Snow is back!

Our
first snowfall a couple of days ago was the earliest snow ever recorded
for Anchorage.  It didn’t last long.  Perhaps it lasted a bit
longer here than it did in Anchorage and the lower elevations between
here and the city, but by the time I went to bed last night it had all
been washed away by the rain.   Before I got up today, some
cold air had moved in and the rain had become a crusty layer of new
snow.

When I
saw the blue sky and interesting low sun angle, I jumped out of bed and
grabbed the camera.  I didn’t even take time to pull down the legs of
my “pajamas”, a comfortable old pair of men’s red longjohns, from where they
had hiked up to just below my knees.  I just jumped into my boots
and scooted out there to catch the light before it changed.

I hurried about halfway down the block to get past the trees for the view across the muskeg in the first picture.

The next shot is looking south along the street when I turned back
toward home.  Home is there among the trees on the right. 
Same old muskeg, same old street — I must get out more and remember to
take the camera with me.

The plants and stuff in the front window caught my eye as I came up the
driveway.   There’s only a little bit of condensation on the
window now.  Soon it will be lots of frost.

A recent Muskeg Heights strip featured Rhonda, my favorite flamingo, still trying to get south..

George the Wood Guy
It rained and snowed last night.  When I got up today there was
still slush on the ground.  Despite there being a lot of snow
today, in between rain showers and falling mixed with the rain
sometimes, the slush is all gone now.  At the moment, there is a
heavy wet snowfall happening, and it’s starting to stick on the cars,
the oil tank, and other cold surfaces, but not on the ground.

George
came today with my second load of wood.  There wasn’t much
conversation.  When I saw him coming I ran out in the rain and
pulled the tarp off the pile.  Then I had to wheeze back in and
use my nebulizer a few times while he started unloading his
truck.  Consequently there wasn’t a lot of time for talk, but he
made the most of what time there was.

I’m not going to make the NPD diagnosis –not yet anyway.  I’ve
not known him long enough to really observe him in a variety of
situations.  I’ve not given him any narcissistic injury yet, and
don’t think I’d do it in an experimental fashion just to see if he’d
fly into a rage, or if he’s more inclined toward the ingratiation
reaction.  That is, IF he’s a narcissist.  I’m not
diagnosing, but I would wager on it.

There are some clues pointing in that direction.  During our first
phone conversation I learned more about him than I ever learned during
the course of several years about my last three firewood suppliers
combined.   He also lied to me about the condition of the
wood he was selling me, which is something a narcissist (and many other
people, I will acknowledge) wouldn’t hesitate to do.  He said the
wood was “dry”,  seasoned, aged.  The wood on the top of the
first load was dry.   He
proudly pointed them out to me before he started unloading.   I
picked up a few pieces of it and tossed them onto the woodpile. 
George told me I didn’t “have to” do that, that he’d unload.

The dry stuff on top must have been just for show.   Later when
Doug split the first round for our stove, it was far from dry, was what
we call “green”.  We’re in for more creosote accumulation from
that.  I’m used to it.  It’s what I expect.  Seasoned
wood is rare and precious.  I just don’t like being bullshitted.

Inappropriate personal disclosure is another clue.   When he
delivered the first load, I learned that he draws some kind of
disability compensation, that he has a brother “down south” who is a
dog breeder, that his (George’s) dog Hunter tends to viciously attack
other male dogs, and a lot of uninteresting details about how he
conducts his wood business, who his customers are, etc.  He talks
virtually nonstop, even while I’m walking away from him.  
When he called me today to make sure I’d be here to pay him for the
delivery, he said they’d gotten three inches of snow at Trapper
Creek.  By the time he got here four hours later, it was up to two
feet deep.  Exaggeration is another NPD trait.

This trip, he appeared to derive some narcissistic supply from my
asking if I could take his picture.  Picturesque, isn’t he? 
He wanted to know why I wanted the pic, and I said, “for my website, my
blog.”  When I asked if he knew what a blog is, he evaded the
question.  That’s another clue to NPD.  In the narcissist’s
reality, he knows everything.  Any hints to the contrary are
ignored.

He said repeatedly that he’s “an old bushrat, just an old bushrat born
and raised.”  After the fifth repetition, I asked him how long
he’s been in Alaska.  He came in 1987.  He’s a
cheechako.   I’ve been here twice as long.  Maybe I
should grant him the “bushrat” part, but I’m not sure he’s even as old
as I am.  Doug has been in the country longer than George has,
“born and raised.”

In the personal disclosure department today, he revealed that his
“disability” is SSI for being “crazy”.  He told me the exact
amount of his monthly checks, and how much he gets in food
stamps.  From behind the seat of his truck, he pulled a used
chainsaw with a new bar and chain, and told me that’s how he spent the
money I gave him for the first load of wood.  He explained who he
bought it from, told me what brand the chainsaw was that this one
replaces because it “blew up,” and how much he still owes John for
it.  If Greyfox is a reliable source, then George probably thinks
he’s just being open and friendly.

I learned how much land he owns, precisely how much is on one side of
Petersville Road and how much is on the opposite side, and that it’s
situated right where the original settlers came through when the first
homesteads were established in the Trapper Creek
area.    I asked him about that, and he displayed a
superficial knowledge of local history.  He named four or five of
the homesteaders, got some of their first names wrong, and told about
their trussing up eight cows and hauling them across the Susitna River
from Talkeetna to Trapper Creek in a 20-foot canoe.  I’m guessing
they made more than one crossing for that.  George didn’t say.

The men built a corral for the cattle, which they broke down and
escaped.  After the homesteaders searched unsuccessfully, Cliff
Hudson went up and flew around and found their cows.  George says
that Cliff was “about [his] age” when he did that.  Cliff is about
eighty now.   He doesn’t fly any more, has Alzheimers. 
He just seems to wait for his keeper to look the other way so he can
get out and wander around Talkeetna in his bedroom
slippers.   For several years before Cliff retired, nobody
who knew him very well would go up in a plane with him. 

Homesteading in the Petersville Road area started in 1948, which would
have put Cliff in his mid-twenties at the time.    If that
grizzled “old bushrat” George is that young now, he’s had a really
harsh life, and he was only about 8 years old when he came to
Alaska.  Oh, and he said “they” want to pay him for his
story.  Hmmmm.  By the time he’s delivered my winter’s
firewood supply, I’ll have gotten the whole story for free, I suppose.

Loud Snow

The comment that sobasysta
left on the photos in yesterday’s blog was prophetic.  She said,
“I love the changing leaves. I guess winter isn’t far behind for you.”

This is how it looks out there today.  Or that’s how it looked a
few hours ago.  It’s deeper now, and not falling so noisily. 
This morning’s snow was mixed with sleet, and when I talked to Greyfox
he said that at the lower end of the valley, fifty miles away, he had
rain mixed with sleet.  The weather guessers said the snow would
turn to rain this afternoon, with no appreciable accumulation. 
I’m seeing a couple of inches out there now, and there’s no more sleet
tapping and rattling on surfaces.  This is just a normal silent
snowfall now.

It
looks pretty, piling up on leaves, smoothing out and covering the tarp
on the new woodpile, my car, and the oil tank I can see through the
window behind my monitor here.  It is pretty early for this much
snow.  If the weather cools and it stays, it will be about three
weeks earlier than usual.

I slipped into my boots and darted out to get these pics while I was
getting tools and materials ready for another of our winterization
jobs:  visqueening the windows.  Visqueen is Alaskanese for
plastic sheeting, although I haven’t seen that brand of poly sheet in
stores for years.  It was exceptionally clear, but thin and
fragile, and extremely solar-degradable as well as expensive.  The
stuff we use now is heavyweight industrial poly, and not so
transparent.  The pluses are that it comes in big rolls at a low
price, and is reusable.  We can cut a sheet to fit each window,
and if I’m careful when I take it down next spring I can use it again
and avoid the tedious measuring and cutting. 

This year about half of the windows will be reusing last year’s
coverings.  In the back room, I have replaced the black poly that
covered that window last year with something that lets light in instead
of the stuff that was intended to keep our light from shining
out.  Doug’s window never got covered last year, but it has been
done already today.  I didn’t do it last year because I needed to
nail some strips around his window to tape the poly to, and it got too
cold for carpentry before I got it done.  At least that was my
excuse.  There were other reasons, too, I suppose.  There are
lots of jobs around here that if they don’t get done before it gets
nasty cold, they don’t get done at all.

Another window that never got covered last year, the one here behind
the computer desk, is covered now.  That was the last of the three
windows Doug and I did after I got up this morning and before he went
to bed this afternoon.  I had already covered the bathroom window
a few weeks ago with last year’s sheet, soon after I closed that one we
leave open for the cats’ convenience all summer.  The kitchen
window remains to be done, and I have remnants from today’s work that
will cover it.  I’ll procrastinate as long as possible on the
living room windows, until the warmth becomes more important than the
unimpeded view, then I’ll reuse last year’s sheets on them.

This window behind the monitor didn’t get done last year, and we
settled for taping the edges of the drape to the wall for insulation,
because Doug and I could not see a way to do the job without moving the
computer and a bunch of furniture.  The task loomed impossibly
hard in our minds, so we improvised an easier but less heat-efficient
fix.  This year, we moved what had to be moved, climbed over a
bookcase and under the dining table, and covered the window.  It
wasn’t easy, but I think it will be worth the effort.  I didn’t
rehang the old drapes and I’m going to be looking in thrift stores for
replacements.

He
might have taken some awkward shots of me climbing around on the
bookcase to attach the poly sheeting in the corner of the room, but I
kept him busy being my ground support, and the thought never occurred
to him.  Before I got up there, when I had moved the stuff off the
top of the bookcase, I noticed some things:  a dirty plate (making
93 Corelle® bread and butter plates in my collection), an empty chip
bag, a jar of beads, etc., that had fallen behind it.  I sent Doug
under there to clear out the debris, and to right the shotgun that had
fallen over as I was pulling the drapes out of that corner.  While
he did that, I had the roll of sheeting spread across the kitchen
floor, using the square grid on the floorcovering as a guide to help me
cut the edges of the translucent sheet straight.  To get back in
that corner, he had to go under the table.

It
used to be a dining table, for previous residents here.  Now it
holds my jewelry-making tools and materials.  When I get space
cleared on it, I make jewelry there or lay out my cards and other
oracles to do readings.  If I leave it untended for any time at
all, as with any uncluttered horizontal surface in our house, that
clear space collects clutter, the overflow from the computer desk here
beside it.  That’s its condition now:  cluttered both on top
and underneath.  Fortunately, some of the clutter under there,
styrofoam egg cartons, made soft knee pads for Doug.  

Kneeling on the kitchen floor, I heard a clatter and an
exclamation.  He’d knocked over his pellet rifle as he was setting
the shotgun back up in the corner.  Anticipating my qurery as to
his all-rightitude (We ask each other often if we’re all right, as we
yip and grunt and scream our way through our days.), he said, “It’s all
right folks.”

That’s a cue, and I responded properly, “It’s all part of the act.”

Even though it wasn’t unanticipated, his response, “Send in the
clowns,” got a laugh out of me.  It was his delivery: 
flawless timing and just the right falling inflection of resignation on
the “clowns”.

Next, after some clattering and grunting, I heard his muffled voice again, “You might want to get a picture of me under here.”

I said, “Hold it a moment, I’m working on something here.”

He answered, “That’s okay, it’s comfy.”  He’d been yawning and
professing sleepiness when I interrupted his game to get to work
earlier, and that had been two windows earlier.  When I finished
cutting the visqueen and came over to take a look, I discovered there
was no way to get the whole young man in one shot.  I got the feet
in ambient light, but under the table where the rest of him was, it
wasn’t light enough. 

When he saw the flash, he said plaintively, “Did you have to use the flash?  It adds ten pounds.”

There
in the shot above, his midsection is draped over and through a gate-leg
holding up one of the drop leaves of the table.  In this next
shot, his upper portion is dangling down off the chair that is pushed
under the table.  I didn’t stick around to see how he got out of
there, but from the sounds I could tell it was challenging.  Then
we got into the climbing and stretching and taping and got the job
done.  After we put the furniture back in place and tidied up our
materials, he went off to bed.  All that’s left for me is to put
my jewelry materials back on that bookcase next to the window behind
the table.  That will wait.

I think one of my next projects is to clear off the workspace on the
table.  There’s a backlog of readings to be done, and seeing all
my stones and beads has inspired me to get back to the jewelry.  I
hope my brain cooperates with my catching up on the readings project,
and my hands are steady enough for the fine tool work afterward.

I  got a bad scare when I tried to boot up the computer.  It
flashed me that all-too-familiar “operating system not found”
message.  We’re on our third hard-drive in this machine, and it’s
still under warranty.  After about five power cycles, though, it
finally found its OS, so here I am.

And here I go.  I’m bushed, exhausted, pooped and worn out. 
I put together a batch of New Mexico style enchiladas right after Doug
went to bed, and had a little serving while I was uploading pics
here.  Now I’m going back for seconds and then I’ll settle down in
Couch Potato Heaven for a while.  If my energy regenerates enough,
I think I’ll start moving the rock collection off its main shelf and
make room up there for the lamp that is taking up space in the
hallway… if I work really hard, I may get this mess cleaned up in
time for Greyfox to move back in and mess it all up again.

Hurricane Warning

Apparently Gaea, Tlaloc, Jehova, or whatever vengeful god controls the
weather, doesn’t like Republicans.  I can understand that
sentiment, given some of the party leaders’ attitudes toward the planet
and some of their recent activities.  Anyhow, the gist of the map
below is that only the Florida counties that voted Democratic in the
last presidential election were spared a pass by one or more of the
recent hurricanes.  I’ve reduced it to a size that fits [my
screen, at 1024x768] better alongside my sidebar.  Please click
for a bigger image with details, copyright notice, etc., and be careful
who you vote for in November.  There’s more at stake here than
just a well-run government.

Doug and I cleaned the creosote out of our stovepipe yesterday. 
Other than the chilly wind, it was a beautiful time to be up on the
roof.  One thing I noticed was how much easier it was to climb the
ladder than it had been three years ago when we did our Mickey Mouse
roof repair with the plastic tarps.  The ladder seemed more at
ease, too — none of that scary sagging or creaking. 
Understandable:  I’m about a hundred pounds lighter now.

While I was making preparations at ground level — finding leather
gloves for both of us, getting the extension cord plugged in and
dragging the
female end of it back from its usual place on the tailgate of Old Blue
(disabled pickup truck in the driveway) where it’s handy for plugging
in engine heaters on cold nights, and using my nebulizer repeatedly to
quell the gasping and wheezing — Doug was taking our tools to the
roof.  They included the Mutt® (indispensible all-purpose garden
tool, designed as an in-line hoe, but useful as an ice chipper,
creosote scraper, etc.), the Shop-Vac® to suck up the creosote the
Mutt® scrapes loose, the long flexible jointed pole that came with the
too-big flue brush that fits the larger stovepipe at Elvenhurst (for
reaching bits the Mutt® won’t), and a flashlight for checking my
progress.

Standing on the ground trying to heave the female end of the extension
cord to Doug on the roof, I missed several times then changed my angle
of approach so as to avoid breaking a window if I missed again. 
He said we should have someone filming it in case I hit him in the face
and he fell off the roof.  My next heave went right into his
waiting hand.

After I got onto the roof, and before we got any actual work done, Doug had to deal with a persistent itch.

Then he looked
up and caught me snapping pics.  He asked if I’d taken a picture
of him scratching.  When I said I’d taken three, and intended to
blog them as, “persistent itch,” he started laughing, and kept
scratching.  It is our laughter and the conversations / repartee that make working together so enjoyable.

Finally I put away the camera, Doug defeated the itch, and we got to
work.  The job consisted of scraping loose the creosote, then
using the vacuum cleaner to suck it up, dangling the vaccum hose and
jiggling the end of the tube around at the bottom of the pipe. 
Each time it sucked up a chunk big enough to clog the hose (every
twenty seconds or so of sucking), I pulled it up and Doug took the hose
out of the vac’s intake port and moved it to the outflow port, and we
shot creosote off into the woods.  That’s another thing that makes
this job such fun.

A
few dozen repititions of that routine and we were done.  Then Doug
went down the ladder and I handed the tools down to him.  While he
put them away and strung the extension cord back out the driveway
(we’re gonna need those engine heaters soon enough), I took a few more
pics including the scenic ones up top and the one of the pitiful
remains of last year’s wood pile below.

Later yesterday afternoon, George the wood guy came.  He had a
little problem finding the place.  I heard a truck’s engine idling
at the end of the block, then I got a message on the internet answering
machine from George’s cell number, so I went out to the end of the
driveway and waved him in.  His little truck won’t even haul half
a cord, so he’ll be back today or tomorrow with more firewood, and we
hope he’ll make six or seven more trips with such loads in the next few
weeks.  Then we’ll be (relatively) warm this winter.

Phases and Stages

So, my friends, are you doing anything special to observe National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week?

No?  Well, that’s okay.  Unless you happen to have one of
those invisible chronic illnesses, or you love someone who does,
where’s the attraction?

I have good reason to observe the “Awareness Week”, and I have been
doing so.  I’ve been observing myself, increasing my awareness of
my illness, and reflecting on the course it is taking.

During the early stages of ME/CFIDS, before I had a reliable diagnosis,
my mother took me to many doctors.  For me, the syndrome began in
infancy or early childhood and first manifested with severity in
elementary school.  Symptoms came up one, two, or three at a time
and would receive one or several diagnoses and various treatments, some
of which relieved symptoms and had nasty side-effects.  Some
didn’t relieve the symptoms at all, but caused interesting new ones and
brought on new drugs to fix the new symptoms.  Perhaps the best
drugs of all, in retrospect, were the ones that had no effect at all.

During that stage of the illness, my major reaction to it was
fear.  There was some self-pity involved, too:  “Why
me?”  I had not yet really started wondering what was going on in
my body, because I believed the doctors and accepted their words for my
condition.

After I was married, when I had access to military doctors and
hospitals, I went through some tough times trying to convince a bunch
of doctors that I was physically ill.  They thought the shortness
of breath, fatigue, and other symptoms were all in my head until an
allergist heard about my case  (in a morbidity and mortality meeting during one of my stays in a psych ward) and did some tests.  That got me out of the loony bin that time, and I’ve never been back in one since.

The next phase of my life was characterized by fewer doctor visits and
more self-medication.  I discovered that methamphetamine made me
feel and perform like a normal person — until its effects wore
off.  Then I learned what depression was like.  I decided
that the debilitating effects of the disease (which was still at that
time just a disparate set of symptoms with a bunch of different names
and no umbrella diagnosis) were preferable to the toxic effects of
speed and the legal repercussions of street drugs in general.

About thirty years ago, when I was about thirty years old, some
irresponsible prescription writing by a Doctor Feelgood sent me into
seizures, precipitating the worst exacerbation of my disease to
date.  That event also began a period of about a decade and a half
that I avoided doctors and studied natural healing.  I learned a
lot, and eventually came up with the “fibromyalgia” diagnosis, then the
next time I was in the local health clinic, my provider there agreed
with my diagnosis.  After I got internet access, I expanded and
updated my diagnosis to myalgic encephalomyelopathy / chronic fatigue
immunodysfunction syndrome, the terminology preferred in the
international medical community, over  the U.S. CDC’s “fibro”.

One of the best things about this disease, perhaps the only positive
thing besides the fact that it’s not necessarily fatal, is that the
symptoms come and go.  I have good times and bad times.  When
I was relying on medical help, that was a problem.  It made the
doctors think I was faking and malingering.  I mean, sick people
are supposed to stay sick, or either die or get well, not get well and
then get sick again, eh?  But now that I’m more self-reliant, I
appreciate the remissions and use them to have a more nearly normal
life for a while.  I get things done.

Things still have to get done, even when the remission is over and
relapse comes on.  In earlier phases of my life, I’d stumble
around in a fog with little awareness of how impaired I was.  That
got me into lots of messes.  It’s not so bad now that I’ve learned
to recognize the fog and minimize the messes.  Until recently, I
wasn’t very good at pacing myself either.  I’d go full-speed until
the fatigue hit.  It felt like running into a wall. 
Poleaxed, I’d go down in flames.  How’s that for a mixture of
metaphors?  Anyhow, maybe you get my drift.  I used to behave
during my brief remissions as if they were lasting cures.  Now I
know better, and now I use my available energy sensibly and sparingly,
doing the most important things first, and then when the work is done,
if I still can, I dance.

Today is the third Thursday in a row that I haven’t made my regular
trip into town.  I’ve stayed here at home for three weeks, not
because I was too sick to drive down the valley, but because I knew
that if I went I’d be too sick when I got home to get the work done
that needed to be done here.  I’m putting first things first,
something I’ve learned in my 12-step groups.  It has been rainy
for a week or so, and I’ve been concentrating on indoor work. 
This morning, the sun is at this moment burning through the fog, and I
can see blue sky.  After I post this, Doug and I will go up the
ladder to the roof and clean the creosote accumulation out of the
stovepipe.  For this:  for the security of knowing that we
won’t have to put out any stack fires for a few months, I weaseled out
of driving the rehab van.

In a perfect world, or even in this one if I were a perfect person, I’d
be able to do both and I wouldn’t have to deal with feelings of failure
and inadequacy.   But this is the real world, and I’m the
real me.  I’m relatively adequate, doing better now than I have
during some phases of my life.  I just got another reason to feel
okay about staying home today.  George the wood guy called to say
he’d deliver our firewood today, if I was going to be here.  On a
“normal” Thursday, I’d be gone or preparing to go, and Doug would be
asleep.  We might have missed the call, delayed the delivery, and
could have run out of wood.  Life is good.

ABUSE

Greyfox told me about this story he’d seen in the paper, after
mentioning it and then hesitating because it was so horrible and he
knows how I empathize and how easily I’m sickened by other people’s
pain.  But I asked him to go ahead and tell me, and then I
searched out the details online.

It goes on, about how the parents didn’t prepare meals for the kids, or “waste money on food.”

A later edition relates the adoptive parents’ subsequent appearance in
court where 45 additional charges were added, bringing the total
between the two of them to 54, most of them against Sherry Kelley, the
“mother”.

I have long had issues with the institution of adoption, having given
up two of my own children because I was told that other people could
give them a better life than I could, and then having learned later
that both of my girls were abused.  In separate families, both of
them were made to feel like outsiders, were verbally and emotionally
abused and exploited as free domestic help.  Both of them told me
of being unwilling baby sitters for the natural children of their
adoptive parents, who were given preferential treatment.  In both
cases, my girls were adopted into those families because the “parents”
thought they could not have children of their own, and then –surprise,
surprise– they had some. 

My feeling is that people who adopt, as the Kelleys apparently did, for
money, or who do so to satisfy their urge for progeny, are setting
themselves and the children up for trouble.  That urge for
offspring is a physical thing, not spiritual.  It’s part of the
same brain chemistry as the mating urge, and don’t we all know how much
trouble that urge can
cause?   It also seems hardwired in the human brain to prefer
one’s own DNA.  Parents oogle over tiny babies, discussing which
one’s smile, which one’s nose, the kid has.  That’s important,
something that should not be ignored when considering adoption. 

Few people are sufficiently spiritually evolved to love someone else’s
children as they would their own.  Too many of those same people
who will indulge their “need” for children by taking in other people’s
kids will also vent their own frustrations and anger on whatever small
defenseless being is handy, usually a pet or a child.  Most of the
ones who want to adopt are not even sufficiently evolved to admit to
themselves the true nature of their percieved need for a child. 
They sugar-coat that biological drive, just as they do their sexual
desires by calling them “love” or “romance”.  If you cannot see
the true nature of your sexual drive, or if you occasionally indulge an
urge to kick the dog, please don’t adopt a child.  Grow up first.

Ancestry

This is important, but not as important as some people believe it to
be.  We are all ONE, after all, but genetic lines are relevant to
many things.  My dietary requirements are a direct result of my
ancestry.  Oddly enough, I seem to have inherited the biochemical
makeup of my Native American ancestors even though their blood quanta
are less in the aggregate than that of my European ancestors.  The
foods I thrive on are corn, beans, squash, and peppers.  The ones
that make me ill include wheat, olives and oranges.  Similarly,
much of the culture of my native ancestors predominated in our family
mythos, such as a reverence for the land and a close
empathic/telepathic link with four-leggeds. 

I may have inherited the skin and hair of my Celtic forebears, but
beneath them are the bones of the Cherokee.  Once, while visiting
the Native American Cultural Center in Wichita, I sat back behind a
class of kindergartners listening to an old man in plains Indian garb
telling Coyote stories from tribes far to the West.  Later on I
talked to him in the gift shop.  He introduced himself as
Glittering Rainbow.  He was an enigma, that old man.  He said
he was Cherokee, wore clothing of Cheyenne design and jewelry from Zuni
Pueblo, and told stories of the Navajo and Tohono O’odam.  But he
had good eyes.  After a little conversation in which neither of us
made eye contact (as we were both enculturated by our families), he
revealed that he had managed to sneak a few looks at my face.  He
said I had Cherokee cheekbones.

The Cherokee is from my mother’s side.  She could document
one-sixteenth Cherokee blood, a great-great grandmother on her mother’s
side.  But I suppose there was more Indian blood in the
family.  It certainly shows in her face and the faces of her
parents, brothers and sisters, to a greater extent than one might
expect if it was so greatly diluted.  That’s understandable,
really.  The family had passed for white for at least two
generations before I came along.  My grandparents were not proud
of their Native heritage.  It fell to me to reclaim that pride and
to trace the family tree.  It’s a sketchy tree on that side, with
very little detail other than the one branch that goes back to my great
grandfather Jessie Brooks whose mother was half Cherokee.

I know more about my father’s side, because the Douglasses were
storytellers and I have his oral history along with a sheaf of
genealogical research done by cousins.  I even have a photocopy of
a copy of my great grandfather Cyrus Dow Douglass’s discharge from the
Union Army in the Civil War, and the story of how he lost his leg in
battle in Missouri.   (from a Scott cousin on my mother’s
side, I have the oral history that Jessie Brooks fought for the South
in that war.)  My father said that one of his great grandmothers
was Hunkpapa.  That’s one of the tribes of the Lakota, the ones
the French called the Sioux.  She had to have been on his mother’s
side, and that also had to have been where he got the Swedish ancestry
he talked about.  None of that, not the Hunkpapa nor the Swede,
which were all the ancestry I recall my father ever talking about, is
in the genealogical documents from my distant cousin Jim Thompson,
whose wife’s mother did most of the research.  That research
focuses on the male line, which is always easiest to trace.

That male line originated in Scotland, of course.  Douglass is
Scots, related to the Black Douglas and to “The Douglas”, James, who
carried out the dying wish of Robert the Bruce by carrying his embalmed
heart on crusade.  Somewhere in time, my branch of the family
doubled the esses.  The first American of that line was Abraham
(either Abraham James or James Abraham, documents differ on that
detail), born in Scotland.  He served in the Continental Army with
George Washington at Valley Forge, and was with him when he crossed the
Delaware.   This would qualify me for membership in the DAR
(and Greyfox says I’d give them a fine injection of some sort of
reality) except that our line may not be legitimate.  We cannot
document Abraham’s marriage, nor do we have his wife’s name.  He
had at least one son, James, and it is from that James that I trace my
descent.  James’s descendants moved west and married into a
broadly branching sampling of the American melting pot.  There are
English, Irish, and German surnames in those lists, among others.

[This will become the first of my links in the memoir thread, and will
be expanded and have some ancestral photos added, sometime.  For
today, I've had enough of it.]

Another Inexplicable Dream
…and perhaps some even less explicable subsequent meanderings


In the dream, Greyfox and I are cleaning up a big yard.  I’m 
raking leaves and debris, and he is throwing them on a trash
fire.  As we work, we are talking about taking “the bird”
*somewhere*.  I get the sense that we plan to take it somewhere to
get rid of it.

Then a big bird, the size of a big hawk or small raven, but brown and
without any distinguishing markings, flies into our trash fire. 
I’m probably about fifty meters away, across the field we’re
clearing.  I see the bird fly down, and see a continuing
disturbance in the smoke, see cinders, ash and debris thrown into the
air for perhaps half a minute, then it flops out of the fire and flies
away.

Then I woke, and as I thought of the dream I began to think about
self-immolation, ritual suicide by fire.  I got up and googled it,
and found a photo I remember seeing in the news forty years ago, of the
self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc at a busy intersection in Saigon.

On the same page, I found a discussion of the act of self-immolation
that went way beyond what I had been looking for, but which engaged my
attention and sent me looking for more.

http://www.buddhistinformation.com/self_immolation.htm

I’d never thought of it in that light.  Ver-ry interesting….

…and completely diverting me from my original direction.

Back to Google, and on to more recent events:

About a month ago, Pebam Chittaranjan set himself on fire as a
political protest in Manipur, India.   This news source calls it “attempted
self-immolation” although he later died of his injuries.  I wonder
who put him out, and whether his act was done with the transcendent
serenity of Thich Quang Duc.  I want more information.

Back to Google, and onto a different track altogether:

In Afghanistan, women are setting themselves afire.  Gurcharan
Virdee works with Medica Mondiale, a German-based international
organization supporting women in war and crisis situations.  Her
sister self-immolated.  She said, “Before she committed suicide,
my sister always said she hoped she would never return to Afghanistan
and experience the closed atmosphere of Herat.”

The full story is here.

Again, I wonder about the partial immolations, the motivations, and the
preparations of those who perform these acts.  I wonder….

This may become a two-blog day for me.  I’ve had one on hold for a
few days, a story about child abuse here in the Susitna Valley that I’d
like to shove in Margery Glickman’s face to show her there are more
important things to do than criticize mushers for running their
dogs.  But first, now that I’ve had breakfast (or half of
it:  a muffin and half of a cup of tea that’s now gone cold) 
I’ll get up and nuke another muffin, fill my teacup and get to
work.  Maybe I’ll make some visible progress in that back room I’m
trying to prepare to receive Greyfox’s knives, rocks, clothing, etc.,
when he moves back in for the winter.  The weather is wet and
cool.  He didn’t open his stand yesterday and he plans to come up
the valley today and take me out for lunch as a belated birthday
celebration.  I have to decide where to go.  Always makes me
do the hard part….

The Morning After

I celebrated my birthday in style yesterday:  my style.  I
took it easy.  I did some “work”, sorted two boxes of rocks that
had been packed away for years, put a few of them out where I can see
them and consolidated the rest into one box for Greyfox to add to the
stock for his stand.  When I got tired I sat down and read or
played Disgaea.  My demon horde reached the game’s maximum number
months ago, and now I’m just leveling them up, making them more
powerful and improving their equipment.  This is a totally
stress-free game, all strategy and routine, not a lot of time pressure
and fast finger movement as in the games that Doug likes best.

The firewood guy didn’t come, but he did call several times. 
After about the fifth try, he’d gone to a land line because his cell
just wasn’t making it.  I live in a cell hole, and he was calling
from another one about ten miles up the highway.  When he could
make himself heard, he told me he’d caught some crud and was running
behind schedule.  My instincts told me the crud he caught is
spelled h-a-n-g-o-v-e-r, but I’m the suspicious sort where such excuses
are concerned, and his voice just didn’t have the ring of truth. 
I’m not worried yet.  We still have a little of last winter’s wood
left.

We also have the three trees that Charley cut down for us a few days
ago.  That was my birthday present from him.  One was a
beetle-killed spruce, a standing fire hazard.  Firefighters call
those dead spruce trees, “gasoline on a stick.”  The other two,
both big cottonwoods, were a hazard of a different sort.  Both
were mere feet from the trailer, leaning toward it, overhanging it,
unhealthy and dropping dead branches occasionally.  We had one
smaller tree fall and hit the house last year.  I wanted those
trees down in a safe direction, and Charley did that for my birthday.

In addition to having caught up with the neglected dishwashing, Doug
has been keeping up with the chore, and I think he pushed extra hard to
get it done before my birthday.  He also did something else we’ve
sorta been needing.  He installed a doorknob in our front
door.  For about three years, since the old knob assembly came
apart, we’ve used a rag to stuff the hole, and pulled the door open and
shut by sticking a finger in the hole.

 We’d discussed buying a new knob, but I knew we had some old
salvaged ones at Elvenhurst.  Besides, we really didn’t need a
knob.  It’s just aesthetics.  We still don’t have a latch
mechanism.  I didn’t bother to look to see if there were any with
the knobs I found at Elvenhurst last week while I was looking for shelf
brackets.  Even if we had one, it would do no good unless we
replace the door frame.  The second avalanche off the cabin roof
tore out the repair job that Mark had done after the first avalanche,
so there’s just a splintered gap where the latch used to latch
into.  So we still can’t lock the door, but visitors are no longer
greeted by that old rag.

Anyhow, after a low-stress birthday and a good night’s sleep, I feel
better than I have in weeks.  Today already I’ve gotten a lot
done, and I’m going back to it after I post this.  Speaking of
posting, the blog Greyfox just posted would make me think he’d slipped over the edge, if I didn’t already know that’s where he lives.

FRAGMENTS

I woke earlier this morning than I really wanted to, got only about 4½
hours of sleep.  I tried to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t
happening.  My mind was abuzz with a jumble of thoughts. 
Some were fragmentary memories from the 1960s, from my first “real” job
in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1961, up through when I got pregnant with my
first son in Wichita in ’64, to some things about the biker years in
Eugene four years later, and something that happened while I was out
during my pre-sentence investigation on the pot bust in ’69.  I
took notes and will flesh out the memories for memoir blogs –sometime,
not now.

It seems that every time I post a memoir blog someone comments on the
details I remember, and often someone asks how I recall so much
detail.  I got to thinking about that as I lay there this morning
trying to sleep.  Recall comes in flashes, scenes that I suppose
are triggered by some association or by a randomly firing neuron. 
Then a series of associated memories follows, if I stop and think about
it and allow them to.  Since I’ve begun writing the memoirs, I
pursue those chains of association, try to recall where, when, and
whatever else I can tie to the fragment.  Chronology matters, I
think, when I’m trying to write a coherent personal history, so I try
to sort out what came first, and place each fragment correctly. 
That’s not always easy, and sometimes the fragments remain isolated and
unassociated.

When I’m stuck, if I remember to, I’ll do the memory trick:  one
thumb on each temple and the first two fingers of each hand over my
third eye (middle of my forehead).  The single-handed version of
it is a universal gesture for trying to remember, and it gives a
“jump-start” charge of body electricity, the ki or chi energy that
emanates from our fingertips, to the brain.  Many times as I write
the memoirs, I sit here with my elbows on the computer desk, head
supported between my hands that way, remembering.  Then I
straighten up and write it down before the memories fade again.

I
heard Doug go, “Ooooh,” and then he said, “sunrise.”  I turned my
head and caught the red sky, jumped up, grabbed the camera and went
out.   It was a quick trip, in my pajamas at 23°F.  I
shot 6 quick pix, and this is the best of the lot.  The color had
faded as I unplugged the camera from the computer, checked the settings
and went outside.  You shoulda seen the sky that got away.

Another thing on my mind as I lay in bed this morning was dogs. 
Koji was there, being his sweet affilliative self, snuggling up to me,
jumping off the bed when I turned over, then back up to curl up beside
me again:  our usual nightly routine.  I recalled some of the
comments on dog mushing from my last blog, and thought about how
ridiculous it is to call it animal abuse.

There has been, to my knowledge, one incident of abuse associated with
the Iditarod.  A musher was suspended about fifteen years or so
ago, for hitting one of his dogs.  The man lost his temper over a
fight between some of his dogs, and the race officials kicked him out
of that race and said he couldn’t race again until reinstated. 
Mushers don’t beat their dogs or force them to run.  Have you ever
known a beaten dog, seen it cower and cringe?  Beaten dogs really
don’t make good competitors in a race.

A musher who knows his or her business won’t even try to run a dog
that’s not in the mood to run.  It’s a fairly certain bet that one
who has finished any of the lesser long-distance races to qualify for
the Iditarod knows the sport and knows dogs.  They select puppies
to train by observing their behavior.  Dogs that aren’t eager to
run don’t make the cut.  In a race, the musher may devise a
strategy for winning, but the dogs decide the tactics.  I’ve heard
Martin Buser explain how he won one recent race because the dogs wanted
to keep on going when he had planned a rest stop.  He went along
with them.

When Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the Iditarod, there
was a big storm on Norton Sound and the mushers who were ahead of her
in the race holed up at a checkpoint to wait out the storm.  Libby
was in home territory, in an area where she had trained her dogs. 
They knew they were close to home and wanted to go, so she went with
them.  The more experienced men at that checkpoint talked about
that crazy woman and half expected her to get lost in the storm. 
The rest is history.  Dogs are known for their homing instinct,
and I’ve heard several stories from people traveling by dogsled who
became ill or injured and just curled up in the sled and the dogs took
them home.

When the dogs decide to stop, they stop.  If it’s a race and the
dogs
decide to quit, the musher scratches and musher, dogs and sled get
airlifted back home.  It happened to Dee Dee Jonrowe a few years
ago. 
It was while she was sick, and many people have expressed the thought
that the dogs decided to quit because Dee Dee was having a rough time
of it.  That wouldn’t surprise me.  I’ve seen how Dee Dee’s
dogs feel about her.  They adore her and it is obvious that the
feeling is mutual.  Likewise with Martin Buser and his dogs. 
Those two are neighbors of mine, and I’ve seen them with their
dogs.  I get warm fuzzy feelings just thinking about it, the same
feelings I get when I think about my Koji-dog.

The other thing on my mind this morning when I should have been asleep
was the difference between addiction and chemical dependency. 
That’s a very fine semantical line there.  The brain chemistry
involved is identical.  The health consequences of both are quite
similar if not absolutely identical, and many of the social and
economic consequences are the same.  Depending on the substance on
which one is dependent, there can be quite strikingly different legal
consequences, but that’s (or, in my far from humble opinion that SHOULD
BE) irrelevant.  Many of the addicts I know started out by
becoming dependent on some prescribed drug and then moving on to
self-medication with the same drug or different ones when the
prescription ran out.

That’s the ONLY difference between chemical dependency and
addiction:  chemical dependence happens when a drug prescribed by
a doctor triggers the neurobiochemical mechanism of addiction. 
There is a different term for it only because the hypocritical medical
community felt a need to distinguish between the addictions they caused
and the ones people get themselves into.  And just don’t get me
started on the topic of iatrogenic disease… I’ve had it.  Come
to think of it, I still have it.  I was talking about chemical
dependency and addiction to Doug the other day, and he said, “There’s a
joke in there somewhere, about the Hypocritic Oath.”  Yeah.

The subject came up for me at a Double Trouble meeting months ago when
one of the addicts there bridled at identifying herself as an addict
and said she was “chemically dependent.”  Then just a few days
ago, I caught a local radio call-in show where doctors were talking
about pain management and the subject of addiction versus chemical
dependency came up and one of them tried to define the
difference.  It became apparent that one has to be either ignorant
or cynical to believe such sophistries.  The doctors who believe
it are either arrogant victims of the god complex or self-deluded and
defensive, unable to face the fact that they create addicts.  The
patients who fall for that bullshit are just pathetic.  How much
better this world would be if so many ordinary people didn’t believe
that other ordinary people were somehow superior or infallible by
virtue of a medical degree!

Okay, enough of that rant (for now).  Thank you, PhuYuck,
for the birthday wishes.  In terms of physical celebration, it’s
just another day around here.  No party is planned, no gifts in
the offing that I know of.  I’m
expecting a firewood delivery later (not a bad birthday present, but
I’m buying it for myself), and I intend to keep working away
at my housecleaning.  If I get a space cleared to lay out my Tarot
cards, I may do a reading or two today, unless the mind fog is too
thick.   I baked muffins yesterday and spent a lot of time on
my feet, which is probably why my sleep was disturbed last night. 
Chronic fatigue is like that:  when the fatigue goes too far, it
starts to spiral out of control because I can’t sleep.  I skipped
my regular weekly trips to town this Thursday and the one before,
because I’ve been too fatigued to handle the driving.  By the
way, next week is National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week. 
I’m not planning any special parties to celebrate that, either. 
But for my birthday, inside where it doesn’t show, I’m whooping it up
in celebration.  I’m sixty.  That’s a nice round
number.  Six is rounded and zero is round, and I’ve hit the big
six-oh!  I really didn’t expect to live half this long.  What
a pleasant surprise it has been.