To 'Have' a Backyard Chicken

I used to be one of those people, who, when they see chickens or a llama, or whatever living critter, say "I would like to have that."

Okay, I'm still one of those people. I'd still like to have some more goats. (I'm crazy that way.)

But now I know what it really means to 'have' animals. Like chickens.

See, I don't 'have' chickens. I am a slave to the chickens. I feed them, dust them for mites, change their water, clean out their enclosure, etc. Which is good and fine on nice days when I'm feeling up to it. It's not so much fun when it's freezing and windy and the waterer is frozen solid and I'm running a fever with chills and a stuffy nose and a sore throat that feels like it's bleeding and on fire at the same time. Luckily I have very few of those days. But I can't skip taking care of my birds even for one day, especially on those horrible days, because if I skip their care on a bad weather day, the chickens will have no water or food when they're most vulnerable. Most people don't think about it, but food heats you up. Calories in the blood help maintain temperature. If they're hungry, they're cold. If they have no water, they're dehydrated, and chickens dehydrate very quickly. If they try to get water through snow, they'll chill even more quickly. They'll be more prone to disease, infection, digestive or vent ailments, frostbite ... the list goes on and on.

All this adds up to suffering. It would be my fault because they're domesticated animals and they depend on me. Human beings bred them to be this way, and so human beings now provide for them.

Same with the goats. Same with the dogs and the cats, though they're a bit easier to take care of as their stuff is all inside the house or in the garage. I can take care of them in my pajamas. No such luck with the chickens and the goats. If there's snow, I'm hiking in it. If there's ice, I'm skating on it. If there's rain, I'm out there in my mud boots holding my hat on my head, wishing I had a free hand for an umbrella.

A friend of mine with horses and I got to talking and I mentioned that I used to play with Barbies, but the Barbies weren't the focus of my play. I had Breyer horses, some really gorgeous ones, and the Barbies were slaves to the horses. They took care of them, groomed them, very occasionally rode them but mostly the horses had adventures and the Barbies were there to take care of the tack.

That's how it really is, my friend told me. Somehow as a small child I discovered the truth in my play.

I read an article in the paper today about how backyard chicken owners are now discovering the harsh reality of keeping chickens, including the fact that the birds stop laying after about three years ... but live to be twenty years old. They put ads in the newspaper. Anyone want my old hen that stopped laying? She's pretty and sweet and follows me around like a dog.

The answer is no. Hell no I don't want your old chicken that doesn't lay. If I'm going to keep a chicken, I want a young one that I can raise from a cute little chick and that follows me around like a dog and who lays for me. If I choose to keep her past her laying years it's because I've developed a bond and I want her for keeps. And if I don't want her for keeps, because she's my responsibility (and because I care about her) I will give her a quick, clean death.

Some of these people turn birds loose in parks or toss them into a random neighbor's dog yard because they don't want to pay for the feed, take care of the birds, or do the decent thing, which is to kill them quickly. Better to eat them, or if you can't bear to eat your pet, bury her rather than let her be savaged by an animal or hit by a car or die from starvation and exposure.

Thus, rescue societies were born. But they're overwhelmed. What are they supposed to do with these birds? The very thing that the owners should have done in the first place. The owners are deferring responsibility because they didn't think ahead and can't face the consequences of their choices. They want the problem to just go away. Well, it doesn't just go away.

Do you really want to 'have' a chicken?

It's great if you like them. I like them. I like to watch them chase each other and hunt for goodies, and I like to carry them around, and I like their eggs and the funny noises they make when they're mad and happy and sleepy. It's great to want fresh eggs. It's okay to be crabby about taking care of them if you decide to become a slave to the chicken. But please, please, as you would (hopefully) consider carefully before adopting a dog or a cat or a rabbit, think carefully about the commitment you're making, and plan for the future. Chickens don't live as long as parrots so you probably don't have to put them in your will should you decide to keep your hens past their laying age out of gratitude for the eggs they provided and because you're fond of them. But be realistic. Will you be okay with your decision a decade down the road?

Abandoned birds don't just vanish into the atmosphere. There's nothing natural about dumping a domesticated animal in someone else's backyard. A chicken is not like a wild animal that can fend for itself. Chickens might be able to scrabble for food for a while, but they have no good defense against dogs, coyotes, or raccoons, none of which kill 'clean'. And they're really not good in the weather. Their ancestors once were. Human beings bred a lot of their survivability out of them in the process of making them bigger, meatier, and faster layers.

Whatever happens to abandoned birds is seldom better than simply slaughtering them. Presumably you want chickens because you like them. I like them too. If you like them, don't let them suffer in utter terror until something kills them. Please don't add to the growing problem of abandoned backyard chickens in urban areas. If it gets much worse, chances are that cities will stop permitting backyard chickens altogether, and that would be a shame. That spoils it for everyone. Backyard chickens are great for responsible owners who take care of them and share the fruits of their hobby with friends, families and neighbors. They're great for pest control, and they're fun. Sometimes they're like pets, and sometimes they're more like the wild birds that people like to feed and watch through their window. Some of them are really, really beautiful birds. Let's keep them around in our suburbs if we can. And if you see someone who's struggling with the backyard chicken thing, remember, offering help and advice is going to go over a lot better than berating them for having a noisy mess or for dumping their bird over your fence so your dog can pin it and slobber on it until it dies of shock. If you can't approach someone, maybe leave some educational materials on their doorstep (usually your local extension service has lots of free stuff) or contact the Humane Society. They're the experts when it comes to education and intervention.

Thanks!

These things I'll never say

I went to a lot of good panels at Orycon, almost always as a panelist, though I visited some that my DH was on. There were a couple that I didn't have time/space enough to say everything I wanted to say. I'm sure that was true for all of the panelists. Panels at conventions aren't meant to be comprehensive discussions of a given subject. They're supposed to be entertaining and informative. Mostly entertaining, I think.

Backstory Bedlam

What a fantastic group of insightful panelists. We didn't get a chance to talk about technique a lot. Mostly we discussed metastory – the environment of the story, and it's themes/flavor, and how authors need to bring in the necessary details without bogging the story down. I think the story's structure, especially character selection and development, are vital. If you've got a story that has a complex setting that has to come through in order for the story to make sense, or if the plot revolves a complex or obscure knowledge set, you have to somehow bring it in without boring the readers to death with the dry facts. Having a character that's an expert (not necessarily the pov character), weather incidents, equipment breakdowns (the fixing of which can reveal a lot about setting) or a naive character that needs to observe, experiment and root out information to survive all work really well to help a writer work in those necessary details. I pointed out that I like to start my books with the character in their normal, everyday setting doing normal things to ground the reader, but those normal things involve a serious problem. That problem will only help me illustrate the world in greater detail. It may have nothing to do with the main challenges the character will face, or it may end up weaving in.

Publishing Your Ebook

I think the thing that got us really going began with the first question: What's the first thing you should do before you publish your book? We discussed making certain that your audience can find your book, finding out how to put together a reasonable cover and estimating what it will cost, copyediting, formatting, and approaching publishing your book as a business. That last part is what it all boils down to, though, doesn't it? When you self-publish, you are the publisher and you have to look at all the things that publishers do. Copyediting, formatting, cover design, blurbs, back copy, ad copy, tag lines, interior design, marketing, distribution ... it's all on you, including budgeting and figuring out what it'll cost you to hire someone to do the things you don't know how to do, or how much time and money it'll cost you to educate yourself about the things you'll need to do.

Writing Believable Sex Scenes

It comes to this, folks. It doesn't have to be ultra-real, or a political statement, or normal. It has to be entertaining, use all the appropriate senses, must be paced like any other scene with its own story arch and character development, and should include telling details that will give the reader a sense that you know what you're talking about (and thereby will hold up that suspension of disbelief.)

Handling Sexuality with Dignity

The audience said they wanted to talk about the sociological aspects of sexuality, but at the end they wanted to hear more about how to be able to hold your head up high when writing about sex. I felt the panel was a lot of fun but ended up kind of muddled and unfocused. Which is fine. The takeaway points revolved around being aware of others and educating yourself. I didn't get a chance to talk about concepts like refrigerator heroines and other tropes that make gender roles unappealing at best to half (or more) of a given audience to works of fiction and media. Just finding out about this stuff helps immensely with communication in the real world and in fiction.

That sums up Friday at Orycon 35. And once again I'm up past my bedtime. G'night, all. I'll type to you again soon.

A good time was had by the young

I had a lot of great conversations this weekend at OryCon 35. It's possible to sign up for Orycon 36 right now at the hotel, and they'll have the website up to accept online preregistration very, very soon. For only $30 (price good only until Dec. 31, 2013) you can have a whole weekend of fun.

One of the reasons I enjoy going to science fiction and fantasy conventions is the opportunity to talk shop with writers at all levels of experience, skill, and stage in their career.  In fact, I had a great time interacting with a four year old writer. Yes, you read the age right. I had to dictate for him, but he wrote the story himself and signed it. In the same group, a young lady still in grade school produced a story (inside of an hour and handwritten, mind you) that had great structure and depth of emotion. Her protagonist went through a try-fail cycle, faced danger, and came through at the end. No joke, I was genuinely moved.

I'm a little too punchy, thanks in part to my late-and-then-early schedule, so I won't embarrass myself by trying to talk about various panels in a coherent fashion. But check back and I'll see what I can come up with after some sleep.

Maybe a day or two of sleep.

Nanowrimo 2013!

Quiet day off. Good timing. Orycon 35 is coming up fast (this weekend, eek!) and this time let me get my head together. I still don't know what I'm going to read. It'll be fantasy, fiction, probably a piece from a novel. I promise I won't yammer on with a big lead-in. I'm not sure if I should read from a book that's out, or from a book that's coming out early next year. My DH suggested After, so I'm going to comb through that tonight and see if I can find something that will make a good fifteen minute read. Suggestions are welcome if you've read the book!

I'm well into my Nanowrimo project, working title The Blood of Old Oak Hill. You can check up on my progress here. I'm going to try to put up a widget on the side bar so that you can cheer me on or taunt me or send me a little pep talk if it looks like I'm falling behind. Right now I'm a little ahead of the game, and at the same time, a bit behind. I'm going for 80,000 words. 50,000 is required to win. Now before you start calling me bad names, remember, this is National Novel Writing Month, and my goal is a short but professional-length novel, which starts at 80,000 words. 50,000 is still a great accomplishment and bravo if you take on the challenge and make it. But this is my 9th year and I've been writing for a while. I already know I can achieve 50,000. In fact I've made over 100,000 in a month before ... but I wasn't working a day job full time at the time. So we'll see. I'm definitely not going to be all cocky-strutty-cake-walky-attitude.

Not unless it's really funny. I might talk a good game, but deep inside I'm shivering at the memory of my office flooding right in the middle of Nano one year and falling about a thousand words short because it took so long to clean out my office (where the computer was, of course). What time I did spend writing I spent on the floor in the family room. Brrr. No, I'm not going to assume this is going to be easy. No way.

To make my goal I need to write 2667 words a day on average. Based on that, I'm behind. I'll definitely put on my writing cap and go for an hour or two before bedtime tonight. Wish me luck!

For more posts on Nanowrimo, some of them quite old, just click on the labels under the post and the magic of Blogger will hook you up. You won't see all of them because I was really sloppy with labels early on, but you should get a nice selection.

The Theme of Life

I've been reminded recently that I really ought to have a theme for my blog. I've resisted this because there are so many different facets to my life, and I'd really hate to stop blogging about some of those simply because they don't fit, or fit only awkwardly into my theme. What would my blog be without mention of The Barbie Lady (who has been shopping at our store a lot lately) or the goats or my long sessions of banging my head against the keyboard while trying to learn yet another skill that I have no business learning when I should be WRITING BOOKS & SHORT STORIES.

Speaking of skills, this house is once again putting me through homeowner school, as in it's schooling me. I don't think I'm actually getting an education, but I am developing a nice case of tennis elbow without actually picking up a racket.

My DH and I surfaced the porch. My sister, mother and I put together the new framework for the porch together, oh, about three years ago now. You see, the porch foundation collapsed so that it leaned to the right on the way in to the house, and then the stairs fell apart, and off to the side, part of the porch completely rotted through and our sitting window is currently supported by about 4" thick of crumbling wood. The 4" may be generous. Anyway, the idea was to rebuild the porch, jack the sitting window, put in a new support under said sitting window, and put siding to cover and protect the new support and continue that siding around the rebuilt porch for a beautiful and shiny new front face for our house. At the time I began this project, I figured it'd take the summer.

Three years after putting together the new framework and reinforced foundation for the porch, My DH and I cashed in about a million Home Depot gift cards we'd been saving up for this, pried up the temporary (ha) surfacing which will become the frame for my (someday) greenhouse (at this rate I might build it in about five years ....) and now we're walking on pressure-treated 2x6 boards instead of a mixture of juniper 2x4s (yes, you read that right, juniper! Smells so good!), pressboard and cinderblock. The dogs hardly know what to do with themselves without the dangerous gaps to fall into and with plenty of room for their food bowls. And, bonus, it's much harder for them to set up a dog block on the way to the door, forcing their owners to stop and pet them before they're allowed to pass. That's not a bonus for the dogs. Just me. And I almost always stop to pet them anyway, but usually only if I'm not balancing three arms worth of groceries in just my two.

Such times are of course when the dogs need love and affection the most. Because if I'm not carrying anything heavy or awkward, clearly I shouldn't be bothered.

I plan to put up the rails around the porch as soon as possible. I wonder if ASAP will be measured in days, weeks, months or years this time.

I guess my theme, if I have one, is how people do the best they can with the resources they have, and my premise is that even when things are tough and nothing works out the way you've planned, just the act of creating and working on problems and living is worth writing about. In the future I may change my mind. This might turn into a DIY blog, or a writing blog, or whatever. Until then, you can expect ongoing stories about pet spiders living in my kitchen window, escaped goats, crazy gardening, weird customers at the store, observations about the seasons, and all the other stuff I've written about over the years.

Coming up: Orycon 35, book releases from Wyrd Goat Press, vanishing websites, adventures with paint (I'm now the proud owner of a quart of flat interior lavender paint) and the great bulb planting of fall 2013. Unless something else more interesting comes up.

OryCon 35 Schedule

I'll be a panelist at Orycon again this year. Yay! Here's my schedule:

Friday, Nov. 8

noon Backstory Bedlam
     I love backstories. They make good short stories later on when I'm obsessively thinking about a book I've already finished and published and can't touch and then a character's backstory just has to, must be told! Knowing that's a possibility keeps me from vomiting every last detail onto the page.

2pm Publishing Your Ebook
     Apparently I'm moderating this monster. I think my main job will be to make sure that the panelists talk slowly enough for the audience to take notes. I'm thinking about bringing a handout. Finding good info about ebook publishing from amid the vast hoards of people trying to make money on formatting books for you and people who do a terrible job but think they do a fantastic job and want to tell you exactly how to do it like they do, not to mention the folks who publish their stuff before it's really ready ... yeah, it's a mess. We'll get you on the right track, don't worry.

5pm Choose a Monster and Write Their Story
     This should be totally fun, and if you don't think so, you're a poopyhead who has cruelly smothered your inner monster. Er, child, I meant child. It'll be a great way to shake loose the last vestiges of the everyday world and get into the spirit of the con.

10pm Writing Believable Sex Scenes
     Let's just start with the basics of how to not make your reader laugh unless you intend them to laugh during your character's passionate moment of pleasure (or plunge into intimate darkness) and go from there, okay?

Midnight Handling Sexuality with Dignity
     I have no idea why they think I'm qualified to talk about dignity, but I'm game for putting on my serious face to talk about whatever, wherever and with whoever in what position ... while being respectful or at least aware of the audience.

Saturday Nov. 9

11am Political Systems in SF
     Game on! I'm excited about this one. Greek forum in a virtual arena anyone? How about the economics behind feudalism driving the political power granted to a particular senator? What about a true democracy via text messaging your vote and the unintended, (evil, naturally) consequences.

5pm Science and Spirituality
     I'm actually dreading this one a little bit, which means it should be an exciting panel. I can't be the only pagan to study physics ... am I?

6pm The Kami and Rory Show
     Actually, this is a half-hour reading slot that my DH and I share. May be prefaced a sparring match to see who goes first. There may be chocolate but you have to show up on time or it's gonna be all gone. I haven't decided what to read yet. If I remember closer to the con, I'll clue y'all in.

9pm Keeping it Clean – or at least not so dirty
     I love this topic. It's all about the bad words that only comedians are supposed to use in public. Let's get real and use the whole language, and maybe some other languages ... and try not to embarrass ourselves too much. Have you seen the Veronica Mars episode where she's at the college and the college guy who uses Frack instead of F*ck? Her expression and reaction? Yeah. That's what you're up against, SF writers.

10pm Smut, Gore and More
     Probably my favorite panel of the con. This is where I get a little political and thrash against the confines of American culture. But also, I'd like to see some discussion about sex, violence, and the glorification thereof.

Midnight Fifty Shades of Dreck
     I keep meaning to read it. Really I do. But what I think we're mostly going to talk about is sex (again, I know!) Non-vanilla sex. Don't get me wrong, I like vanilla ....

Sunday Nov. 10

10am  Infrastructure
     In fiction. Sewers or lack thereof, agriculture, air scrubbers ... why does every protagonist in a futuristic society have to be a scientist, a cop or a teacher? Let's get some air scrubber engineers in there, or a garbage hauler.

3pm Gardening in Fantasyland
     OMG, fantasy horticulture. Heaven! Plus, if you want, bring your real-world gardening questions and I'll try to answer them. BTW, my amarylis is like four years old now and it's soooo big, and my orange tree has two proto-oranges on it. I love this growing season! It's so long, and firm, and soon at the end it'll begin to glisten with moisture ....  Oops. Sorry. This is *not* a panel about sex or violence or use of profanity. It's about plants. My obsession. My guilty pleasure. It'll be a great way to wrap up the con. And if no one shows up to listen, I'll be there on my laptop working on a book or plant geeking with a fellow panelist or two if they're obsessed like me.

I think that's everything. I've got a really busy schedule.

BTW, if you're a panelist and you *don't* have a busy schedule and you want one for next year, here's what you do:

You volunteer for every conceivable panel you would deign to attend, and if you're only vaguely interested, rate it low, which I think is high. Check the scale. It's at the top of the page. Lots of panelists pick 5 for their favorite when 5 actually means that you'll do it if they drag you to the panel and chain you to the chair. Also, send programming a note if you'd like to do a special presentation, and be sure to check the reading and/or autograph session boxes if they're there, even if it looks like it's intended for someone else. That will at least start a dialogue with programming.

Be available all day every day if at all possible.

Suggest panels right after you fill out the form.

Speaking of the form, fill it out early and often, and if you've had trouble with the form going through in the past, send an email asking if they got it.

Most panelists who have trouble getting on panels pick the five panels they want to do, and are available for maybe six hours on Saturday and four on Sunday. That will usually get them zero panels, or one. Not because programming is punishing them, but because you won't be the only person on the panel, right? And all other sorts of people will also want to be on the panel, and their schedules will have to be juggled with yours, and if all theirs match up for 6pm and you said you're only good until 6pm ... you'll get bumped off because the panel ends at 7pm. The other thing that kills their schedule is if only one or two other people volunteer for the panel, and all three of you have such divergent schedule needs and conflicts that the only person available for the panel is you. Then the panel won't happen. If you love a panel idea so much that you're willing to do it as a solo presentation, again, email programming so that they know that.

I think I volunteered for half the panels being offered this weekend, and I made myself available until 2am. As a result ... here I am.

See you at the con!

Kevin the Spider

My DH is home, gammon is on, and life is good.

Like a lot of writers we know, our good life is, well, a little ... different.

I'm a long-time arachnophobe. Had to train myself out of completely freaking out, as in jumping around squealing, just so I could walk through the woods to the bus stop in the mornings. You see, orb weaver spiders, especially the ones that reach that nice, big, mature size, need a lot of room to make their webs, and besides, how else can you capture humans in order to suck their brains out through their eyeballs and lay eggs in their ears unless you build a web all the way across a people path?

I had an orb weaver in my kitchen window for a while. I called her Michele, a coworker terrified of spiders. Sadly, Michele, after getting really, really huge, got very weak one day and fell into the sink. Rather than let her stagger around in there, knowing she probably couldn't cling to her web anymore, I let her go outside, figuring she was done for. They only live a year, and she was long past that. I was sad. Me! An arachnophobe! But she never wandered from the window (except that one, sad, last time) to suck my brains out through my eyeball and never laid eggs in my ear, and for that reason, I was fond of her.

I had great plans to clean the window, but then Kevin moved in, named for a coworker who also doesn't like spiders. Kevin built one of those cobwebby-webs right under Michele's old, now tattered home. Kevin got big, and then I realized Kevin was probably a girl. Kevin vanished for a while, and then I found Kevin outside ... and figured out it was actually probably Kevina and she'd slipped through the window crack and couldn't get back in.

Now I have another Kevin, who appeared to have moved into Kevina's web. I knew it was a different spider, because he was smaller. Emphasis on the was. Once again, I'm fond of the fact that every day I go into the kitchen and Kevin is nicely staying put, eating flies that normally would bounce off the kitchen window and walk all over my nice food while I'm cooking. Now Kevin is even bigger than Kevina was. I mist his (better be a boy and not lay eggs!!) web every morning to make sure he doesn't get dehydrated.

Here he is:

I'll get a better picture of him later. He comes out quite often to bask in the sunshine and gloat over the corpses of his enemies.

I never thought to have a pet spider. Actually, I don't think that Kevin is so much a pet as he is a neighbor. He's a very good neighbor. Unlike that OMG creepy thing that descended from the ceiling right next to my DH while we were starting to get frisky ... talk about killing a mood!

I knew, just knew that nasty thing would have sucked my brains right out of my eyeball given half a chance. I fled. My DH bravely fought it off and killed it after an epic battle. He's my hero.

Kevin would never do that. Never.

Never.

Birds of Other Feathers

My new birds are settling in. By that, I mean I'm managing the ongoing stress as best I can while they figure out that their new home is not the most horrible place in the world.

The day I went out to take pics of them happened to be sunny, which meant all the pics of the black hen turned out really cruddy. I'll get her on a cloudy day sometime. Until then, here's the splash hen, who has yet to have a name stick to her. She's sweet, and destined to live at the bottom of the pecking order, poor thing.

And here's the new rooster, Argent. I like that argent means silver and also sounds like sergeant without the s. He's mellow but not a pushover, and when he finds his feet, or beak, or wings, or whatever, I think he'll get along with Sophie, my pain-in-the-butt silver-laced Wyandotte hen, just fine. At least as well as I can get along with her. She's always sneaking up on my and zinging me at the top of my thigh/base of my cheek. She favors the right side. Dang, I'm tender there, and she knows it! Anyway, Beatrice, my American Araucana/Buff Orpington mix, gets along with everybody. If it were just her, I could throw them in together with no worries. Except, well, you're supposed to quarantine new birds. They don't have the same immunities and bugs as my local birds, and by local I mean my farm. The neighbors probably have a completely different mix of bugaboos that their birds carry and are immune to. Despite knowing this, I keep my birds all in the same coop overnight because there's no other safe place to put them, and then they're separated during the day.

And, because these things happen, we have a rat problem right now. Still working out how to get rid of the one under the coop without endangering the chickens. Thinking ....

Other than having to get up at first light every day to check on the birds, distribute feed and separate the flocks, this has been pretty easy going so far. The birds are stressed, of course, and I worry, and every day seems to bring a new challenge, but they're totally worth it.

Bouncing Good Kangaroo Times

I didn't post about this at the time. Too much other stuff. But we had a wonderful, unique visitor to our little farm recently.

Yes, she is a for-real baby red kangaroo. She spends most of her time in her carry pouch. She's getting quite heavy. I got to lug her around for a while so her human mommy could take a break.

For the record, she is as soft as she looks. And she's very sweet and quiet. And she leaps! We would have let her run around with the goats, but we weren't sure how they'd react to each other, and if she got into the blackberries, we might never catch her. I think she would have leapt back into her pouch very quickly, but better to be safe than very, very sorry.

Besides, she'd be very lonely in the woods in the Pacific NW, with no other kangaroos to play with. I hope she'll visit again soon!

Sitting Still, Standing Up, Braving Through

A lot more people in the world have desk jobs than ever before in history. Once upon a time, you might have had to convince people about how back-breaking and even debilitating working at a desk can be.

In a way I'm really lucky. I stand all day at my day job, so when I come home to write, I'm ready to sit down for a good, long while. But even that gets hard. Because I'm either standing for a long time, or sitting for a long time, my body wears out quick even though I get to switch between the two. I try to get up a lot and walk around to break up my writing, but I want to get a lot of writing done, and so I always sit longer than I mean to ....

Anyway, it made my mini-adventure yesterday a lot more fun than it otherwise would have been. I came home to a lost dog shut into the upstairs bathroom. Luckily, she had a collar with all her information on it. Calling did no good. Power was out up the road. So the girl and I walked her home. The place was all shut up with, get this, an electric gate blocking the way. No way to buzz the house to let us in. So I had the girl hold my flashlight and umbrella, hefted the dog into my arms, and lowered her over the gate safely to the other side. She dropped maybe the last six inches was all.

Pouring down rain, warm wind, transformers sparking and arching red and gold, the trees swaying and creaking and cracking, fir needles and pine cones littering the road, no lights except the flashlights that flickered and grew steadily dimmer, the flash of lights on a truck as an emergency power crew waited for the go-ahead to work on the line, my shoes squelching and squishing with so much water it felt like I was wading along a river shore ....

Awesome.

So often, writing feels like living in a cell. Sometimes, even if it's uncomfortable, its so good to get outside I never want to come back in.

Sometimes, especially because it was uncomfortable, and a little scary, and so real, I want to do it again.

Instead I sit down, and do my work. At least until the next time the weather and the world summon me.

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.

Integrity for Grownups

This post is not actually all about me, even though it sounds like it and sometimes I'm self-absorbed like that so that wouldn't be an inaccurate perception. There's stuff going on. What I'd like to say is, I will treat others gently when met with matters of word, honor, and responsibility, because I see myself in them. I won't always and unyielding-ly hold people to their words ... they must hold themselves to their words, unless they feel in their hearts, minds and spirits that not holding themselves to their words would be a greater sin than following them. As for procrastination and denial ... those things hound me too.

Someone recently told me that they read (or thought up) what it meant to be a grownup. They got to live in their own place, go out with friends and do whatever or stay home and enjoy the solitude on their own schedule ... and went to the dentist without being bullied or dragged in.

In days of yore, people would say things like 'a man is as good as his word' and 'my word is my bond.' When thinking about these things as a young adult, I thought it meant that no matter how crappy things got, you followed through on promises, even if it killed you.

How do these things connect?

I'm not entirely a grownup, as my DH well knows. I don't go to the dentist for annual checkups or six month cleanings. I go when I feel a hole start to develop on the surface of a tooth, or if something hurts. And though I try to be careful to: A. only make promises I can keep and B. follow through when I say I'll do something, the hard reality is that I'm usually on the verge of being late for work almost every day (I generally arrive just a couple of minutes before I have to clock in) and that I'm a sloppy communicator, so I may not always mean exactly what I say. This has caused some irritation and grief over the years, mainly to my DH, who has to put up with my silliness and inconsistency and my tendency to race around the house looking for my purse when I ought to be walking through the door at my work site.

As I've grown older I've come to realize that 'my word is my bond' and 'a man is as good as his word' are more complex and beautiful and difficult than mere adherence to formally-made vows. The things we say, especially the things we say over and over again, are the things that people around us have to assume that we mean because otherwise the stuff that comes out of our mouths is worthless. We might as well not say anything at all. In fact it might be better not to say anything at all, especially if what we say is something to let ourselves off the hook when we fail.

Integrity isn't always as simple as a failure or a success, a truth or a lie. If I say I'm going to work really hard to get this project done by Tuesday, and the work is overwhelming so that I'm late on delivery but I stay in touch with the manager, let him know how things are going, and tell him as soon as I can that it's going to be done on Friday (or ask for help so that I can get it done on time), he'd be a pretty crappy guy to say "but you saaaiiiid you'd be done by Tuesday! You're a crappy employee!" My lateness shouldn't reflect on my integrity, just my powers of estimation. But if I say, "we can have whatever you want for dinner tonight," and then the suggestion is deep fried shrimp, potato salad and devil's food cake for dessert and I start to wheedle with "but it's so fattening and I'm really in the mood for a salad and some nice broiled fish ...." That's not fair. And I have pulled crap like that.

I've also realized that being responsible isn't just being response-able, though that is a huge and important part of being an adult. There's a need for people to grow and learn and constantly seek new ways to become better at surviving, thriving, and contributing. Being a responsible, grown-up adult also means facing and dealing with the unpleasant, scary, painful shit in our lives, and doing our part to survive, thrive, and contribute to the solutions that will hopefully lead to some improvement if not actual victory. Ignoring or hiding from problems, hoping that they'll go away or get better on their own, or convincing ourselves that they're maybe not so bad, or focusing on all the other stuff that goes on in our lives in the hopes that a lottery win will fix it all for us ... that's not being a grownup.

And I am not a grownup. Not all the way. I hope I'm getting better, stronger, smarter, more competent. I hope that my efforts and communication skills transmit to the people that I love that I probably won't be done by Tuesday, but that I'm working until I'm exhausted every waking hour trying to fulfill my promise. And when I whine for broiled fish and I see the look of betrayal in my friend's eyes, I hope I'm forgiven, though now both dinners are poisoned for everyone because of the guilt and the betrayal. I hope I don't pull that kind of shit again next time I work to deadline or yield a decision to someone else, if I'm given the honor of a next time. Part of what motivates me to do better is the awareness that my friends don't have to forgive me. To respect them, to honor them and to build integrity, I must assume that they might not forgive me.

Damn I've got a lot of growing up to do.

I won't drag my friends to the dentist. They have to go to the dentist themselves. For my part, if they ask, I will be honest about the decay I see, and offer what insights I have. However unworthy they may consider themselves to be for whatever they have done or not done, unless they've managed to hide something extreme like that they're a bunny-raping axe murderer, I know we are akin in our imperfections, and forgiveness, understanding and love will remain possibilities in our ongoing lives.

One last observation. The things that we are most ashamed of or most fearful of might not be what our friends and families find most painful and distancing. So often it's not the mistakes we make, but what we don't do about them or don't say about them that damage our integrity the most. Those times that we are most afraid, hurting the most, and the most isolated are often the very times we need to reach out, if for no other reason than to get a second opinion from people we trust. If we have chosen our friends wisely, it's more likely that our worst nightmares of condemnation and isolation will vanish, and we'll wake into a world of support, caring, and with the hope of a fresh new start.

Stuff

Lately I've been feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, not only because of work, although that contributes, or because I also have too many projects in various stages of completion, which of course doesn't help either, but because I have too much stuff to track and maintain and organize. I feel a strong desire to downsize, not so much in the direction of a smaller house, but in terms of unloading things that I don't want or use anymore.

Some of the stuff we have around the house is garbage. It's useless, not just to us, but to anyone really. Some of the things I have in my office are so dirty or water damaged or bug/mouse/creepything infested or stained by the leavings of those things that I don't even want to touch them. Motivating myself to go through those things, especially because I'll want to try to clean/repair/rescue some of those things is tough. The last thing I want to do after a long day at work, or even worse, on my weekend, is wrestle with giant spiders and dust mouse droppings off of something that had once been precious to me.

It's too dry to have a paperwork burning. That's one of my favorite forms of purging mess, is to sort through boxes or bags of paperwork that I didn't feel comfortable just chucking into the recycling bin. It's easy with no guilt and very little desire to retain/rescue individual pages, but it's time consuming. Anyway, since I can't really do my favorite garbage-ridding, I'm looking for ways to downsize the rest of our accumulation.

Donation is easy and convenient for those things we don't want or need anymore. We have a Goodwill station right by the grocery store. But I sometimes wonder if I might be able to get some actual cash money for some of our items.

Unfortunately, a lot of that non-useful-to-us stuff really needs to be cleaned up and organized, and then what? We're a bit too far out to have a garage sale. Ebay would require a big learning curve, and a friend of ours let us know that it can be quite time consuming without any guarantee of making back enough money to offset the time you spend on it, never mind get what the item is actually worth.

So, I'm debating what to tackle in what room, to what extent, and when, and while I debate, of course no progress is being made. Still, it's on my radar. I now that having less stuff will help reduce my stress level and give us less housework overall. When I look at homes that look nice, they tend to have very, very little clutter and almost no stuff in each given room. That would be full of awesome.

As long as I don't have to sacrifice any books. Clearly what we need are more bookshelves. Which technically are stuff, but ... not, right?

Ugh. Stuff. Too much stuff!

Yet Another Weird Thought About Writing

I wondered today if I was the last person on Earth, or marooned on an island with no hope of anyone finding me, and/or if I could only write on materials so transient that they would become unreadable before anyone but me could read them again ... would I still write? I know these aren't original thoughts, but that's where my brain went today. Nothing new under the sun.

Anyway, I think I would write as much as I could. In fact, I think writing would become even more precious to me. I don't think I'd have much time to write in a survival situation, so there's the scarcity principle in action right there.

But I also have a scarcity principle in operation because I work full time, so I have very little (by comparison to the rest of my day, considering that I have chores, have to eat, sleep, etc.) time to write. So writing is precious to me in part because of that.

And I have no guarantee that anyone will find my work, or read it. It's a grain of sand on a vast beach. I would like to be read, but that's not the primary thing motivating me.

Still, there's a chance. In that marooned situation, last person in the world scenario, why would I write?

To ease my loneliness, even if it's only until the tide comes in and sweeps the words from the sand.

I wonder if there's a lonely part inside every writer that writes to make itself feel better. Is it deluded, unaware of all the companionship all around it ... or is that part of a writer the part that's aware that no matter how many friends we have, how close we are to family, or how many pets we cherish, each of us can only live our own lives. As we are each born into one body, that one body must die and no one can take that journey for us, or go with us ...

Our writing is perhaps one of a few things that exists as part of us outside of us. Sculpture, art, music ....

Prehistoric cave paintings on a wall. Made for posterity? Maybe, but even so, their creators were like us. Are us. Found pleasure it extending their existence outside their bodies so they could look at something so much better than a mirror. Art, as a companion? A soul mate?

Bonny blue een

The girl is putting together a paper and a diorama for her poetry class. She and I had a lot of fun making a rice-stuffed doll. She did the rest entirely herself (although as a surprise, I'm going to make a shield for her fallen knight tonight.) We may have reached new lows, or highs, depending, of family weirdness as we both really like the doll. Even though it has no legs. And looks wounded. And is creepy.

She has ravens, a nest, and everything. We used corn silk for the hair, and painted two buttons with blue nail polish (doesn't everyone have blue nail polish just laying around the house?) for the eyes.

Her subject:

  Twa Corbies! (Anonymous, from bartleby.com)

AS I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane:
The tane unto the tither did say,
'Whar sall we gang and dine the day?'
'—In behint yon auld fail dyke	5
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.
'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,	10
His lady 's ta'en anither mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.
'Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pike out his bonny blue e'en:
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair	15
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.
'Mony a one for him maks mane,
But nane sall ken whar he is gane:
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.'

Whether the doll is weirdly, creepy-cute, or just plain wrong, that was about the best quality time the girl and I have had to spend together in quite awhile.

Getting Stuff Done

As most of you know or have gathered, I work a full time day job (yay!) and then write, design books, garden, do light physical training, create cover art, and teach myself various business-related skills like web page design, tax accounting, graphic design, typography, and how to maintain my delicate facade of calm and competence when in fact I'm constantly overwhelmed by work and dreaming crazy dreams.

Lately I've been more overwhelmed than usual (!) with stuff that needs to get done by various deadlines. This is what I do when I have so much crap to accomplish that I don't want to do anything at all. It might work for you too.

I separate daylight and after dark activities. It really doesn't work to garden after dark, though I've done it. Ditto for trimming goat hooves, mowing, taking the dogs for a walk, staining the deck, carpentry, etc. So if I plan to make headway on one of those sorts of things, I prioritize my time accordingly.

I separate heat-of-day activities from cool temperature activities. I might get away with staining the deck, washing a car, giving the dogs baths, or even pulling tansy during the heat of the day, but mowing during the heat of the day, or rototilling, or digging up a huge plant and moving it to the opposite end of the garden might be best for before noon or after 6pm.

I give myself an hour or so playing dithering games. Those vary from the obvious, like playing endless rounds of Bejeweled, to weird, like deciding to reorganize my underwear drawer. I could try to not do those sorts of things at all, but I find that if I don't give in at least for a little while, I can't seem to focus and I end up puttering and not getting much done ... basically I dither by default. Once that hour (or so) is up, I have to stop and work on one of my real goals. Something about the time restriction, and allowing myself to waste time on my own terms, helps put me in a good working headspace.

Then I get to work, dividing my time between two or three things over the course of the day so that I don't get mush brain and start to make mistakes. I listed this last, but I seem to do much, much better if I decide in advance which two or three things on my long to-do list I'm going to work on on a given day.

When I start to hesitate, or realize that I don't have all the stuff I need to finish, or my eyes start to cross and I lose track of what goes where and whose eyes are green, I stop, dither a while, tank up on food and water, and do something different, whatever is next on the day's list.

This system has been working really, really well for me. And the more I practice it, the more I seem to accomplish.  Pretty soon I hope to announce the completion of a big project I've been working on for years. I'm very, very close to getting there. Because I'm a typical, self-sabotaging creative type I of course didn't want to put the finishing touches on this project as soon as I got home from the day job, and instead watered my garden, played Bejeweled, weeded around some of my roses, trimmed oregano back from a garden path, and made snide comments about a really, really bad movie playing in the background while I played Bejeweled. Well, I've had my fun now. According to my rule, I need to put some time into real work now, so it's off to copyedit a few more chapters in my book, and then bedtime. Who knows? Maybe if I get on a roll, I might even finish tonight. That would be awesome.

Junk

I tried to find something today. It was a fairly important thing that at the time I thought we would need today, ASAP.  Turned out that we didn't, but, I spent about an hour looking for it.

I found:

Boxes of paperwork intended for burning.
Spiderwebs larger than my head.
Enough dust bunnies that they could probably be felted into a fine and substantial hat.
Old CDs I'd burned for bellydance classes that I haven't held in many years.
That although the floor had been recently swept in my office, there was enough accumulated cat litter tracked out of the cat box now that it's extremely unpleasant to walk in there barefooted.
Paycheck stubs from years ago waiting to be filed, along with a huge stack of other to-be-filed material.
That we have an impressive colony of the spiders I loathe and fear the most in our downstairs.

And much, much more.

I'm inspired to get some of this stuff organized, cleaned out, and whatever is junk, thrown away. I would also like the spiders to magically disappear as if they've never existed, and I will pretend that they were all nicely let outside where they belong and will lead their happy, long, creepy spider lives elsewhere.

And I would really, really like to find the disk we were looking for. We found the box, the instructions, the legalese ... but not the disk. Argh. We don't need it, but in case we do, I don't want to search through all that junk again.

Because, seriously. That was scary, and gross.

Rose Rosette Disease

Rose Rosette Disease.

I've been out of the horticulture world for a while. I garden a lot, I learned a bit of plant taxonomy, took classes in plant propagation, helped build a greenhouse, toured nurseries around the northwest corner of Oregon, and drove my husband crazy by collecting plant samples and drying them in weird places in the house and spewing Latin names as we drove through neighborhoods while studying for exams.

This disease was never mentioned in class. It snuck up on me.

Part of the reason is because it hasn't officially blipped on the radar in this area. Part of it is because thanks to a newly-developed test and the devastating loss of some important rose gardens, in 2011 RRD and the rose rosette virus have gained new attention.

It has no cure. Roses that have the disease have to be destroyed, and no new rose may be planted in its place, as the roots remaining in the ground may transmit the virus to the new rose. This disease has destroyed a huge number of wild roses, and many healthy wild roses are destroyed in an effort to restrict the spread of this disease.

The primary vector appears to be a particular sort of wingless mite that doesn't appear to live in this area, and so it may be that my other roses won't be affected, but it may also be true that they're already infected, and I'll lose them all. As symptoms arise, I'll destroy plants, and in their place put lavender and rosemary and peonies and try not to think about how much I loved the scent of all those blossoms in the early morning as I walked down my favorite paths.

I suspect that the rose was infected when I bought it, probably through root stock or a graft purchased from a nursery in an infected region. Last fall, the rose sent up a bizarre shoot. I thought it might be just a weird sport, and wondered if it would bloom. It did, beautifully. The stem remained red, as did all the leaves, and the stem was covered almost completely in thorns. It grew so tall and thick and fast that it easily broke in the next strong wind. Very short side shoots developed, with more rose buds, and one more bloomed. None of the side stems grew more than a couple of inches--unusual for a knocked down branch that bothers to grow side shoots.

In the spring, my husband accidentally mowed it where it lay. The grass had covered it up. I snipped it and forgot about it.

While surfing I ran across an article about the disease, and my heart sank. The stem covered in thorns, the red foliage that didn't mature to green, the very lush, brittle growth ... I had everything except the witch's brooms, elongated and twisted leaves and short stems growing in profusion from a single node, eventually forming 'brooms'. The next morning I went out. That weird stem was long gone, of course, but I had the rest of the plant to look at. It looked normal, except ... the red leaves at the growing tips looked twisted and puckered. No more stems covered in thorns, but .... I emailed our county master gardener program. They concurred with my assessment. Dig it up, burn it. Don't wait for more symptoms. Even if the rest of the rose isn't blaring signs of the disease, even though those leaves might be twisting for other reasons, even though the leaves may eventually turn green, because the rose was probably infected via a graft or root stock, because there's no cure ... there wasn't much point in waiting to see if the rose might not be okay. It wouldn't be.

I may have unwittingly spread the disease. I didn't disinfect the clippers after I clipped off what I thought was a weird sport. I don't have a lot of problems with powdery mildew, and black spot is endemic ... all my roses have at least a little black spot, and so I don't worry about making that worse.

That lack of foresight and basic sanitary practice may have cost me my rose garden. There are always diseases, known and unknown, ready to arise in all our gardens that could kill living things that we prize and that rely on us for their survival. Sloppiness, laziness ... it's easy, but it's risky. I gambled. We'll see how much I lost. Maybe nothing. Maybe just the one rose, a rose I didn't infect, a rose that came infected, that was dying, though neither of us knew it. I surely hope so. Because I have some great roses, and I'd like them to stick around a long, long time.

Cat up a Tree, and Down Again

It's been one of those weeks.

The two main things are near and perhaps impending badness.

First, Wizard got stuck in a tree. I have no idea how he got up there. All I know is that the dogs went bananas, and then I heard people talking, and saw a pickup truck. And then I heard yowling. You know how a cat sounds like your cat, but not, because it's making a weird, not-usual sound? Yeah. So I head up there, terrified that he got hit by a car, and I'm a little grateful that someone pulled over because most people when they hit an animal keep going or worse, slow down, decide that they can't cope and jet away ....

But, he's not at the side of the road, bleeding. He's about 25 feet up a Douglas fir. I couldn't find my big ladder, and the folks that stopped (I still don't know if they hit him--thanks to today's sue-happy society, I'm sure they'd be terrified to admit they did, even though they wouldn't be liable for anything) and 'noticed him' stuck up there, had to go but they promised to come back and check on him. Right after they left, of course then I found my big extension ladder. I flagged down one of the folks that use our road as a bicycle training hill, and he held the ladder steady while I climbed up there.

For my family's sanity, I won't describe what it took to get a terrified cat, who has four clawed feet, off of a tree branch that he doesn't want to leave, while perched close to the top of a tall extension ladder set up in the back of my pickup truck because the ladder wasn't tall enough set up on the ground.

Wizard had a very, very bad limp when I got back to the house, so I took him to the vet. Right now he's still on major kitty pain killers. The vet suggested that if he's still walking funny with his elbow tucked in under his ribs in seven days that I should get him x-rayed. I'll keep all y'all updated. In the meantime his limp has all but disappeared, and he seems happy, although a bit confused about why I won't let him or Huntress outside anymore.

Reason being, if it wasn't a truck that scared him badly enough to chase him up a tree, it was probably a coyote, or a bobcat, or some other critter bent on eating him. Neither cat is going out right now, and quite possibly ever again. Both our remaining kitties are older animals now, and it's simply too dangerous for them out there. I had no idea Wizard got that close to the road (assuming he wasn't chased across the road, of course) and the traffic is too ugly there, too. So, it's just best all around if they don't go out anymore.

The other news has to do with my roses. That'll be a long-ish post with pics and links, so that'll wait until next time. The gist is, I may lose some, or all of my roses over the next couple of years to a viral disease. You might too, so if you have roses, be sure to check in and I'll give you the skinny on rose rosette disease, or RRD, caused by the rose rosette virus or RRV. If you can't wait, Google a bit and prepare to be alarmed.

More About Work

Not everyone gets to work at a job they love. I wonder sometimes if the vast, overwhelming number of people actually actively hate their jobs.

I think the world would be a better place if everyone loved their job, but that's sort of like wishing that diseases didn't exist. It's a nice sentiment, but it's not gonna happen.

Disliking or actively hating a job can damage a lot of stuff. There's that sense of time being wasted or lost, and we all have limited time, whether we like to think about that or not. Because most of us need to eat and like to have a roof over our heads and electricity and telephones and stuff, we're forced to endure the unpleasantness of work. Even really good, fun jobs can be boring or stressful at times. Unless you're independently wealthy, you just gotta power through.

That stuff is not that big a deal, and it's certainly not a revelation. Everyone pretty well does that every day without needing someone to remind them.

What I have been thinking about lately is how hatred of a job, of some aspect of a job, can twist and scar morality and spirituality. You may consider yourself a kind person, but be rude to someone who doesn't deserve it because the person before irritated you. You may consider yourself honest, but lie (or stretch the truth) to get out of doing something. Maybe, over time, core values get so worn away that the kindness that was once all yours to claim divorces you and moves away and you become bitter. The job did it to you.

Or did you do it to yourself?

I think I'm going to pay special attention at work today, to see if I'm upholding my work ethic, and to make sure I'm being myself, the self I want to be. I don't hate my job, but I certainly don't love it (though most of my coworkers and customers are great.) Sometimes it's stressful or boring (or both ... it's a bit mind-bending but it does happen) and because I'm there for such a great proportion of my overall waking time, I know my work shapes me. I think it's a good idea to periodically check and make sure that any changes are changes I want to see in myself.

And if I really want to be proactive, maybe I should think about ways I can change my work, or my attitude toward my work, to make sure I behave the way I want to be. In the end, I can't really blame my work for turning me into something I don't like. I'm the one living my life. My work isn't living my life for me. It can't. It's inanimate, unless I animate it. I have the power to work in a way that reflects my ethics, morality, spirituality, and creativity.  I may not choose when to work or what my work is, but I choose how to work, and how I work is what builds my character and shapes my soul. I choose.

I choose.

The Work of a Lifetime

I've written about work and keeping busy before, but it seems to, like history, keep repeating itself every day.

Customers that come into the store where I work all have work lives that wrap around them like clothes. Sometimes its invisible, but most of the time it's clear ... not necessarily what they do, but how they do it, and how passionately they do it.

A friend of mine at work that recently retired always worked quickly, efficiently and with great attention to detail. She's busier than ever. She and I sometimes had a quick chat (no time to dawdle and talk at work!) about the work we had at home and how it never seemed to get done. Even with her day job behind her, she never gets done with all the things she wants to accomplish. I know it'll be the same for me. There's always something else that I'd like to achieve, whether it's to move the appliances and scrub the entire kitchen floor, weed out an ornamental garden bed, rough in another book cover, or finish the front porch (argh, there's so much to do!!) When my friend shops she's a woman on a mission. She's got to get back to work. Time is slippery, and we all have only so much.

But not everyone's life is like that. People shuffle in, bored, and roam the aisles looking for something to divert themselves. Sometimes it's just that they're exhausted and shopping is a vacation from the daily slog. But that in and of itself is telling. They slog, not just one day but every day. I have a beloved customer that always teases me when he comes in. He never seems to find anything to do. He shops out of boredom, often more than once a day, and more often than not leaves without getting anything because he can't find anything he wants. He's my opposite.

There are shopping explorers where everything is an adventure and fun and they're looking for something new to add to their homes or their hobby stuff. There are distracted people who can't pull their gazes away from their telephones or their conversations long enough to notice what they're doing. People who devote the vast majority of their time interacting with their children. People who come in with children and spend the vast majority of their time ignoring them or demanding that the children behave in such a way that they're easier to ignore.

It's just one shopping trip, but it's one of many that build into a pattern. I see the same people every day, week, month and watch them build this pattern. It's just one hour, of one day, of a lifetime. But the days form an architecture. Brick by brick, everyone builds their lives, and it's amazing and humbling to notice the ones that live in stark, empty rooms that they circle in restlessly with little to do, and those that have tidy homes and tidy gardens where they find enjoyment in the art and order, and those that beat trails through jungles, and those that build villages, or huge cities with all that they do and create ....

We are all of us, every day, contributing to the work of a lifetime, a masterpiece. It's not always beautiful or awe-inspiring, but it is who we are. Some feel like they're forced, some choose what they do, but we all do it just by managing our days. I find that endlessly fascinating.

Soul in the Words

After, my pagan afterlife novel, is almost ready. I've had other projects take over my spare time recently, so that book has been set back by a couple of weeks, but it's close.

Or maybe I'll finish producing it this weekend. It all depends on how quickly the other projects come together. 

A long while ago now I posted on facebook that this book could have far-reaching repercussions in my life. I didn't want to go into details, which worried some people. The kind support warmed my heart. Whatever happens with After, it was and is my choice to publish it, and I'll live with the consequences, whether they're negative, positive or a mix of both at the same time. Chances are that the people who might object in a way that could make my life miserable won't ever read it. That won't necessarily keep them from passing judgement, I suppose, but unless they hear about it in some way, they shouldn't feel a need to.

I don't make a secret of my beliefs, but I don't talk about them much either, especially lately. When I was young, I think I spoke more about them because I wanted to share my experiences. Subconsciously I may have also been testing society to see where I fit in and how it would react as a whole. That openness helped me connect with other like-minded people, and I even spent a short time with a coven. I miss them ....

As I get older, the more private I become. It's not fear. I know where I fit in. I don't feel a need for everyone around me to know me well enough to share in the knowledge of my connection with the wider, spiritual world. And if my friends want to know, they can ask. (That's permission right there if any of you are curious but are shy or worried that you might be crossing a line.) As for the confidence ... I'm not. I'm absolutely confident about what I experienced first hand. I even believe most of what I've heard and read, though I now listen with a keen awareness of how experiences and beliefs can be rewritten in the person's own mind and heart to fit with what they expect and want.

Ultimately, it's that expectation and desire for my experiences and understanding of the physical-spiritual world to fit into something easy and comforting that has silenced me. The older I get, the more I realize that it's more important for me to learn something true and experience something real than to have a religion that almost-but-not-quite fits with what I believe. That much as I want to be part of a larger community, my religious experiences keep pushing me out into solitary expression and study.

I wrote After as a work of fiction, not as a religious text. There's a lot in there that's meant to be story, not parable. The book is about KJ, not me, and it's about her growth beyond the life that both nourished and confined her. My childhood and marriage were and are radically different from KJ's, though on paper we appear to share minor elements. I didn't write After as therapy. I don't need any. 

But I did want to write a work of fiction that had a pagan aesthetic closer to my own, rather than the more mainstream pagan culture, if there really is such a thing. Measuring against that bar, I succeeded. Today I would probably write a different book. But at the time that I wrote After, I wanted, maybe needed to reveal little pieces of my heart and I hid them away in the words on the pages of that book. There's no need to go looking for them. Chances are that if people go looking for them, unless they know me very well, they'll only find themselves.

I'd count myself most fortunate if they did find themselves. I couldn't ask for anything better than that.

Publishing Company News

Today I read about two individuals who are leaving traditional publishing houses to start up literary agencies.

I sincerely wish them both well and good luck with their ventures. Having said that, a thousand questions popped into my mind. These are things that should enter any writer's mind before they shop for a literary agent, so I'll go ahead and list a couple of them here. If you don't like the answers a given literary agency gives you, don't sign up with them. In fact, if they post their terms on their page and those terms don't make sense from the writer's point of view, I wouldn't contact them at all.

What percent? Historically, agents received 10% of the writer's paycheck from the publisher (both the advance and royalties.) This has crept up to 15% and stuck. Most folks would, perhaps rightly, contend that an agent will get them a bigger advance than they would on their own. But the royalties? For all time? Where is the justification for 15% there? Not arguing, just asking. What would be the added benefit of having an agent over, say, a literary contract lawyer, who actually fully and completely understands contract law from his client's perspective, not from the publisher's perspective? A literary contract lawyer will charge a one time fee, based on how much time and trouble it is for her/him. And then s/he's gone. If s/he charges $800 to vet a contract for you, it won't matter if you're negotiating a $5000 advance or a $750,000 advance. And then you get all the royalties from your work. Forever.

I have to admit, I did cringe a bit when I heard the news. One of the reasons I cringed is that I have heard many stories about agents and editors settling on a contract with a writer that was actually worse than the worst-terms boilerplate for the publisher. With an agent on your side, you wouldn't think that it would happen, but it does. Editors mainly edit. They don't practice law. Having an editor leave the editing business and go into agenting ... well, I have my doubts.

Next question:  Will they ask for rewrites before they're willing to send your work out? In this case, if the editor was very good at their job, I'm more comfortable with that than I would be with an agent whose history and education I have no clue about. Having said that, I'm wary of anyone who would take on a writer because of that writer's compelling writing who then turns around and asks for a major rewrite. Little stuff, oh yeah. Bring it on! If I change the character's name in the middle of the story, let's go ahead and fix that and save us both some embarrassment. But I don't want to go with an agent who is trying to groom me into becoming the sort of writer s/he believes will sell better (or who will write like s/he would like to write themselves.) That says that they see potential, but won't work with me until I'm better. I'd rather get better on my own, with my own learning process, than under the direction of someone who is supposed to be selling manuscripts to publishers, not reading and critiquing almost-there manuscripts for their stable of writers. Seriously. I've heard of agents bad-mouthing their authors to publishers, calling their work commercial dreck, smut, etc. If an agent doesn't love, really love, my work, I don't want to have them represent me. And if they're asking for extensive rewrites, especially with the idea to make it more commercial, they don't love my work. End of story.

Stuff to think about before signing on with an agent. There's lots more questions. I hope that writers who see two new literary agencies on the horizon don't start setting up their submission packages before they've settled these and other questions in their minds.

When the Coyotes Sing

Misread of the day: Urban Wine, for a second, looked like Urine Wine and I thought, ew, what?!

A long-haired, pure black (doesn't have any sun-faded brown areas even!) kitty has been dumped in our neighborhood. It's not feral. I can't get close to it, but it understands domesticated kitty concepts like food comes from houses. It's also been in our house (I think) eating from the kitty food bowl.

Here's another plea that will not reach the right ears. Please don't dump your kitties in the countryside! Yes, most of us will feed these animals but our own cats will fight with them, and if they get injured, there's no way to get them to the vet. Also because they're so skittish and scared, we can't take them inside at night and they will inevitably be eaten by coyotes.

After I noticed it around for a few days the kitty, which I believe is female, disappeared for a couple of weeks and I thought damn, I guess that's it. But now she's back. My son is calling her Oops for the moment.

The coyotes sing at every sunset very near our house. And often during the night they yip and cry while they tear apart and share whatever kills they've managed to snag. One of these times, it will be Oops.

Every morning now I wake up and wonder if Oops will come up to the deck to snatch a quick meal, or if we'll never see her again.

Sigh.

Long Grass

Lack of gardening continues unabated.

It's been wet, cold and rainy, so gardening amounts to walking through during a break in the rain so I can evaluate what's going on, and applying slug bait.

These are actually really important things to do. I have seedlings hanging out waiting for a spot to open up. If a zucchini is destroyed by slugs (happened) or if a tomato is broken off by wind (might happen today--wowza is the wind rockin' and rollin'!) I can replace them without having my garden set back. It might not be the same sort of plant (tomato it will be--in the case of the zucchini, I'm going to stick a cucumber in its place) but the space won't be empty. Which reminds me--those seedlings need to come inside today, not because it's too cold, but too windy for them.

Slug baiting right now is super important, with frequent re-applications needed. This is prime crawling, eating and breeding time for slugs, and newborn baby slugs are really hungry. They also have this nasty habit of eating their way down into the crown of a plant and destroying it beyond any hope of recovery without ever being exposed to future applications of slug bait or pesticides. So, best not to let them have the opportunity. Early and often, folks. Early and often.

BTW if you haven't pruned off spent peony heads, do that now. Don't take any leaves off. The more stem and leaf you leave on, the better. Next year's blooms will thank you for it, and you'll take some weight off of the plant so that spring storms aren't as likely to snap off a stem or twig and make you cry.

I guess there's stuff to do in the garden after all.

Waiting for the next break in the rain, while the grass grows longer and longer ....

It's that tender root time of year

I've got almost my whole garden planted. It's really hard to say what the growing season will look like, but so far it looks promising. I'm a little worried that the tomatoes aren't growing lots of new green yet. That's probably due to the temperatures. We've had some low lows (one night below 40 degrees, very chilly for tropicals) and it may have set the tomatoes back. Once they're set back, they don't like to get going again.

But, they're still alive.

Also, there's a lot going on with plants that we can't see, mainly, root development. It's easy to focus on the leaves. Why aren't my leaves bigger? Why isn't the plant taller and more full? What are all those yellow spots and purple patches? Oh noes, there are little holes in the leaves! But these things, though they may signal something like flea beetle damage, aren't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. As long as the plant has enough surface area on the leaves to get sugar to the roots which can then fuel the development of new healthy leaves, ultimately the plant can be okay. It's much harder for the plant to recover from bad stuff going on with the roots.

For best root health:

Drainage, drainage and drainage. Here in the Pac NW it's easy for plants to get cold and waterlogged from chilly spring rains.

Mulch. It brings good soil organisms closer to the surface where they'll help aerate and fertilize soil that's closest to those young seedlings whose roots don't go very deep. Also, it keeps competing weeds down and helps warm the soil from the previously mentioned shivery rains.

Don't go too crazy with pulling weeds, especially if you use tools. You may be inadvertently damaging your plant's roots. Especially when the plant is very young and vulnerable, it's better to snip weeds that are growing very close to your plant, and to gently rub out tiny seedlings rather than using a hand rake on them.

Happy gardening!

More Garden Geekery

Did something today I haven't done in a long time. I cut flowers for my table.

Also, I was very bad and bought a tree peony, Golden Experience. They say I can hybridize using the pollen from this plant. I'm not sure if the other peonies I have are able to do this, but hey, it's worth a try, right? I have two other tree peonies that I'd love love love to cross with this beautiful plant. And who knows? I might help create an incredible new peony. That would really be something. Of course I won't find out what the offspring will look like for ten years or more after planting the seeds ....

Which makes me want to play with roses, which have a similar seed-to-flower span.

Yes, it's a long time for payoff. But people who do this sort of stuff don't think like that. They don't think about payoff so much as love. I didn't raise my children for a payoff. There's no time at which point I'll feel like I've gotten something in return for my time and effort.

I can plant a seed, and help it grow. I can appreciate what it becomes. The pollen, seeds, plants--they do the actual work. I provide a nurturing environment and occasional guidance. That's it.

So, maybe if I remember, this year it'll be roses. Next year, peonies. It'll be a whole new adventure.

If you would like to give it a go, do some reading first to save yourself some trouble. First of all, not all blossoms have viable pollen and seed production capacity. Second, to control pollination, bag the blossoms before they open (careful to make sure there aren't any bugs first) and then mingle the pollens after the stamens after the flower has opened into full bloom. To prevent fungal issues do this only in dry weather and use paper bags. To figure out when the buds have opened into full bloom, mark buds on the same bush that are at the same stage as the ones you're using. Mark on the bag who the daddy is. And keep records someplace easy to find--on your computer is okay, but it's actually better to have a easy-to-find gardening book that you make entries into on a regular basis.

Of all the gardening things I do, it sounds easy-peasy compared to digging out new beds or weeding!

Baby Roots

Sorry about the long break between posts.

I came home yesterday from work with the intention to go working out. I just had to do one thing 'real quick' in the garden.

Two hours later I had my 'real quick' thing done. The pumpkin and squash starts that absolutely, positively had to go in the ground or else went in. There were several that probably won't make it, or will be so stunted that it wasn't worth starting them in advance.

The thing about squashes, pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchinis, melons, etc. is that they hate having their roots messed with, especially when they're wee. Retailers sell them at nurseries and grocery stores but honestly, I would save my money. Except, that we're in a short season area for them. Long season for just about everything else. It's just that for crops that really need hot weather to get going, we don't get that hot weather, not for long. So although my roses are in full bloom and happy, the tomatoes are still shivering.

If you must buy pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchinis, melons, etc. at the store and take them home to plant, this is what I'd do if I was doing as I say instead of as I do (which is plant my own in peat pots and then wait too long):

Don't buy any where the root is coming out the bottom. At all. Peat pots are better than the plastic.
Plant them ASAP, preferably as soon as you get them home.
When you do plant them:
Prepare your area very carefully first. Weed, dig around to make the dirt soft, and make a little hole that's almost exactly the right size. Just make the hole a bit deeper (1/2 inch to an inch, depending on the size of the starter pot.) Use the pot to make sure the hole is the right size. Stick it in the ground, gently compress the dirt around it so that the hole doesn't collapse, and pull the pot back out. Don't worry if it does collapse, you'll be fine if you made it deep enough that a little extra in the bottom won't matter. Get scissors and (very carefully!) cut an x in the bottom of the pot--

Unless it's a peat pot!

Just trim the peat pot (with scissors, don't tear because you might tear down to the roots) down to the soil level if there's a rim, which there usually is. Put some water in the bottom of the hole and then plant the peat pot. (Make a shallow well around the plant and make sure the whole peat pot is covered.)

If it's not a peat pot, proceed to cut from the x up onto the sides a little bit so that you have a guide. Set the pot in the hole you made, make sure again that it's deep enough, and add water. Then cut down the sides down to the lines you cut on the bottom. Gently, gradually remove the pot from the plant, cutting wherever necessary, filling in and gently compressing the dirt as you go so the roots are disturbed as little as possible. Make a shallow well so that water will tend to pool around the plant, but dirt doesn't drift toward the stem when you do water.

You're done!

Sadly I've been too busy to deal with my starts so about half of them had roots poking out the bottom. Sigh. But, I also planted seeds directly in the ground a few days ago. With a little luck, between the two I should have something to show for my trouble come autumn. I will say that although it's a lot of trouble, it's very worth it to grow your own vining broadleaf hot weather plants. Try using them as ornamentals, and even the heavy-fruited ones can climb, though I wouldn't let a pumpkin climb up enough that its fruit won't touch the ground or have some support when it develops past the 10" size.

Garden hour(s)

I got a whole bunch of gardening stuff done today.

It's too early to plant tomatoes, and definitely too early for peppers, but I did it anyway. We've had unusually good weather, and it's very close to tomato time here (Mother's Day for the lower elevations, June 1 for me) so I went for it. I'm holding back my main tomato plants, though. I mulched heavily on the tomato and pepper rows this time, which will hopefully generate a lot of heat and keep those plant roots warm. This is the origin of the term hot bed. Farmers would lay down partially rotted compost with a layer of mulch and heat up the soil for tender seedlings. It is possible to make it so hot that it will kill the seedlings and seeds, so it's not a place/method in which to put your one prize (fill in name of special plant.) These are sacrificial plants that, if they survive, provide a jump on the season and yet aren't a catastrophic loss if they all die or are set back so far that you may as well have planted them at the proper time.

Planted my fuschia starts in their hanging baskets. It's easy to develop feelings of inadequacy when I see the huge baskets of blooming fuschias for sale at most stores right now, but I take comfort in the fact that I didn't spend $60 on the three of them. Having said that, yes, I did buy two hanging baskets, one for sun, and one for shade, to cheer things up in the garden. They were part one of my Mother's Day gift, gotten early and enjoyed fully in the meantime.

Against my better judgement I transplanted two orchids that were in full bloom. I couldn't handle seeing them crammed in their thimble-sized plastic cups with the roots bound tightly around a couple of teaspoons worth of icky old moss. Hopefully they won't keel over from the stress. I got them very inexpensively, which is usually a red flag when buying plants, but Mother's Day is coming up ... the nicer one will go to my mommy, and the smaller one will stay with me as my Mother's Day part II.

Also against my better judgement, I transplanted a poinsettia a friend of mine gave me when she was done with it oh, around mid-January. It's producing new leaves and is still technically in bloom. It would have been better to wait until we were at the other side of summer, but I already had all my transplanting stuff out, and ... yeah. I'll fess up if it dies so y'all will know not to do as I do, only as I say.

I planted out my Mother's Day part III gift, a You Me Forever hydrangea in pale lavender with green tones. It's in a spot that I'll be able to see it from the house, and where I'll be passing it every day that I go out to garden. The You Me Forever series of hydrangeas are exquisite. If you do well with them and have an open spot, I highly, highly recommend them.

My boxwood and chamaecyprus (I'm sure I just butchered the spelling) cuttings appear to be taking root. It will probably be fall before I put them out, but they'll need to be potted up in the meantime, probably in about a month, maybe sooner if I see roots starting to poke out the bottoms of the trays.

Geraniums went in the ground. Geraniums really, really don't like even the slightest cold weather. Mine are in a very sheltered spot, and I'll run out and cover them if the weather report warms me of a cold night in time. I should have waited, but the warm weather makes me dumb like that.

I put chicken wire around the new plantings and a purple rose that would make me cry if the deer ate it before it bloomed.

And lastly (actually, I did this firstly) I switched our back outdoor faucet into growing season mode. It now has a four-way split on it with a little gizmo that prevents water from siphoning back into the house from the icky hoses.

No hard physical labor today, but I'm pooped. I'm glad I had help from my daughter.  And now, bed.

After I set up to plant seeds tomorrow.
Because I'm crazy and I'll garden until after midnight.

What seeds, you ask?
Pumpkins, winter squashes, cantaloupe, cucumber and corn.
Yes, I know. I'm both too late, and too early. But not really. All these items detest transplantation, and need warm soil. By giving the pumpkin, cuke and squash seeds a head-start in the house, and planting in peat pots, if they make it I'll be ahead of the game. I'm also direct seeding all of these later on. As for the corn ... I've failed and failed and failed and finally I think I'm going to try to start them in trays and plant them out when they're really gotten going. Knee high by July is my goal.

I think that's everything for today. Tomorrow is another gardening day!