter and also rabbit feed.  D'oh!  But I didn't think of that.  I went out to try to herd the cows toward our neighbors' place.  Whether or not they belong to the neighbors is moot.  They needed to be contained so the rightful owners could eventually locate them.  Right?  So my good Sam butt got run ragged trying to herd them when finally I called 911.  What's my emergency?  Cows.  

The officers are on their way.

I figure, if we can't herd them, maybe we can have a nice roast?

Anyway, as I get to know the animals, I notice that there are two cows, two nice calfs, and a young not-very-big (read young, but no longer a calf) bull.  They're nice, docile animals that like to kick up their heels when they run away laughing mockingly at the two legs trying to keep them from either running down into the woods or onto the road.

I meet two of my neighbors at the road, and they join in the happy hijinx.  I'd thought, earlier, that maybe late tonight I'd go work out.  I decided, while gasping as I climbed the hill behind my house for the fourth time, that that would be overdoing it.  As time wore on, I wondered if there was good karma coming out of me chasing someone else's livestock.  Maybe someday someone will chase my livestock for over an hour, keeping them out of harm's way and trying to contain them so I'd have a better chance of finding them.  Wouldn't that be nice?  I knew of at least two other fools, er, I mean, neighbors who, like me, were willing to slog about in snow, mud and blackberries to tend to someone else's problem, so I guess it's in the realm of possibility that someone might return the favor someday.  

In the end, though, the bull kicked up his heels one last time and danced, laughing, into the woods.  We called it a night.  I called 911 back and told them not to bother anymore.  We'd never get the cows out of the woods in the dark.

The Sea of Unconditional Love still barks, though sadly, toward the woods where the cows roam (or are probably bedded down by now) all alone in the Ravine of Doom.  The dogs remember the Ravine of Doom well.  They spent several days lost down there.  Poor cows!  Come home, cows, come home! the dogs call.

Soon I'll feed the dogs and they'll forget all about the sad (not!) cows dreaming in the dark woods.  The real sadness is that the liquor store closed while I was running around with the herd.  No Navan for Kami.  But at least we had beautiful, unusually late snow to adorn the Land of Mocking Livestock.

Anyone missing some disrespectful cows?

Cold Snap

Got the woodstove going again.  Cold weather has returned to our bit of paradise.  The greenhouse plants are shivering like chihuahuas, I'm sure.  Poor things.  I had to stay late at work to help shroud the annuals from the expected chill tonight.  This necessity torpedoed my hope to zip over to the INK meeting tonight before it got too late for some critiquing and planning of our writerly futures.  Weatherman says snow, maybe, down to 1000 feet or so.  I wonder if I'll wake up to the whitest April 19th I've ever experienced.  Questions I haven't had to concern myself with are popping up.  How will the peonies and clematis fare?  Will this stunt my poor asian pear trees?  Do fumes from oil lamps harm seedlings?  Shivering minds want to know.

At least we have water, and lots of it.  Turns out the new tank can keep keep our water running for some time once it's pressurized without the pump having to step in and work like mad.  I wonder, now that the pump's workload is much easier, if it might not give up the ghost, poor thing.  It's been overworked for who knows how many years and now, with a normal load, it may not just settle, but collapse.  

In the meantime, though, we have water, heat, shelter, food, all the niceties of modern life keeping us comfortable.  As for the wild things--good luck, and I hope you make it through the cold snap.

In Flux

Katherine is settling in nicely.  She's learning the joys of chasing paintbrushes, empty dinnerplates left on the counter after a prime rib dinner, a steady food supply, toilet water (ugh!) and kitty laser pointer games.  I'm still worried about her.  She sits a little funny and her hindquarters aren't very strong.  Still, she gets around and has enough energy after a day-long nap to play, explore and knock things over.  I'm teaching her the joys of stealth, aka not knocking things over, and areas that are out of bounds.  She responds very well to intimidating body posture, so I haven't had to yell at her, which is great.  I just stand in her way and loom and she backs down.  She's not fearful, just responsive.
Such a perfect little kitty.  No calls yet in response to the ad or the Humane Society file.

Meanwhile, we've had more snow.  Right around dinner time we had a big fall that kept the big flakes coming until sunset.  We ended up with more record-setting snow and pretty sky colors despite the warmer temps today.  It's really fun, wondering whether I'll wake up to rain, snow, or clear skies.  After many years of dreary, rainy springs with non-stop cloudy skies from early March through early June, I feel like we're actually getting to experience a new season as opposed to enduring the long, drawn out death of winter.  

I celebrated by taking some pics, some movies, and I wrote some and painted some.  Technically I'm still painting.  There's a phase in watercolor called leave it the hell alone.  So I'm leaving it alone so that the color can dry and stabilize before I go play some more.  Katherine informed me that it was time to leave it the hell alone by hopping up onto the dining table and sniffing around the watercolor palette.  Something smelled intriguing enough that I was worried she might sample, so I picked up the palette.  She would have none of it.  She followed the escaping palette by climbing onto the chair.  When I swung it out behind me she made a jump for it and tipped the paint tray just enough to splash a little Hunter's green onto the soon-to-be-eradicated white carpet.  

Time for the kitty to go play with Orion.  She purred madly as I picked her up.  I let her play with the paper towel I've been using for blotting while I carried her down the stairs.  I let the boy know it was his turn to entertain the thing.  She has served her purpose.  She got me away from mucking up the colors.  Now it's time to get back to work.

I hope everyone is having good, or at least fun, weather!

They're Here!

I finally snagged some pics of the grosbeaks.  Today was probably the most bird-diverse day we've ever had.  The grosbeaks mingled with juncos, varied thrushes, house finches, chickadees, robins, stellar jays, scrub jays and our lone nuthatch.  All at once.  Unfortunately it was raining when they all came so I could only sneak out once during a dry spell when the grosbeaks had chased the juncos out of the feeder.  By looking at our feeder it appears that we have only a slightly heavy sunflower seed mix, but looks are deceiving with this mix from Costco.  It includes quite a few shelled sunflower seeds.  It also has peanut pieces, but I don't know if the grosbeaks like those.  They're really picky about what they want as far as feeder food.  If you don't have enough sunflower seeds, they'll move on.  Our flock today was about ten individuals, mostly male but a few females.  I've seen as many as a dozen and maybe this year we'll see even more.  They tend to return to the same feeders on their migratory paths so there's an opportunity to get more and more each year as the chicks accompany their parents.

Also new today, hyacinths.  I'm sure they've been around for quite some time in the valley, but seeing them in full bloom here for the first time gave me one of those yay moments.  The low-growing tulips are stretching their necks, and all the early daffodils are open now.  The daylilies are tall enough that the fish don't look silly.  Roses are sending out their first leaves.  The tree peonies are opening their first flush of purple leaves and the regular peonies have buds peeking out.  Primroses are going crazy.  Hostas have their noses poking out.  Pansies have got their faces painted on.  The daphnes are getting ready to pop open while the lenten roses have been open for a good month and are wondering what everyone else is waiting for.  The place is starting to look up.  Maybe someday I'll have a garden that looks good year-round, but for now I have to wait until spring for my show and I'm so glad the opening act has started.

We had just enough sunshine that I managed to dash out and get our Christmas tree from this year planted, and I yanked more baby blackberries and put out slug food.  I know every year I lose quite a bit to slugs and most of the time I shrug it off, but this year I was very disappointed to see that slugs had destroyed several of those kewl tulips.  I don't know what's more heartbreaking--seeing a bud eaten down to just a little color showing or having the stem chewed through and the blossom laying in the mud.  The stub, I guess.  At least I can bring the blossom in.  Die slugs die!  I need to encourage more snakes, although this time of year the snakes are still napping most of the time and won't be eating much in slugs.  

The equinox is the day after tomorrow.  I don't know if I'll be doing anything special except welcoming the day.  I have to work, drat-0.  Maybe I'll celebrate by coming home to a clean house.  That means lots of work tomorrow.  Cleaning out the house is a semi-tradition here at the household on the equinox, not exactly a party, but really rewarding.  The mini-cleans I've done over the past weeks will help set the stage for a great spring cleaning, I hope.  Yay clean house, yay birds, yay spring!  Even when it rains, when the flowers are blooming it's a beautiful day.

Sunshine Kisses

The garden is starting to wake up.  I've been working like a maniac (when it hasn't been raining) trying to get the young blackberries pulled out of the wildflower garden before I run the risk of crushing too many volunteer seedlings.  I can't say that it's looking good, but except for one corner it doesn't resemble an empty city lot anymore.  The goldenrod that grew to incredible proportions (no fair! it was only knee high in the meadow and I would have never planted it so close to my Shakespeare 2000 rose if I knew it could reach 5') got moved into the wildflower garden, as did a chunk of bouncing bet (anyone want some bouncing bet? I got lots) and some daylilies donated by my sister last fall (ahem.)  

We've finally had the grand opening of the first few daffodils, aka sunshine kisses.  There are only about a half dozen that actually opened in a spotty fashion today.  In a few more days hopefully I'll have whole patches open, and then I'll take many pics.  As we get even later into spring (the pic was taken April 5, 2007) I'll have enough daffies up that I may even cut some to take inside the house.  That's always a good day, the first day with flowers in.  Sometimes I force forsythia, but most times I wait until my bulbs do their thing.  They last a long time and they're so darned cheerful I can hardly stand it.

Fifteen days until the vernal equinox.  I'm so ready for spring, and yet, the winter went by quickly this year.  Now that I have a little floral sunshine, I'm okay with things slowing down.  Any time now.  Go right ahead, world, slow her on down!

Knowing Your Plants

After a brief hiatus, here we are discussing Radcon 5 again.  

Apparently this panel has been extremely well-attended at other conventions.  Well, not at Radcon 5.  I brought an attendee with me (the unstoppable C.S. Cole) and Gayle, Gerald Nordley's delightful wife, decided the panel would be a great place to knit.  She was absolutely right.

Frieda Orsborn, my fellow panelist, had a wealth of herbal knowledge and she brought some magazines for reference.  I paged through one as we waited for others to show up (didn't happen, although two young men arrived, sat for a minute, probably realized we weren't discussing government moles, and left) and when Gayle asked about ephedra I got to laugh and tell her that it was being re-released to the public by the FDA and here's the article, enjoy!  (I do not endorse the use of ephedra, nor any other herbal product with a very few exceptions, and I'll explain why below.)

Despite the fact that the attendees of Radcon 5 weren't interested in the growing with roots plants as opposed to spy-type plants, we had a lot to say about them.  

For example, say that your fantasy has the characters moving from point A to point B or is describing village life and it sounds like every other fantasy.  You can spice it up considerably by flavoring your text with a healthy dose of what it's really like to  live off the land without modern agriculture and distribution/grocery stores.  

Your job as an omnivore is to be able to eat just about anything to sustain yourself.  A plant's job is to reproduce successfully, and there are several clever strategies by which to do this.  Edible fruit with an undigestible pit is a great one, because your seed gets distributed everywhere.  The trick is to not make your leaves and bark very nutritious or as many an orchard owner can lament to you, the deer (who have adapted to eat stuff that will give us the runs like crazy) will eat the whole tree down to a pitiful stub.  Other methods include relying on seeds that blow around, sprouting from the roots or tips that arch down to the ground and forming big thickets, or dropping seeds from toxic berries and letting those slowly spread your kind and being as poisonous as you know how so that hardly anyone wants to evolve how to eat you when there's a perfectly good apple tree sapling right there to nibble down to a stump (darn you, deer, darn you!)  There are strategies in-between, but remember this is developing with evolution and it's tricky to have totally toxic leaves and yummy fruit at the same time.  It's not something you can necessarily plan, as such, anymore than you can plan to have a boy as your first born without getting nasty (or lucky.)  

But I digress.  The point is that when your heroes head out into the wilderness, they need to find stuff out there that's edible to them that hasn't already been eaten.  If they're out there in the winter, especially in late winter, good frickin' luck.  Everything edible out there has been searched for and assaulted full time by the wild critters.  Also, think about hunting for a little bit.  We have an enormous abundance of deer right now (Kami shakes her fist at them helplessly from the house) and yet there's many a hunter with all kinds of equipment, including firearms, and all the time they can get off work, that will take days and days to bring home their deer.  Wild animals are great at running away from things that want to eat them.  So, your adventurers turn to living off the plant life.  They have options--pine nuts, certain leaves and needles that can make tea, some roots--but it takes a lot of time to find and collect enough of these things to get a halfway decent meal.  Yes, you can eat grubs, but finding and digging for them is time consuming and they're not very filling.  (If you want to try this, I suggest cooking them.  You don't have to eat them raw.)  Also, lots of green matter without starch is going to give them a nasty case of the trots.

Having your villagers wish for the first of the harvest in summer while they're picking greens in the spring can add a lot to your setting.  So can a real understanding of the cyclic nature of primitive agriculture and haphazard storage capabilities of a low-tech society.  It can also be great fun contrasting availability of items in a city where they have access to snow/ice year-round vs. a temperate city vs. the tropics where you can usually find something fruiting year-round.

You certainly don't have to include this stuff in your writing.  After all, folks read to escape the realities of starvation, feast/famine, and the joys of diarrhea.  But like I said, it can set you apart from everyone else and add some tension if you like.  

What about medicinal uses, Kami?  I want my herb wife to be able to heal my character who just got hurt.  I don't want to deal with infections and stuff like that.

You can do that.  But again, let's have some fun with this.  There's a lot of material out there with borderline or outright magical people who can heal heroes from the brink of death with a chocolate-coated magic pill.  The way to make things interesting is to take into account the guesswork involved in this sort of thing.  One of the reasons there are fewer herbs on the market than really ought to be has to do with how our bodies are only partially adapted to eating things that don't want to be eaten.  The gov tries to bring things down to the lowest common denominator, and therefore things get taken off the market or are never approved because an unacceptably large proportion of people are allergic or sensitive to what's otherwise a really good product.  When you use the whole herb rather than a refined extract, the chances that you're sensitive to one aspect or a combinations of an herb's profile of components is that much higher.  The combination/complexity can also provide more benefit than a refined version, or the components can cancel out the overall benefit.  Some systems, most notably the Chinese system of herbal medicine, maintain that medicines have to be crafted for each individual and can't be mass-produced for any real effect.  

Suddenly you can have a lot more fun with your herb wife as she hits and misses with your character's individual chemical tolerances and her local herbal availabilities.  Also, side-effects can be fun to play with.  Your character doesn't get an infection, but now he's nauseated, or groggy, or both and trying to fight the bad guy.

If you know your plants, you can also have a lot  more fun inventing poisons that don't exist.  They sound and act more nasty if you have reality to draw from.

We had a great time, the four of us, discussing plants and how to apply them to fiction (and real life too.)  We got a little bit into lore and how it develops (multi-use or very important core plants can become the center of an entire culture, even naming the people who use it) and chatted a bit about gardening.  (Why the heck is basil so hard for me to grow when everyone else can grow massive pots of it??!!) But mostly we talked at the edges of a really big topic, because an hour is not even close to being enough time to go deep with this stuff.

BTW, I'm always available to answer your plant questions.  I don't know everything, by any means, and I'll let you know if I have to research it because you may be better off researching it yourself.  But if your rhododendron is ailing or you want to know how hard it is to grow a camellia sinensis for tea, etc. I'm here for ya.  Know your plants.  Love 'em.

More Snow? Bring It On!

I haven't built a snowman in what seems like forever.  Today we went overboard and built a snow ogre that I had trouble reaching to create the nose and a spot for the eyes to rest (Rory pinned them in, and he also provided the creative genius and physical skills for the teeth, mustache, eyebrows, branchy hair and the green beard.)  Andrea and I used truck ramps to roll the snowball for the midsection onto the lower section.  Rory lifted the head up.  Orion provided creative options and some help with the shoulders but mostly he worked on his sentinels for the driveway.   He also made the little snowman on a spit for the snow ogre.  If we only had a tractor, we could build a really gigantic dragon--or I guess I could just use good ol' fashioned elbow grease.  That'd be a lot of grease, though.  Might even be bad for me.  Cholesterol being an issue and all.  Or is elbow grease cholesterol free or maybe the good kind of cholesterol?  Anyway, since we were doing the traditional snow stuff anyway we had a couple of snowball fights (I've noticed that concepts like teams and sides are more fluid in snowball fights than other games) and the kids went sledding.  The neighbor kids came over and had fun and then we all had hot chocolate (the adults had adulterated hot drinks.)  The weather couldn't have been better for all this.  I even abandoned my coat at one point.

While rifling around my gardening stuff looking for seeds (it's time to organize and also to get the slow-germinating seeds into their starter pots) I discovered three bags of overlooked tulips, poor things.  They were still alive, so I planted them.  Going from occasional light and warm air to dark and wet and frigid must have been quite a shock.  I hope they make it.  There might be more bags, as that area is still a mess.  I'll try to get that all organized tomorrow.  Then again, all is a very strong term.  Most might be a more appropriate word, or perhaps even some would be about as much as I can expect.  It's a mess that's been around a long time, so it's entrenched.  I wouldn't be surprised to find mice nesting in there, and I've already seen some impressive spiders who've made a very fine home amid the debris.  Yeah, it's that bad.  

As much as I love summer and gardening, I have to say that I'd be thrilled to have more days like today.  This one will last in memory a long time.  I hope everyone else had a great day too. 

Birds and Hazards

We had heavy (for this area) snowfall last night while we slept.  I love waking up to snow, and quiet, and the swarms of birds that snow always brings.  (Note to self--refill the feeders.)  I swept off the tile downstairs where I keep my bird supplies and dumped the sweepings onto the snow.  In minutes, three juncos had found the pile and started scratching through it.

The motion attracted Huntress.  She started talking to them in the language of the birds.  I don't think they understood her.  She has a really thick accent.  She kept trying, though.  They ignored her, poor thing.

I went in to work late, when I felt comfortable with driving.  The roads were good on the way to work, and on the way back home, but just before I got to the house I noticed there was still traces of slush in the road.  If it freezes tonight, it could be nasty, though not all the way down the hill.  The trick is to get past the ice without ditching and making it onto the lower, dry or merely wet part of the road.  The other trick is to have that instinct that tells you that the steep curves near the bottom of the hill are safe.  Many a driver trying to commute into town has listened to their instinct and been oh so wrong.  They've been wrong enough that the folks living on the downhill side of the curves got tired of people ending up in their cow pasture, so they built up a huge berm.  

If only cars were as proportionally durable as a skateboard, you could bank off the berm down the next stretch and look pretty cool in the process.  Of course the last curve has no berm and you'd then end up off the side of the road on a steep hill crushed against a tree.  What we really need there, since the slope is too steep to rationally attempt to build a berm there, is one of those cement half-pipes set on its side.  Then not only could you use it to negotiate the curve, you could also flip a loop with your car.  Not even the Dukes of Hazzard pulled off a stunt like that.

A moment of regret

I had a moment today. While I was walking through the garden I was thrown momentarily back in time to spring. I suddenly longed for spring, and the summer to come. I normally love autumn but I wished with all my heart that it was spring, and it made me sad to see just a very few bees humming among the very last of the flowers. Not so long ago there was so much activity in the wildflower bed that you could hear it a good distance away. When the sun hit it, you could see silver sparkles where the insects flew and leapt among the blossoms.

I had a hard time gathering seeds. The birds have really picked them over. But I got enough, I hope, a future garden in little zip lock bags.

We'll get our first really hard frost soon and I'll forget all about this, snug in a house that smells of cinnamon and spiced cider, taking pictures of frost heave, enjoying how fluffy the goats are, and being able to see the birds in the feeder when the leaves are all gone. But for a moment, I had regret.

September

I love the soft crooning of crickets, but when I hear them I think Noooooooooo, summer can't be running out on me yet! Much as I love cricket song, I love nights when I can leave the sprinklers on until I'm ready for bed, and then I just slip on some sandals and walk out in my pjs to turn them off. I love looking at stars and the moon on the deck. I love getting up early in the morning and working until I'm hungry, which is usually around 10 or 11am, and then I have second breakfast. I love the dry weather that keeps the grass tidy, and the summer rainstorms that sometimes come with thunder and that summer after-rain smell that inspires foolish grins and drunken behavior. I love the swoop and dive of swallows, and the hummingbird wars. I love discovering praying mantises, and as the season grows late, seeing bigger and bigger ones. I love the contrast between sweating in the hot sun and cooling down in the shade of trees with a glass of cold well water. I love working in my bikini. I like the way washing a car feels all sloppy and sudsy and dirty and somehow you end up with a clean car at the end. I like wandering the garden paths at night. I like the swarming birds that come after ripe berries and fluffy seeds.

I love autumn too, and the wandering feelings and intense rushes of longing it inspires, the changes and the sweetness of garden beds gradually dozing off like unruly children finally converting to that angelic stage (asleep,) but there's something special about summer. August is done, and onward to September.

An aside: I managed to stay up and watch the lunar eclipse. Once upon a time, as a child, it happened relatively early in the evening so that I could watch. I'd imagined the moon getting eaten up by blackness. Boy, was I disappointed. I stomped back to the house in a huff, annoyed by boredom. I don't know if explaining the whys and hows would have helped. As an adult, though, I had a good time marveling and staring. Maybe the telescope helped. Maybe it was an appreciation for all those subtle colors of red, amber, burnt orange and how they transitioned from the moon's normally pale surface that did it for me. I dunno. There was just something really neat about the Earth's atmosphere filtering the wee bit of sunlight that got around our massive globe to those burning hues, and the way the shadow's movement didn't seem quite linear but looked like it advanced and retreated in micro-sways, and imagining myself standing on the moon and watching a solar eclipse flare around it. Just like a solar eclipse on Earth, it doesn't turn to night-darkness, just a deep shadow like heavy clouds had passed over the sun. And I wonder, had I been on the moon during an Earthan eclipse, what color the moon's shadow would be on Earth. Would it be reddish also, paler because the atmosphere is so thin as to be non-existant? Would it be a neutral shadow? Would the shadow of the moon on the Earth be too small to see? Or would it be a fabulously perfect round, a cut-out shadow traveling across the world?

So I watched, with Rory beside me, and wondered and let my gaze wander around the Milky Way for over an hour, and afterward I slept so deep and dreamt about being an actress.

I wonder what September will bring.