Month: November 2004

  • SITUATIONREPORT

    First, I think it’s time for a progress report.

    Why?

    Because I have progress to report.

    How it used to be:
    No middle ground for me.  Extremes:  hot passion or temper, cold rage or contempt.

    Now, my emotional repertoire includes some warmth and some cool.
    That’s progress.

    Not that I’m not still capable of reaching the high and low ends of my
    range.  Now I can manage to live in the middle of it sometimes.

    I also think I’m not quite as territorial as I once was, but I still
    like the idea of having a space that is mine, my little sanctum. 
    That was the attraction for me in blogging from the start.  I’d
    done chats and BBS forums and had my fill of mods deleting my posts
    because they did not conform to the party line.

    I deplore censorship on principle, so when the first annoying insects
    started buzzing around my Xanga site, I hesitated to slap them down
    with a block.  I hesitated briefly.  It’s my place, and so it
    remains.

    Now I have had to decide if KaiOaty’s Klinic is going to be open or
    closed to those who wish me ill.  On the one hand, I don’t like
    censorship in any form.  On the other hand I have a lot of
    legitimate work to do there and can’t see the advantage in letting what
    order I’ve achieved be turned chaotic by deliberate disruptors.

    And then there’s the issue of endless arguments bringing down the mood,
    the tone, of the place.  I advocate love.  I practice love,
    and dammit I’ll keep practicing until I get it right!  I’ve got
    the unconditional part of it down, but I’m still working on the
    universal part.  Some people are just harder to love than others.

    This has not been an easy choice to make.  Where does the courage
    of my convictions leave off and reasonable compromise begin? 

    Then I got to thinking about how some moderation in other aspects of my
    life can be viewed as progress.  I asked myself if unbending a bit
    on some principles, such as censorship, might also be a moderating move.

    I made up my mind.  Nothing is perfect.  Nobody is without
    some flaws.  Anybody can have redeeming characteristics, all the
    same.  But enough is enough and too much is way over the top.

    Moderation in all things, I say… except for addictive substances,
    truth-telling, and _______________ I’m leaving myself some blanks to
    fill in later, if I get back into an extremist/perfectionist mood.


    And on the home front, the stray cat that adopted Greyfox and moved
    into his cabin with him finally had kittens.  After a gestation
    period about half again longer than normal, she has four little fuzzy
    sausages.  Tentatively, they are named Honer, Buckyball,
    Fullerene, and either Dingus or Five (maybe).  If I remember to
    take my camera in Thursday, I can take pics.

  • National Treasure Movie PicI’ve
    got this marvelous feeling of liberation, release, and relief
    today.  Some of that is from Greyfox’s news, and I’m not going to
    spoil it for him by spilling it here before he can get into the library
    to blog about it.  But I’ll surely mention it later. 
    Certainly after my next trip to town if not sooner.

    Okay, I’m slow.  Most people did this days and daze ago, but I just completed this cool online scavenger hunt for National Treasure,
    the new movie with Nicolas Cage. Solving these puzzles and posting
    about this sweepstakes makes me eligible for free Xanga Premium, $100,
    a signed movie poster, DVDs, and a t-shirt… Check it out!

    All right… Nicolas Cage is one of my three favorite actors. 
    These are men I dream about — in my sleep, of course.  Funny
    thing — I just realized it has been quite a while since I did any
    daydreaming.  That must mean I’m reasonably content with my waking
    reality.  I did more daydreaming in prison and in school than
    anywhere else.  Who needs a fantasy life when reality is so
    fantastic?

    I tell ya, doin’ the “right” thing feels so damn fine!

    I’ve added a new quote to my favorites.  Y’know?  That lengthening list in my left module… things such as:

    “Great spirits have always found violent
    opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when
    one does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly
    and courageously uses their intelligence.”
    —Albert Einstein—

    and

    “Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by
    legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being
    stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence
    is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out
    automatically and without pity.”
    —Lazarus Long—
    (Robert A. Heinlein, really, but ol’ Laz always got Heinleins best lines.)

    The new one is:

    “One of the most calming and powerful
    actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and
    show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light
    of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires …
    causes proper matters to catch fire.
    To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these —
    to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both —
    are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls
    catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.
    If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest
    things you can do.”
    from Letter to a Young Activist

    in Troubled Times
    —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD—

  • I have just done something I never did before.  I had
    scruples.  I hesitated and dragged my feet for a while.  I
    would not have done it at all, but my Spirit Guides advised it.  I
    questioned it and they insisted that honesty is the best policy and
    that just turning my back on the situation would not be right. 
    Even so,  I worked up to it in a roundabout way that is very
    uncharacteristic for me.

    I was up at 3:30 AM, preparing myself for the task I knew was ahead of
    me.  I thought about it, outlined what I needed to say, did some
    websearching for supporting data, etc.

    First, around 9 AM, I posted one of the FAQs I’d outlined.

    Then I started working on the second FAQ and posted it after 1 this afternoon.

    Finally, I was ready to do the reading itself.  It was posted a little after 4 this afternoon.

    That is a 12+ hour workday, a lot of time to spend on one reading, but
    doing the two FAQs separately assures me of having that ammunition on
    hand if I ever need anything like that again.

    Wheeew!  Now I can relax.

  • Meet Jim Kloss

    He’s a blogger who joined Xanga when he already had a thriving blog
    going, just so he could leave comments on my site.  Back a couple
    of years ago when he was just starting his webcast thing and I was
    blogging my biker-years memoirs, he was reading my daily blogs to his
    listeners. 

    He had found SuSu with his daily Google search
    for “Talkeetna” (done so he’d have local color to offer his listeners) after I had taken some pics of the 4th of July parade
    there.  He already knew Greyfox from the roadside stand, and it
    took him a while to put us together.  Now, Jim and his lady Esther
    are in the news.

    I ran into Jim one day on the street in Talkeetna, and had to laugh
    because we were treating each other like celebrities, all, “Wow!, it’s
    really you.”  I’ve tried listening to his show, but with my slow
    dialup connection it’s interrupted a lot.  Sometimes I chat a bit,
    but it has been a while.  Jim, if you see this, it was great
    getting an update out of ADN.

    Radio in the raw

    Talkeetna webcasters build a small but worldwide audience

    By JOSH NIVA
    Anchorage Daily News

    (Published: November 21, 2004)

    adn.com story photo
    Esther
    Golton fills in for Jim Kloss on Whole Wheat Radio while he heads for
    the outhouse. “We couldn’t plan (broadcasts) if we wanted to,” Kloss
    says.

    (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


    adn.com story photo
    Whole Wheat Radio’s play list includes songs from CDs that musicians across the country send to Talkeetna.
    (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


    adn.com story photo
    Golton
    and Kloss run Whole Wheat Radio out of their 12-by-12-foot cabin in
    Talkeetna. The station is Web-based and requires no antennas. The
    building to the left is an unfinished house and studio, where they plan
    to produce live music for broadcast.

    ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS

    (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


    adn.com story photo
    Kloss
    broadcasts live over the Web during his daily morning show and watches
    the Web site’s chat room, where listeners make their presence known.

    (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


    adn.com story photo
    Jim
    Kloss climbs the ladder to the loft of his Talkeetna cabin, a bedroom
    that shares space with the little Whole Wheat Radio studio in which he
    does a live webcast at 11 a.m. daily.

    (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


    adn.com story photo
    Whole
    Wheat Radio’s Esther Golton interviews Peter Belanger, a Talkeetna
    visitor who runs a performing arts co-op in Fall River, Mass.

    (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


    adn.com story photo
    Golton
    prepares lunch for workers building a new house and studio on her and
    Kloss’ property and for friends who have stopped by to chat.

    (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


    Click on photo to enlarge



    TALKEETNA — Jim Kloss is mid-rave in the early
    moments of his weekday morning talk show, “Rant-N-Raving Muffin,” when
    his co-host and life partner, Esther Golton, halts his rambling.

    “We’ve got to empty the slop bucket!” Golton says into her microphone.

    A few visitors have joined Golton on the ground floor of Whole Wheat
    Radio’s studio, and so has a mild odor. Kloss, who goes by the on-air
    handle Jimbob, grumbles, reels in his rave and pulls off his
    headphones. He climbs down a ladder from the upper studio, which also
    happens to be the bedroom loft of the couple’s cramped 12-by-12-foot
    cabin.

    Golton interviews guests as Kloss high-steps around household
    items and a jungle of mike stands, cables and folding chairs on the
    ground floor. Reaching under the kitchen sink, he grabs a bucket handle
    and stomps out the door with a moan.

    “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Golton says with a laugh.

    Wheatheads — the station’s regular listeners — join Golton in piling
    on Kloss, but he doesn’t hear them when he slides his headphones back
    on. That’s because Whole Wheat Radio doesn’t have listener phone lines.
    The station doesn’t have any antennas, play lists or even an AM or FM
    frequency.

    Listeners communicate with Golton, 38, and Kloss, 48, via chat room.
    WWR is broadcast over the World Wide Web from this little cabin in a
    quiet, wooded area a few minutes from downtown Talkeetna.

    The station doesn’t have running water or indoor plumbing, but it does
    have a loyal, worldwide audience for its format of independent music
    and independent thought.

    “Commercial radio is just a wasteland that’s not meeting the needs of
    people, really,” explained Rod MacDonald, a singer-songwriter from
    Florida who started tuning in to WWR a year ago and toured Alaska this
    summer. “What amazes me when I travel around is what really good music
    is being made and how little of it I can find on the radio. Stations
    like Whole Wheat Radio are giving people a chance to hear a much wider
    range of music.”

    NOTHING CANNED

    August marked the second anniversary of Whole Wheat Radio’s live launch.

    Kloss opened WWR — originally a canned broadcast known as Radio Free
    Talkeetna — playing music from his own collection, mostly classic rock
    like The Who along with some James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. It was
    also a forum for the opinionated Kloss.

    “It was the freedom to say what I wanted to say and, of course, a love
    of music,” says Kloss. “But I couldn’t believe people would tune in and
    listen.”

    Few did, initially. Kloss quickly tired of prerecorded radio, dumped
    his mainstream approach and went indie — with the music, with the
    format, with the Web site, www.wholewheatradio.org.

    The current musical format focuses on the singer-songwriter vein in
    genres like folk, jazz, blues and bluegrass, while also highlighting
    Alaska artists. There’s also a little pop and country. Once Kloss
    settled on this format, people started tuning in.

    Today, WWR hovers around its 60-listener limit (10 dial-up and 50
    high-speed lines are available). This happens frequently during the
    “Rant-N-Raving Muffin” show, the station’s only daily program hosted by
    humans. Most other between-song filler is provided by the station’s 30
    “EJ” personalities, computer programs created by Kloss to select music
    from the station’s library of 42,000 songs and which use electronic
    voices to read copy.

    The first time the station reached its listener limit, then 50, it crashed.

    “All right! Fifty! It was a record day,” Golton says, smiling. “And then the site went blah!”

    Kloss recently expanded the listener lines to 60, though it was a pricey move financially and psychologically.

    “We’re very conservative, fiscally and everything else,” he says. “And
    I don’t want this to become a big thing that I lay in bed and worry
    about.”

    And they do worry.

    “Every gadget we’ve added back into our lives has been a heartbreak,”
    says Golton, pulling pita pizzas out of a toaster oven while preparing
    lunch one day this summer.

    Now the couple, who moved to Alaska for a quieter life, have this to
    ponder: They’ve built a cabin just to house their radio station.

    There’s more… it’s a multi-page story in today’s Anchorage Daily News, and you can read the rest there for a limited time only.

  • My Old Fart and I both had productive days today.  He worked a
    holiday bazaar at our local community center (about halfway between
    where he lives and where I live), then went home and phoned me to
    report.  He sold two battle axes and a set of three samurai swords
    (katana, wakizashi, and tanto), along with a lot of smaller
    items.  Getting rid of the big things makes his job of packing up
    after the show easier, but this time he blew that.  He bought a
    big lot of Alaskan pyrite crystal clusters from another booth
    there.  He said he had to divide it up into five boxes to be able
    to carry it all.  And I better stop there in case he wants to blog
    his own report on the weekend later.  Tomorrow, it’s another
    bazaar, in Big Lake, closer to his end of the Su Valley.

    As for myself, after supervising (read slave-driving) Doug to finish
    shoveling the roof and work some more on the driveway, I posted
    readings.  I transcribed a past-life reading Greyfox had dictated
    to me over the phone last night, and then did a reality check to go
    with it.

    My only mishap all day was a mis-step in the hallway that flipped over
    the drip can and spilled about a half gallon of water.  Well,
    actually, there was another mis-step, too.  I then stepped into
    the puddle I’d just made.

    My workday is done now.  I’ll post this, then I’ll call Greyfox
    again to see if he needs my help with his crossword puzzle, then it’s
    off to bed and the thriller that currently has my rapt attention.

  • Life’s Little Mysteries

    Someone left me a question in my guestbook, wanted to know what “that”
    is a picture of.  On the assumption that the “that” in question is
    the snowy profile pic currently up there, it is a poorly-aimed
    self-portrait.  “That”, if that is the picture you mean, is peachy
    sunset light illuminating a heavy load of snow and hoarfrost on the
    trees around here, and on my head and shoulders from a little walk
    through the woods.  I’ve gotten a little better with my camera aim
    since I did that a couple of winters ago.


    Just to clear up any misunderstanding…

    The note to myself about disabling comments when I whine and vent was
    not because I receved any unkind or critical comments.  It is just
    because I cannot stand to be “poor babied”, as a few of my long-term
    readers have learned to their chagrin.  [Yeh, Lucky, I mean you.]  I don’t vent to get
    sympathy.  I vent to get the feelings out.  It’s a
    therapeutic technique, not a sign of weakness.  The weaklings are
    the ones who hold it all in and let it eat at them because they’re afraid of appearing
    weak. 

    Perhaps I should not have used the word, “whine,” because
    if you’d have heard my voice describing the events of those two days
    and nights the tone would have been something between irony and
    disgust, and nowhere near agony.

    I have recently had a major personal insight about pain.  Do you
    know about “conditioning”, about the way something we practice over and
    over becomes automatic and unconscious?  My use of the painswitch
    technique has become that way.  I live with a disease that has
    many neuromuscular symptoms, one of which is chronic pain — but the
    only time I feel any “pain” now is when a big, severe one catches me by
    surprise.  You know the kind of pain that nauseates you and makes
    you go weak in the knees and dizzy?  Those will get my
    attention.  The milder, moderate “pains” are not pain for me any
    more.  They are just sensations of one sort or another: 
    pressure, tension, inflammation, “electric” feelings, cold, etc. 

    Used to be, they’d start out feeling like pain and then I’d apply the technique,
    and the “pain” would go away, leaving one of those other, more specific
    sensations.  Now, for the mild to moderate sensations, at least in
    my conscious mind, I just skip
    the “pain” part altogether.  There must still be some unconscious
    awareness, because a hefty collection of such sensations will tend to
    disturb my sleep and make me a little distracted and cranky.

    I became aware of that recently when I was doing a little
    self-inventory, a bit of the Work on Self that has paid off so
    wondrously for me.  I was just observing myself, paying attention
    to what’s going on in here as opposed to out there, when I noticed a
    collection of sensations that in a less-evolved state I would have
    called “pain”.  But they are not pain. 

    The one in my scalp is actually a sort of fizzy feeling, and across my
    shoulders there’s a buzz, with a sensation in one spot there that feels
    like something sharp poking me.  My left biceps area feels hot and
    my right foot feels chilled.  Until I just now shifted my position
    on my ergonomic office chair, there was a pulling, tearing sensation in
    the skin on both shins.  That one was sufficiently uncomfortable
    to get enough of my attention to cause me to shift position.  My
    stomach feels empty, and I’ve got a sinus that feels heavy and
    congested.  My blood sugar is low because I’ve not had my
    breakfast yet, and that’s making my head sorta spin, with a dull achey
    feeling high up. 

    Gotta go eat.  Seeya later.

  • Note to self:

    Next time you feel a need to whine and  vent, be sure to disable comments.

  • Warning –
    whining ahead
    (and possibly a little Too Much Information)

    It’s snowing again.  Wet, fluffy snow, melting on our warm
    roof and dripping down through at least three holes.  I hope it’s only
    three, because I have cans under three.  One of those cans is now
    overhanging the edge of the computer desk.  It has been inching
    toward me ever since I sat down here.  When I came over here to
    post the second of today’s past life readings on KaiOaty’s site this
    evening, I discovered a drip hitting the front of the monitor.  I
    moved the monitor back a bit and put a can under the drip.  The
    drip has been gradually moving southward.  The trailer leans and
    its floor and roof slope gently toward the south, which can be a good
    thing when it rains and we want water to drain from the flat
    roof.  Snow doesn’t drain off.  It stays there and finds
    holes to leak through.  If that drip keeps migrating, I’ll have to
    move the can down onto the keyboard shelf and put the keyboard
    somewhere else.  If the roof HAS to leak, I prefer drips that stay
    over the cans I put under them.

    When I got home from town a week ago, I breathed a sigh of relief,
    thankful that I had two weeks to recover before I had to go back
    again.  Then Seph called.  I wanted to see him.  We’ve
    heard from him only infrequently while he’s been in Iraq, and he IS one
    of our favorite people.  The morning two days ago that I drove
    down the valley to pick him up for our lunch date was HELL.  I
    hadn’t recovered fully from the last trip to town.  I got all
    dressed and went out to warm up the car and scrape the ice off the
    windows.  The cold, the exhaust fumes and the exertion of scraping
    precipitated a severe asthma attack.  I headed toward the house
    for my nebulizer and — here comes the TMI — wet my pants. 
    Incontinence is another of the damned symptoms of the damned
    neuromuscular disease.  It comes along with the shortness of
    breath sometimes, adding insult to injury.

    After puffing on the nebulizer a while, I changed my pants.  We
    were fifteen minutes late picking Seph up, but the car was certainly
    nice and warm when we left here.  Our lunch was enjoyable. 
    He told us some stories and he and Greyfox got into a little low-key
    NPD duel, talking over each other, ignoring what anyone else was
    saying, etc.   Then he wanted to go to the card shop. 
    While he spent about $200 on Yu-Gi-Oh cards, I browsed in the packed
    aisles of action figures (bought a Ron Weesley for myself), leaned on
    the shoulder of the life-size Yoda figure and had a little one-sided
    convo with him, removed the baseball cap someone had put on Yoda’s head
    backwards… and hung it from one of his ears.

    We finally got out of there.  I needed some groceries, so that was
    another couple of miles of walking — supermarkets are VAST, especially
    when I’m exhausted.

    [DAMN!  A drip just hit the "S"
    key, so I had to move the can down.  The keyboard is now hanging
    off the right side of the shelf, and I'm shouldering up against the
    bookshelf to type.  Next time the drip moves, it'll be on my lap.]

    …exhausted, I said.  On the way out of town, Seph wanted to stop
    at the pawn shop.  He bought two wrenches and a screwdriver to
    replace ones missing from his tool kit back in Iraq.  As the guys
    were leaving on leave, the sergeant suggested they replace their lost
    tools.  When a humvee or truck has been bombed, the first five
    times, they repair it.  After six times, it’s automatically
    redlined and replaced.  The army can replace vehicles, but not
    tools.  Anyhow, I found a chair and waited while Seph picked out
    tools and Doug found an anime DVD and a PS2 game.

    We stopped at Greyfox’s cabin a while on the way out of town, then in
    Willow for gas and at the spring to fill some water jugs before we got
    home.  I needed to bake muffins, because I’d eaten all of the
    previous batch.  Before doing my muffins, I made a pan of bar
    cookies for the guys.  I’d planned to cook tuna and noodles after
    the baking was done, but by then I was done in.  I told the guys
    to fix themselves sandwiches, but I think they made do with cookies and
    milk.

    I went to bed, but not to sleep.  Seph has this squeaky, shiny new
    coat.  The tag on it when he bought it said, “body-snug unisex
    polypropylene jacket.”  He wore it all night.  First he
    talked on the phone to the girl who wants to be his girlfriend (I’m
    going no further into that one).  Then he lay down for a while and
    fidgeted, adding the creak of the couch to the squeak of his
    coat.  Then he got up and paced around some, replacing couch creak
    with boot-clomp.  I had asked him if he was jet lagged when I saw
    him yawning in town.  There’s a 12-hour time difference between
    here and Iraq.  He said no.  Deep in denial, that young man.

    He slept most of the next day, and then got his not-girlfriend’s mother
    to come get him.  He was to meet her at the mailboxes up by the
    highway, but he gave her the wrong milepost number and she waited for
    him a mile up the highway, while the wannbe girlfriend called here
    frantically leaving messages on my internet answering machine warning
    Seph that her mother was only going to wait five more minutes before
    leaving without him.  I called her back, gave her proper
    directions, she relayed them to her mother, and Seph departed.  He
    called this morning, early, bored because he was the only person awake
    in the house.  Doug was up, and they schmoozed a while. 
    He’ll probably get over his jet lag just in time to go back to Iraq.

    So I’d lost two nights’ sleep, from fatigue and disturbances. 
    It’s a downward spiral when I get sleep-deprived.  The longer I go
    without sleep the harder it is to get uninterrupted sleep.  Today,
    I wasn’t up to doing any readings.  I transcribed two readings
    that Greyfox did, and can only hope I got them right.  I’m not
    going to list everything that hurts or is malfunctioning.  Too
    discouraging, that, and probably easier to list what’s working right,
    if only my brain were working well enough to discern what’s working
    right.  Unfortunately, the damn brain needs to keep focusing on
    what’s hurting in order to shut off the pain.   I’m going to quit
    whining and get out of the way of this migrating drip.

    Be well, everyone.  If you are well, be grateful.

  • The Redhead Theory Revisited

    For a while this morning, as I sleepily fed wood to the woodstove and
    got my first cup of tea, I was wondering what had gotten me onto this
    train of thought.  Then I traced it back to my latest subscriber, neuroticfitchmom, and our apparent mutual pleasure at having found another red-haired Xangan.

    I don’t suppose, for example, that people with black hair find as much
    delight in encountering others of their type.  I guess part of the
    interest here is the rarity of red hair.  We natural redheads are,
    I have read, the smallest ethnic minority on this planet.  The recessive nature
    of the gene for red hair makes our occurrence in any given family
    somewhat unpredictable.  Two red-haired parents can have offspring
    with other hair colors, and often do.  Neither of my parents had
    red hair.  Although I have red-haired cousins on both sides of the
    family, none of my aunts, uncles, or grandparents is red-haired.

    I’m told that the gene skipped three generations of our family, that I
    had one great-great-grandmother on each side with red hair.  One
    of my five children has red hair, and at least one of her kids is a
    redhead.  At least, my daughter Angie‘s
    hair was red when she was a baby.  When we were reunited in the
    1990s, she had it dyed to almost the same shade of red as my hair,
    although it had darkened to brown as she matured, she told me.  I
    wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t told me, because she has the light
    eyes and pale skin with a sprinkling of freckles that many of us
    have.  In my opinion, no matter what her hair color, she’s still a
    redhead.  I also generously grant “redhead” status to two of the
    men with whom I’ve had long-term relationships:  my fourth husband
    Michael (The Hulk), and Gary (Stony), the man with whom I came to
    Alaska.  The hair on Michael’s head is brown and Gary’s is blonde,
    but both of them have red beards and orange pubic hair.  They
    qualify.

    There are a lot of chemical (not bio-chemical) redheads around, of
    course.  But there is more to being a redhead than just
    melanocortin1.  As we say in the Realm,
    There is an attitude that goes with it.    My late red-haired
    best friend Mardy had some friends she classed as honorary redheads
    because they had the attitude.  Mardy said it wasn’t their fault
    they didn’t get the hair color to go with it.  The stereotypical
    redhead has a hot temper and healthy sexual appetite.  In my
    experience both stereotypes are to some extent true of both genders,
    but there is a prevalence of hot tempers among red-haired males and of
    hot pants among the females.  There is something else, too, I
    think.  That’s where my redhead theory comes in.

    I cannot take full credit for the theory.   The portions of
    it relating to the tempers and sexual appetites had been developed by
    my fifth husband Charley and his redheaded internist Martin Palmer, MD,
    before I met either of them.  Charley is not a redhead.  He’s
    an honorary redhead.  His father was red-haired and all his
    children except for my son Doug have red hair.  I was his third
    wife — third red-haired wife.   Charley says he never even
    considered marrying a non-redhead.  I suppose he’d notice just
    about any naked woman who strolled across his visual field, but he has
    some kind of radar for redheads.

    Charley had observed in his first two wives and their daughters some
    similar physical weaknesses that seemed to him to possibly have a
    genetic basis.  They all had skin problems, clotting deficiencies,
    sinus problems, digestive problems, allergies….  Observing that
    his doctor was a redhead, Charley mentioned his observations to
    Martin.  Martin admitted to having some of the same health
    problems, and to having noticed similar things in his red-haired
    patients.  When Martin started treating me for some of those same
    things, the three of us discussed the theory that Martin and Charley
    had come up with to account for the redheads’ stereotypical reputation
    for hot tempers and hot pants.

    According to the theory, we have so many genetic weaknesses associated
    with that recessive gene that individual survival into breeding age,
    especially in primitive populations, would necessarily be small in
    comparison with other genetic groups.  In primitive populations
    having a quick temper could be a plus in ensuring that one survives
    long enough to breed, so the redheads who did most of the breeding
    would be the ones who were quick to defend themselves from the
    slightest threat.  Likewise, those who bred the earliest, 
    most frequently and most vigorously would have the most offspring, thus
    helping their hot tempered and sexually hot line survive.

    My contribution to the theory came in when I noticed that in the
    Anchorage chapter of Mensa five out of twelve active members were
    natural redheads.  It was a small sample and I wasn’t immediately
    ready to credit it even though that ratio was far out of proportion
    with the percentage of redheads in the general population.  I did
    some informal research and learned that IQs are disproportionately high
    among redheads.  It makes sense, does it not, that in a small
    genetic group with distinct physical weaknesses, not only a tendency to
    fight or fuck at the drop of a hat, but also some superior smarts could
    help an individual survive and pass along his or her DNA?   I
    picture in my mind with fondness a long line of gimpy, but far from
    wimpy, brainy carrot-topped ancestors with rashes and sniffles and
    such, merrily getting it on for the good of the genetic line. 

    I
    suppose I’d feel just as fond of my ancestors if the red hair and a lot
    of those genetic weaknesses did not appear on the lists of traits of
    Pleiadian Starseed, but I gotta admit that last little fact does add an extra frisson to how I feel about my redheaded great-grandmas.  I once posted the list of Starseed traits on a forum at the Realm,
    and asked my fellow redheads how many of them had similar
    characteristics.  All of the responses except for one acknowledged
    having some, even some of the more obscure traits such as extra or
    transitional vertebrae (I’ve got that one, too).  That lone
    dissenter took violent, vehement exception to any implication that she
    might be descended from space travelers or that “aliens” had ever come
    to this planet, or that “they” even exist.  Okay, there’s one in
    every crowd.  When Doug (another honorary redhead with attitude)
    or I express some idea that my current husband (#6) the Old Fart
    considers exceptionally bizarre, Greyfox says that’s more proof that we
    did not evolve on this planet.  Doug and I just share a look and a
    smile, and nod.

     

  • Warm Colors,
        Cold Temps

    As usual, I missed the most intense sunrise colors this morning because
    I stopped to put on my boots.  It’s too slick out there on the
    packed snow paths and in the icy street for my house slippers. 
    I’d slip fershure.

    Still, I caught some pink.

    Maybe
    it’s because I’ve become accustomed to the beautiful winter sunrises,
    or maybe it was just because I hadn’t taken time to put on gloves, hat
    or coat, but the scene that looked best to me was the one as I turned
    back toward the house:  the smoke from the chimney, and the two
    new snow tools still on the roof rack of my car.  (See, Ren, I
    didn’t spend the gift on boots.)  I bought Doug a new roof rake to
    replace the old one that broke, and at his request got a big ergonomic
    “sleigh shovel” for our driveway and the flat roof here.

    There’s a lot to tell about our trip to town yesterday, and maybe it
    will be told sometime.  Maybe not.  I have things to do here, work to do on KaiOaty,
    and a houseguest to feed and entertain.  Right now, Koji is
    “entertaining” Seph.  They’ve both fallen asleep across my
    bed.  Seph was giving Koji a belly rub and sleep just seems to
    have slipped up on both of them.