Nine days to

Christmas –

The
Legend
of
Santa Claus

The legend of Saint Nicholas has been growing and
changing since the Middle Ages.  He has morphed into Sinterklaas,
Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, Santa Claus and other forms in various
parts of the planet.

According to the Kids’ Domain:

 Fordham University’s online Mediaeval Sourcebook translates the story of Nicholas’s death from Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (written ca.1275, pub. 1470):

“And when it pleased our Lord to have him depart out this world, he prayed our Lord that
he would send him his angels; and inclining his head he saw the angels come to him,
whereby he knew well that he should depart, and began this holy psalm: In te domine
speravi, unto, in manus tuas, and so saying: Lord, into thine hands I commend my spirit,
he rendered up his soul and died, the year of our Lord three hundred and forty- three,
with great melody sung of the celestial company. And when he was buried in a tomb of
marble, a fountain of oil sprang out from the head unto his feet; and unto this day holy
oil issueth out of his body, which is much available to the health of sicknesses of many
men. And after him in his see succeeded a man of good and holy life, which by envy was put
out of his bishopric. And when he was out of his see the oil ceased to run, and when he
was restored again thereto, the oil ran again.”

My
parents tried to use the Santa Claus legend to convince me to be a
“good girl,” as many parents do.  I was told that if I was good
I’d get nice presents, and if I was bad there would be coal instead of
fruits and nuts in my stocking, and my prettily wrapped presents would
contain only rocks.

 I remember the day I got wise to their lies.  I even recall
the moment that it all fell together for me.  I think I was three
years old.  I hadn’t started to school yet.  My mother was
holding my hand as we waited for the light to change to cross a street
in downtown San Jose.  We were Christmas shopping.  I’d been
on the lap of various “Santas” in three or four different department
stores.

 They all smelled different, and certainly looked different from each other. 
Most of the Santas wore bright red in rough fabrics, but one of them
had a suit of deep wine colored velvet.  There were some fairly
incredible elements in the story itself, such as the idea that this old
guy kept track of every girl and boy in the world and judged our
behavior.  It just did not hold up to logic in my young mind.

I kept my thoughts to myself as we crossed the street and entered yet
another store.  Riding up the escalator, I caught sight of another
Santa with a line of kids waiting to sit on his lap.  I gave a tug
on my mother’s hand and said to her, “There really isn’t a real Santa
Claus, is there?”

She paused, seeming a bit flustered, and then insisted that there was,
indeed, a real Santa, and these men impersonating him were only
Santa’s helpers.

 As we stood in that line and watched the “Santa’s helper” in an elf
costume handing candy canes to the kids and guiding them off the stage
as they came off Santa’s lap, I questioned her more.  She kept
replying with flimsy lies.  That night when Daddy got home from
work, I asked him.  He wouldn’t lie to me.  I was then free
of at least one of the bogeymen of childhood.

As a child, I was an insufferable know-it-all.  I wasted not a
moment telling every kid I knew that there was no Santa Claus, that it
was all a trick to make us be good.  Their parents didn’t like
that, oh no!  My parents heard about it from some of my friends’
parents, and they tried to enlist
me in the Santa Claus conspiracy.  My father let me read the, “Yes
Virginia…” story that was reprinted in our newspaper.  Mama and
Daddy explained how much “fun” kids had waiting for Santa, leaving out
cookies and milk for him and all.

They appealed to me as a reasoning adult, and I fell in line, the
politically correct line.  I stopped telling kids there was no
Santa Claus.  Instead, I took pleasure and pride in being in on
the secret, part of the adult conspiracy.  But I never told any of
my kids the Santa bullshit. 

Doug and I have just been talking about his early school days when he
first encountered children who believed in Santa Claus.  He
recalls being in on the conspiracy and keeping the secret, not spoiling
the “fun” for the other kids.  I seriously question whether it is
actually fun to be afraid of any bogey man, even a “right jolly old
elf” who lives at the North Pole and brings toys to all the good girls
and boys.

Someone asked me a few days ago how the John Lennon Acoustic
album sounds.  In one word:  intimate.  John is said to
have hated his voice.  I love it, because it comes straight from
his heart, with feeling.  When I heard the opening chords of Woman
is the Nigger of the World, I cheered.  Less than half a minute
later (the track is only 42 seconds long), I was crying. 

Yoko dedicated this release to the future guitarists, saying that John
always played from his heart and she hopes they will learn to do the
same.  Liner notes include chord progressions for all the songs,
and in the back are chord diagrams.

I could not begin to give this CD an objective review.  John
Lennon’s philosophy resonates with me, and his music was the soundtrack
of the most interesting years of my life.  I will play this music
over and over again. 

The two companion tracks, Luck of the Irish and John Sinclair,
are worth the price of the CD, all by themselves, especially if you’re
Irish, were once a hippie, or have any sympathy for the downtrodden
masses of the planet.  Working Class Hero left me breathless the first time through, and Cold Turkey makes my needle tracks itch every time I hear it.  That’s not necessarily a good thing, but I can handle it.

Ten Days ’til Christmas

In a recent comment,
LuckyStars

said, “Odd…it’s not the religious aspect of the holiday that made as

big of an impression on me as I was growing up, but rather the time

spent with family, and memories of that time, that have stayed with
me.”

I, too, have some great memories of Christmases spent in our little

nuclear family, just my mother, my father, and me, before he

died.  Later on, there were some Christmases when my mother’s

brothers and sisters gathered and there were cousins there with whom I

had good times.   But my mother’s family, the Scotts,
were a

contentious lot and some of her brothers were obnoxious
drunks.  I

cannot recall a single family gathering that did not include

hostilities.

But even at those gatherings, there was always good food. 
Food

seemed to be the reason for getting together — unless what motivated

those holiday gatherings was someone’s forlorn hope that there might
be

a happy family reunion.  My mother and aunts would congregate
in

the kitchen, and I was always there underfoot, until I was big enough

to be a real help.  I have always loved to cook and to
eat.

I still enjoy cooking and eating.  Sometimes I even prepare
dishes

that are not on my diet because I know they please others.  I

don’t do that often, though, because it is tempting and dangerous for

me.  Much of the time when I begin to obsess on the foods I
cannot

have, I will simply eat something healthful and that takes care of

that.  I’m looking upon this blog as both a sort of catharsis
for

me and a way to share a few of the foods I used to enjoy without

tormenting myself with the aromas.

and now I suppose I never shall.  Mama always said I wouldn’t
like

it

anyway.  “Since you don’t like gingerbread, you won’t like
plum

pudding

– too spicy.”  I’ve gotten a taste for spicy foods since
then,

and

eventually became fond of gingerbread, too.  I’ve been
thinking

about experimenting on a gluten-free, sugar-free gingerbread
recipe.

Another traditional Christmas treat that I never liked as a kid was

fruitcake.  I never did acquire a taste for the traditional

fruitcake, and I suppose I’m not alone in that.  There is a

longstanding Christmas legend that says there is really only one

fruitcake in the entire world, and it keeps getting passed from one

person who won’t eat it to another, year after year.

The thing about fruitcake that I never liked was the glace

“fruit”.  It consists of candied orange, lemon and lime rinds
and

the rinds of citron melons.  The way I see that, they’re
adding

sugar to stuff that to most people is garbage and around here we call

“compost”, and expecting people to eat it.  Not me, not
hardly!

I do, however, have a recipe for  (drumroll,
please)

Edible Fruit Cake

Preheat oven to 275°F.

Mix in a large bowl in the order given, stirring well after each
addition:

2 cups seedless golden raisins

1 cup Maraschino cherries, drained and stems removed

1 cup canned pineapple tidbits, drained

1 cup shredded coconut and/or 2 cups broken pecans and/or slivered
almonds

1/4 cup sherry or orange juice

4 slighly beaten eggs

1 cup granulated white sugar or firmly packed brown sugar

3 cups all-purpose flour sifted together with 1 1/4 teaspoons
double-acting baking powder

3/4 cup melted butter

Pour into a greased 10-inch tube pan or two 8 1/2 X 4 1/2-inch loaf

pans that have been greased or lined with greased brown
paper.

Bake about 2 1/2 hours, until a light touch leaves no
imprint.

These are my favorite Christmas cookies:

Jelly Tarts

(thumbprint cookies)

Blend until creamy:

    1/2 cup butter

    1/3 cup granulated sugar

Beat in:

    1 whole egg or 2 egg yolks

    1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla
extract

    1/4 teaspoon grated lemon
zest

    1 cup all-purpose white flour

    1/8 teaspoon salt

    (optional) 2 tablespoons poppy
seeds

Chill dough for several hours or overnight.

Roll into 1-inch balls, dip in slightly beaten egg white, roll in
chopped nuts.

Bake 5 minutes at 375°F.

Remove from oven, make thumbprints, and fill with jelly:  red
cherry, golden apple, and green mint jelly for Christmas.

Return to hot oven and bake for about 8 minutes more.

In my mother’s house, “pie” meant chocolate cream pie for her and
lemon

meringue for my father.  I wasn’t fussy about pie; I’d eat

both.  Later on, when I was cooking for feasts or making
baked

gifts, my specialty was apple pie.  The way I did it, with
fresh

apples and lots of cinnamon, and simmering the skins in a sugar syrup

to get a rosy pink tint to the filling, it was a crowd pleaser.

I’ve been thinking it over, and I suppose I never met a pie I didn’t

like, but my favorite has been pecan pie ever since I moved to Texas
as

a pre-teen and had my first taste of one.

Pecan Pie

Preheat oven to 350 F .

Mix together:

3 eggs, slightly beaten

1 cup Karo syrup, light or dark as preferred

1 cup granulated white sugar or firmly packed brown sugar, as
preferred

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Then stir in 1 1/2 cups pecan halves or broken pecan pieces.

Pour into unbaked 9-inch pie shell and bake about 50 to 55

minutes.  Pie is done when a knife inserted halfway between
center

and edge comes out clean.

For that pie shell, the pastry must be tender and flaky. 
Since I

was 12 years old, I have been relying on the recipe in the Joy of Cooking for
that.  It never fails.

finding weird pictures online that are only nominally what I was

looking for.  I posted the pornish “frango” and “fruitcake”
pictures in the blog before
this one.  Later on, as I was searching for a pic

of broken chunks of chocolate, I found this pic of a strain of
Cannabis

Indica called “ChocolateChunk”.

My Twelve Days of Christmas blog inspired Greyfox to write his own updated version of the
song.  I

love being that man’s muse, especially on the occasions when I inspire

something in him besides rage, terror or despair. 

First, he

phoned me for a rundown of the last few lines of the traditional song,

apparently having forgotten the drummers drumming (how could

he!?!).  Then a bit later, he left a message on my answering

machine with the entire rundown of his revamped twelfth day. 
The

cell signal was breaking up so badly I didn’t catch all of it, but there

were five yoyo strings, two surgical gloves, and some gimps and tards, I
think.

Up On the Roof

Yesterday,
I climbed onto the roof as Doug slept.  I would have left it for
him, but it was looking as if he would sleep through the daylight
hours, so as I noticed the sun starting to get lower in the sky about 1
PM, I grabbed the Mutt® and climbed the ladder.

I had noticed that smoke was coming out of the woodstove when I opened
the door, instead of going up the chimney.  That could only mean a
creosote clog in the stovepipe.  A thorough cleaning is not a
one-person job, so I was just going to take the Mutt® up there and
break through the clog.

The clogged area proved to be below the roofline and I had to lower the
tool down into the stovepipe for the full length of its handle. 
This left me with ugly black smears of soot and creosote on my formerly
clean fleece-lined leather gloves.  I guess they had to get broken
in sometime, but now I no longer have a clean pair of warm gloves.

I poked around in there just long enough to clear the pipe, then
started taking pictures.  It’s the same old view from my roof that
I’ve shown you in all seasons already, same old blue sky, same trees
except for the missing three that Charley cut down this fall:  two
sick, dying poplars that were leaning over the trailer and a
beetle-killed spruce in the front yard.

The
lighting was nice though.  I think it was worth taking the camera
up there.  As I was shooting the view to the east toward the
Talkeetna Mountains (right, with the mountains almost lost in the haze
beneath that cloud on the horizon) Doug stepped out into the yard and
called up to me, “Mom… what are you doing?”  I told him I was
taking pictures, then said there was new snow up there to be shoveled
off after breakfast.

Yesterday evening when I opened the stove to put in some more wood, the
surge of flame ignited the creosote I had knocked down onto the baffle
at the top of the firebox, and we had a nice hot creosote fire for a
few hours.  What with Doug heating water in the kitchen to do
dishes, the temp in there got up to 80°F, briefly.  It was about
67°F in the living room.

It had not been a lot of creosote, so the metal of the stove and
stovepipe didn’t get glowing hot this time.  As the creosote
burned I used the handy rock hammer that has been the “fireplace poker”
ever since Mark lived here, to knock down more of the accumulation from
the stovepipe.  That kept the fire small and confined to the
baffle at the top of the stove. 

No flames climbing up the pipe and blazing out the top this time. 
Just a nice, safe creosote fire that got rid of most of the existing
accumulation so I won’t have to clean the stovepipe again for a
while.  Now there’s an accumulation of ash and supposedly some
unburned creosote chips and flakes on the baffle, blocking the flow of
smoke.  The next step is to let the fire burn low and then use my
bent coat hanger tool to scrape the ash down into the firebox. 
That job is going to let some smoke out into the house, but after it’s
done there’s a fairly good chance that the stove will draw properly for
another month or two.

Today my plan is to get in some recipes, doing that early-on in case
anyone wants to try them for their holiday treats.  Along with the
recipes, I intend to do some reminiscing about Christmas sweets in
general, since reminiscence is the only contact I have with candy and
cookies at this stage of my life.  I went on a web search for some
pictures to illustrate my sweets blog, and found a couple of pictures
that don’t really fit the format, but are too sweet not to share.

 **OMG!  Don’t look, boys and girls.  This is adult fare.**

The first one, I found under “fruitcake”

…and this next one came up when I searched for “frango”.

Adrenaline

Recently, I was nearby as Doug was loading wood into the stove. 
We have been burning the unwanted spruce that came with the latest load
of wood while we are awake, because it burns up much faster than the
birch.  We save the birch to build long-lasting fires just before
we go to bed.  There was a large charred chunk of spruce in the
stove, and as the air hit it when Doug opened the door it sent out a
shower of sparks and embers.  That’s one of the things I don’t
like about spruce.

Doug moved back, swatting at the burning bits of wood on his pants, and
then ground out the ones on the carpet with his foot.  When he had
finished stoking the fire, shut the door and closed the damper, he
turned to me and said, “If spruce was better firewood (meaning
supplying more heat and longer-lasting fires), I’d like to burn it all
the time.”

I said, “What!?!  You LIKE getting showered with sparks when you open the stove?”

He laughed and said, “You forget, I still have my adrenals.”

I still have my adrenals, too, but I know what he means.  Before I
understood my body chemistry and got my food addictions under control,
I lived with exhausted adrenals.  It took what is for most people
their emergency reserve energy, just to get me through a normal
day.  I went from being a thrill-seeking, risk-taking adrenaline
junkie, to going out of my way to avoid adrenaline rushes.  When
my health was at its lowest, a little fright could cascade into a
dangerous hypoglycemic episode.  I still don’t like being
startled, because it can trigger an asthma attack.

I had never thought of Doug as an adrenaline junkie, because he does
none of the things I used to do for my adrenaline rushes.  He
doesn’t drive fast cars, ride motorcycles, go back time after time to
stand in line for yet another roller coaster ride, or hang out around
race tracks and drag strips.  

His confirming that fondness for the woodstove fireworks show made some
things fall into place for me.  We are both video game addicts,
and we both enjoy role-playing games, but he plays another class of
games I don’t play at all:  shooters.  That’s where he gets
his adrenaline.  Sometimes he gets so tense and/or frustrated at
those games that he mutters curses at them or even yells.  I have
sometimes wondered why he plays them, when he so obviously isn’t having
fun at it.  Now I know.  Cheap thrills.

The best trips are the uneventful ones.

This was the Thursday, the “alternate Thursday”, that I drove to
Wasilla to drive the van from the rehab ranch to the NA meeting. 
This time, it wasn’t routine — wasn’t as harrowing as the bad weather
and road conditions two weeks ago, but far from routine.  I’m
exhausted, but too keyed up to sleep yet.  It’s now about a
quarter to two, ayem, as I start to write this. 

When I phoned Greyfox an hour or so ago, to tell him I’d made it home
okay, I said I’d like to blog while it’s fresh in my mind, but thought
I was too beat to do it tonight.  Then I got into my pajamas and
into bed and realized I’d rather be up here writing the story of the
day, than over there reading something someone else wrote, in an effort
to unwind enough to sleep.

Getting out of here this morning was easy enough — no flat tire to air
up beforehand.  Why it had gone flat while sitting in the driveway
between each of the last half dozen trips to town and then decided not
to go flat this time, I’ve not a clue.  I accept such crazy
blessings gratefully, but not unquestioningly.  I question, but
this time no one has answered.

The temperature was near zero, just half a degree above, when I left,
and was at 11°F when I pulled off the highway at Felony Flats. 
There had been enough traffic since the last snow to wear most of the
ice off the highway, and it was an easy drive in.

Greyfox was making coffee when I arrived, and it smelled so good that I
weakened and asked for coffee when he offered me a cup of tea. 
That’s my first coffee in many weeks.  While we had coffee and
talked, I played with all the kittens, and held Dingus on my lap the
longest,
giving her a chance to get used to me since she will be coming home
with me in a few months.

Greyfox showed me some of the quartz clusters he had bought at his most
recent show, and some of the more choice pyrite clusters that I’d not
seen yet, from the lot he bought earlier.  After I playfully tried
to distract him while I stuck one of the quartz clusters in my pocket
(two large crystals –, one of which is a multi-record-keeper with a
pattern of facets unlike any either of us has ever seen — set amid
numerous smaller crystals)  he said he had been wondering what he
could give me for Yule, and gave me the cluster I coveted, since we
probably won’t see each other again for two weeks, until after the
solstice.

One of the pyrite clusters was so exquisite and unusual that I came
right out and asked for it, no fooling around, and brought it home with
me tonight, too.

When we left his cabin to do some shopping before I went to the ranch
to pick up my vanload of passengers, there was a brief discussion of
which car to take.  Mine has only one headlight and his is leaking
coolant from a faulty water pump.  We ended up taking his. 
On the way into town (Greyfox’s place is out past the edge of
Wasilla.), there was more than the usual amount of squeal from a loose
belt, and I mentioned it.  I said it didn’t sound good.  He
said he had talked to his friend Sam about it, and Sam said he could
stop that squeal by putting some brake fluid on the belt.  I said
if it was slipping because it was oily, that might help.  It would
tend to make the belt tacky, but would hasten its deterioration.

That’s a conversation much like several conversations we’ve had about
that squealing belt over the past year or so that it has been squealing
off and on.  This one ended with Greyfox saying that the brake
fluid idea hadn’t sounded too good to him at the time, and my saying
that if a belt was squealing like that on my car, I’d get it fixed,
meaning either tightened or replaced.  The squealing belt
punctuated my statement by stopping its squeal with a little *clunk*
sound

Then we pulled up to the stop light at the corner of Main Street and
the Parks Highway, and when Greyfox started up as the light turned
green he noticed that his engine temp was almost in the
red.   As he started to make a left into the gas station on
the next corner, he noticed that his power steering wasn’t
working.  When he raised the hood after he’d gotten into the gas
station, he noticed a couple of bare pulleys where a belt should have
been.  It had been the long serpentine belt that ran his
alternator, power steering, water pump and whatever else.

Since he had already used up his allotted free tows from AAA this year
and I’d used none of mine, I called triple-A from the pay phone in the
convenience store at the gas station.  I
even resisted the aroma of coffee in there.  I WILL NOT let that
one little slip this morning lead me back into regular coffee
consumption.  It’s back to tea for me.  The towing service was there within about 20 minutes.

Greyfox went out to meet the driver where he had parked at the far end
of the lot, while I put on my hat and gloves.  When I got out
there, I saw Greyfox talking to this very good looking man, and the
thought that went through my mind was, “I never realized Greyfox was so
little.”  Then I realized that the wrecker driver was very BIG. 

I would not have been so gauche as to ask him just how tall he is, if
he hadn’t given me such a good opening.  On the ride out to
G-Force’s garage where he dropped us and Greyfox’s car, he said he had
once owned a car like it, but he got rid of it because he couldn’t fit
in it.  So I had to ask — he’s seven feet tall — and
well-proportioned along with it.  No wonder he made Greyfox, whom
I have to look up to, look so little.

G-Force’s mechanics couldn’t get a replacement belt for the car until
today, so Greyfox walked across the highway to his place where I’d left
my car parked, and drove it back over to pick me up.  We still had
enough time for one shopping stop before the meeting.  Both rear
doors and the front passenger-side door are frozen shut.  I’m
feeling lucky that the driver’s door opens.  Greyfox had to crawl
in and out over the console and shifters (gearshift and 4WD shifter)
every time we stopped anywhere all evening.

On the way out to the warehouse food store, we stopped for gas. 
It was already dark by then, and the wind was harsh.  Greyfox
pumped gas while I checked and filled the oil.  First, he couldn’t
get the little filler-cap hatch open, then I couldn’t find the
screwdriver I keep handy for that purpose.  I crawled in through
the rear hatch (thankful that that would open — I can only imagine
[with horror] trying to load two weeks worth of groceries through the
driver’s door) found my alternate screwdriver in the box of junk on the
back seat, and popped open the little gas filler hatch. 

After that, the shopping stop was a breeze, then Greyfox dropped me at
the ranch.  I was early enough that Mayta (the new female ranch
hand) and I had time to exchange a few of our bear and moose encounter
stories.  She’s got some good ones.

There’s some illness going around among the ranch residents and I had
fewer passengers than usual.  The ones who rode with me were
uncharacteristically quiet, too.  Something’s up, and of course
Greyfox and I were speculating about what it might be.  We may
never know, because it could all have blown over by the next time we
all get together.

Tonight after the regular meeting we had our monthly group conscience
business meeting, and it was more eventful than most, with a couple of
things to be discussed and voted on.  When that was done, I
returned the van and passengers to the rehab ranch and Greyfox picked
me up there for the shopping we hadn’t gotten done earlier.  Thank
all the gods and goddesses for all-night supermarkets in small Alaskan
towns.

Except for the fatigue that Greyfox and I were both experiencing, and
an excruciating case of “fibro-foot” that made me stop several times
for in-store toe massages, the shopping went rather smoothly. 
When I dropped Greyfox at his place, I took one of my socks off and
stuck it in my coat pocket, and that made the drive home easier. 
It might be more accurate to say that it made the drive home possible. 
I’d been close to screaming in the last of the checkout lines, and did
let out a few yips and moans in the car on the drive to Greyfox’s cabin
because every step or toe-wiggle or foot stretch or bump in the road
would reactivate a fibromyalgia trigger point in that foot.

Considering what we two old people had been through during the day, I
guess we did okay at sorting the groceries and unloading Greyfox’s
stuff at his place.  He did remember the NA briefcase with all the
group’s literature and the lit fund, etc., but forgot his
clipboard.   I got all but two of his grocery items out of
the bags in the hatch.  When I called him from home, he told me
about the loaf of bread that was missing.  When I talk to him
tomorrow, I can tell him about the can of coffee I found when I was
putting my groceries away.

Gone, but not forgotten…

Over
forty years ago, on my first date with the man who was to become my
second husband, in a little backstreet bar frequented by Air Force
personnel in Wichita, Kansas, we danced to I Wanna Hold your Hand.  It was the first time I had heard the Beatles. 

Within months, I had all three of their albums that had been released
in the U.S.  As more albums came out, I collected them.  Sgt. Pepper
helped me convert a bunch of hardcore chauvinistic bikers, who had
contended that all real acid rock was American, to the Liverpool
sound. 

One of my most memorable psychedelic experiences was scripted and soundtracked by Abbey Road.  Ever since that night, Here Comes the Sun has been a sure cure for the blues for me, able to lift me out of the deepest depression.

During the sixties, when everyone seemed to have a favorite Beatle, I
couldn’t settle on one.  I loved Ringo for his sense of humor,
George for his work on sitar and synthesizer, and Paul for his voice
and face.  It took me a while to learn to appreciate John. 

My all time favorite song lyric is Imagine. 
When John Lennon died 24 years ago today, I’d recently learned I was
pregnant.  Perhaps the subsequent radio play given to his music,
and the prenatal saturation, had something to do with the fact that
Doug is a Beatles fan.   Maybe not.  Who can’t love the
Beatles’ music?

Did you try the PainSwitch? 
Menstrual pain comes from uterine spasms.  First focus on the
uterus, without judging the sensations, listen to what your nervous
system is saying and let your body know you know what’s going on, then relax
the spasms.  One thing that always helped me with menstrual cramps
was to get onto my hands and knees and let my abdominal organs fall
into a position more natural to mammals on this planet.

Next ensued some negotiation.  Doug wasn’t interested in listening
to any of my newer jazz CDs or old favorites.  Then I suggested
Christmas music.  We ended up listening to seven disks out of our
Xmas collection, including the Sinatra Christmas Album, the Beach Boys Christmas Album, A Big Band Christmas,  This is the Time by Michael Bolton, and Christmas Island by Leon Redbone.

It was an enjoyable evening — lots of blasts from the past, and some
intergenerational fun.  We both agreed that Michael Bolton’s Ave Maria
was the most moving piece, and that the Big Band collection (most of
which was recorded before I was born) was all-round best album. 
Of the several renditions of Blue Christmas we heard last night, I
liked Leon Redbone’s the best.  My all-time favorite Xmas carol is
O Holy Night, and I
particularly like the Lou Rawls version, but for me the most memorable
moment of that musical evening was hearing a very young Frank Sinatra,
before his speaking voice got that whiskey-and-cigarettes edge to it,
at the end of one of his songs, wishing everyone a merry Christmas.

What pain is…
and what it isn’t –

Pain is, “a negative response to a positive stimulus.”  That is
how a physiology professor defined pain to a class that included one of
my fellow “fibromites”, a nurse with whom I started an email
correspondence after we “met” on a fibromyalgia bulletin board
site.  She had remembered that class when I related the painswitch
technique on the board.  Her prof meant that what we feel are
neurological signals without which our body would be in grave danger,
but our fear and tension turn them into a negative experience.

For me, pain used to be scary.  It  might have been even
scarier for me than it is for many kids, since I’d been told I didn’t
have long to live.  Every pain turned into something potentially
lethal, in my young mind.  Since my mother and my doctors shared
those fears, my pain then became a way to get attention and
sympathy.  I don’t remember ever faking pain just to get attention
or sympathy.  I never had to.  There was always something
that hurt.  I also never had to exaggerate how much it hurt. 
If I concentrated on it, and let my fear amplify it, it would hurt more.

After a while, pain became for me an excuse.  It got me a doctor’s
excuse from phys.ed. in school after the year that my F in PE brought
down my otherwise A and B grades to a below average GPA.  It was
always a handy excuse for getting out of anything I didn’t want to
do.  When it kept me from doing some things I really wanted to do,
I felt sorry for myself and let the pain be my exuse for my
self-pity.  Poor me!  Why me?  Pathetic and disgusting,
I was.

Then, through the wonders of medicine, pain became a reason to take
drugs.  At first the drugs were prescribed for me.  Then I
found other drugs that not only took away my pain, but also relieved my
chronic fatigue and gave me energy to spare.  The drugs always
wore off and the pain and fatigue came back in waves worse than what
had gone before.  Other physical symptoms of my disordered
biochemistry brought other drugs to treat them.  Depression that
came in the wake of my amphetamine highs never got any drug treatment,
however.  Perhaps I was fortunate in having gotten all that
bullshit done and over with before the waves of antidepressants hit the
market.

I still have that “positive stimulus” that most of you would call
pain.  Only when it is a new one, sharp, sudden and unexpected, do
I judge a sensation to be pain.  And then I stop and ask myself
what it is I’m really feeling.  Pain is just a judgement we lay on
our sensations, I know.  Through the power of my mind, I could
make it feel pleasurable, but that would be foolish.  So I simply
cease judging and start paying attention, looking for the subtle
messages in the signal.

I used the word, “fibromite,” above, to denote a person with fibromyalgia.  That’s Devin Starlanyl‘s
word.  I like it even though it seems to define a person by her
disease, which is something I don’t like.  At least it doesn’t
call her a “victim” or a “sufferer”.   “Pain is part of
life.  Suffering is optional.”  That is attributed to the
Buddha, and is as wise as any words I’ve ever heard.  One of the
cliches often kicked around at NA meetings is that there are no
victims, only volunteers.  It may not be universally true, but in
that context and for many of us who would take on the role of victim to
give ourselves an excuse for otherwise inexcusable behavior, it is true
enough.

What pain is not, for me at this time, is an excuse for anything
(except possibly a blog).  I may stop in a supermarket, sit down
on the floor and take off my boot to massage away a muscle spasm, but
the pain isn’t my excuse for such aberrant behavior.  Relieving
pain and preventing damage are my reasons.  With good reasons, who
needs excuses?  Similarly, if sensations in my hands and arms tell
me I should put down the game controller or the book I’m holding, or
stop and shake out my hands and stretch them before I go on typing, I
do it.  What I don’t do is tell myself it hurts, get all tense and
worried about it and let it escalate.  And I don’t take drugs to
make the sensations go away.

Drugs don’t take the sensations away, anyway.  One of the clinical
characteristics of this disease, myalgic encephalomyelopathy, AKA
“firbromyalgia,” is that it doesn’t yield to painkillers.  I went
through the available pharmacopaeia of analgesics in my youth,
developed allergies to many of them, addictions to some — and fuck
that “chemical dependency” bullshit, an addiction is an addiction even
if it’s prescribed by a doctor — to the point that when I had surgery
seventeen years ago, the only drug left that I could take was a
Schedule II narcotic, Dilaudid:  hydromorphone.  It didn’t
take my pain away.  It just took away my ability to care about the
pain or anything else.  THAT was scary!  And that was the
last time I took anything stronger than an NSAID.  I even use them
quite sparingly, because I certainly don’t need leaky gut syndrome on
top of all my other problems.

As I see it, what I need most is to keep my wits about me.  When
the symptom de jour is the “rheumy eyes” (one of the old common names
for this disease is “rheumatism”) and I can’t see clearly, or when the
fibro-fog moves in and I can’t think straight, or when I’m stumbling
and fumbling, or twitching and jerking, I don’t see where any of that
will be helped by adding the handicap of a narcotized brain. 
Since neural sensation (AKA “pain”) is always there, while the other
symptoms come and go — the only way the pain comes and goes is that it
comes in one place when it goes from another — my best course seems to
be to make friends with the sensations.  Pain, in that context, is
my friend.  It tells me when I need to sit down, or stretch, or
get warm or cool off or just stop doing whatever it is I’m doing until
the sensation eases.  As long as I keep paying attention, I have
nothing to fear from my body’s sensations.  That leaves me better
equipped to deal with other stuff.  And I have some stuff to deal
with now.  ‘Bye.

Mixed Blessings
Both
loads of wood were delivered yesterday.  The first load to be
delivered was the second one I’d ordered, the one from Lou that was
supposed to have cost me $130 for a cord and a third.   Lou
had said he’d be here at 1:30 with the wood.  I phoned him around
2 PM for a sitrep.  He said it was all cut and ready to load as
soon as Jake got there.

Jake apparently is Lou’s son.  Lou said that the night before,
when he’d got off the phone with me, Jake, who had overheard his end of
the conversation while I was telling him where we are, had said, “Dad,
you know?  That’s not just outside Willow, it’s almost to
Talkeetna.”  Actually, it’s about halfway between Willow and
Talkeetna, but I didn’t argue when Lou added another $20.00 to the
price of that load of wood, since he said he would be willing to take a
check for the extra $20.

Jake delivered the wood at dusk, having gotten lost and phoned for
directions before he finally showed up.  I eyeballed the load on
his stake-bed truck and it did indeed appear to be over a cord. 
Lou is a fast talker and a sweet talker, and that had made me
reflexively suspicious, but the wood was all birch and apparently
seasoned.  It did a good job of raising the temp in here from 50°F
to 59° before I went to bed last night.  No complaints about that
deal.

After
having told me Saturday morning that he’d have my load of wood here
Saturday afternoon, being delayed a few hours by mechanical problems,
then setting that time back to “early Sunday” when I told him I wanted
all birch instead of the “half birch, half spruce, with a little poplar
mixed in” that he said he would bring, Mark phoned me about the same
time Jake called for directions, and told me he was leaving Wasilla
then, was “on the way.”  It was dark when he got here.  He
said he had to go back and fix a tail light because he only had
one.  He wasn’t making eye contact when he said it and I wondered
why he’d even feel he needed an excuse for a slight delay.  This
morning, I think I may have figured that out.

I think he wanted to be sure it was full dark when he got here so I
wouldn’t see how much spruce was in that load.  There was no
spruce visible at the back of the load or on top when I went out to
greet him.   The portion of the load to come off the truck
last appears to be mostly spruce, but since it snowed during the night,
and I neither wanted to clear off the snow nor dig around under those
big rounds, I don’t know how the proportions shake out.  Any
spruce is too much for me, and if I can’t find a seller closer to home,
Lou will be the one I call next time I need wood.  I am sure there
was no misunderstanding about what I was ordering.  Saturday night
after Mark and I discussed the spruce and poplar issue, I called him
back one last time and repeated that I wanted “all birch, in
rounds.”  He said, “I got that message.”

Veracity or the lack thereof aside, Mark is a sorta odd guy, in my
estimation.  He was out there last night unloading that wood at
double digits below zero, without a coat or hat, and wearing only
cotton work gloves.  That is about as un-Alaskan as you can
get.  Every adult Alaskan I know has and uses good cold weather
gear even if it is patched with duct tape. 

There is a certain class of juvenile Alaskan who thinks it is cool to
run around in winter in heated cars in shorts and tee shirts.  I
see them hugging themselves as they sprint stiff-legged across parking
lots in town almost every time I’m in town.  Occasionally, I’ll
read in the news about one of them dying of hypothermia when his car
breaks down.  I’ve seen a few of them hopping from one foot to the
other as they use coat hangers to try to get into the cars they’ve
locked themselves out of.   Leaving cars locked and running in
parking lots is a common, although illegal, practice here in cold
weather.  Sometimes, when it’s sufficiently cold, the cars won’t
start, so leaving them running seems a prudent move.   Presumably
some of the people who do that carry spare keys to let themselves back
into their cars.

Mark was using the stiff-legged gait that cold seems to dictate,
too.  When he got the truck backed up to the pile of wood that
Jake had left, he jumped out of the cab, removed the chain and cargo
straps that were securing the load, and pushed two or three courses of
the rounds off the back of the truck.  Twice, while he was doing
that, he paused to slap his hands against his thighs, then tuck them in
his armpits for a moment.

I went back in the house to get his money, and when I returned, he was
in the cab, presumably warming up.  He got out again, removed
another strap that was cinched over the middle portion of the load, and
told me he was going to “dump” the rest of the load.  I stepped
back out of the way to watch, assuming he had some hydraulics and a
dump bed on his truck.  That was not the case.

First, he pulled a few feet forward, then reversed and slammed into the
woodpile, jolting a few rounds off the tail of the truck bed. 
After ten or a dozen repetitions of that, shedding four or five rounds
with each jolt, his tires had worn a smooth, slick groove in the
driveway and he was compelled to get out in the cold again and shove
the wood off by hand.  Then he stood shivering by the back of his
truck, bent over using the red light of his tail lights, and went
through the sheaf of bills I handed him three times with stiff shaking
fingers before he got it counted.

He climbed back into the cab, and tried to get out of the driveway, but
not only had he created a slick, he had even less traction after
shedding his load.  He got back out and locked in his front hubs,
and finally got underway, with two smallish rounds of my wood hung up
on his back bumper.  Later, as I was telling Greyfox about his
novel way of unloading his truck, the old fart commented that it must
be hard on the machinery.  Then I recalled that Saturday’s
delivery had been delayed because of some broken linkage.  Hmmmm.

Ah, well, I have wood, finally.  And this was the year I said I’d
get it all laid in before snow fell.  I was well on my way before
the contretemps with ol’ bushrat George.  That was
September.  After George got caught delivering short measures and
refused to deal with me on a more honest basis, I started calling every
number I could find.  That included both Mark and Lou.  I
left many messages on machines, and got no callbacks from any of
them.  My messages had stated where I live, my desire for nothing
but birch, and the fact that I needed short lengths not over a foot.

After that first round of calls, Greyfox said I might get results if I
waited until cold weather and then told people I was desperate and out
of wood.  That did not sound like a prudent course to me, but it
turned out to be what I ended up doing anyway.  I was still
checking bulletin boards and classified ads for wood sellers when the
heavy snow came down.  

Then I started telling Doug he needed to get that side of the driveway
cleared so that if I found a source for firewood they could get in to
deliver it.  But Doug had several new PS2 games.  He took
care of the high-priority (to him) snow removal, from the roof and
around my car on the other side of the driveway.  I could not
persuade him to clear out the way to the woodpile until the firewood we
had was nearly gone.  Since there was no way for anyone to deliver
wood without leaving it in the road (which would be illegal in addition
to being dreadfully inconvenient as we’d have had to heave it off the
road by hand), I stopped making calls to wood dealers.

Not until Doug discovered that we were almost out of wood did he start
clearing that snow.  That was just a few days ago.  I had
already called every number I had, so I went back and called all the
ones who hadn’t returned my calls.  I said I was out of wood and
needed it bad.  A few apologized and said they were out of
wood.  Two refused to deliver this far up the valley.  But
Mark and Lou came through, probably both of them being justifiably
confident that they could get away with price gouging.  Greyfox
was right.

Tickety-Boo, except….

Everything seems to be humming right along.  That noisy hard drive
is still noisy, but not excruciatingly so.   We have been
able to maintain an indoor temp around 50°F, even though the outdoor
temp dipped to -15°F overnight.  That’s MINUS fifteen. 
Sixty-five degrees difference between in and out is pretty good for our
little woodstove.  If there was a wind blowing, it wouldn’t be
able to keep that up.

I must be in the flow.  I can’t really burn any of that wood
that’s on order until it get here, but having two separate sellers tell
me they will be here today with wood for me is fairly
confidence-building.

Mark’s trouble with his truck yesterday worked in my favor, I
think.  I had been talking to so many wood sellers that I had
forgotten who I’d told what.  I sometimes forget to mention that I
need short lengths to fit my stove.  I had apparently forgotten to
tell Mark that I wanted only birch.  He called Yesterday afternoon
after his truck was repaired to tell me that there was “another lady”
who had a bunch of wood that was already cut to my length, that he
could go take a look at, and if it was okay he’d load it up and bring
it to me last night.

Then he said it was “birch and spruce mixed” but there might be a
little poplar mixed in.  Was that okay?  I said, aghast,
“birch and spruce mixed?!?”  He said yeah, and we didn’t even
mention the poplar again, that damned fireproof, useless wood that’s
worse than no wood at all.  We talked for a while about “birch and
spruce.”  He said if the lady’s mix was more than half spruce,
he’d add some more birch.  Still aghast, almost speechless, I
said, “half and half?!?”

He went on talking while I regained my wits and my voice, and finally I
conveyed the idea that I wanted all birch, no spruce, no poplar. 
He didn’t put up any argument or suggest any higher price or anything
of that sort, so I suppose it was just a test to see if I was stupid
enough to pay $170 a cord for poplar that won’t hardly burn and spruce
that’s likely to end up burning my house down with its combination of
high creosote and fast-flaring fires with lots of sparks. 

I managed NOT to ask any of the questions that popped into my mind, such as, “Are you INSANE?” or “Do you really
have customers in town who will pay you $150 a cord for half
spruce?”  Speechlessness does have its rewards, in human relations
terms, sometimes.  Since I wasn’t willing to accept the “other
lady’s” mix, he said he wouldn’t be able to get my wood to me until
sometime today.

I must be in the flow, bigtime.  When I made that deal with Mark
for two cords at $170 a cord, I had $350.00 cash that had been tucked
away in a drawer for firewood purchases ever since the deal with old
George (who is undoubtedly younger than I) went south.  Getting my
firewood without having to make a trip to the ATM twenty miles up the
highway was GOOD.  Having ten dollars left over was even
better. 

Then I got the callback from Lou.  His price for a truckload (cord
and a third, he says, all birch — most assuredly “green” at that
price, not dry and seasoned) was $130 at this distance and in the
lengths I specified.  He specified cash, as they all do, so I was
looking, maybe, at a trip up to the ATM after all.  I got out my
wallet and counted my cash:  $121.  Add to that the ten left
over from Mark’s deal, and I’ve got a dollar left for myself. 

This particular bit of Valley trailer trash is feeling pretty good
right now, considering that all my firewood is either just unfulfilled
promises or little fiddly bits that are just about gone.  Marian
ordered pics of me surrounded by wood, but even after it gets here
that’s not gonna happen.  I will neither stand in the way while
those guys unload on and around me, nor will I burrow into the middle
of the heap they leave.   You might see a pic of Doug beside
the new woodpile, or Koji, or maybe even me, but I won’t be surrounding
the wood and it won’t surround me.  If you’ll settle for an
illusion, maybe I can peer over the top of the pile.

And to clarify the seasonal shifts for hotvette101,  I live in the
northern hemisphere.  In December, this end of the earth’s axis is
tilted away from the sun.  Antarctica and Australia are having
long days right now, and relative warmth.  In summer, here in the
north, we have long days and relative warmth from the sun toward which
our end of the axis is then tilted.  Right now, the sun rises
around 9 AM and sets around 3:30 PM, at this latitude (62°N).  And
we are just a little over two weeks from the Winter Solstice, my
personal High Holy Day, best day of the whole damned year, when the sun
starts back in our direction and days begin getting longer again. 
Yay for daylight!

A miracle, probably temporary…

This morning I was checking email when my computer, which has been
somewhat noisy for a while, suddenly escalated into a grinding
whine.  I hit the power switch and waited a while.  When I
started it again, the grinding was the same, so I shut it down again.

I had some phone calls to make, breakfast to cook, some additional snow
removal work by Doug to supervise so that when the wood arrives the man
can get his trailer into my driveway.  When it was done I decided
to try and call the computer doc who had installed this hard drive last
spring.  It was a warranty replacement for one he’d installed
about a year before that, and it was a little noisy right from the
start.  We got used to it, but that grinding moan was not
something we would be able to get used to.

I got the man’s answering machine on the line, told him what was up,
and then hit the power switch to give him a little sound bite. 
Surprise!  No grinding, no whining.  So I just said, “I guess
that’s all, ‘bye,” and hung up the phone.

At this moment, the machine is humming along as usual.  I’m not
surprised, really.  I’m familiar with physical symptoms (mine and
other people’s) that disappear while we’re waiting in the doctor’s
waiting room.  I’m also familiar with machines that fix themselves
when Doug or I fiddle with them or set them aside for a while. 
One of Greyfox’s cars used to give him problems occasionally, and he’d
let me drive it for a while until the car was running okay again.

That fixer talent is something I don’t even believe in, can’t believe
in, knowing as much about mechanics as I do.  It’s absurd. 
Someone, Philip K. Dick, I think, said, “Reality is that which, when
you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” or something like
that.  I’ve never believed in the “fixer” talent, but still I do
what Greyfox calls the “technological laying-on of hands” when machines
go wonky, just in case.  Just because I don’t believe in it,
doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it.  What do I know? 

Anyhow, last night I made contact with another of the wood sellers, and
he is supposed to bring me a load tomorrow.  That’s Lou. 
Mark, the one I mentioned yesterday, who told me to call him this
morning, said today that he had a helper coming and would get my wood
up here before dark today.  He just called again, to say that he
had been ready to load my wood on his trailer, when some part of some
linkage broke.  He’s waiting for the mechanic with the part to get
there, but that guy had to tow someone’s truck first.  The
delivery may be today if all that gets done promptly.  If not, it
will probably be tomorrow.

My next task is to go start my car and move it over farther to improve
Mark’s access to the driveway.  We are not out of wood yet, but we
are down to burning little chunks, chips and pieces gleaned from around
the chopping block, some pieces of hemlock that aren’t as efficient at
heating as is the birch we prefer, and some knotty and odd-shaped
pieces of birch that Doug has split down as far as possible, and just
might fit into the stove if there’s no other wood in the way.  I
think it’s time to go try to get the big piece in there now; what was
in there before has had time to burn down to coals.

By the way, temps here are in single digits above zero.  Unless
there’s a power outage, we’re in no danger of freezing.  We have
some electric heat.  The sensitive things are my
houseplants.  I need to keep them above freezing.  Doug and I
have been conserving wood for a few days, dressing warm in the house,
doing a lot of cooking to get extra heat that way.  I’m planning
to bake muffins today, too.  Whatever works, works.