Random shots

Lena, who helps me garden:



Sage, Bryn, and an unidentified ninja:


Popular costumes this year:

• fairies (lots)
• cowgirls (2)
• ninjas (5)
• angels (2)
• Hermione Granger from Harry Potter (3)

My favorite of the evening: a girl showed up with black wings, antenna, tights, and all black clothing.

"Are you a moth?" I asked.
"No, I'm a dead fairy."

Ah. Well of course. ;)

Funny comment of the night

I was sitting on the porch tonight, handing out candy, when Phoenix (seen below in one of his favorite haunts - the linen closet) decided to join me for a while. The cats aren't big fans of Halloween -- too much activity, too much fire, too much loudness, who knows. But Phoenix is a devoted fan of his mom, and he crept out on the porch for a few minutes to be with me.

Just then two little boys showed up.

"Nice decorations," they said. "What's the black cat for?"

Um... he lives here?

I love Halloween

The title says it all. I love Halloween. Partly, it's that Halloween is the beginnning of the great triumverate of Really Fun Fall Holidays. Part of it is that I'm a sucker for holidays, period. But really it's that trick or treat is nearly as much fun to take part in as an adult as it was as a child, especially in our neighborhood.

As I've probably posted before, our neighborhood is awash in other people's kids - they run in herds, with everyone on the block keeping an eye out for all of them and everyone sort of liberally sharing dogs, cats, and children in one big cauldron of community.

I love this sense of neighborhood, even on normal occasions, but doubly so on Halloween. The neighbors mainly go all out - blasting the scary music, decorating the porches with big spiderwebs and spinning bats and ghostly blue lights. A million jack-o-lanterns flicker everywhere -- this year the scariest one on the block said simply:

W won

EEEEEEK!

Across the street, one of the pumpkins flickered out the message:

Vote Kerry

Gotta love Seattle. :)

Brett and I usually trick out in some kind of costume, put out a billion and a half candles in jars, and decorate the front of our house as best we can. This year, Brett dressed sort of randomly in a mullet wig and lots of flannel. Sort of the "hick guy" theme. Us adults found it funny, and to the kids, well, he had cool hair, so that kind of gained him street cred.

Me, I was just going to wear the devil horns I wore to work on Friday, but when I pulled out the big box of Halloween stuff I somehow couldn't resist going more overboard than that. I started the evening on the porch in my simple horns and normal clothes, and every time I went back inside I'd end up with something else. Long black wig. Then creepy black clothes. And then, fun fun, grab a black eyeliner pencil and start playing with your face. Suddenly I'm a demoness. Or Elvira. Or something.

On a side note, I own a crazy amount of Halloween wigs. If you ever need a wig, you know where to come.

A couple of fuzzy pictures of some of our decorations:






Purple shiny bat.

Scary A couple of scary face blinky lights I planted in the stairway pots. One of the really young kids who came by refused to come up on the porch because of them:


You can also vaguely make out our rabid rat, which is truly one of the grosser Halloween decorations I've ever seen. Brett bought it last year. Here's a closer look:



The cats literally won't come up the porch when we have this thing out. They don't react to any other stuffed animal, but something about this guy's expression is enough to make them steer clear.

Their thought process:

Holy crap. What IS that?
Hrm, no scent.
Is it real?
He looks mean. Let's not find out.











I'm not a big drinker, but I felt like having some wine tonight. On one of my trips inside, I decided to augment the bottle to add to my props for the evening.

All in all, it was a fun evening. We had so much candy that we were giving it away by the handful, and ended up dumping most of a bowl into the bags of the last two trick or treaters that came by. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and there was spookiness aplenty.

What more can you ask?

Search Miracle

ARG!

Fricking search miracle. Some kind of spyware has installed itself on my system, and I can't get it off. I've been searching the web and downloading various tools for two weeks now and nothing works.

What it mainly does is insert all sorts of links to porn on the pages I bring up. For example, anywhere the word or string of letters "bed" appears, suddenly there's a link. It doesn't go somewhere I usually want to go.

Except that today I noticed that it's inserting the same links into any blog entries I make from this computer! Just had to go back and manually remove a few links from my last post on garden stuff. Here - I'll put an example in here. Let me use the word "analyze" in a sentence. See? See the link there? I didn't do that. I'd manually delete it, but it's serving a purpose here.

I apologize if you're getting bizarro links off to strange stuff from my posts. I don't really intend to send you or your children off to see triple X sites when you're reading my stuff. I swear, really I don't.

Any advice on getting rid of this would be highly welcome.

Garden: Things that will grow here next year

Last weekend, I (somewhat sadly) dug up the rest of the sunflowers from the front bed where they've been nodding away the late summer and fall. Most of them were past their prime and mainly serving as snackfood for the squirrels, who were often observed by the neighbor ladies racing right up the stem of the big six and seven footers and having themselves a quick nosh. Although I never witnessed it, I suspect they also threw their weight around once they'd reached the top of each stalk until some of them snapped, bringing their big seed heads down to ground level and allowing for easier munching.

All fine with me, although I'd hoped to feed the birds rather than the squirrels - but either way I'm supporting the wild inhabitants of the neighborhood.

I could've left the sunflowers for a while longer, but the fact is that I really needed to get the daffodil bulbs in the ground. Back to Old House Gardens again - I had a big bag of their Red Devon daffodil, a handful of the giant Mount Everett alliums, and a few bags of other less rare daffodils (butterfly mix) and smaller alliums from Swanson's.

In the course of all of this planting, a neighbor came by to tell me that all their bulbs were eaten by squirrels shortly after planting! Good god. Having now spent a small fortune on bulbs (oh, boy, will I miss the ability to throw money around on gardening supplies when and if I ever leave my job), that was a horrifying prospect, but I could also see the hungry little buggers coming back for their next round of sunflower seeds, and ravenously attacking anything they could find. So off we went to the store for wire wesh, which I cut up and laid down on top of all of my recent excavations.

Hopefully that will do it! We'll see in the spring. My big idea is that all of these bulbs will peter out right about the time I need to plant the sunflowers back in there, and it will all flow together just fine.

Remaining fall garden cleanup tasks:

• Cut down the last tomato plant and compost it.
• Move the last of the really big pots into the carport.
• Mulch the roses.
• Find a new trellis for the porch-side climbing rose, which has outgrown its current support in a single season.
• Plant the lily bulbs (only two) which are languishing away in the crisper drawer of the fridge.
• Get out the saw and cut and inch of the two narrow edges of the vegetable bed boards and make the whole thing a little smaller for next year. This is the big job and the one I least want to do. It may have to wait until spring.

Learning to adjust

I just had my first chiropractic adjustment. To my neck. Let me just say that if you're incredibly scared of chiropractic adjustment, having someone snap your neck as your very first experience is not entirely the wisest place to start. Did it hurt? Well not exactly, no. Was he gentle? Yes, very. Was it nonetheless startling as hell? Why yes. Did I scream loud enough that the receptionist came to look? Yup. Then I laughed.

Amazing. I didn't know my neck could move that far.

The place I'm going to has a naturopath as the medical director, several massage and physical therapists, and two chiropractors, one of whom is also a neurologist. Tonight, at the end of my appointment, the naturopath I'd been talking to called in the neurologist for a quick look at my neck. And suddenly things got all fascinating for the two of them.

There they were, shining flashlights in my eyes, measuring contrasting muscle strength on different sides of my body, beating on my thumbs with a little hammer to see if they vibrate afterwards... and all the while doing things like say "Oh wow!" and "Uh oh" and "I hadn't noticed that before." Oh swell. They were good humored about it and actually had much better bedside manner than I'm giving them credit for, but nonetheless I finally had to butt in.

"Isn't it bad when a neurologist keeps saying "Uh oh!" when he looks at you?"

*much laughter all around*

But seriously, guys. C'mon.

So, now, I have to get a full neurological workup on Thursday. Something, apparently, seems to be wrong with my brain. With my basal ganglia, to be specific. I didn't really catch all the details, but apparently there's way too much movement on the left side of my body, or way too little on the right -- anyhow, my pupils are contracting and expanding differently, the sore places on the back of my head hurt worse if you shine a light in my eyes, and my thumbs vibrate too much on the left side, or... or... or heck, I don't know.

All I have to say is enough already. Jesus fricking Christ. So far this year I've had bronchitis, a bone tumor of such rarity that my doctor had only seen two ever, and a headache for twelve straight months. I'm tired of coming home and telling my husband what my latest medical mystery is. Did I do something to someone, cosmically? Is this karma? Or is, perhaps, all this joking about how my job is killing me perhaps the actual truth? I was pretty healthy before I came to Microsoft.

I wonder how many people that's true of.

Things I didn't know about my husband before we got married (Part 1)

Things I didn't know about my husband before we married...

...and have discovered this week:

1. Will not leave a movie in the middle, even if we're both hating every second of it and/or napping. Not even when enticed by sushi.

2. Will get upset if you say things like "Oh, wow, they're going to win!" while watching a Red Sox game. This, apparently, is not as helpful and supportive as I expected. I'm only beginning to dimly grasp the vast suffering of the Red Sox faithful over the years.

3. Favorite musical: The Music Man. Can sing almost all of it, word for word.

Medical mysteries, and my last Diet Coke

I have had a headache for a year.

Literally. Started last November and has been my near-constant companion ever since, except for a few brief weeks once or twice when it's abated for some unknown reason. But most of the time, nine days out of ten, I have a headache. I wake up with it, I have it all day long, I go to sleep with it. It's impervious to drugs. To say it's affected my life a little is an understatement. I've learned to function around it most of the time, but it's a real drain. 90% of the sick time I've taken in the last year has been because of this.

And not just your normal tension headache, but a weird, hit-with-a-hammer feeling right at the base of the skull. Have you ever seen that PBS show about how xrays seem to show that Tutankhamun was killed by a hard blow to the back of the head? Right. There. That's the spot. Ow. I feel for the guy.

Anyways, I'm a medical mystery. I've gone whining to my primary care physician a few times and been checked for everything. Here's a brief list of what we've ruled out:

Brain tumor Thyroid Alien impant Anemia Low ferritin Kidney disease Brain suckers from space Marriage Depression Vampire bats Insomnia Insanity HIV Voodoo Witch Doctors Too much exercise Not enough exercise Anxiety Stress Liver malfunction Heart murmurs-- and pretty much anything your blood or other bodily fluids can be tested for.

So. Today I went to a naturopath/chiropractor. I fear chiropractors. I fear them enough that I had to have a headache for an entire year before I'd see one, and then after a little bit of a meltdown yesterday, I decided I was desperate enough to do it. Got a referral, got an appointment the next morning, and off I went!

And surprise surprise, I loved the guy. Naturopathy is pretty cool. So far nothing has been cracked, adjusted, or realigned on my body but I just got what I think was the most thorough, thoughtful, reasonable, paying-attention-to-everything-I-said medical exam I've ever, ever received. In my whole life. He spent 90 minutes talking with me, listening to my answers, examining me, listening to me, manipulating various limbs, listening to me... you get the picture. Impressive. They even sent me off for new xrays of the bone spur I supposedly have that no one has seen on film since 1988. But most impressive - seriously, I know I'm repeating this - is just the degree of talking with and listening to me.

So we'll see. I've been prescribed several things --

• First of all, quit drinking diet soda completely. 75% of his female patients with headaches drink diet soda he says. One of them who drinks as much as me just came down with a very rare brain cancer linked to aspartame. Ok, I get it, but still bad news. I'm a total diet coke addict. Then again, I suspect there's something to this because the headaches started shortly after I got off a nutritional program during which I had no diet coke for six months and started up on it again.
  
• A combination of massage and physical therapy for the next month or two, starting with three appointments next week, then tapering down to fewer appointments. (Yay! Frequent massages on my insurance company's bill!)
  
• A visit with their chiropractor/neurologist once a week for a while. After turning various limbs in my body a hundred different ways, he determined that I am in fact experiencing some kind of chiropractic issue in my neck.
  
• Green tea in place of caffeine. Caffeine is less of a worry than aspartame, but still bad. Green tea is a good way to start stepping off of it. Then taper that down too.
  
• Further testing/medical review to ensure that there's nothing that was missed in my bloodwork and that I'm not in fact dealing with migraines.

So, I'm sitting at my desk eating the lunch I picked up at Wendy's today, sipping what is probably my very last Diet Coke. Bleah. Double bleah. Triple dog bleah. But if it gets me painfree, it's worth it.

Interesting ways to hurt yourself, #1

Always looking for creative new ways to embarrass myself in public, I came up with this today:

• Go to gym.
• Shower, get dressed, go sit on stool to get yourself fixed up.
• Put mascara on one eye.
• While it's still wet, get overwhelming urge to sneeze.
• Grab the counter and try hard to sneeze while keeping that one eye open.
• Fall off your stool.

That's me. Epitome of grace. And I still ended up with mascara over half my face.

Random observations

Had to laugh at the gym tonight - I was in the cardio room, using a randomly chosen elliptical trainer (and hating every second of it, but I digress) when I suddenly noticed that all of the other people in the room were clustered in one tiny little area, looking sweaty and smelly and way too close together.

This is unusual, because the Pro Club is a BIG PLACE. Hundreds of cardio machines. At least four different cardio rooms that I'm aware of - some brightly lit, some dark, some in between, some for women only, some for mixed company, etc. Normal gym etiquette seems to dictate that, if at all possible, you spread yourself out a bit from your nearest neighbor. Leave a machine or two between you and them. Just for courtesy.

Anyhow, another second of observation cleared it all up - all of my fellow exercisers were clustered on machines in direct line of sight to the one television showing the Red Sox/Yankees game.

Entire rest of the gym? Empty.
Every row of machines in that one line of sight? Full.

Right in the middle of them was my husband. Needless to say, all of his companions were men.

I laughed, then went to use the empty machines on the other end of the room, all by my sweet self.

My weekend

This was the weekend when, as I mentioned earlier, I was really hoping to spend the whole time out in the gardens, putting things to bed for the winter. Here's how things really went.

Saturday:
Rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

*run out and chop down some tomato plants in the one hour break all day*

rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

*run out to dinner in the one break that evening*

rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

(etc)

Sunday:

rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

*run out to buy bulb food in the pouring rain, just in case*

And then suddenly, around 1:00 on Sunday it stopped! Oh joy. Ran out and happily spent almost five hours planting tulip bulbs in the rock wall gardens out front. I lost count somewhere in the midst of it, but I think I planted about 70 bulbs today. Half of them came from this fabulous site that sells old or rare bulbs -- Old House Gardens. Well worth a look for you gardener readers out there. OHG specializes in rediscovering great old standards and saving them from extinction. The oldest thing I planted from them was this tulip that was last popularly cultivated in 1620 -- nearly four hundred years ago. How cool is that? Hope it comes up.

This is the first time, btw, that I've gotten to use the bulb planter I bought last fall -- and I must report, what a handy, ergonomic, perfectly designed little tool that is! I wish all of the tools I use in my daily life were as simple and pleasant to use as that little thing is.

I felt sort of silly dragging the hose out to water these beds when I was done, but I did it nonetheless. It's likely that it's going to rain again tonight, but it might not, and I'd hate to have all these expensive bulbs shrivel up and die because I decided to wait on the rain when I planted them. Otherwise, they're fertilized and mulched and should be ready for a nice winter's nap.

Satisfying, this. And it's the first real work I've done in the garden in over a month. Nice to be getting back to it.

Crazy Halloween Costumes

I was at Fred Meyer (local Target-like store) earlier today, and while I was there I took a couple minutes to flip through the Halloween costumes hanging on a rack. You know, the cheap, highly flammable, polyester-based onesies that adults are supposed to buy and wear in public? Now I love Halloween - any holiday where you have an excuse to buy and wear a wig or a big huge witch hat is just dandy in my book -- but these costumes are scary. A sampling:

- Butterfly. Nowhere near as nice as the MSN guy, and would in fact look scary on most people. Do you want a 6'4", 200 lb demented butterfly leering at you from the cubicle next to you? I thought not.

- Goth princess runaway - Mixing our genres here a bit, aren't we? So this costume consists of a) shapeless knee length black dress of cheap velvet with off the shoulder silver things, b) fishnets, also black c) tall pointy silver hat, a la medieval princess. Odd. Really odd.

- Adult baby. Um, this is a costume? Or this is a fetish? I'm confused.

and my personal favorite:

- Zombie clown. Full clown's suit, although in muted colors, and COMPLETELY CREEPY RUBBER ZOMBIE MASK. The kind that covers your whole head. Rotting dripping off skin, green teeth, and all.

Because clowns just aren't scary enough in their natural state, obviously. :)

Goodbye, tomatoes

Back to gardening for a second.

These utterly lovely things are the last of my tomato crop from this year.



Lemon boys, Juliets, SunGolds, Matt's Wild Cherry - all still producing. The Cherokee and the Brandywine finished a while back, but these have held on. I think, though, that this will be the last harvest I make.

The backyard is a bewildering mess of half-dead tomato plants and stray tomatoes that have flung themselves from their branches. Because I've been out of town for a couple weeks, the HUGE acorn-shaped garden spiders that moved in around early September, displacing all of their cute little cousins who'd been there all summer, have taken over, spinning their webs with wild abandon right across most of the walking paths. Prior to vacation, we'd developed a well-understood truce about where they could spin and where they would be likely to find their work undone because someone walked into it -- but apparently spidey memory is short.

Most of the other backyard plants are winding down as well. All three nicotanias, which bloomed so faithfully for almost six months, have closed up shop for the season. The basil, which did well this year, for once, is slowly dying from the bottom up. (I assume this is normal, and a function of all this rain we've had lately.) The late season lettuce, however, is gorgeous and just in the bloom of good health and vegetable-y goodness. Some of that will be going into a salad tomorrow night.

Anyway, it's mainly carnage. This weekend's task -- clean it all up. Start carting pots into the shed for the winter. Sweep up the rotting tomato-lings. Compost everything.

Productivity boosting, corporate style

I don't normally blog about work, but since this is about a corporation rather than a person, I must break my rule for a brief rant.

The Company has put a new series of signs up around campus, the kind that you drive by and read one word of the sentence on each subsequent sign, until the entire message is revealed. Like the farmers used to do in their fields – “Eat” “At” “Joes”. These signs, however, say:

• “Be”
• “More”
• “Productive”

followed by a brief ad for Tablet PC. Legitimate, I suppose, but I was too annoyed by the message preceding it at that point to pay attention to the ad. What makes the powers in marketing think that it will be a good motivational idea to throw up some signs around campus urging already overworked, highly productive, very stressed out people to be more productive? Am I supposed to think, 'oh, what a helpful suggestion!', and go about my day refreshed and renewed?

(On a side note, if this works, perhaps I should go home and put signs around the bedroom: "Pick" "Up" "Your" "Socks". Nah...)

I don’t know what it would take for me to be more productive – an extra memory chip for my brain, perhaps, or five more employees, or another six months of project time before we lock down, or, most helpfully, a nice long sabbatical – but let me tell you this much. It sure isn’t a tablet PC. All a tablet PC would do for me would be to make it easier for me to deal with email and other tasks during meetings that are boring and that don’t really require my attention, because a tablet is so much quieter to use than a laptop. I often feel bad when I’m tap-tap-tapping away at a mail during a meeting. So I tap-tap-tap slower and more quietly. But that slows me down - grr. Now, with a tablet and its nifty little pen thingy, I could scribble away without detection! Hrm. Maybe there is something to this.

Shortly after absorbing this inspirational message, I came in and immediately had a catastrophic failure on my laptop, the kind where you have to flip it over and take the battery out to unfreeze the thing and then your mail still doesn’t work for the next several hours.

Funny how a day that began with such an inspirational message may have ended up being my least productive in years. :)

Zalkan home for wayward cats

We live in Seattle, where there aren't many mosquitos, causing us to leave the living room window open most of the time (it has no screen). We also have a cat door in the back door of the house. Our four cats make liberal use of both easy entries into the house.

And so, on occasion, do other cats in the neighborhood. Apparently, we're Krispy Kat Treat Central for most of the neighborhood. There's always some strange cat hightailing it out the cat door if we walk into the kitchen unexpectedly - someone who just came in to have a bite, thank you very much, and has no desire to actually meet us. This has become so commonplace that we hardly even comment on it anymore, and our cats don't seem bothered by it, so all is well.

However, every once in a while, one of the mystery visitors decides to settle in and get comfortable. The last one was Indiana Jones, cat of legend, seen in the picture at right. Indiana technically lived in the rental house across the street, but he really lived with us. Indiana differentiated himself from all of his snack-stealing peers by settling in on the couch, on the cat tree, and even on the bed, not at all bothered by the fact that THIS WAS SOMEONE ELSE'S HOUSE, AND THEY WERE IN FACT HOME RIGHT NOW. Doh. We fought him for a while (the other cats, oddly, did object to Indie), but then we grew attached to him and pretty much adopted him as our fifth cat. Low man on the totem pole, whipping boy of the Zalkan cat inhabitants, but nonetheless a member of the family.

Indie moved recently and we've been missing him. It's winter now, which is about the time he'd start sauntering in, waving hello, and settling in near the fire for a long nap. But he's gone, and our dim hopes that perhaps he'd leave his new home to pull off one of those Disney-esque lost cat treks back to our house, where the people who really love him live, have proven unfounded. Drat - he must actually LIKE his real owner.

Anyways, to make a long story short, just as I accepted the fact that Indie was gone for good, we seem to have acquired a new friend. The last few weeks, there's been a strange kitty in the house nearly every evening. Any time I walk into the living room, someone's little white butt hightails it out the window. He's fairly bold -- he does flee when we come into the room, but he doesn't actually run away, just stands on the fence outside the window waiting for me to leave so that he can come right back in. If I walk over to the window and look out, there he is, blinking up at me, somewhat puzzled. What's this person looking at me for? And then off he goes for real.


I haven't gotten a very good look at him, aside from these few glimpses. But this morning, I got up at oh-god-thirty to go to the gym, walked into the hallway and flipped on the bathroom light, and hey -- someone was asleep on top of the cat tree! Someone not belonging to us! Sure enough, it was our new guy. Apparently he's sleeping in our house now. This is, of course, step one of his complete colonization of our abode.

The cat tree, at left, was where Indiana also slept at night - apparently the resident cats have permanently ceded this piece of furniture over to the visitors. Maybe they're running a hostel. Maybe this is the wayward bed available to cats who are down on their luck, on the outs with one of the neighborhood dogs, etc. Our cats seem to know and like this new guy, since I've seen his hind end disappearing out the window when all four of our cats are sitting placidly around the living room, utterly unperturbed. Maybe he was invited. It could be some kind of party. They're just hanging.

Our new friend took off in a terror when I found him this morning, completely caught off guard by my extra-early appearance and his deep snooze. But it does seem that Indiana has an heir. By this time four months from now, we'll be waking up and finding him on the bed with us.

Three short quotes

This is not really a gardening post. I don’t feel like writing only about gardening right now, now that I’ve gotten in the habit of posting my day to day thoughts. (There’s vacation for you, always screwing up your complacent routines.) What I feel like posting about today is an odd summary of things:

1. Marriage. Just saw this quote on the FAQ for Dooce’s blog, which I’m addicted to:

I used to use a Nikon Coolpix 990 to take all of my photographs. It’s a few years old, and it’s something I inherited when I married my husband. When you get married you should make sure that the person you’re about to swear your life to comes with great gear. In addition to the camera I inherited a really big flat screen TV, some lamps, a big area rug...

Just kind of made me laugh because I’ve been thinking lately about stuff like this. I’ve been realizing lately how deeply I hit the jackpot on the husband front. Not only did I get a great, funny, kind man who not only wanted to get married but seemingly loves being married now that we are, I got one who is completely enthusiastic and welcoming about the idea of my parents moving to Seattle. His in laws. Living in the same town with him. Somehow this does not fill him with the fear that it would most stereotypical married men – he invited them himself, and meant it. How, how, how did I get so lucky?

He also came with good gear, as Deuce says above. Mainly a nice little craftsman house, room to garden, and a clawfoot tub. And he did buy a nice camera shortly thereafter that I probably use more than he does. But all that’s just frosting.

**

2. A quote and a phrase that have been on my mind lately – ran across this little bit in a book a few days ago, and it was one of those things that leapt off the page in recognition. Colin Wilson, in another of my husband’s crazy conspiracy books (I’m temporarily obsessed), was talking about his early enlightenment into the fact that the world was broader than he thought it was, and about how that shook him up:

”Even so, periods of intense depression were interrupted by flashes of feeling I called – after a phrase of G.K. Chesterton – “absurd good news”. It often happened early on a summer morning, when I set out on a long cycle ride, with a bag of sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade in a knapsack: the feeling that the world was infinitely rich, and that the problem lay [elsewhere]…”

I love this label for an emotion I very frequently experience: “absurd good news.” This happens to me all the time – I’ll be in the midst of a perfectly ordinary day and I have a moment of such intense joy and overall well-being that I can hardly stop myself from turning a cartwheel. (In fact, I’m not now nor have I ever been able to turn a cartwheel, which is what actually does stop me.) Sometimes there’s a definite cause for it, and sometimes there isn’t, but either way I love the feeling.

Happened today at work – there I was doing my job, like normal, having meetings, talking with people, not particularly having a great or even a good day, but not having a bad one either -- and I walked to the bathroom and suddenly realized I was smiling so big that my face was about to crack and just feeling so incredibly… happy. Just for that one thirty second moment, when my mind was wandering, before I noticed. And believe me, I don’t love my job anywhere near enough for that to explain it.

Am I manic depressive? No, no. I certainly don’t have the opposite crashes into depression, and I don’t really have all the accoutrements of a manic phase either - no massive bursts of energy or productivity, no fast talking or suspiciously sped up movements. It’s just a quick and blinding happiness, an overwhelming sense of good will that comes over me and then goes. Certain folks I know would call it grace. I don’t really have a label for it. But it’s nice to have these little peak experiences in my life on a semi-frequent basis. From now on, I’m going to shamelessly use Mr. Wilson’s label for it.

Husband: ”What are you so happy about?”
Me: “Oh, nothing, just another moment of Absurd Good News.”

***

3. Which brings me to another related quote, a favorite of mine that I’ve had hanging over my desk for five or six years now. This also sums up something quite fundamental in my experience of the world:

“Happiness lies in small things, passing experiences, accidental encounters, and yes, I think that some people have it in their nature to walk out the door in the morning and, even though beset by deadlines and anxieties, take a certain exhilaration from the dew on the grass, birdsong, a dog going about his dog business, the herd of children waiting patiently for the school bus, the aroma of sod. And other people, even in the flush of success and ease and booming good health, brood over old resentments and anticipate disaster.”
- Garrison Keillor

A tip of the hat to Mr. Keillor, who as usual puts everything simply, perfectly, beautifully. I wish I could write like this – such grace and clarity, and such spareness.

Garden woes

Back to blogging about gardening. The big shock on returning from Hawaii is that I think I have moles! How is it possible to have moles in a yard the size of a crib quilt? I'm not 100% sure that's what's going on, but there are three or four little mounds in the flower beds in the front yard, and a couple of suspiciously dead plants. If I *do* have moles, given the size of my paltry garden, they should be able to tear it up and kill everything in it in, oh, about a week.

So I'm poking around online looking up things like "moles seattle" (expecting to get a lot of stuff about skin cancer, but no, the first several hits were all very helpful). This page suggests a variety of violent and not-so-violent home remedies including mole-fishing with a pitchfork ("moles move at 12-15 miles and hour. Be vigilant." Yuk!), razors and gasoline in the tunnels (um, no), or (my favorite) chocolate exLax.


Here's another interesting cure, originally posted here:

I have a cure for moles: Bury fresh dog poop in each new mole hill or tunnel. The bigger the dog and the fresher the poop, the better. Then water it, so it sort of melts and spreads down the tunnel. Moles know a predator when they smell one — they'll move to the neighbor's yard. If you don't have a dog — well, great! Your yard is where I send my moles.

I don't have a dog. But Mike has a few. Hrm.

Back in the rain

Just a quick follow up to our trip reports before I return to my more regular subjects. We came back to Seattle on Wednesday night, after securing ourselves another comfy and cheap upgrade to first class. (For some reason, we've only ever been able to get these on flights to and from Hawaii - they're always available and they're dirt cheap. And the mai tais they give you when you board are a nice touch.)

One final note on Kona - taking off from Kona during the daytime was much more pleasant than arriving there at night. Here's Brett's artist rendition of the experience we described of landing on the big island after dark - imagine this is the view out your window:



The trip home was uneventful, although turbulent. Landed at Seatac at 10 p.m., waited forty five minutes for our bags (Seattle is notoriously bad at the baggage handling stuff), and headed home.

Of course our time zones were all screwed up, so instead of sensibly going to sleep, we ended up watching a Woody Allen movie (Anything Else) until nearly 2:30 in the morning. Then down for a five hour nap and off, blinking and bleary-eyed, to the train station to pick up my parents, who took Amtrak out from Ohio for a five day visit.

Since then, we've been happily shepherding my parents around town. They're considering moving out here in the spring, so we've been visiting some of the smaller communities outside Seattle -- Edmonds, Mukilteo, Woodinville -- trying to give them a sense of what's available. We've also visited a few senior communities; my parents have lived in several of these and are interested in finding another. We went to three up in the Edmonds area, and they were somewhat of the "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" variety -- the first was much too big, the second much to small, and the third was almost right. Anyways, they have the winter to think it over and figure out what they want to do, but we're hoping the decide to come.

Today we drove out to Leavenworth, hoping to have a nice slow look around, but EGADS! Forgot about Oktoberfest. Us and four million of our closest friends had the same idea. As it was, we ended up just having lunch, poking around a book store and one or two other places, and then giving up and heading home. Nice drive though, and we did eventually drive out of the rain.

I'm slowly starting to sort through my work mail that accumulated while I was out of town. A few stats:

• Unread mails accumulated in my inbox in two weeks: 936 (not bad, actually)
• Number I was able to delete without reading: 532
• Number I still need to read: 404
• Employees who quit while I was gone: 1 (total bummer, although not a surprise)
• Employees hired while I was gone by my underlings: 1
  (it'd be nice if this corresponded to the position above, but it doesn't; back to the hiring game)
• Number of "wow, who knew you did this much?" mails I was sent by managers working for me: 2
• Other emergencies that went on: not sure yet

Nene

This is a nene, Hawaii's state bird. According to this page, there were only fifty of them left in 1957, but now there are somewhere between 350 and 500 of them living in the Hawaiian islands. Given that, we felt pretty lucky to see two of them hanging out on the rim of Pele's crater.

Apparently their call sounds like the moo of a cow, but we didn't really notice that. They clucked a few times, but that's all.

On the moon

We spent the last two days on the moon – or at least it seemed like that. We drove across the “saddle road”, which cuts across the middle of the island, rising to about 6000 feet and cutting between the two most active volcanic peaks (Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea), and over to Volcano National Park, south of Hilo. On the way there, we went partly up the access road to Mauna Kea, stopping at 9600 feet to see the visitor's center, but the road was scary and the altitude was hard to adjust to, so we ended up not going to the summit to see the telescopes. The Visitors Center had plenty of cool displays about what they do there, and we spent quite a while reading up on the nine or so different telescopes they run up there, including the Keck, the Subaru telescope, and one member of the Very Large Array. At night, when the sun's setting, you can see them from Waikaloa.

After Mauna Kea, we drove through Hilo and around to the south side of the island, to Volcano National Park. Ended up staying the night there at a national park system inn that’s right on the lip of the Kilauea crater. This was the view out our hotel window:

Is it safe to sleep right on the rim like this? Apparently. This particular crater hasn't been active for quite a while, although magma is only two miles below the surface at this location (sounds pretty far away to me, but apparently that's pretty close in geological terms) and the active eruption on the mountain continues out a side vent a little further east. Interestingly, park bulletins reveal that in September there was an unprecedented number of deep earthquakes below Mauna Loa, something like 500 in a period of 4-6 weeks. No one's sure what this means, but it does seem to indicate that magma is building up beneath the peak and that a major eruption could lie ahead.

The park was definitely one of the highlights of our visit -- lots to see and do. We visited some petroglyphs in a lava field, saw active steam vents, hiked across a lava lake that only cooled about 30 years ago, visited a tropical rain forest, and drove down the road to the sea to the point where the current lava flow has cut it off from civilization. When you do this, signs point out, you're standing on the newest land on the planet. Sort of an interesting thought - what we were standing on was a lava flow from 2002. This part of the island is forming and reforming all of the time - beaches and forests are swept away and new ones are formed. Roads are cut off and reconnected. The big island is still growing, every day.

We didn’t see any flowing lava, but the landscape was surreal and fascinating – huge swirls of lava that look like cake batter, yellow sulfur stains smeared across the side of a mountain, a half-mile wide crater where the volcano goddess Pele is supposed to live and which in Mark Twain’s time was a swirling sea of lava, dark smudges of black lava flows cascading down a 2000 foot drop, with new trees and grasses beginning to colonize a new existence out of them… Fascinating.

Petroglyphs:

Lava field we hiked - hard to get scale on this, but it's about a mile across, and nowhere near as smooth as it looks:

On the way back the next day we went by the southernmost point in the United States. Of course, every little business in the area had to capitalize on this. Sourthernmost Bar in the United States! Southernmost Gas in the United States! Southernmost Waste Treatment Facility! (Ok, I made that last one up.) Kind of funny.

We also visited the place of refuge on the drive home – in ancient Hawaiian society, if you’d committed a crime or there was a war on and you made it here before your enemies reached you, you were safe from harm. Now it’s a national park, with several reconstructed temples and the original layout delineated and narrated. It was definitely a beautiful spot, with its coconut trees swaying in the breeze and the white sand almost glowing in the sun. This turtle was taking a little refuge himself:

Partial vacation reading list

Brett and I travel with a lot of books, and then we buy more when we get to wherever we’re going. Probably half of the weight of our luggage is reading material. On this trip, my three objectives were to sleep in, swim, and read a lot. We’re doing pretty well on all three.

Here’s what I’ve been reading so far. Kind of an usual list for me.

Finished:

• Peyton Amberg, Tama Janowitz – why do I keep reading her? I don’t really like her work all that much, and this must be the third book of hers I've read. But it was plane reading, loosely based on Madame Bovary, and it did its job of making the flight go by.
  
• In Search of King Solomon’s Mines, Tarih Shah – great, fascinating, couldn’t-put-it-down travel/adventure nonfiction. Goes deeply into Ethiopia’s history, which I’ve always found interesting but didn’t know much about.
  
• The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, Michael Parreti – also great. This and the previous book are interesting because at the start of the trip, I was reading Shah and Brett was reading this one, and we immediately swapped and devoured each other’s book as soon as we’d finished. That’s unusual for us – usually our tastes diverge pretty broadly.
  
• By the Light of the Moon, Dean Koontz – found it in a hotel, and got sucked in for the next day or so. The ending sucked but until then it was lots of fun – sometimes mind candy books are very satisfying. Surprisingly well written.
  
• The Atlantis Blueprint, Colin Wilson – I’m married to an Art Bell fan. It leads me to occasionally read this kind of thing. Interesting book, anyways.

Halfway into:

• Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Linda Berdoll – my my, how the Darcys do carry on. J I’m not sure what to make of this – I doubt I’ll finish it, because it’s not all that compelling, but somehow I keep coming back to it. Mainly out of bemusement, I think.
  
• Rules of the Wild, Francesca Marciano – hasn’t grabbed me yet, but I only read a chapter or so. This is slated for the plane ride home. Nonfiction travel writing about aid workers in Nairobi.

Skimmed through:

• Three gardening books about Hawaii and/or tropical plants (our hosts’)
  
• Martha Stewart’s Decorating with Color (ditto)
  
• Oprah, Elle, Vogue (all mine)
  
  
  
  

And the sky full of stars

Just another brief "Wow!" moment from Hawaii. Last night is was made abundantly clear to me what it means to live in a place without the constant light pollution we live with on the mainland. We were driving home the long way from dinner in Kohola, which took us around a long dark windy road away from any towns or villages, and partway through while we were singing along to the various disco stations that seemed to be the only choices for late night listening I rolled down the window, stuck my head out like a dog, and looked up.

*boggle*

I have never seen so many stars, ever. The arm of the Milky Way was smudged out directly above us and stretched from horizon to horizon, one big glowing, pulsing band of white. Millions and millions of stars everywhere you looked (or didn't look, with that trick that the dim stars have of only being visible when you look a little above them.) It was truly amazing.

Of course we pulled over and stared for quite a while. I used to make a ceremony, when I was a kid, of laying on the front yard late at night in August, staring at the Milky Way through my dad's Navy binoculars and dreaming all sorts of things about who might be looking back, but what I saw then was never anything to compare to this. Sit yourself down in the middle of the Pacific with only a couple of small towns around and nothing else for a few thousand miles and it's quite a different story.

A little plant life

Back to the subject at hand, although briefly --

Plumeria pic from the backyard of the house:



Wild begonias on a trail we were hiking yesterday:


I have to say, I've known for a while now that begonias are a wild tropical plant, but I kind of had to see it yesterday to actually believe it. How, I felt, could something that was present in such abundance in Ohio when I was a child, be tropical? It's sort of like suggesting that you put wonder bread out on your gourmet smorgasboard - throwing the most commonplace, mundane thing you can think of into the midst of fanciness and splendor. But yesterday we ran across mounds and mounds of them growing wild at around 2500 feet in a tropical forest, and I had to admit that yes, they fit right in.

BlogAcatMas Day

Mike Pope points out that it's national blog-your-cat day. Although it's neither garden nor travel related, I can't resist. :) Here are our four:

Maddie:


Max:


Phoenix:


Cassie: