Good things, for a Change

OK. That helped. Thank you for your patient listening to that last bit of self pity.  Now taking a breath, and taking a look at some of spring's encouraging signs.

Lady bugs are back. And, apparently, so are their gentlemen friends.

After slipping on our "walk-the-plank" bridge arrangement in the garden, and ripping various thigh muscles from their attachments, ML painted and installed this cool little "Monet" bridge for me. I was so inspired and grateful that I started weeding.

Stopped weeding pretty much after this picture was taken.

We decorated ML's old scar for the benefit and enjoyment of the doctor and staff at the dermatologists' office. Ml's instructions: "Make it look like Wilson, you know, on Castaway."

I think the likeness is pretty good.

It's amazing what you can see when you stop moving for a minute. What's in this picture?

Yeah she's there, sunning herself between two logs:

Poor, cold toad.

Out with the old, in with the new. When we moved here over twenty years ago, a decrepit old red truck body was part of our storage system. It filled up with junk, as all empty spaces do around here, was basically sealed off and left to the rats and opossums.

In my paranoid old age (and in no small part as a result of our forced week-long evacuation in 2007) I have worried a lot lately about having our water supply interrupted. Justified or not, with 60 dry mouths to feed and water, it looms large in my recurring "What-If " nightmares. So I located a 2,500 gallon storage tank, which we bought and hauled back to the ranch. And - even more amazing, ML managed to empty the "red barn," drag it from its decades-long plot, and move the new tank onto a leveled pad, pretty much single-handed. I tell you, the man is a genius!!

 

Some of us were working like dogs during shearing last weekend, but Yollie and her goat, Mouse, were just plain bored.

Urge, Purge, Dirge, or When to Call the Doctor

First off, this is crazy. I have lost both parents, a sister, one marriage, and countless other people, things and critters of value. Why - how - can the death of this dog so unhinge me? It has been almost a month since Tank died, yet crying jags continue to ambush like sudden seizures. It's totally crazy.

It can come on quite suddenly, maybe when I realize that we are filling just three bowls instead of four, or five. Maybe when I catch site of the shaded empty pen. Maybe when a sudden wind comes rushing from nowhere, roaring like a river through the tall Torrey pine tree near the house, while every other bush and tree on the hill is calm and still.

We both miss him, Michael perhaps more than I, but we soldier on in our own little capsules of grief and quiet, offering the briefest of hugs coupled with many resigned sighs and consoling phrases. He was miserable. He was very sick. There really was no hope, either way. Even if we had elected chemo and radiation over the surgery, his time was running out. The tumor was huge. He must have had it for a long time and we just didn't know. Or it was very aggressive. Or maybe both. At least when one dies on the operating table in an attempt to remove an enormous fibrosarcoma that was literally squeezing the life and breath from him, the survivors are saved from having to play the coulda, woulda, shoulda game. Kindly old Karabey died almost two years ago, and made it until five, despite multiple disabilities. But Tank, dead at three years? It shoulda been different.

It has long been my theory that the loss of pets helps to prepare children for losing loved ones later in life. We start out with a pale goldfish belly-up in a murky bowl of water, or a turtle that escaped and was later found, dessicated shell like a poker chip, under the couch. We all had legions of little wounded birds resting in shoe boxes full of tissue, which later become convenient coffins. And all of this should be bringing us to the stage where we, as adults, learn to recognize and accept the impermanence of life. But I am not finding it so. In fact, each death now seems cumulative, shock based on a Richter-scale-like rating system, each one ten times worse than the previous.

Apparently now there is research that shows people who have been dumped in a relationship, and are said to be "suffering from a broken heart," actually do feel real, physical pain. It's a fist in the gut, labored breathing, and - quite literally - a sore heart. In ancient Greece, around in 300 BC, Menander wrote: "Time is the healer of all necessary evils." This has been thoughtfully appended by J. Worth Kilcrease , when he wrote, "Time doesn't heal, it's what you DO with the time that heals."

So we continue running the ranch, mowing, chopping thistles, installing an emergency water tank, feeding, shearing, and loving those that are left just as much as we can. They say you stop crying when you run out of tears. But I swear, when that strange wind starts tearing at the top of the pine tree, and it sounds like big Kangals running through tall grass, I would surely join them if there were any way at all.

Tank was the firstborn of seven puppies, and earned his name by his physique.

Here, Tank (left) keeps a watchful eye on the goats.

Tank checks out Mouse, a tiny, preemie Pygora.

Tank was Michael's dog.  Period.

Tank (center) and the girls rough-housing.  Zerrin, his mother (right) avoids a fatal nip by leaping into the air.  Notice his two-curl tail.

The end

What The...?

As one might imagine, nights around here are not necessarily silent. There are occasional calls from sheep and goat kids who have temporarily misplaced mom, coyotes chorus in the distance, our dogs and sometimes the neighbors' dogs answer them. We also have a frog population, that carouses most of the night this time of the year as the males seek female companions.

A variety of night birds chime in from time to time, the most impressive of which is the great horned owl's "hoo hoo-hoo hoooo hoo." Starting in November they call and respond in what eventually becomes an almost soothing addition to the rest of the nocturnal orchestra. After having three of my own kids and acting as animal midwife to hundreds of critters, I am a fairly light sleeper. Noises don't necessarily bother me, but do cause me to rise to the surface of a dream in order to make positive identification of the noise and its cause. Let's just say I sleep with one ear open.

So when the owls went off the other night I just made a note and rolled over, but it did sound unusually close - like maybe in the big, old live oak tree near our bedroom window, the one that is in Tank's enclosure. Then Tank woofed, a sort of confused, "what the...?" utterance, followed by some growling. Before I had time to sort that out, there followed an enormous disturbance of some sort; no voices or yelps, just the sounds of one or more large objects thrashing and crashing about ... in the tree? On the ground? Oh, no - could Tank have an owl?!

I raced out of bed, stuffed feet into Crocs, pulled on a jacket and ran out to the deck that overlooks Tank's pen. The scuffling noises continued, but this time were punctuated by incessant high pitched chattering and squeaking, and they were coming from the ground ... underneath Tank. By now the "hoo hoo-hoo hoooo hoo" had deepened and moved a dozen yards away into the neighbors' yard, but I still could not see what what was going on.

Back inside, I grabbed our big hand-held spotlight and went outside and down the steps to the pen. From outside the gate I could clearly see Tank standing over something that was glaring at us with beady little red eyes. Tank threw me a pathetic "Now what?" sort of look, to which I had no answer.

"I dunno, Tank; what IS it?"

As I opened the gate to go inside, the creature made some sort of a very bad decision, because it struggled and Tank calmly reached down and dispatched it with one chomp to the neck. Then he backed off and looked at me for orders.

The "hoo hoo-hoo hoooo hoo" now came from atop our Torrey Pine tree, so it wasn't the owl. Closer examination showed a well-armed, furry creature taking its last gasp.

"Ohhh, Tank. It's a raccoon," I said, regretfully.

Then I started looking around in an attempt to unravel the puzzle. Where did it come from? Tank's enclosure is surrounded by a six-foot-tall fence, much of it topped with barbed wire. There was no way it could just walk in or "drop by."
Or ... DROP by....?

A cursory postmortem examination of the raccoon showed him to be a nearly full-sized male, 20 - 30 pounds with no external signs of damage whatsoever, other than some scrape marks on a front leg. There was no blood, but Tank did have a small scratch or two on his face, which is understandable. The owls have not been heard since.

I am still puzzling over the incident, but little by little the pieces seem to be coming together. What do you think happened?

Tank checks it out, then wants nothing to do with it.

Sorted, Skirted, Picked, Weighed and Sampled ... Oh My!

What a GREAT week this has been! Last Saturday (AM - After Market) we sheared a dozen of the (mostly) Wensleys, and I spent that week getting fleeces sorted out and ready to sell. I have a spread sheet with pictures, prices and fiber information, but it was too big to upload here. If that link doesn't work for you, cut and paste this:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B743nbzGR7t_MDA2ZjYzZGUtNWExNC00YjZiLWFhOWEtNjhlMWNkMTczZWYw&hl=en&authkey=CPvHudcJ

UPDATE: Opal and Lila's fleeces have been sold. Thank you!

It is over 6MB, so takes a while to load.
Next weekend we do more and some goats, yay!

This week, we skipped the Saturday market and instead drove to LA where I was able to sit in on the SCHG (Southern California Handweavers' Guild) monthly meeting. Patsy Zawistoski gave a great talk and slide show on Using Your Yarns; A Look at the Creative Process. That afternoon and all day Sunday she taught a superb workshop called Quick Novelty & Boucle Yarns. I don't know how quick I was, but it was a treat and a challenge to keep up. We worked on spinning a worsted slub spiral, a core spun bouclé, a knotted yarn, a cable yarn and a lopi style singles yarn, among others. The worksheets she designed served to keep us on track as well as provide a reference for future projects. Never have I been so organized! All in all I found them to be a wonderful, lively guild, and the workshop was stupendous.

Today (Valentine's Day) I gave a short presentation on carding and spinning on a Navajo-style spindle to my own guild, Palomar Handweavers' Guild, PHG . Now I sit with my brain quite literally spinning, thinking "Fiber, fiber EVERYWHERE but never time to think!"

What a Strange Way to Start the New Year

I know that most people begin a new year by making a list of resolutions or taking stock of the year past, but I decided to start by taking the Death Test. The questions are reasonable, thoughtful, kind of interesting, and some are downright funny. You should try it - it doesn't take too long.

After several pages, the verdict was revealed:

Dead At 72

From Cancer

View my profile:

Find out when and why you'll die, take The Death Test!

Why they showed a picture of this odd man from the 50's with a bump on his head, I do not know. But the truly spooky part is that I actually toook the same test twelve years ago ... and got the exact same answer, down to the actual day: November 18, 2016.

Then came the sobering statement:
You have 1944.3 days left on this earth.
You’ve already lived 93% of your life.

Now THAT calls for some taking stock, doesn't it?

If this test is too morbid for you right now, check out the web site: there are 43,442 more tests, dealing with a dizzying array of subjects. There are tests in other languages and on all maturity levels, rated on the star system, complete with statistics of how many people have taken it - ever - and how many have taken it in the last hour.

The top three?

The Which Karamazov Brother Are You Test
Which of the Karamazov brothers from Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous novel are you? 4.43

3085 (#3206) people have taken it. 10 (#282) people took it in the last 24 hours (↑400%).

The Commonly Confused Words Test
Complete Answer Key available. URL at end of test. Good communication is not necessarily about using an expansive vocabulary. 4.4
1238180 (#2) people have taken it. 363 (#6) people took it in the last 24 hours (↓9%).

How good of a Calvinball player are you?
Do you have what it takes to win? It's a tiger-eat-boy world, so you'll need to be quick on your feet to win this game. 4.42

22776 (#408) people have taken it. 8 (#348) people took it in the last 24 hours.

So hey, if you are bored this weekend, or don't want to examine your life and learn your fate right now, just jump right in! Maybe I'll try the PERSONALITY DEFICET Test next.

WeFF

One week later we were locked and loaded for another big event: the Western Fiber Festival, held annually in Torrance by what was formerly SCHG. What fun! And this time it was just a one-day event, so we could leave the mighty Mouse at home with our farm feeder. It was dark when we left - 4 something, by the "new" time - but the skies lightened by the time we arrived, revealing strange cloud formations over Long Beach.

As we got closer we decided that it was a phenomenon due to the still weather; lack of wind allowed heated air from the refineries to travel straight up, like chmneys or tornado's tails. Interesting to watch, to the point that we had to turn off our book on CD - Malcom Gladwell's What the Dog Saw. And that book is hard to turn down.

WeFF is a feast for the eyes, a bonanza for the buyer, and our happiest day of the year. We earned more in one day (10 to 4) than we did in FIVE tortuous days (and one evening) at Convergence.

Plus we had great fun, the people (both public and organizers) were wonderful, and ... AND... they served us coffee and donuts while we set up and gave us little sandwiches, soda and chips for lunch!

Whew!

How many posts have I begun with that exhausted "gasperation"? Or maybe it just seems like a lot, because that is the mantra that assails my mind the minute I find time to sit down for an update. Nevertheless, whew is a pretty good descriptor for the last month.

We prepped and packed for a weekend at the SWFF (Southwest Fiber Festival) in Amado, AZ, one of my favorite areas to visit. Only this year (the festival's third) we were vendors instead of visitors, a whole new ballgame!

We made the trip (trailer and the ever-present Mouse in tow) in good time, but it was a no-frills trip because ML had to work the next week. We spent two nights at the Amado Territory Inn, two days traveling, and one day selling.

Traveling the stretch of I-10 just west of Tucson was a humbling and numbing experience. I have been coddling and nursing along a small hand full of natural colored cotton plants, painstakingly grown from seed (another post, for sure!) and here we were, driving past miles and miles and MILES of cotton. We passed endless acres of fields with fat green plants sporting tiny white bolls, monstrous mega-machines harvesting row after row, hundreds additional acres of skeletonized plants with more cotton left hanging on the bare limbs than I can ever hope to grow, enormous gray tarps staked over mounds of compacted cotton the size of my house, and drifts of white cotton waste covering fences, weeds, and filling the roadside ditches. Wow.

We had a double booth space because I was teaching some classes, so we had plenty of room to spread out.


Midway through the afternoon, winds gusted and blew my shelf of roving over -- fortunately NOT during class!

True to course, Mouse was an excellent trooper, spending nights quietly sleeping in his dog kennel in the back of the car and days in his pen behind our booth. He had his own shady tree and a bevy of admirers.

Feeding him was a bit of a challenge, since he is still on the bottle (one that prophetically says "The one and only...") and refuses cold milk, but we carried a thermos which helped.

Mouse supervised loading and unloading,

took the thousand mile trip in stride,


Small traveler, big desert.

and came home to appreciate all the comforts of home and hearth.

Especially hearth.