Agnes Was at Doe Bay

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A few small repairs

My pack arrived! I am babysitting quite a bit this week, while simultaneously beating back the (early, but obvious) spring-time laundry beast and making the tiny home improvements that make life better.

N-man has learned to make grits by himself and is now only eating grits for breakfast. We'll see how long that lasts! I love watching these guys learn to cook. They are so happy with their burgeoning independence!

My cell phone (which had a busted usb port) has been repaired. This was at least a minor issue, but because the phone was under warranty, my contact wanted to get it done. I shouldn't say repaired-- replaced is a more accurate statement. Shiny!

My cranky van is in the shop for its annual tax-time money-suck. No, I am not kidding. Every year at tax time, this van has had something go wrong with it that doesn't involve less than 250.00. Last year, it was my son breaking out a window and then a few months later, a fuel pump failure combined with a shorting out computer. At the time, we chose to replace the fuel pump because that was all the money we had.

This year, it is the brain. One of the ongoing issues with this vehicle has been intermittent failure to stay cranked. It always cranks, but then some kill switch is activated, as if it had an alarm (it doesn't) and it stops. Other, less invasive electrical problems persist as well, but that's the attention grabber. This season's issue involved a two week hiatus for the minivan in which it refused to start at all. Out of the blue-- the day we got our tax return-- it began to start again.

Hmm.
Just "well" enough to get it to the mechanic.

Some people would go along with conventional wisdom and ditch this van altogether. I can't say that isn't tempting. P-daddy had the idea to convert it into a chicken coop, and if we had 5 acres, I might even go along with it. Personally, I have been having fantasies about buying a vintage Vanagon for 2 grand and once again having a vehicle I can repair myself. But rationally, given that we can't yet finance a late-model vehicle, if we were to purchase something we could actually afford right now, we'd still be 1. paying more than this repair will probably cost and 2. buying someone else's problems. The cost-benefit ratio doesn't pay out.

Just in the 4 years we've had this thing, we have replaced so many integral components, it really is a better vehicle than it sounds like it is. The computer issue is probably going to resolve a great many of the trouble spots, and we will at least be able to have an accurate picture of what is going on under that hood. So, whatever. I can't burn energy worrying about it when our path is fairly clear. I don't want to be a one car family, but we can do it if we have to.

Family Style

We took the weekend and packed it full of family stuff. It was nice, reconnecting with just us and carrying no outside plans. We made organic blackberry applesauce, using our own blackberries. I should say that this time, all I did was turn on the stove and mash the product. The kids did all the work.

The tongue of concentration

P-daddy even acquiesced to go to IKEA-- on a Saturday-- so that was a huge deal for him. We have some interior redecorating to do so we're desperately in need of some inspiration for furniture placement for a home-based lifestyle like ours. (I am just not finding it online so if you want to spam me, feel free to do so in the comments!)

D-meister always dresses for the occasion. The perfect outfit for IKEA? Eurotrash!

They're clearly stunned by the Vibrancy

The point

And sometimes, we get the point. <3

Good things about the heat wave

1. I am losing sweat weight. Keep hydrated, people!

2. Tomatoes, sunflowers and squash are having a FANTASTIC time. This will round out the garden nicely.

3. From the kids perspective: unlimited otter pops are a fantastic thing.

4. An excuse to use water in spurious ways, like slip n slides!

5. Gazpacho

6. Vichyssoise

So love the cooperative housing thang

Chrysalis

As might be expected, the subsistence issues dominate my thinking. We have plenty to update on homeschool terms, on gardening terms, but everything feels so up in the air. Well, everything IS up in the air, and it's a pretty harsh damper on my writing efforts.

Still here. P-daddy has a couple of offers but they involve changing our lives pretty drastically. We're still figuring it out.

So how does one "update" life this crazy?

Maybe not catastrophic (for us) anyway but crazy. A friend of mine just bulleted through, so I suppose I should too. In no particular order of chronology or importance:

I went blonde. Blonde. Like, really blonde and slightly reddish on the ends, as is the fashion, don't you know. Blonde, as in the first time since I was three years old that I was lighter than a muddled burgundy. I despise that it makes my skin light up-- I look so much younger, they say, and even with my behind still fat and my hair chopped short (to accommodate the perfectly expected damage from such a gigantic chemical step), I get a lot more attention. Go figure. It makes me look good. It does suit my coloring. The color worked very well and looks nice. I hate it. Ugh! I can't determine whether I despise the cut, or whether I am just so resistant to change that the stranger in the mirror makes me uncomfortable. I will leave it for now.

Twilight. Nearly everyone around me has caught the bug. I rented the movie and read her online tome, (what there is), Midnight Sun. I have to admit that it is engaging, but not one to suffer from spoilers, I read ahead and I can't buy into the whole dead-guy-still-makes-active-sperm thing. I do like her take on the Vampire as an animalian subspecies, not a soulless, dead-but-not entity. I have one friend in particular who should lay some bricks when she gets to book 3. I can't wait.

Our garden is growing. P-daddy and I have been working together nicely to shore up the homestead. He built fine, square foot gardening boxes in the front yard. We mixed fill soil from our own compost, store-bought vermiculite, sphagnum moss, and Tagro a friend of ours scooped and delivered to us for free. All told, our garden beds cost us around $72.00. I know we would have done this years ago had we known! We tied them off in grids together, and have recently put in all our starts and our things we are willing to start from seed. Typically, once there is the slightest outside activity, I abandon the computer, so this is what partially explains our absence. The other is that my camera is all funky, so even on days when I would normally have great, wordless blog entries to share, ah, shucks.

Just today, the kids started their own children's gardens. When he built our primary garden beds, P-daddy used our leftover Trex board from building the treehouse and gave each of the kids a 2 X 2 box of their own to fill as they see fit. G-girl and D-meister chose to put them in the front yard with ours, but N-man placed his in the back, close his original garden and adjacent to Presley's grave. He says this is how he will grow flowers for Presleydog. They will still have access to the side gardens, but we have to get P-daddy's yard waste* out of there.

The neighbors moved for real this time. It has really saddened me on a number of levels; we will miss the little girl terribly, we enjoyed having neighbors so close to us in age and family composition; and we would like it if they had left on a completely voluntary basis. Most of all, though, it causes me some discomfiture to benefit so greatly from their departure. They moved offshore, so they left an amazing amount of things behind, including big ticket items like a chest freezer, a 10 X 10 garden shed and a yakima roof box. They gave their swing set to a friend of ours, and they gave us all their lawn furniture, which is great for us because the winter decimated ours. The kids in particular are thrilled with the influx or yard and sports toys. P-daddy has spent the past three weekends helping them sort their last things and then rebuilding the shed over here*. It's been abject chaos, and I am working so hard to be mor egrateful than I feel guilty. My guilt makes little sense, even to me, because when we moved across country, we did the same thing. We gave away or sold things I miss to this day (like our freezer!), so it's nice for some of it to come back to our family.

Interrupting all of this was a month-long illness on my part; I finally caught the flu / pneumonia / bronchitis beast that took out half of Puget Sound. Thankfully, all our family was better when it took me down. I have never needed an inhaler in my life, and needing one, plus antibiotics, plus weeks of absolute stillness to heal this, was truly startling. The illness prevented me from doing a lot of my planned work for the garden (never got my grow lights hung or my cold frame built) and it made dealing with the suddeen windfall from next door very inconvenient, despite how welcome it was. I simply haven't been fit for anything, much less extra putting-away.

I am having issues with challenging kids, my own and my friends'. My children have been celebrating spring by being mouthy and willful, scrapping with their siblings, disputing my authority and ideas on a daily, if not hourly basis. That's hard enough to deal with from just the three of them, but the thought of adding friends has become so very untenable. With a few exceptions, most of the children I know right now are half-deaf and completely bonkers. Combine that with the extreme physicality I have noticed lately in all of them, and people are getting hurt. Being bullied by my schoolmates and abused my some family, I am very sensitive to getting "beaten up." I am not very tolerant of verbal sparring either, but I really have a very hard time drawing the line between acceptable rough-housing and its resulting misunderstandings and out-and-out bullying. I think because of my awareness of my own sensitivities, I err on the side of letting it go too far. I am fully sick of stick-fighting, whoop-screaming, rock-throwing**"fun". They're all getting hurt, actual bleeding, bruising, why-won't-you-stop-I-said-enough! hurt. I don't know how to handle it; I am not willing to do some of what I've read I should do (remove the offenders from your life-- how does one do that when ones' own child is a full participant?), and furthermore a lot of that advice doesn't apply to our lifestyle as homeschoolers. While it's not natural to get cooped up all day with 35 others of your same age and real estate, its also not natural to just be able to shove people to the curb when you feel like its just too hard, either. Community means being stuck with the same folks sometimes. The goal here is to work forward towards some form of maturity and you know, having FUN when we get together or need to babysit. I'm working on it. The other Moms are good, smart people and do see what I see, so it's all good. I am hoping it's just a rough Spring on the heels of a brutal winter.

**D-meister broke the window out of my van during one of these festivities of "fun." He had a compatriot in the rock-throwing glee, but lucky for everyone it was actually my kid who broke my window. Lucky him I actually DO think spanking is a bad idea. Witholding dessert? That is something I am perfectly comfortable dishing out, especially for 200.00. (get it? Hardy har.)

The economy, in a very direct way. My husband works for a state contractor doing pretty integrated work with the department of corrections. I can't elaborate more on that here, but I can say that both the contract (every 7 years) and the state budget were up in the air this year. Anyone who lives here knows that Washington state has a 9 billion dollar shortfall in it's budget for the forthcoming year. That's a LOT of cuts, a lot. Even if his company does win the contract (fairly likely) which was decided in secret last week, the state budget will have to be appropriate to fund the work. It's been a potentially disastrous, completely perfect storm of happenstance-- the real estate crash, the stock market decline, the state budget crisis, the unemployment rate, the contract renewal date-- that has all these factors working together to a climax to come this month. It's been wearing on us for six months now but I haven't wanted to write any of it out here. All our life savings is in this house, which of course has lost all of its equity from the last four years. If he loses his job, that's it. We start over, middle-aged with three kids and three degrees between us. No home of our own, no job.

So I do what I can, I focus on gratitude and on ways to mitigate the changes for the children, if the worst should come to pass. We have very basic goals-- keep the family together, try to stay in Washington (even better, in this house!) if we can. We will see. Again, that Dalai Llama quote: "If you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do about it. If you can, there is no need to worry about it; if you cannot do anything, then there is also no need to worry."

Susan Boyle Saves the World

Go here to listen to this crazy wonderful YouTube video: Susan Boyle

Aside from the rather cynical satisfaction I received from watching someone gobsmack Simon Cowell and make Piers Morgan express genuine emotion, this middle-aged, lonesome cat lady brought the PIPES. A jaded, mocking audience rose to its feet within seconds of her even beginning the song. Clearly unafraid and confident, living solely in the moment of fulfilling her dream of singing to a gigantic audience, she delivered an intense and professional delivery and then promptly walked off stage. She came, she delivered, and she left.

They called her back for her accolades, but the reminder it brought me (and judging from the instantly viral youtube of her performance, millions of others) was of sheer joy. The whole underdog thing, the pleasure the arts bring us all, the whole "something is still going right in the world" just brought me to tears. This is for everyone who has hidden their light under a bushel, anyone who has been misunderstood. I hope you'll watch it and get a lift as well.

Liberation

Well, this isn't seasonal. Spring cleaning-- dusting and window wiping-- that's seasonal. Ripping things off the walls, that isn't so much a requirement of the season.

However!

I am free-- free of the ugly chintz swag drapes in the living room. I may not love my Contemporary California architecture, but I no longer have to balefully notice those pastel pink and green things in the living room. I know they were expensive, and at some point in time, even tasteful. But they have never been, in this world, reflective of the tastes of my husband or myself. And now, despite having purchased adequate replacements, they are gone.

And I am fine with that!

If you also felt the anti-love for the swags, gimme a comment!

Brittle

Spring is beginning to show itself in the PNW. The trees are budding in the far away sky, and pollen now dusts our cars each morning like facepowder from the hands of a toddler. Writing has taken a back seat to teaching my six year old to read, planning our garden efforts and clearing out, clearing out, clearing out. I feel like we're forever purging.


The economy has not directly hit our interests, but we do have it looming over us. Until April, I will be wondering in the darker recesses of my mind whether this garden is even something we should be concerning ourselves with. One of my favorite garden trinkets, though, is a garden plaque which references the inherent optimism in planting a garden. So I will plant the garden and expect to harvest the fruits of our labours in one fashion or another. The Dalai Lama says "If you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do about it. If you can, there is no need to worry about it; if you cannot do anything, then there is also no need to worry." This I am taking to heart and consider it every day.

So while I mean what I say about worry, and while I have in most ways kept a pleasant outlook for the sake of my health and my children's daily life, I still find myself depleted. It takes a lot of energy to keep the sadness and despair at bay. I look around at the state of things locally, where every day I see a new shell where a business had recently thrived; where I read of homeschoolers in common groups putting their children in school so the mothers can take minimum wage jobs so the family can keep the lights on; where people I personally know are losing their home and lying to the kids about why they are moving, in yet another parental attempt to preserve something of a happy childhood for them; it all presses in and makes maintaining a status quo work.

I am not depressed or overtly anxious, but I remain contemplative and far more serious than I would otherwise like to be, with a contrasting and overriding sense of complete gratitude for what we do have, and the options that stretch before us come what may. There has been plenty for me to write about, to share, but I have this sense of survivor's guilt, as if to share it all in my typical blithe revelry would be disrespectful to the many who are hurting so much.

So there it is. The birds are singing, the days are lengthening and I will plug along with a spirit of work, to drive away the idleness of hands that might otherwise make a painful spirit.

The sun is shining

I can't overstate how happy sunny days are when you're plowing through a PNW winter. You can actually see how vivid the green is in the forests around you and the mountains-- ah you can appreciate the white capped peaks when you can see the mountain ranges spread out in the distance. Generally, an open winter sky also means you're freezing your butt off, but it's a fair trade off.

I must admit, I don't mind temperate weather at all. I have acclimated to the summer temperatures and the winter is warmer, actually, than the cold bits of a Charleston winter. The fog and drama of the climate here is actually more than ok with me because it's changeable. I enjoy departures from the routine and the PNW delivers. Except-- when it's grey for too long. Then THAT becomes mundane. So I don't require a sunny winter, by any means. But I love the sunny days.

Needs / Wants-- the Tao of Bar Stools

Part of my foray into voluntary simplicity has been to use a heavy hand where it pertains to the defining line between needs and wants. I slide it a little farther toward "need" on the scale and try to go without. While I have some sparking examples of failure, generally it's been working to keep the net household intake in check. But there are some things I have gone without for far too long. I am about ready to snap.

Bar Stools.

I WANT bar stools. It offends me that my youngest never sat at the counter as a toddler while I baked cookies or muffins, like his big sibs. That he couldn't sit happily on a perch while I cooked and he ate a snack. I loved my bar stools. They were readily available and plentiful in Charleston, so I left them when we moved out here. Who knew, that like chicken, bar stools were valued like gold in Washington? I've been idly looking for inexpensive bar stools (15 ea at MAX) for four years. Not on craigslist, not on freecycle, not at yard sales. Do people here not use them or do they just covet them too much? Do they use them until they are worn into obsolescence?

I have to have them. Am I going to have to pay for them?

Don't have much to update

I have been spending a lot of time lately waiting. Waiting for invitations, waiting for free time, waiting for the allergy test results, waiting for packages to arrive. Just a lot of waiting. I don't do confused and I don't do well with waiting. I need those packages to finish projects. I need the allergy results to know what our next steps will be with G-girl. I feel somewhat stalled.

But that's not entirely accurate, either.

Life is moving forward-- we're keeping in good touch with our friends, we've started classes again at the Y and the theater. I'm better organized in the hall of learning (school room) and my new supplements regimen is helping out. I have experienced a huge reconnection in my personal life and that has occupied a good chunk of my time as well. I am finishing up the scanner job that got pushed aside with all the snowy festivities. I am enjoying it, but it takes TIME. Time you'd think I would have with all this waiting.

P-daddy is playing house-husband while I do this stuff and in other ways, sit on my butt. So I guess at the end of it, I am actually very busy, yet I still don't have much to update. Perhaps it's not my daily life that lacks the spark, but my inner muse. I suppose I can wait for it, too, to come back.

Pressure Cooker Non Sequitur

I still love my pressure cooker. That is all.

Working with Grandaddy, both of them.

I can't say that I remember being a Daddy's girl. My mother assured me that when I was a very small girl I was, but I don't recall it. After the separation and divorce, I didn't see my father again until I was an adult in college. I did have a relationship with my grandfather, though; in my estimation, when I was small, he was a big, giant teddy bear who could do and build anything. There was a period of time after the divorce when my mother wouldn't let me see that side of the family and that loss of connection was at least as devastating as the destruction of my nuclear family.

For about 6 years, if I got to see my Grandparents at all, it was a twice a year visitation kind of situation. The day I turned 18, I biked the three miles (isn't that a travesty? Only three miles!) in the Charleston June heat to my grandparents house. By the end of that summer, they were more than happy to drive me all the way to Virginia to my college dorm, to be involved with helping me set up a life. I never slept another night in my mother's home. It was a bumpy road, though, getting to know them again. I'd suffered things they didn't understand and they wanted to rewrite history, I think, or wave a wand and make our pain go away. They struggled through my angry years. I have always been a writer, and they didn't like some of the newspaper columns I sent home from college. Healing can be a nasty business.

I have written before about what my Grandparents mean to me. If I hadn't had P-daddy in my life when my Grandfather passed, I don't know what his death would have done to me. I had fully invested my identity at that point as their granddaughter. In the years since, I have gotten closer with my father and to my regret, lost all contact with my mother. It's complicated, as all families seem to be, and of course it informs how I parent my own children.

After my Grandfather passed, my Grandmother gave me all their slides and the projector. My Grandfather loved to take pictures, and for a period of time in my father's early childhood, he preferred slides. A stroke of genius, I say. Slides hold their color so perfectly. As I scan the slides, I get to see the pictures in all their integrity. One by one, I get to see these images surface on my computer screen as they were when he shot them. It's proving to be an emotional experience. I think a lot like my Grandaddy, and as I work through these slides, I find him instructing me even now; an x marks the bottom left of the image, no matter what the Kodak label says. Dates, places, categories, all there for me to decipher in a way that may make sense only to our family. That connection again, that tie to the larger web of family. It resonates within me. It aches. I am scanning these over the course of this week to preserve and deliver these images for my family-- my Grandmother, my father, my cousins. What a Christmas gift, to have family pictures from 5 decades ago resurface now, the few prints of which have been long lost.

And finally, another shocking discovery. My Grandaddy was born in Egypt, Georgia and raised in Savannah. It was no surprise to see a box marked "Ephesus," as I had already encountered "Sarasota." Assuming I would see family pictures at a farm or a picnic in the rural South, I was surprised to see Ephesus. As in Turkey. As in The Cathedral of St John and The Great Theater. My Grandaddy had never been to Europe. These were slides taken by my then-18-year-old father. My Daddy had taken these.

Only in recent years has he talked to me about his time in the service. He didn't enjoy his time as a Viet Nam war serviceman, but what little he has told me centered around his tours in Europe, and the pleasure he took in actually walking the ancient streets. I was slightly dizzy as I examined the shots. I know my father lost every photograph he had living on sailboats after the divorce. I know he doesn't have these. But we do, now. He will get them back. And my children will get to see their Grandaddy's history unfold before them while I am watching mine.

This is a good work, and I am so grateful for the chance to do it.

Interminably boring

I have been following politics.... the economy.... so I have not been really writing here. I don't want to revisit this period when it is over so I will decline to even bother with it. The campaign is nasty, full of lies and posturing. People want Obama to bring his own "bam" in retaliation to the smoke and mirrors emanating from the McCain camp, but I am wanting candidates who can focus on what we (as a country) need. I don't have patience for anything else. Flash and vim, leave it home please. Tell me how you're going to fix it. Fix it.

I have been studying the great depression-- the causes are identical to what is happening now-- but I have been focusing on what they did to survive it, get past it, on individual family bases. I am trying to identify whether my family will just struggle, or will be Hooverville candidates. So yes, I am not writing much about that. While these things occupy my mind, my husband and I are focusing on making the children's world stay the same. The children- who are studying phonics and Egyptians and geography. Who climb rock walls, swim laps and paint pictures of giant farting dinosaurs.

How grateful am I that we practice voluntary simplicity? That we refuse to buy new cars because ours are "old?" It may not be voluntary after a while, and I am grateful we were already looking at sustainability out of principle. In many ways, that makes us prepared ahead of the curve.

We love our kids, just like everyone else. Make it. Make it. That's all it is lately with me. Make it.

Wrung out

If you've ever hand washed anything you know you can wring a piece of fabric until it is almost dry. I feel like I have been doing that to myself. It's been great, don't get me wrong, to live this much but I am so tired. I am ready for the moody blue of winter to come in and still us somewhat.

Canning more peaches this week.

Took the kids on a 5 hours jaunt to the zoo with the C-family, where we were treated to some funny sights. There's little more amusing to me than watching an ancient porcupine (at one show I think they said he was 12) lumbering down a sidewalk without his leash. They got to see a polar bear really showing off his tasty treat, as he kept bringing his bucket closer and closer to the window through which they peered. And finally-- the walrus. One of the walrus females hauled up to the viewing net where the kids were just hanging on, and she doused them completely through. After gazing at her handiwork for about thirty seconds, she filled her mouth with pool water again and just let fly. The viewing area was as wet as if a man had thrown a twenty gallon bucket of water onto the kids. It was FUNNY and I was so glad the kids were laughing as hard as we were.

We started "school" this week, which for us just means paying a bit better attention. I have been working on phonics with G-girl and lettering with the small one. N-man has been picking words out more and more. We did a bio-sheet on walruses after their zoo escapade, and have started talking morning walks to energize us for the day.

I've returned to a way of eating I really used to like, in part because it worked so well for me, but after two weeks at even it's strictest "setting," this plan is failing me. I am not sure what is going on but I don't think I am going to last. Despite mindful attentiveness at times, steady exercise for months and even months where I ate whatever I wanted, I have held steady at the same (fat) weight for the last year (it's September right?) and I am beginning to despair. Nothing I do for the good or bad seems to be changing my weight or appearance. SO I am just going to choose to eat for health and suck up the ugly, I guess.

Summer marches on

Or should I say "summer." Honestly, if my garden wasn't complaining, then I wouldn't either. I don't mind the overcast as long as it's above 60 degrees. I don't mind a little rain in the summer to help water the plants. But when it's grey enough that the plants are sleepy, then I have an issue.

Even so, West of the Cascades the farms are coming through so I will be able to can cherries and peaches, enjoying the bounty that makes it over the mountains.

My father and stepmother will be visiting us next month. They arrive in about two weeks and I am somewhat nervous. While *I* am proud of what we have accomplished in the last three years, there are some values we do not share and I worry about how they will perceive our house. I've never been a tidy housekeeper and my home, while very clean compared to my singleton homes, is overrun by three small children-- three small homeschooled children. We're always here. And it shows.

All these projects I have in the to do box, I want them done now, or at least before they arrive. I know how to do this stuff, just not...when.

As of late we've been making connections with other homeschoolers in the harbor we hadn't met before. I think we have enough people to make a pretty sound group, so I am happy with that. It doesn't take a lot of parents, particularly if they have more than one child. Things are moving along nicely, just at a boring-to-read summer pace.

Locking down again

I am having some feelings of overexposure. It seems this happens to me annually, but I am feeling pretty vulnerable right now, so I am closing the blog. I may still have to cull some people as I need to process things that aren't necessarily pretty. I hope you understand if my blog goes "poof."

If I had transferred to wordpress already I could just seal off the few posts here and there, but of course I had to procrastinate. I am always procrastinating.

I have made a few big mistakes in the past several months, and they are coming now at some heavy cost.

We will be ok; we always are.