Frogs and Ravens

Allergy Season

The sheet is covering my nose, creating a warm, moist space in which I attempt to breathe.  One nostril is completely clogged up; the other feels swollen and there's a sticky snicking sensation every time I inhale.  I try breathing slowly, then quickly; both ways elicit that faintly panicky feeling that says you're not getting enough air.  I roll to the other side.  Perhaps the clogged nostril will drain?  No dice.  I breathe through my mouth, faint hissing replacing the mucousy snuffles. 

Now the medicine begins to kick in.  My sinuses feel curiously empty, dry air echoing in their cavities.  I seem to vibrate softly, every cell buzzing gently like a drowsy bee.  I teeter on the edge of an adrenaline rush, forestalling the incipient panic attack by thinking about breathing.  I turn over again, frustrated in the warm soft dark.  My nose is still clogged, my inhalations still thin and meager.  I return to breathing through my mouth.  It grows dry and tacky, my taste buds rasping against my dehydrated palate.  I summon up saliva, but it provides only a modicum of gummy relief.  My tongue and cheeks and lips grow arid again.

I stagger out of bed, neither awake nor asleep, in search of water.  I wobble and stumble past the cat, grope blindly for the cup and pitcher, and drink down water in great gulps, staring blearily at nothing.  I shuffle and weave back to bed, crawl back into our soft nest.  Before long I am hissing through my teeth again, wearily.

I repeat this several times.  The tinging of the alarm offers a meager blessing; I am upright, and the dawn air is cool and fresh, even if I am not.

Wild Self

I found this fun avatar maker at Scrivenings...

  Before, my "normal" self...

#1 on Google Meme

Here's a new meme (generation string: The World's Fair --> Pharyngula -->  Creek Running North):  Find five search strings that return your blog as the number one hit.

Here are mine:

Frogs and ravens (or ravens and frogs, frogs ravens, ravens frogs, etc.)

Post-academic stress syndrome

Herb sweater

Dog-paddling upstream

The rushing of squirrel feet

Wildfire

I've been following the coverage of the San Diego fires closely.  The eerie thing is how much of the area I can picture from just the line-by-line descriptions and evacuation alerts.  I knew the region far better than I realized.

The color and smell of those smoky skies is something unreal and unlike anything else.  Growing up, the smell of brush fires in the distance was a regular feature of childhood; one of the hardest things about living in the Midwest was not freaking out when people burned leaves in the fall; I'd smell that leaf-brushy smoke and worry about wildfires.  Some people worry in the night about burglars or terrorists; my midnight fear has always been fire.

When my friends' houses in the backcountry burned, many things were vaporized, not even leaving ash.  It's somewhat disturbing to think that less than an hour's drive away I was inhaling things like televisions and automobile tires while the soot drifted down to coat cars and plants and windows.

And now the cycle's repeating.  My friends evacuated with time to spare, and are hopeful that this time the fires will spare their new homes.  Even though it's a horrible time, and I'm thousands of miles away, I have this odd regret that I'm not there.  Smoky and dangerous though it is, California is part of who I am - even though it's likely I'll never live there again.

(In response to this post at Creek Running North.)

San Diego Fires

I am very glad that my friends in the backcountry evacuated safely.  I just hope that their homes - which were burned completely during the last major fire - will be spared.

This is a site with good information on the fires in San Diego County:  http://sdcountyemergency.com/

Terra Cotta

When I was going through my yarn stash, taking pictures to add to Ravelry, I was surprised to discover the amount of orange I had. I do not normally think of myself as an orange sort of person, but there were all sorts of rusty shades, waiting to be combined with greens, blues, and purples. Lately, russet tones have been infiltrating my wardrobe, and most days if I'm not wearing turquoise, I'm wearing something that's rich and orange-toned.

When I was a child, I had a book called When the Sky Is Like Lace, filled with lovely purple-shaded illustrations, and one of its admonitions was that, on a night when the sky is like lace, you should not wear orange, "not even underneath." This always amused me then, because I owned nothing at all that was orange, let alone "underneath."

Now I have a wardrobe that speaks of falling leaves, and rich brown dirt, and purple twilights, and large silent conifers (colors that supposedly belong to men, just like how cedars and sages and pines infuse their toiletries and not those of women). I am wearing orange, though still not underneath, and as I step briskly to work, the harmony of my socks and my shirt and those multi-toned leaves beneath my feet feels as right as the crispness of fall air.

I think it's time to go buy a pumpkin!

Cool Meme with Sucky Questions

Okay. I've been tagged for a meme that is really cool in its concept, but the questions for it SUCK. Hard.

So I've gone ahead and answered it, but I'm not inflicting it on anybody else. You're welcome to do it, and track back to one of the preceding "generations" but, gah. What horrible questions! (Well, the first is okay. The rest... *barf*) They combine the "what's your favorite..." meme with the "how well do you know pop culture" meme - and I SUCK at both! BLEAH!!!!

Water and Dirt

Yesterday I did my first volunteer stint at a local archaeology lab. I'm going to work my way through various tasks, learning as I go, and this first one was "Washing."

Basically, the dig team collects and bags artifacts and other markers (such as the residue from fires). These bags are labeled and brought to the lab. Before they can be sorted, identified, and catalogued, they must be washed.

Which entails pretty much what you would think: you carefully dump the contents of a bag onto a plastic tray, then scrub each item free of dirt and grime with a toothbrush before rinsing it and placing it on a screen to dry.

What makes the task interesting - besides the "whee! I'm doing archaeology!" aspect - is the way each kind of object requires a slightly different approach.

Little bits of glass are the easiest; it's obvious when they are clean and when they are not, and minimal scrubbing with a soft toothbrush is required. Chipped stone (as in arrowheads) is the next easiest; it tends to be durable and smooth. Ceramic pieces are also good. For them, you need a stiffer brush than you do for glass, and some pieces are fragile and don't take well to soaking (one kind, officially called "tinware" is called "M&Ms" by the dig crew because of the way its thin glaze can pop free), but they are often interesting to look at. Also interesting, but fiddly, are pipe stems, which need to be cleaned both inside and out, which requires delicate work with pipe cleaner and dental pick.

Plastics and bone tend to be fiddly and sometimes fragile. A simple piece of plastic is easy (though it holds onto dirt more than glass, stone, or ceramic), but the screwcap from a milk bottle was maddening. Things like teeth are able to be scrubbed; softer more fragile pieces are not.

The remaining three categories offer several different forms of aggravation. The first is plaster and brick. Both are soft and if they get too wet, they start to dissolve. This is tricky when they are attached to something hard that needs scrubbing like, say, a piece of sewer tile. Pieces of metal are a mixed bag. On the one hand, you cannot scrub them too forcefully, or bits crumble off. On the other, it sometimes seems like the object is nothing more than a crumbly mixture of iron and soil in the shape of a nail. (The crew call these "cheetos" - another bit of apt food slang.) So they're a pain and unsatisfying, but you also aren't expected to achieve much by washing them. The last are these weird bubbly hunks of something that looks like carbonized tar, which are a form of fire residue. They are tough and can be scrubbed without fear - but they are also full of nooks and crevices that fill up with dirt and provide places for lots of tiny roots to attach.

I finished half a tray, and go back next week.

---

After lunch I went to work in the ceramic studio. They have a deal where you can rent a cubby and studio time, and if you buy your clay from them, the price of the firing and glaze is included. I've been going in there once a week (though I skipped last week) to play with the clay.

When I first went in, I felt somewhat as to a loss as to what I wanted to make, knowing only that I wanted to play with the clay again. (I have realized that it's been nearly 20 years since I've spent much time in a studio.) I've made a pinch pot, and a little cat, which have been fired. I'm working on a small slab box, and yesterday I threw four bowls. I've finally relaxed about not having an Official Project; I've realized that what I'm doing is, in effect, an exercise in reminding myself of the skills I have or had, so none of these practices pieces are a waste of time and clay.

Yesterday, as I noted, I set down to throw for the first time in years. I've always had a bit of a hang-up about throwing in that I find the first essential step - centering - to be both fiddly and demanding of strength I don't have. I also dislike having to work with an electric wheel - the wheel I learned on as a teenager was a good, old-fashioned kick wheel - because the control over the speed isn't as precise, and the angle between working surface and potter isn't as good. So I've had this irritation about centering, but I decided that since there was no one else in the studio to see me screw up, I might as well give it a try. Plus, I really want some nice symmetrical bowls and cups!

Some of the same old issues surfaced; I still don't have the knack of bracing my forearms against a leg to hold the spinning clay still, nor the hand strength to do it that way. But I did manage well enough to produce three smallish containers. And then I figured out a trick that made the centering, if not easy, much less difficult.

It's not pretty. It involves me hunching over the spinning clay, both elbows wedged into my belly, nose inches from the whirling top wheel. But, hey. It works.

Unread Books Meme

Pica offers up the following meme:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of yesterday). Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand.

(It's sort of embarassing to realize how many of these works I haven't read, though I can console myself with the thought that when I do read a book, the vast majority of the time I finish it. I think it comes down to not being the sort of person who reads popularly acclaimed book-club books, and to not being interested in most of the classics; if I didn't read them in high school or college, I'm unlikely to have been interested in them on my own. And, of course, this list says little about how well I actually remember the books that I did read...)