Desert Sojourn round one

I am back from my first week of surveying in the desert. The town of Barstow wasn't the terrible sucking void of rural depravity that I had been imagining--but that may be because I only ventured out from my hotel room on one evening out of the four we were there. We arrived rather late on Sunday night and then I had a terrible time trying to sleep--the last time I looked at my clock it was about 1:20 a.m., and I had to get up at 5:45 in the morning. After a full day of stomping around on desert pavement on less than four hours of sleep I wasn't up to going out for dinner with my coworkers at all and hibernated in my hotel room. I was in bed before 9 o'clock. The next night we all piled into the two company vehicles and went to the local pizza place, which was nicer than we expected. But of course, they had nothing on tap that a beer snob like myself would consider paying to drink. However, to make up for this terrible affront to consumers of quality alcohol, they did serve an appetizer called Mafia Bread. I forgot to have some.

I do love working out of town sometimes. It gets tiring being away from home if you have been doing it for months on end, but in small doses it's a nice departure from the responsibilities of daily life. I had no chores to do, no pressing issues or business to take care of other than loafing in my hotel room and reading a good book. I also tend to eat better for some reason when I'm working in the field: I eat at least one piece of fruit every day and vary my diet beyond the ubiquitous bread and cheese that I subsist on at home. I'm really not sure why I can't sustain this kind of healthy eating behavior when I'm not out of town. Now I'm back to three meals of cold cereal per day, punctuated by the occasional yogurt.

The work itself was as exciting as ever; I am not being sarcastic in the slightest. Even though we found very little of archaeological interest and we were assaulted by gale force winds for three days, I had a great time. The area we are working in is south of Barstow proper by at least 8 to 10 miles, on the west side of the I-15 freeway. By many people's standards, I suppose it isn't pretty. I used to hate the desert myself. I'm sure it stems from my childhood trauma of relocating from the tree- and water-bound realm of New England to the hottest part of central Arizona when I was seven years old. As a child, I found nothing inspiring or beautiful in the denuded landscapes surrounding the Phoenix area. Family excursions to the painted desert were excruciating exercises in boredom, and Hole-in-the-Rock was just a mildly interesting geological phenomenon that barely held my interest before I was distracted by the delicious thrill of fear provided by our substantial new elevation. Even the varied and sometimes bizarre desert wildlife that I found so utterly fascinating and collection-worthy could not alter me from my steadfast opinion that the desert was an ugly, barren waste.


I was twenty-eight years old the first time I ever found beauty in the desert. I was working my first paid archaeological job surveying in Anza Borrego State Park. It was late winter, but springtime for the high desert. Every cactus in sight was covered in multicolored blooms, the ocotillo were in full riot mode, sporting fistfuls of tiny red flowers at the tips of skeletal green fingers, and there was even grass in many places. Grass! I finally began to notice that the landscape was not a barren wasteland at all, even without the flowers and the unexpected greenery. There is a symphony of color and texture to be found in deserts unlike anywhere else.

The desert outside of Barstow may not have the wildly varying topography of Anza Borrego, but the tenacious cacti in all their varied forms and the long, sloping lines undulating up to the horizon are still beautiful in their sparse way. The cacti out here are unlike any I've seen before--they are so thoroughly covered in long, interwoven spines that the cactus itself is almost completely hidden from view within the basket-like encasement of miniature swords. I even found several that had died, and the spines remained locked together in the shape of the original plant even though there was nothing inside anymore--all the cactus flesh had long since wasted away and the spines held nothing but air.

The last few days of our survey were unbelievable from a meteorological standpoint. I had never ever been outside in winds like that before. In the afternoons, we were still bundled up like astronauts even though it wasn't quite that cold, although the mornings were unbearable with the 45-degree temperatures coupled with 60-mph winds. I kid you not. We heard on the last day that there had been gusts up to 100 mph out there, and it certainly felt like it. We had to abandon our survey on some of the hills because the winds were so ferocious at the higher elevations that we were losing our footing on the loose rocks, and it was just too dangerous. Cheryl fell down 4 times, and I lost my balance on countless occasions. Both Cheryl and I did some experimenting and discovered that we could lean our bodies fully into the wind and it held us up. I counted a maximum of 6 seconds on one occasion before the wind finally let go and I started to fall. Up on top of the hill, before we gave up and went down to less treacherous altitudes, we encountered a related phenomenon. There is a cell phone tower at the top of the hill surrounded by a cinder-block wall. We all gathered on the lee side of the wall at one point to escape the wind, and every single one of us had the same experience getting there. Our bodies were so tense and leaning so hard into the wind that when we turned around the wall's corner, the sudden cutting-off of the wind made us all stumble and almost fall over.
That's me on the right, there; this was actually taken on one of the LESS windy days.

There isn't much to report from an archaeological standpoint. The area we were surveying this week was mostly disturbed. People have been using the cell tower hill and its vicinity as a shooting range for a good long while. Absolutely everything there is full of bullet holes--even many of the yucca plants are all shot up. People evidently have great fun taking their old computers out to the desert and using them for target practice, along with just about anything else you can think of. We found bowling pins, bowling balls, a plastic human skeleton (nearly life size), numerous propane tanks, black light pot posters, and my favorite, a statistics textbook, all blasted apart and riddled with holes. Have something around the house you don't use anymore, doesn't work, or you just want out of your life? Don't sell it on ebay or take it to a thrift store--take it out to the desert and shoot the bejeezus out of it instead! K told me that the hill was used by the military for target practice before the general public discovered it, and it is now called Lead Hill. Apparently, there is so much lead from the spent ammunition that it is now leaching into the water table.

We found very little cultural evidence--only a few very sparse rock rings that may have been hearths at one point. We did see several desert tortoises, however. That truly made my week. I've only seen a tortoise one time before in the wild. We found a total of 4 or 5 between the two survey teams. Two of the tortoises were snug in their burrows, but the others were out an about, roaming their slow way across the desert terrain. We also found three shells/skeletons. One was a tiny tortoise shell smaller than the palm of my hand, and it made us all sad that the little thing died so young. The other desert life was pretty scarce--no snakes at all, and only a few lizards and the occasional jackrabbit bounding away from us. I believe that it was just too cold and overcast for the reptiles to be out in the open air. The second to last day of this week, we even got a few minutes of rain along with the wind and clouds. It was beautiful watching the clouds racing through the sky and their shadows zooming across the landscape were almost surreal, but it was terribly cold. The wind was just so fierce that sometimes I literally could not catch my breath.

Now I am home and enjoying the lack of wind. Actually, I am at K's house with her family. She is making french toast for breakfast, I am looking out the windows of the sun room at a canyon full of trees, and my cat is here bounding around like one possessed. I feel good.

Decent

Well, I had a fairly good day today and thought that warranted posting. It started out pretty nasty (see below for just a small sample of the nastiness), and I was in a wretched mood by the time I arrived at work. Fortunately, I work in a beer factory. It's fun. Just about everybody who walks in the door is supremely happy to be there, and if they're not when they get there, they definitely are by the time they leave. We even get the occasional hardcore fan from several states away making a pilgrimage to the brewery--they are always easy to spot by the awed and disbelieving looks on their faces as they walk into the store very slowly and reverently, which soon gives way to sheer joy and giddiness and exuberant stories about how far they had to travel to get here. These people are loads of fun to be around.

The above photo, incidentally, is of my very favorite beer that we make. It's truly lovely, and if you are a fan of Imperial stouts at all, you have no business not trying some. Soon.

I also got to give another tour today, to my largest group yet--28. I actually started out pretty badly (in my opinion, but was told later it wasn't so). I felt like the first 5-10 minutes of the tour I was only warming up to my usual meaningful banter, and unfortunately the warm-up took place with everybody listening while I repeated myself and said stupid things amplified by a microphone. At any rate, it ended quite well; people laughed at my dumb jokes and were good-natured about my making fun of them. I even passed a sneaky test--one of the tour-goers was an experienced customer of ours who was evidently feeling that I couldn't possibly be up to par with Ken, who is our main tour guide. So, he expressed his doubts to my brother, who encouraged him to ask me his question rather than bugging Ken about whether I knew it or not. I got it right! Hah. I may just be the small back-up tour guide, but I know my beer.

I'm not a believer

For some horrific and inexplicable reason I woke up this morning with a Monkees song stuck in my head. Bloody hell.

Feel better or else!

I have been in a terrible funk of late, due to health reasons among other things, but my friends have done their best to help me banish it. Saturday after work I went over to K's house and had dinner with her, her kids, husband, and husband's friend. It was great to be surrounded by so many people. We ate lots of homemade burritos and watched a movie--or attempted to. Out of the six people in attendance, only two of us managed to remain conscious throughout the entire show. Granted, it was a long and slow-moving film, but it held my attention well enough. The movie was "Mongolian Ping Pong." I liked it, but I think I was alone in my appreciation. K's husband and his friend were being driven absolutely nuts by the pacing and began boisterously heckling the screen about halfway through. If you don't mind prolonged, long-range camera shots and a slow-moving and sparse plot, it's truly worth it. The scenery is breathtaking and I felt that the pacing and subdued dialogue fit the story and the culture beautifully. It reflected the broad, bleak landscapes and the isolation of a nuclear family living alone miles away from the closest neighbors.

Then I spent all day yesterday in Newport Beach with three friends--it was a much needed departure from my daily routine. Nothing but mindless fun and lots of lascivious conversation. We tried on corsets, ate a lot of food, made dizzying rounds in and out of the dressing rooms in a funky alternative clothing store with a sulky salesclerk with multicolored tall hair, and watched K (the other one) and L drink a lot of mixed drinks. Those girls know how to have a good time.

That's me in that photo, by the way, sporting the dominatrix outfit that I will be wearing to my new night job. I seem to have misplaced my whip...

Today I paid dearly for my fun, unfortunately. While I had only a few sips of the drinks (I was driving), I shouldn't have exerted myself so much. I couldn't sleep last night on top of being so exhausted, and today I'm really just not feeling up to snuff. I work tomorrow at the brewery and then have two days off to rest up. After a few more days' work at Stone I will leave for my survey job in Barstow--wish me luck!

Grammatical Rapture, Mutants and Bacon

It looks like my intention to write in my blog every day has fallen rather short. I have been somewhat busy, actually. Either that or moping...at any rate, here's an abridged synopsis of the past week, minus any episodes of brooding and non-activity (truthfully, there haven't been too many of those lately; I'm just using them for dramatic effect).

The last few weeks I've been working a lot more at the brewery, which doesn't really inflate my bank account by much (I actually did some calculating yesterday and realized that I make the same amount there that I do by not working at all and collecting unemployment payments), but since nobody else is even replying to my job applications, it's the best I can do. And it is a fun job; I truly enjoy my time there...when I'm not folding shirts. This last Monday I had the occasion to give both of the brewery tours that day. I had a great time. Giving tours makes the day go by incredibly fast, for one thing. And I positively love talking about beer in front of large groups of people; I think I just love talking to people no matter the occasion. And yes, I enjoy being the center of attention, to be honest. However, whatever selfish motivation I may have for enjoying giving tours so much, they were very well-received. My brother is convinced that people pay more attention to a woman than a man leading tours, and I'm starting to think he's right. One guy even told me that this was the third tour that he's taken here, and that mine was "By far the most informative." Amazing! And then someone else asked me if I was the main tour guide. And then another guy tried to tip me (we can't technically accept them). He should have tried harder--I would've taken it had he offered it a second time. All in all, I had a wonderful time. Even though I'm not getting paid much, I love being paid to stand around and share my beer snobbery with a captive audience.

Two days ago I had an unprecedented and totally gratifying experience at the grocery store. Henry's, to be more specific; I want to give them all the credit they deserve. Bear in mind my fanaticism in regard to the proper use of English grammar (except when writing my own blog--note previous sentence). Well, there I was in the checkout line, and lo and behold, their express line sign actually said, "10 items or fewer." Fewer! Every other express checkout line in the land says "10 (or 12 or 14 1/2) items or less," which is, of course, totally and horribly wrong. Less is for things you can't quantify, like sunshine or happiness. Saying you can have only 10 of something certainly makes them quantifiable entities. Hurray for Henry's, the only grocery store in Southern California to fully grasp the simple beauty of correctly applied grammar!

One result of my ongoing pennilessness is that I have sunk to new lows of gastronomic self-abuse. Last night I made a sandwich, the more offensive details of which I will leave out to spare the faint of stomach. I was actually laughing out loud as I made it, and thinking to myself, "This is the most horrible sandwich I've ever made!" Truly, it was. Why did I do such a thing to myself? Partially out of boredom; I'm tired of eating cold cereal and bread and cheese. I was also attempting to stretch my grocery money out a little further by attacking the long-forgotten Morningstar brand fake bacon lurking in the freezer. Blechh. That stuff tastes like bacon bits in elongate form. I have been avoiding it because in addition to its unappealing flavor, this brand, in particular, has an ingredient list that takes up half of the box, and it's full of polysyllabic words of unfathomable origin. I didn't buy it, just in case you're wondering. But it was there, and I thought I'd try to be frugal and eat the stuff. Next time frugality is taking a hike in favor of eating something that is actually pleasurable.

Today I went downtown to sign paperwork for the project I'll be working on next month. I wish it started sooner; that paycheck is a long way in the future. At any rate, I'm exceedingly happy just to have the work. I did have to spend about 1/2 hour of my precious day off completing the company's online code of conduct training--you know, answering questions about whether or not it's unethical to lie to auditors or leave photos of naked people on coworkers' desks. I think I passed (leaving nekked pictures is okay as long as nobody knows you did it, right?).

Oh, and I saw The Host last night. Fantastic movie! It was not highbrow artsy fartsy cinema; just a good old-fashioned entertaining Korean monster movie. With some extremely unlikely humorous moments and a good wallop of well-executed human drama thrown in (I nearly cried several times). I recommend it: there was no gore or gratuitous violence, just some honest scary moments and not too over-the-top tension. And the monster was very, very cool looking. Quite appropriately freaky and mutant-ish. But don't go see it expecting logical explanations of plot elements--that's not the point. Just enjoy it. I did!

Beggars and Raindrops

Hey Kids! Today has been a decidedly better day than yesterday. I'm sure that not waking up at 4 a.m. with a persistent bout of insomnia had something to do with it. Then I was just a whirlwind of activity, which always feels good. I bravely tackled the many stacks of old paperwork and unopened mail which have been lurking ominously in hidden locations around the house. I did a lot of recycling and refiling. I went to the store, post office, and gas station. All in all, I am very pleased with myself for being so successfully industrious.

One of the main perks to my day was that someone called me this morning and offered me work on a 2-week project next month. Oh happy day! I'm ecstatic to have real work in my immediate future, even if it does entail staying away from home in a cheap motel in Barstow. Yikes. It's a survey project, and I love surveying--it's always been my favorite archaeological endeavor. Sometimes it feels like getting paid to go on long hikes in the wilderness--that's in the most ideal situations. Sometimes it can be a real ordeal, as in the three months I spent in the blinding heat of El Centro's desert last summer. No matter what, it always is exponentially more fun than sitting in an office typing away on a keyboard under florescent lighting.

There is a hitch, of course: I had been planning on going to a really fun beer class at Stone next month on the day before my birthday. It's going to feature many samples of different varieties of stout, one of my favorite styles of beer. And I'm going to miss it. At first I was considering missing a few days of the survey to come down for it and celebrate my birthday, but that's just displaying a phenomenal lack of common sense. I'm in the unfortunate position of beggar at this point of my life, not chooser. So there you have it. I will be spending my birthday in Barstow, sitting in a local dive bar drinking Bud light...ACK! I will, of course, be doing no such thing, even though I'll be in Barstow. Maybe I'll buy a jelly donut and stick a candle in it after I eat my frozen dinner.

The day even closed on a lustrous and gorgeous note: There were mountains of dark blue rain-filled clouds filling the eastern half of the sky, but there was room under the western cloudbank for the sun to break through, and it was shining this brilliant intense white light on all the buildings in the neighborhood and lighting them up in glowing contrast to the darkening sky behind them. It was absolutely breathtaking. And then there was lightning! That is a rarity around here. Real lightning and real, booming, echoing rounds of thunder following. The first fat drops of rain started coming down just as I turned the corner of my street. I thought my ice cream cone was dripping on my wrist at first...but it was just sweet, gentle, glorious rain.

Disguised Alley Stealth-walk

Today was my first "weekend" day. I worked the past five days at the brewery, which is fun, but exhausting with the commute and standing on cement floors all day. I went to Jen's house this afternoon, after a long morning and early afternoon full of lolling about the house. I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning, and couldn't go to sleep again for another few hours. Then I sat on the couch and read all morning til I couldn't handle the encroaching sleepiness and went back to bed for the third time. My day started in earnest at 1 p.m.--that didn't leave me much time to be productive.

I was overly optimistic about the weather when I walked to Jen's place, and didn't take a jacket with me--and I was wearing flip-flops. It was getting dark by the time I left, and the weather had turned very windy and cold, so she loaned me a baby-blue jacket to wear on the way home. Those of you who know me well know that this is not a color I normally choose to adorn my person. Pastels in general tend to make me cringe. However, it was kind of a liberating experience wearing her jacket home. I felt like I was in disguise wearing something so out of character for me. Nobody knew who I was! Maybe I was on a secret mission for the FBI. Could happen. Because it was so cold, I walked almost the whole way home through the alleys. Somehow, all the two-story apartment buildings in the neighborhood are clustered around alleyways, which forms a nice windblock for chilled women walking home in baby-blue jackets.

Here are a few impressions from today's excursion: Walking by a house with an open front door, I heard the reception of a woman who had evidently just gotten home; almost drowning out her affectionate voice was the maddened scrabbling of two large dogs' nails on hardwood floors and a symphony of joyous whining and barking. And then, bordering one of the alleys in a nondescript and humble spot, was a narrow strip of cement with the imprints of several leaves in it. Accidental art.

Only one thing infringed upon my happiness of walking home at dusk with the wind at my back and the darkening sky laced with wispy orangey pink clouds: walking down the alleys (Struttin' down the alley...) made that Stray Cats song stick in my head the entire way home and it is still there...Singin' the blues, while the lady cats cry.

Girlycycle and Pizza Pie

My favorite neighborhood sighting today: a woman on a big street motorcycle, with big black saddle bags dripping fringe on either side. The most eye-catching feature, however, was her helmet--burnished gold with bright pink trim. And the coup-de-grace: a big pink stuffed puppy dog strapped onto the back side of the high seatback, cheerfully glowing girly pinkness at the general public.

I have really been enjoying my frequent walks around my neighborhood lately. It's a great little community, full of older houses and small privately owned shops and restaurants, and a lot of people get around by walking or riding bicycles. I have also been going on extra walks with my friend Jen, who is blind. She needs the extra exercise, I need the outdoor exposure, and we both benefit from being with a friend in the afternoon. A truly symbiotic experience. And today we discovered another mutually beneficial aspect of our friendship: she loves to be read to, and I love to read out loud. So we spent some time today with me reading her some of my more entertaining and older blog posts to her. It's more fun for her because I can use a lot more variation and inflection in my voice than the reading program on her computer manages. I think I do fairly well at not sounding like a robot when I read. Plus, I can correctly pronounce all those made-up words I like to drop into my writing from time to time. The screen reader evidently just plods through phonetically as best as it can, which takes all the fun out of making up words in the first place.

I was overcome by a pizza craving on the way home from Jen's house. Fortunately, a mere two blocks from my apartment building is a tiny little family-owned pizza place. They are super nice folks and you can even order single custom-made slices with anything you want on them. I decided to go the more economical route and just got a whole small pizza--I can justify the extra five bucks of expense by the additional two meals I will get out of it. Walking home was a terrible ordeal, however--the pizza smelled absolutely delicious and my stomach was rumbling angrily at me and it was all I could do not to just open the box right there on the street and stick my whole face into it. MMmmmmmmmm....piiiiiiiizzaaaaaa...(animal-like sloppy devouring noises)

Ma'am Ogled

Welcome to the next installment of "Who Stared at Me on My Way Home." I really am starting to feel a little boost in my self-esteem, no matter how silly, from the visual attention I am garnering on my increasingly frequent jaunts around my neighborhood. I was talking on the phone to my friend Steve and told him that I was getting stared at much more than usual today, so we had a brief discussion about possible causes. He first asked me if I remembered to wear pants. I looked down. "Yes, I am wearing pants. That can't be it." Hmmmm. Maybe it was the fact that I was on the phone: perhaps that made it more permissible to stare openly due to the presumption that I would be preoccupied and therefore not notice as much? I finally decided on the fact that the shirt I'm wearing today has shrunk and a very thin strip of unclothed tummy skin was exposed between the bottom of the shirt and the top of my jeans. No navel was brazenly displayed or anything, but that must be it--people in this neighborhood are desperate for that inch of skin. I even had one solicitous young man earnestly warn me in between not-so-covert downward glances that I needed to walk extra carefully because of all the construction on the street. He actually stopped me to tell me this, and then said, "You have a nice day, ma'am." Ma'am! I find it fascinating that you can have exposed abdominal flesh and still constitute a ma'am at the same time. Maybe my tummy looks old and respectable. My tummy exudes ma'amness. I am ma'am, hear me roar!

Money Toad

It occurs to me that perhaps the reason I am having such difficulty pinning down a real full-time job is that I have not been wearing my money toad. I have several gorgeous jade necklaces, all of which contain some type of Chinese symbolism, generally relating to luck, health, or finances. My money toad is an adorable little stone creature with one back leg extended and gripping a coin in his mouth, ready to deliver it to the home of his wearer. I have been neglecting him, and therefore, he is neglecting me. I am not particularly superstitious, but I do believe that if you surround yourself with physical reminders of what you need and desire from life, these things will be in the forefront of your thoughts and therefore you will be better equipped to make them happen. It is just an assisted form of positive thinking, I suppose. Whatever works; the human mind is capable of much more than we typically use it for during our daily routines, and it's about time that I put mine to better use.

Mr. F-word meets Ginger

I had an amusing experience today at my brewery job. As one might expect, being the only woman working in a place serving beer I get flirted with, or just plain stared at, fairly often. Most of the time, this doesn't reach levels of true obnoxiousness. However, tonight, there was a man, presumably about my own age even though his behavior belied it, accompanied by two younger men who said that he was their uncle. He sprinkled the f-word so liberally throughout his comments that I genuinely, with no exaggeration, could not tell what he was trying to say some of the time. At any rate, the nephews kept apologizing for him, which I found very amusing. At one point Mr. F-word told me that I was awfully giggly, and that he liked that in a woman. I don't giggle. I laugh. Loudly. At any rate, after a few more moments of heckling and badly worded come-ons, he then said, "No, no, I'm sorry, I'll stop." I told him please not to because I needed the entertainment. A few minutes later he asked me what my name was, and I looked pointedly at his nephews and asked, "Is it safe to tell him my name?" Vigorous head-shaking ensued from both parties. So I told Mr. F-word that my name is Ginger, which made his nephews laugh uproariously. "Ginger!" They shouted gleefully. "Yeah, that's my stage name." I think Mr. F-word believed me.

musing

It is cloudy this morning, as it was yesterday, and I am so grateful for the temporary respite. I spent much of Monday mentally shaking my fist at the blank white cloudless sky and cursing the dry heat. I suppose a San Diego day of Santa Ana winds is better than a summer day in Florida with all the smothering humidity and bugs the size of small dogs. But still. It's March, for god's sake; it's too early for me to be getting in my car and yelping in shock from the sudden contact of my skin against the blazing hot upholstery. And these cloudy mornings are proving to be an empty promise. Burning afternoons with all the moisture sucked out of them, followed by evenings of scattered clouds and even sprinkles appear to be the new norm. Craziness.

I recently made a few resolutions, only one of which I am making any progress with. I decided that I absolutely must begin exercising more, and that every day this week that I am not working that I will go out for a long bike ride. Monday I managed a medium-length bike ride, and I'm very proud of myself. I'm also trying to be more aggressive with the job search, but I'm having difficulty with self-esteem issues--a serious impediment. Both of these resolutions are kind of on hold today, at least, because I have had a mysterious pseudo-migraine headache for three days. It alternately feels like a moderate oppressive ache and then suddenly there is some crazed demon stabbing my forehead with an icepick. The accompanying nausea is the real kicker, I suppose. It's very hard to motivate myself under these conditions. I just want to go back to bed with the hope that tomorrow this will finally leave me alone and I can take my refreshed and energized self down to the Career Center and do some serious job hunting.

Coda: On Monday, during my bike ride down the looping street that winds itself around the perimeter of my neighborhood, a couple of men doing some roofing whistled at me (several times!) when I rode by. I was amused and surprisingly flattered by this. When I was much younger I used to be totally incensed at construction workers' catcalls and remarks--I felt besmirched somehow by their behavior. I thought they were just being misogynistic assholes. So now I find it terribly amusing that not only was I not upset by the wolf-whistling roofers, but that it actually made me happy. I suppose it is a function of growing older that I am pleased that anyone still thinks I'm worth whistling at.

Literary Diversion

I have decided when I have days like today, steeped in despondency, or when I'm feeling uninclined to write, I am going to share some smidgen of literature with you. Today's installment was written in the six years or so following the end of WWII, by a woman who was New York's State Poet from 1995-1997, and whose photo graces the beginning of today's post. I discovered her when I stopped to browse the used books for sale at the library many months ago.


Meteors

Whom can we love in all these little wars?
The aviator, king of his maps and glowing lights
But dispossessed of six-foot-two of ground?
The sailor, blind as a worm, suspended
In a hammock made of scrap iron, in his fear
Heavy and liquid to the touch as night?

Whom can we love? The same question
Asked five years back drops through my ear and dies
With a fizzle of brightness at the center of my brain.
The sky is streaked with pilots falling. I see
Buried in altitude like meteors
Cartoons of wit and sex, skeletons of leaders.

-Jane Cooper

Confessions

My dear friends and fambly, I'm sorry I've neglected my blog for so long. While I originally began this bloggy venture as a way to keep my widely scattered loved ones in touch with the goings-on in my life, I long ago decided to keep it fairly non-personal. Meaning that I didn't want to lapse into long descriptions of my emotional state, and that I wanted to keep the negativity at bay and only write about the positive happy bits. The downside to this Pollyanna-ism is that when I'm having a low spell, you folks don't hear from me.

This past month has been a combination of extremes: I have alternately been horrifically depressed and weepy and manically busy finding things to distract myself. I have had more than my share of low blows lately, some of it financial, much of it just ongoing wretchedness that began months and months ago. Life is definitely an uphill struggle for me right now, but I'm still plodding along. My largest obstacle at the moment is that when I was finally healthy enough to go back to work full time, there was no work to be had. Financial chaos has ensued. Combine this with my already volatile emotional state and you have a recipe for a very despondent Kathryn. However, I do, as I have mentioned many times before, have a large number of very good friends who have been doing an excellent job of providing me with shoulders to cry upon and with numerous excursions to distract me from my woes. Thank you so much to those of you who have helped me keep my head above the water. With that said, here is the original post that I wrote a week ago (plus a few improvements) but was feeling too morose to post:

In addition to my dance troupe practice once a week, I am now taking belly dance lessons once a week. My friend Lisa (of the gorgeous jade-colored eyes) got me into this class and I love it. In contrast to my dance troupe, where we have to put in a lot of serious practice for upcoming performances, the belly dance class is pure fun. It's also very much needed for me--there are several basic belly dance maneuvers that I still have a difficult time performing, and given that my dance troupe is having our first performance of the year in a week and a half, I really need the extra practice. The instructor is great, too. She's always telling us how hot we are and that we need to flirt with ourselves. She's a blast.

On Presidents' Day Weekend I took my first road trip in years and took off to Arizona for another one of my Medieval Nerd Conventions, otherwise known as an SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event. This particular gathering was a war, where you have hundreds and hundreds of people--not just men: remember the "creative" part of their name--out on a big field dressed in full armor and bashing the hell out of each other with swords and spears and axes. It's a great spectacle of noise and color. Other than that, it was just a bunch of wandering around dressed in cleavage-enhancing period clothing and enjoying the freedom of being totally separated from my normal life. I spent most of my time shopping at merchant's row in the daytime and carousing in the evening: wandering from fire to fire watching drumming and dancing, and tripping over the agricultural berms and falling in a heap with my friends. I took K with me; actually, he drove, so I suppose it's the other way around. He had never been to an SCA event before, and this particular war is a great place to start due to its size. There typically are 6-8,000 people attending the war in Arizona. I'm pretty sure K had a good time. What's not to like? We got to start drinking at noon, sitting around camp in our period outfits eating fancy bread and cheese and just generally reveling in our indolence before the serious carousing began. A good life.

In other more serious news, I finally have a roommate. For real this time--he's actually moved in; he's been here for a little over a week. I am still fairly leery of this whole deal and I'm having a somewhat difficult time adjusting to having someone else in my living space, particularly a boy, but in general, I know it's a good thing. I definitely needed the help with rent, and after all, he makes delicious smoothies for breakfast. I can't complain too much.

Magic Toilet Show

I have not recently subjected you poor folk to any cat-related postings or photos. So brace yourself--your blissful hiatus from felinity is now over. My cat, Sylvie, as many of you are aware, is insatiably curious, acrobatic, and hyperactive--at times a very pesky combination. Her latest discovery is that when I clean the cat box, this means an exciting toilet-flushing event is imminent. She has never ceased to be amazed and transfixed by the whirly gurgle of the water going down in the bowl as it flushes; now that she's figured out the signal that immediately precedes the show, she is always there right on cue to watch. This morning, the minute I began cleaning the litterbox, she jumped up to her front-row seat (the top of the toilet tank) and waited for the fun to begin. Once I flushed the toilet, her ears perked forward, her eyes dilated, and she stretched out her paw toward the whirlpool in the toilet bowl, utterly hypnotized by the noisy rush of the water. My only hope is that she never discovers the handle that makes it all happen. She is a very intelligent animal, and I wouldn't put it past her abilities at all to figure out how to do it herself. As a warning for owners of inquisitive cats everywhere to keep their pets away from the toilet lest their water bills suffer accordingly, I present this video.

Linktest and Happyblog

I just updated my browser, and a lot more options are available to me now when I write my posts. They probably always were available, but without being fluent in writing html, I couldn't do it on my own without nifty little icons to help me and do all the formatting. Now, hopefully I can make seamless, integrated little links in my text without having a big green bulleted thing show up. Sometimes I'm rather fond of big green bulleted things, but there have been many times when I just wanted a particular word to be the link without a whole lot of fanfare. Just like this: check out this blog that I have been going to nearly every day. It's a calm little dose of happiness in the form of short quotes and pretty things to look at.

Well-heeled Biohazard

I went for yet another neighborhood jaunt yesterday, this time with a practical aim: I needed to drop off several things at the post office. The past two or three weeks or so since I got out of the hospital, I've been dressing up almost every time I leave the apartment, even if it's just to go to the bank or the grocery store. My soul had just gotten weary from wearing sweats and t-shirts for 7 weeks without letup; I needed some uplifting after all that illness and emotional bogging-down. Looking good is a great cure for the blues, lemme tell ya. So, yesterday, there I was, dressed in an elegantly feminine springtime dress in a pretty 1930s-reminiscent floral pattern, wearing little black low-heeled Mary Janes and generally feeling very pleased with myself for managing to not look frumpy. But the very best part, the part that made me laugh the whole way to the post office and wish that I had gotten someone to take my picture, was that I was carrying a large carton with a big red "BIOHAZARD" sticker on it. That amuses me no end. I love the juxtaposition of the girly clothes and scary mysterious medical paraphernalia.

The explanation for the box: it's very mundane, really. When I was doing IV medications, the home nurse had to take weekly blood draws to check the level of the antibiotic in my bloodstream (it's highly toxic stuff and will ruin your kidneys if you get too much of it). So they gave me a little sharps container to put the syringes in and a postage-paid box for mailing the whole thing back to them. Enough of that.

In other happy news, I am on the hunt for a job. A real job. As in one with benefits, and maybe even a smidge of paid vacation every year. Whoa. Aim for the stars, I believe, and you just may catch hold of one. I'm feeling lucky at the moment, like something really good is about to happen. I think I will dress up again today and walk down to my friend's house down the street--just to be out and about and feeling pretty. It's a healing experience.

World News

Hey Kids,
It's time for you to stop looking at pretty pictures and learn about what's going on outside of my sleepy little neighborhood. Please check out the latest installment of my friend "Frances Goodman's" adventures in the middle east. She just went to Lebanon for a few days, and has written a very detailed, incredibly informative, and alternately humorous, heartbreaking, and infuriating report. I am always stunned at how utterly next-to-nothing I know of what is going on all over the rest of the planet--and I'm highly informed compared to your average complacent American. It's just not right. Enjoy your dose of world news.

Driving in Jordan blog

I must share this with you as well, because without putting it in writing and telling everybody I know it won't happen. I am going to travel this year. I am sorely overdue for some traipsing about in foreign lands. And this is going to be epic. I am determined to make this a reality for myself, and it begins with this simple statement. I am going to go visit FG in Jordan, visit my friend Irish in Turkey, and visit my friend Peter in Denmark or London or wherever he will be living this summer. I'm going. I have no idea how this is going to happen, or where the money is going to come from, and right now that doesn't faze me in the slightest. Big talk, I know, coming from someone who is unemployed, living off of state disability and can't even pay her own bills by herself at the moment. But things always change, and I truly believe that if I just put out this statement to the universe it will come about. I'm going.

Perambulation

I downloaded several of my photos from my recent walking jaunts around my neighborhood. Click on the Flickr badge down there, and you will see them in all their neighborly glory. I'd like to put them all in one neat little folder, but I can't (I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that) since I haven't paid those Flickr people for the privilege. I do love taking photos. I wish more of the ones I had taken had proven worthwhile enough to post, but there are enough good pictures to make me happy for now.

A hint for you: a dear friend of mine and I recently had a discussion about how few people click on the photo thumbnails to get a really good look. He was contemplating an experiment wherein he would keep shrinking down his thumbnails smaller and smaller until he found the point where every single person would finally be compelled to click on them for the larger photo. Trust me, you are missing out if you don't look at them bigger and close up. You should do that with any photo I post on here, as well as on Flickr. It's fun, I promise.

The best shower ever

I am so damn clean! I just took the most glorious, long, luxurious, utterly enjoyable shower ever. The nurse came just a few hours ago and took the PICC line out, so I was allowed a totally unencumbered showering experience. I washed my hair 'til it squeaked. I washed my left arm for the first time ever in over 3 weeks. I was reveling in the experience of having total freedom of both arms; not crackling with plastic wrap and layers of surgical tape and having to hold my left arm out of the water as much as possible the entire time. I was finally able to wash that one part in the middle of my back that has been neglected for 3 1/2 weeks--I've been imagining a very small very dirty spot lurking there insidiously where I just can't quite reach with only one hand. I spent much too much time in the shower, but I feel so very, very good right now. And clean!

I am super excited about my freedom time-wise, as well. I keep thinking I have to rush out to do my errands so I can be back in time for my 3:30 IV medication--and I don't! I can stay out all damn day if I want to! Oh, glorious freedom. Oh frabjous day!

The weather today is seducing me. The sky is full of dark blue, grey, and white clouds, with portions of bright pale blue sky in between, and the sun occasionally shining over the clouds' rims, outlining them in brilliant silver and gold and shooting gently shifting rays out from behind the cloudbanks. And just now the light got very intense and bright and is shining in brilliant white on the buildings across the street, making them a sharp contrast to the deep greyblue of the sky behind. It's lovely. I'm going for a walk.