Hilary had a new litter of kittens yesterday.  When I identified
her as “our climber” here previously someone, NFP I think it was, asked
if she was named for the mountaineer.  Yes, we named her after Sir
Edmund because as a kitten she showed a strong preference for vertical
movement, especially up the Navajo rug hanging on the wall, clothes in
the closet, trees in the yard….

Before she weaned her first
litter, she was fiercely protective of them, all hisses and growls and
swatting at Koji when the kittens came near him.  He learned very
quickly to avoid the kittens, but they persisted in trying to snuggle
up to him for naps or swat at  his wagging tail.

After
weaning them, Hilary was as likely to growl and swat at them if they
came near her as she was with the old lady cats or withKoji.  As
her latest pregnancy progressed, she was increasingly cranky, but now
that she’s a new mother again she is mellow and sweet.

One
kitten, the one at far left in the first photo above, was born early
yesterday morning, and none of the others was born until sometime late
last night.  By the time I was up today we had four of them.

The
coloring and markings of the two on the right in that top photo
resemble Potemkin, the stray tomcat who has been making himself at home
here long enough to eat, drink and get warm several times a week for a
month or two.  Po was very skittish and wary of Koji when he
started visiting us, but no so much any more, now that he has
spent  time around the dog and survived.

Doug hauled the
kittens out of Hilary’s nest in the corner of his closet, the same
place where she had her first litter, so I could take these
pictures.  Hilary came out immediately and started taking them
back, so I didn’t have a lot of time to arrange kittens artistically or
get insurance shots.  What you see is what I got.

Doug helped Hilary return the kittens to her nest, then got the shot at left here. 

Last
week, when Hilary was all grumpy, hostile, and dangerous, I would have
cheerfully taken her to the pound, but now that she’s her old sweet
self again, I don’t think so.  Doug and I have been agonizing over
what to do with the two “extra” kittens from her first litter that we
feel are really more than we can support and certainly more than we can
afford to spay and neuter.

The economics and logistics of the
neutering are the reasons we have this new litter.  There’s a
clinic on the edge of Anchorage that offers the services considerably
cheaper than any of the ones here in the Valley, but they have backlogs
a month or more in length and charge extra for cats in heat or
pregnant.  We failed utterly to make a workable plan to transport
our cats in there at the right time before the first litter was
conceived, and again between litters.

Now, Doug and I are faced
with the certainty of becoming emotionally attached to four more
kittens.  We’re also faced with the difficulty of formulating and
executing a neutering plan for the ones we can afford, and all we have
done toward figuring out what to do with the others is say to each
other plaintively, “What are we going to do?”  It’s humbling, and
it’s frustrating, and they’re cute, darnit.

---

Anyone else
been hit as hard by this New Moon as Doug and I have been?  I’m
not going into excruciating detail about it.  Suffice it to say we
have had a stressful and painful day.  I haven’t looked at his
chart to see how this stuff is impacting him.  When I found the
new celestial weather report
in my email today, I’d already had a frustrating, difficult headache of
a day, so I looked to see if Rich Humbert had any explanation. 
Did he ever!

Well, I told
Greyfox I’d call him back when I was done with what I was doing, and if
I wait too long I’ll just get his voicemail.  G’Nite.

It was summer, between seventh and eighth grades, when Mama went to
work for Mrs. Bull and we moved into her big blocky brick house out in
the middle of some wide weedy fields that were once part of an even
bigger wheat farm.  Mr. Bull had been dead for a while, but not
for more than five years or so.  The dove gray Cadillac sedan in
the ramshackle old garage beside the house was only about five years
old then.  He had bought it shortly before he died and it only had
a few hundred miles on it. 

On long, boring afternoon drives through the flat, boring Kansas
countryside, Mrs. Bull and Mama in the front seat would talk about how
the wheat fields were disappearing into subdivisions, and I would space
out in the back seat and daydream.  I was very good at that back
then.  It isn’t so easy to do at this stage of my life.  I
can still space out just fine, but what comes out of it isn’t the sort
of fantasy I used to concoct.  But that’s a whole ‘nother blog.

When I think about Mrs. Bull and our situation there, it seems clear to
me that Mama wouldn’t have been likely to stay in that job very long,
even if she hadn’t had the new boyfriend in Texas to lure her
away.  She was probably more than ready to take any opportunity to
leave.  The way Granny Conners (my Aunt Alice) referred to Mrs.
Bull was, “set in her ways.”  That phrase is innocuous on the face
of it, but I’ve never heard it applied to anyone who was set in any
pleasant or agreeable ways.  Mama would use the same phrase a bit
later, to describe my new step-father Bill.

Mrs. Bull had a soft-boiled egg and dry toast every day for
breakfast.  Lunch was generally soup and a sandwich, but could
include hot dogs occasionally.  Dinner for Mrs. Bull always had to
include a boiled potato and one-quarter of a head of iceberg lettuce,
with a dollop of Miracle Whip imitation mayonnaise.  Early on,
Mama made a mixed green salad and that made Mrs. Bull angry.  She said she
always wanted her wedge of lettuce and that’s what she meant.  The
main course was varied; could be macaroni and cheese, pork chops, fried
chicken, chicken fried steak, or meatloaf, but it always had to be
accompanied by boiled potatoes (unless the main dish was potatoes au
gratin) and lettuce wedges with Miracle Whip.

She had a subtle way of expressing disapproval.  Within our first
week there, she had pointedly shown Mama where the cookbooks were kept
in the kitchen, and marked a few of her favorite recipes.  Mama
told me to set the table, and I did it the way Mama always did, with
napkins flat on the table to the right of the plates, and all three
“tools”: the flatware, one knife, one fork, one spoon; on the
napkin.  Mrs. Bull saw what I had done and sent me to the
bookshelf for an etiquette book.

After she showed me where the good silver was, I set about learning how
to properly set a table with fancy-folded napkins, two forks at each
place setting, and as many spoons and knives as necessary for whatever
was being served.  She gave me “permission” to move Amy
Vanderbilt’s and Emily Post’s etiquette books from the bookshelf in the
living room into my bedroom to study at my leisure. 

I hadn’t had a real room of my own with a door I could actually shut
since we had left San Jose when I was eight years old.  That was
one of the best things about Mrs. Bull’s house.   Those books
were another good thing.   I was keenly aware of my mother’s
low-class speech and her ignorance of history, math and many other
things.  I had always enjoyed correcting her pronunciation and
pointing out her other failings, and after being exposed to Vanderbilt
and Post I applied myself conscientiously to excelling her in
ettiquette.

Mrs. Bull’s library wasn’t extensive but it was certainly
specialized.  It was a lady’s library, focused on ettiquette and
fashion, with lots of books about movies – not film, which I’d get into later,
but Hollywood movies.  She subscribed to Modern Screen and Vogue,
and when I showed interest in fashion she subscribed to Mademoiselle
and Seventeen for me.  She ridiculed my mother’s taste for romance
magazines such as True Story and True Confessions, so I stopped reading
them.  Thank you, Mrs. Bull.

I didn’t like Mrs. Bull.  She wasn’t very likable with all that
snobbery and stubborn idiosyncracy.  But I did respect her because
she exemplified the ladylike behavior my mother had always advocated
but never practiced.  Mama’s motto was, “do as I say, not as I
do.”  I always was in full agreement with not doing what she did,
but I also took everything she said with more than a little grain of
salt.  I started seriously cultivating a class act.  I found
relief from my guilt and shame in snobbery and perfectionism.

I
was still in my first year of biological womanhood.  While we
lived in Mrs. Bull’s house, I’d start getting severe menstrual cramps
several days before my bleeding would begin.  Mrs. Bull had
remedies for that.  As soon as the cramps would begin, I’d be sent
off for hot epsom salt baths in the huge old claw-foot tub, to relax
the muscles and start the flow.

Several
times a day every day, I’d be compelled to choke down a big
tablespoonful of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound and one of Beef,
Iron and Wine Tonic.  I don’t know if the patent medicines did me
any harm, or any good.  The hot baths did help get the flow
started and gave me more than the usual number of opportunities for hot
sudsy orgasms.

The thing that finally did bring relief from the cramps was something I
found in an article in a magazine.  It might have been in
Seventeen.  For menstrual cramps, it recommended getting down on
hands and knees and crawling, or just rocking back and forth on elbows
and knees.  That always worked, and I used it for the full forty
years between menarche and menopause.

About half a mile or so to the west-southwest of Mrs. Bull’s house
there was a subdivision of new houses surrounding the new school to
which I’d be going when my eighth grade term started.  I wandered
over there several times, watching the construction workers and
wondering if they’d have it finished in time for the start of
school.  A few times in the evenings, I’d take off after dinner
and go explore the new school, ignoring the “keep out” signs.  One
night I encountered a girl a year or two older than I and her two
younger brothers there.

Her name was Jeannie McGehee or McGeehe.  She was going to be in
the eighth grade, too.  Her family had moved there just recently,
from Arkansas, I think.  She was skinny and blonde, with freckles
and a rebellious attitude and sharp ironic sense of humor.  By the
time school started, we were best friends.

Being in the first classes to attend a brand new school was
interesting, especially because the building wasn’t finished. 
Some of our classes were in temporary prefab buildings because about
the only part of the school that was complete was the main section
where the offices, auditorium and cafeteria were.  We didn’t have
lockers the first week, because they were still being installed.

I remember threading our way past drop cloths, ladders, scaffolds and a
tangle of industrial strength extension cords to get to our first
assembly in the auditorium.  One item on the schedule for that
assembly was to have the student body select the school colors and name
the sports teams.   If I remember correctly, the teams became
the Truesdell Trojans.  Picking colors wasn’t that simple.  I
think we may have been presented with a few options, but we more or
less ignored those “suggestions” when we filled out our ballots. 
That year, THE “in” colors were pink and charcoal.  Overwhelmingly, our student body voted for them as our school colors. 

The next day, we were called back into assembly.  The
long-suffering principal patiently explained to us that we had to
choose from a restricted set of selections, basically the colors
available from Josten’s catalog.  One of  our two colors had
to be either white, light gray, or yellow “gold”.  Our colors
could not be the same as any that were already in use in Wichita
schools, so we didn’t have many choices left to us.  Again we were
told our options and allowed to vote.

The next day, we were back again.  We’d tied between a maroon and
gray combination, and green and yellow.  We had to take a
tie-breaking ballot.  There was some heated and acrimonious
discussion, with many pronouncements about the nauseating qualities of
the green and gold combo and the gloomy and dull appearance of maroon
combined with gray (which had been as close as we could come to pink
and charcoal).  Green and yellow won, or at least that’s what the
principal told us later, although not very many students, when
challenged, would admit to having voted for it.  Curse Jostens!

This week’s Photo_Challenge is hosted by mybabymans

The subject is obsessions.

Fortunately, I’ve got that covered in a post from 2004.

Poor Toto!

I bet you thought we were
getting out of Kansas,

didn’t you?

I did say, “I reserve the right to pick up the thread at some later
date if more stories come to mind.”  It

isn’t that I don’t want to get out of Kansas and on with the Texas

portion of my memoirs.  Well, maybe it is,
partially.  There

are some truly unpleasant memories coming up, which may have some

bearing on the way I’ve been dragging my feet with this writing and

dwelling tiresomely on the peaceful and relatively pleasant

present.  The nature and quality of this current crop of
memories

might have some bearing on my not having remembered them before

this.

Enough preamble, let’s get this over with.

Back up in time, to Halstead, circa 1954.  In the midst of
the

symptoms of muscular pain and stiffness, weakness, and transient

paralysis that puzzled and baffled my doctors at the time but now seem

to be the same as what the World Health Organization and I now call

ME/ICD-CFS, and the CDC persists in calling, “fibromyalgia,” I had a

few other physical problems to deal with as well, some of which
brought

with them some mental/emotional baggage, too.

I started having trouble with my feet.  While Mama and I were

still living on the little loft over the back part of the sundries

store, I got athlete’s foot.  It itched horribly, bad enough
that

the sting of the Absorbine Junior I poured on it felt better than the

itch.  I liked the smell of the liniment so much that I stuck
my

nose in the bottle and took a big long sniiifff.  That gave me
a

nice rush and a little buzz, so I did it some more. 

Those
little

bottles of Absorbine Junior didn’t last very long.  After
about

three of them, Mama asked me if I was bathing in the stuff.  I
had

sense enough not to tell her I’d been inhaling it.  She had

already indirectly
made it clear that anything that felt good was
forbidden.  In years to come, I’d find a lot of other pleasantly
psychoactive inhalants to use surreptitiously, including Benzedrex
inhalers (amphetamine), Whip-it chargers (compressed nitrous oxide),
and nail polish remover (acetone).

The fungus cleared up, but before long I started feeling as if there

was a rock in my shoe all the time.  I checked the shoe and
didn’t

find anything.  I complained to Mama and she checked the

shoe.  Then we noticed that there was a bump on the ball of
my

foot.  The doctor said it was a plantar wart. 

The prescription for it was X-ray treatments.  Afternoons
after

school I’d walk to the clinic before I’d go home.  I’d sit in
the

waiting room until the X-ray tech came out in her lead-lined leather

apron and took me into the little room with the big X-ray

machine.  I’d lie down on the cold hard table on my tummy and bend my
knee

so that my left foot was elevated, and the tech would pile sandbags

around the leg to hold it in place.  Then she’d hide behind
her

shield wall and turn on the buzzing machine for fifteen
minutes.

On those trips to the clinic, I also had a standing appointment with
my

doctor’s office nurse.  She’d check my swollen lymph nodes
and

listen to me whine about hurting all over and being too tired after

school to drag myself up the stairs to our apartment without resting along the

way.  I don’t suppose she knew any more than anyone else did
about

what was causing my problems, but she did realize that I was scared
and

that the fear and tension were making my pain more severe. 
She

tried to calm and encourage me, and taught me relaxation techniques that I
still

use and that I in turn taught to Doug as he was growing up.

Previously, I mentioned an
ear infection for which I was given sulfonamides and aureomycin,
some early antibiotics.  Maybe I really needed the antibiotic, who
knows?  I had an adverse reaction to it that only worsened when my
doctor responded to my mother’s frantic phone call by telling her to
increase the dosage.  Another doctor probably saved my life
(again, assuming that the antibiotic saved it in the first place) by
switching me to a different drug.  When the fever went down and
the pain in my head went away, we thought that episode was over.

If anyone ever associated the sticky and smelly vaginal discharge I
started having with the antibiotics I’d taken, nobody told me about
it.  The doctor in Wichita I went to when the discharge made me
itch to distraction and my scratching the itch in my crotch got my
mother’s attention, didn’t mention any connection with
antibiotics.  Nobody mentioned yeast to me.  If anyone had, I
would have remembered that.

Maybe he mentioned it to my mother, and neither of them thought it
worthwhile to tell me.  Or, maybe they hadn’t yet made the
connection between antibiotics and yeast infections.  I had
numerous such itchy smelly infections after that, but it was at least
fifteen years before anyone ever suggested to me that the itchy, smelly
crotch rot was caused by yeast overgrowth that resulted from
antibiotics.

That first time, after the uncomfortable and embarrassing experience of
the gynecological stirrups and speculum, the doctor prescribed a tube
of some oily yellow stuff that was supposed to be applied to my vaginal
area.  Not trusting me to do it myself, my mother further
embarrassed me by laying me out on my bed to apply the salve.  She
got a little too thorough or enthusiastic about it, and pierced my
hymen with her finger. 

The bleeding that resulted led to another trip to the doctor, the
stirrups, the speculum, and his reassurance to my mother that I was
really okay, just not quite virgo intacta any more. **sigh**

Well,
after that, I guess the silly slumber party story is anticlimactic, but
it’s a dangling yarn and I’m going to spin it.  The girl in
pajamas on the right in this pic is Deloris Weesner, one of my two best
friends in Halstead.  I’m the one in the long flannel nightie.

One night, I talked my mother into letting me have a few of my friend
sleep over.  The girly practice of the slumber party was something
that all my friends did frequently, but I either wasn’t invited or my
mother wouldn’t let me go.  My being sick all the time might
account for the lack of invitations.  I don’t know.

Anyway, a total of five of us spent a wakeful, giggly night in our
apartment above the movie theater, waiting for the sunrise.  That
sunrise thing was my bright idea.  There was a ledge of gently
sloping roof beneath the windows at the back of our apartment, and I
told my friends it would be a great place to sit and watch the sun come
up.

I sat out there sometimes at night and looked at the stars when Mama
wasn’t home.  As soon as I heard her feet on the stairs, I’d come
in and shut the window because she’d freak if she knew I’d been out on
the roof.  I  had never watched the sun come up there, but it
seemed like a good idea.

It might have been a good idea, except that those windows at the back
of our apartment faced west.  We were out there perched on the
roof as the sky grew light and the sun rose over the buildings on the
other side of Main Street and shone in our front windows.  **heavy
sigh**

Larry
is Lance Mackey’s lead dog.  Lance had a commanding lead over Hans
Gatt and William Kleedehn when they left the last checkpoint before the
Dawson City finish line.  (The race is supposed to finish in
Whitehorse, YT, but this year’s trail conditions dictated a
turnaround-route that took the teams into Dawson, back along the trail
and then back again to Dawson.)

Then, Lance got off the trail.  Larry tried to go the other way,
the right way, but Lance overruled him.  By the time Lance
realized his mistake, he’d lost three hours.  He said he was
crying, just boo-hooing, and apologizing to his dogs as he headed back
toward the correct route.  He was sure, when he rode into Dawson,
that he’d lost the race after having assured this one, his second win
in a row.

When Gatt and Kleedehn pulled into Dawson an hour later, they were
surprised to learn that Lance had won by such a narrow margin. 
Lance, who had an index finger amputated shortly before this race to
put an end to excruciating pain from nerve damage, was having a hard
time speaking when radio and TV reporters tried to interview him at the
finish line.  I think his expression and the grip he has on Larry
in this picture says more than any words could.

Go, Larry!

I went back and forth in my mind:  should blog — why should I
bother? — therapeutic — emetic — whatthehell, might as well.

I pushed myself through the wrap-up of the Kansas end of my adolescence
memoir because I’d been obsessing over some of the events that happened
after the move to Texas.  Maybe just recalling that stuff is
therapeutic.  It felt a lot like reliving trauma.  I don’t
think I’m going to be able to write about it until I work through the
feelings.  I suppose that’s what it’s all about.

Anyway, since I finished up Kansas for now and cleared the boards to
deal with what came next, I haven’t been thinking about that. 
This is a relief, and a surprise, in a way.

There is still a dangling thread in the 1970s, and another in the
1990s.  At one time I thought that having several memoir threads
running at one time would help keep me working on it, as I could move
to another sequence when I ran out of steam on one of them.  It’s
not working that way.  When I feel like writing, I have a tough
time deciding where to start, and when I don’t feel like writing I
don’t write.

Does it count as writing when I expend four or five paragraphs saying that I feel blocked?

I wish I’d been paying closer attention today when I heard the piece on
NPR about Nevada’s water troubles.  I caught that quote above,
“oligarchic anachronism,” and understood that he was talking about
Nevada farmers and ranchers, but missed the man’s name who said
it.  He was either an academic or a bureaucrat.

This issue boils down to this:  Las Vegas wants to pump water out
of the aquifer upon which the farms and ranches of southern Nevada
depend.  The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s representative
claims that they don’t know what the effect on the aquifer will be if
they pump that water out.  I say they should ask the farmers in
Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas who have to keep drilling deeper wells, or
who have to start drilling wells when the ponds dry up that they once
depended on for stock watering. 

Or, they could ask the people in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico,
that town that used to be called Hot Springs.  Geronimo was known
tohave used one of the springs in that place.  Fifty years and
more ago, the town was a resort with more than a dozen active hot
springs.  Last time I was there, the biggest and best-known
resorts had closed when their springs dried up, and only two or three
warm springs remained.

Nevada’s government, like the rest of this country, is a democracy de
jure and a bureaucracy de facto.  Lots more jobs and tons of
tourist dollars depend on keeping Las Vegas hydrated.  Anybody
want to take a guess or make a bet on who will win there?

---

Somebody asked–

I got an email through the xanga@xanga.com link, from joesmitherman@yahoo.  Joe had seen my “interests,” where I wrote:

Joe asked what I explore and what I do to improve my mind.

The answer to the former is twofold.  In one sense, each journey
into the shamanic Otherworld is an exploration of alternate
realities.  In another sense, every time I visualize a world that
is saner, more loving, more sustainable, etc., it is an exploration of
an alternate reality.  Both of those are work of a sort.  One
is the work of divination or healing that I do for individuals who
consult me.  The other is dreamwork I do for the Universe.

One of the things I do to improve my mind is to exercise it in those
ways just described and through math puzzles, logic problems, and
various games.  If ever in my reading or other means of input, I
encounter a concept I just don’t “get”, I don’t just let it go.  I
think about it.  I may diagram an idea to try and visualize it, or
google it to get more information, whatever it takes for the concept to
make sense to me, and for me to expand my conceptual framework to
incoporate it. 

Another way I work on my mind is through the memory exercise of memoir
writing.  This builds new neural pathways, I’ve been told.  I
do not accept amnesia lightly.  My memory is full of gaps around
which I nibble and worry, attempting to recover whatever is
there.  This exercise is not only good for my neurology, but also
for my psychology.  There is therapeutic value in remembering, and
the more effectively a memory is buried, the more effective will be the
therapy in recalling it.

Another process or exercise I have been employing is that of
“upgrading.”  Thirty-some years ago I started transcending all my
addictions or upgrading them to preferences.  Or, maybe that was
“downgrading.”  It all depends on one’s perspective.  After I
had been doing that for a while, I discovered that I had been addicted
to being “right” and that this addiction had led in some instances to
my denying reality and adopting some false and limiting beliefs. 
Then I started examining all my beliefs and either upgrading them to
knowledge if they deserved to be, downgrading them to the bullshit
category if they couldn’t pass the test, or keeping them around as
working hypotheses pending further investigation if they were still
useful but not provable.

And then there are the nootropics and cognitive enhancers, the amino
acids and other “smart” drugs and nutrients I have been studying and
ingesting for thirty years or so.   Y’see, Joe, it’s like
this:  When I was a kid, people would gush and rave about how
smart I was.  The general consensus was that it was a “gift” of
some sort.  As time passed and I explored my reality, I came to
believe that if there had been a gift involved that gift had been
curiosity, a desire to learn and explore.

I can generally account for all the rest of those things that allow me
to score high on IQ tests by the fact that I try harder than most
people do.  I really work at knowing and understanding.  Most
of the people I know are content to inhabit a reality filled with
“black boxes,” mysterious processes, devices, etc., that function in
ways they don’t understand.  I like opening up black boxes. 
I may not have enough time in this life to explore and understand
everything around me, but that is not, in my far from humble opinion, a
reason to stop trying.

I put on a couple of layers this morning:  a long-sleeve blue
mock-turtle cotton tee under my new favorite greige (?oatmeal?) velour
anorak, both of them from Greyfox’s recent bonanza of mongo out of the
dumpster at Felony Flats.  When I saw the new weekly_Photo_Challenge (hosted by guccibear, the subject is, “What does your t-shirt say?”
) I wasn’t even tempted to slip out of my warm layers to model a t-shirt.

I just put the shirt on over what I already had on.

This one did NOT come from a dumpster.  Doug picked it out for me
as a gift.  Each time I have worn it, I half expected to meet
another blogger, but apparently we’re a rare breed around here. 
The first time I wore it, Greyfox and I went to the laundromat. 
He bet me that nobody would know what it meant.  After he had
asked three people, none of whom had a clue what “blogging” was, I
conceded that he had won the bet.

What really shocked me was a little incident at the computer shop when
I picked up our machine after they’d replaced the motherboard.  As
I headed out the door with it, I said how great it would be to be able
to blog again.  A customer standing there turned to the tech I’d
just paid for repairing my computer and said, “What’s that?”  The
techie looked puzzled and stammered and turned to me and said, “It’s
some kind of website, isn’t it?”

UPDATE:

benevolentMitch pointed out that this post was uncharacteristically short, so I decided to…

Naah, I can’t blame it on him.  I had decided to edit this and add
a few other shirts even before I saw his comment.  I had briefly
considered doing a multi-shirt layout as soon as I saw the challenge
topic, but the fact that there would inevitably be cats in the middle
of anything I tried to do, and the other fact that the topic specified
“shirt” singular, led me to model just one.

Then I saw what a few others had done and decided to go for it myself.

Immediately, Cecil fulfilled my expectations, but I rolled him up in
the Betty Boop shirt and rolled the little bundle aside long enough to
get a quick shot of the other shirts.

The one in the center, with “Alaska” partially obscured, is a
twenty-some-year-old classic.  At upper right is a shot of three
of my grandchildren when they were younger.  It’s Cassie
in the middle, flanked by her brothers Alex and Jake.   The
one at center top is the shirt I wear more often than any other, both
because it’s a perfect fit and has long sleeves, and because I like the
enigmatic image on it.  The bottom one is absolutely true, and the
one at left is a very handy thing to have sometimes, almost as good as
a backstage pass.

[EDIT - about two hours later:  It was after sunset but before
dark when Doug woke up today.  As he wandered into the kitchen, I
was picking up the last "full" water jug to pour water into a pitcher
for use in preparing dinner (my dinner, and probably his lunch since he
grabbed a granola bar for breakfast).  I noticed that the jug was
nearly empty, so we loaded the car for a "short" water run.  That
means we left the biggest containers home, and only got about thirty
gallons instead of the usual sixty or more.

I left the camera home.  You didn't miss anything worth
seeing.  It's ugly out there, with dirty snow and gray skies... at
least they were gray when we were there.  Now it's almost dark and
the sky is just obscure.

Latest news on the Iron Dog snowmachine race, which has seen lots of
wrecked machines and injured riders this year:  weather conditions
have caused the trail to be shortened to avoid standing water on top of
ice.  This year's race has been more grueling than most.

END OF EDIT]

Lance
Mackey was first into Dawson City this afternoon.  If he finishes
the race, he’ll get four ounces of gold as his prize for being first
into Dawson.  I don’t know when or where Lance passed Hans Gatt,
who had been first out of Eagle yesterday.

The big stories coming out of this race involve the rescue of six
mushers and their teams who had gotten lost and/or pinned down by a
blizzard on Eagle Summit.  The Alaska Air National Guard made four
trips in a Pavehawk helicopter to get them all.

I heard one of the guardsmen on the radio talking about one of the dogs
that just didn’t want to stay back in the cargo area with the rest of
the dogs, and kept crawling forward into the cockpit.  After being
put back in the cargo bay several times, he finally settled on the
console between the pilots and they let him ride there.

Trail markers had been blown down or drifted over by snow, leading a
total of thirteen mushers from the Quest and the Yukon Quest 300, a
shorter race running concurrently, to be reported missing at least
temporarily.  Six mushers were airlifted out and the rest
straggled into checkpoints on their own. 

The mushers who were rescued by the National Guard were disqualified
from the race and some are trying now to get their entry fees refunded
because they say that race officials were responsible for their
problems, having told them that the trail was okay when in fact the
high winds and whiteout blizzard conditions made it impassible.

ADN.com has published four related stories over three days, but this one about the dogs is most interesting to me:

The story continues at that link above.

---

Your Five Factor Personality Profile

Extroversion: You have medium extroversion. You’re not the life of the party, but you do show up for the party. Sometimes you are full of energy and open to new social experiences. But you also need to hibernate and enjoy your “down time.” Conscientiousness: You have medium conscientiousness. You’re generally good at balancing work and play. When you need to buckle down, you can usually get tasks done. But you’ve been known to goof off when you know you can get away with it. Agreeableness: You have high agreeableness. You are easy to get along with, and you value harmony highly. Helpful and generous, you are willing to compromise with almost anyone. You give people the benefit of the doubt and don’t mind giving someone a second chance. Neuroticism: You have low neuroticism. You are very emotionally stable and mentally together. Only the greatest setbacks upset you, and you bounce back quickly. Overall, you are typically calm and relaxed – making others feel secure. Openness to experience: Your openness to new experiences is high. In life, you tend to be an early adopter of all new things and ideas. You’ll try almost anything interesting, and you’re constantly pushing your own limits. A great connoisseir of art and beauty, you can find the positive side of almost anything.

Your Love Element Is Earth

In love, you have consistency and integrity. For you, love is all about staying grounded and centered. You attract others with your zest for life and experiences. Your flirting style is defined by setting the scene, creating a unique moment in time. Steady progress and stability are the cornerstones of your love life. You may take things too slowly, but you never put your heart at risk. You connect best with: Fire Avoid: Wood You and another Earth element: need each other too much to build a good foundation

It has been months since I’ve had much of an urge to pursue my
memoirs.  Going back to the dangling end of the adolescence
thread, I discovered that I ended the Going Steady episode with a cliffhanger.  That was rude, I know.  Sarah
asked for more at the time, and there may have been one or two of the
rest of you who were left hanging, wondering what happened next in my
relationship with Larry.

I saw him a few more times at school before he, his mother Dolly, and
his brother Perry moved out of our neighborhood.  There were a
few phone calls after that, but very soon after the move that took him
out of Hamilton Jr. High, his family moved farther away, out of state,
and I didn’t hear from him again until I was seventeen, married and
separated from my first husband, with a two-year-old daughter.  The story of our reunion, written for our daughter
(who had tracked me down after growing up in an adoptive family, and
wanted to know her birth-family history), was the beginning of my
memoirs here.  That can be found at the start of the “story of the
‘sixties” links in the left module.

Until late in 2005, there had been no developments in my relationship
with Larry since the parting I described then.  For years, I would
see a tall blond man and think of Larry.  A few times, I followed
and approached one or another of them, only to discover it wasn’t
him.  Life went on, but Larry stayed steadily in my
thoughts.  When I came online I started searching for him and a
few other people whose memories remained strong within me.

I found my son Will, my Douglass cousins, and some old
classmates.  Larry had a common name, and my searches returned
many results.  I followed dozens of trails and none of them led to
Larry, his mother, his brother, or any of the Wichita branch of his
family I had known.  When I learned about Zabasearch last year, I
started over.  I found a mailing address for Perry, Larry’s
brother, and wrote to him.  After several months, I got a reply
from him.  He told me that Larry had been killed in a car crash in
Austin, Texas, “some years ago,” but he didn’t recall the date.

---

This episode begins with one of those “other stories” I referred to in
passing a couple of years ago when I skipped ahead in my story and told
the Panhandle Christmas
tale out of sequence.  Through circumstances I related in that
entry, in the late summer between seventh and eighth grades and for the
early months of eighth grade, in the time surrounding my twelfth
birthday, I had unlimited free movie passes.

I went to every Saturday matinee and to evening shows occasionally,
usually on Friday nights.  The social life at the Saturday shows
(not true matinees, but early morning kids-only Brer Fox Club shows, for
which I had a membership card) was much like what later developed among
teens at malls.  In the lobby and rest room before the show and at
intermission, and in the theater while the lights were up, girls would
congregate and talk about the boys. 

When the lights went down, there would be some shuffling around in the
seats and girls would pair off with boys for “necking” (kissing,
handholding and/or arms around shoulders or necks, of which nobody
seemed to disapprove) and “petting” (groping at breasts or genitals,
which some boys didn’t do and which no girl would admit to doing whether she
participated in it or not, for fear of getting a “bad reputation”).
 
One very cute boy was pointed out to me as “Frenchy.”  I guess he
was about two or three years older than I was, which would have put him
in my
grade or the one just ahead of me if he was in school.  None of
the girls there knew him from school.  Nobody knew his name. 
He was called Frenchy because
he liked to French kiss, with tongue.  This was notable because
most boys didn’t kiss at all and the ones who did usually puckered and
pecked. 

I think it was the very next Saturday after I had gotten the word about
Frenchy, when he sat down beside me after the lights went down in the
theater and put his arm around my shoulder.  I don’t know whether
one of the girls told him I liked his looks, or whether I caught his
eye, or maybe he just sampled all the new girls in the crowd. 
That last surmise has some credence, considering that I came down with
mononucleosis about that time and there was a lot of it going around.

Frenchy and I started meeting every Saturday morning at the Brer Fox
club, in “our place” by the windows upstairs, then we’d find seats at
the back of the balcony and spend the next three hours or so sucking
face.  [I love that term, which I first heard about a quarter century after these events occurred.]  I never saw Frenchy outside those Saturday movies.  His name was Roy Bear,
and he lived in North Wichita about as far from where I lived as
possible in that town.  We talked a little before the movies started and kissed a
lot after the lights went down.  He must have had some expert instruction, or else he was
naturally gifted.  He was an excellent kisser.  His soft,
sweet, deep kisses curled my toes and made my panties damp. 

He did also fondle my breasts, but not as ardently as Leroy Coy
had.  He was much better at kissing than Leroy had been, however,
and he seemed to appreciate my experience and passion.  During the
weeks and months I was there, we always sought each other out as soon
as we arrived and sat together exclusively.  I can only guess at
the gossip about us that went on amongst the girls in the
bathroom.  At the time, I didn’t even think about that. 
Making that move out of the gaggle of girls into a couple with Frenchy
seemed as natural as breathing.

Frenchy wasn’t my “steady”, however.  The Saturday meetings with
him didn’t seem to have any connection with the rest of my life. 
The movie theater where the Brer Fox Club met was in North Wichita and
I don’t recall ever seeing anyone from my school there.  I had a
succession of dates to movies and FAD Club (Fun And Dance) dances with
boys from my school, and one steady boyfriend during that time.

Dating was just one of the troublesome issues between Mama and me
around that time.  Clothing and cosmetics were a couple of
others.  She had ideas about what was age-appropriate.  They
differed markedly from mine, but I wore her down with my logic.  I
pointed out that the other kids my age were a year or two behind me in
school.   I made the honor roll about as often as not in junior
high, and always scored above average.  I convinced Mama that
since I was excelling over most of my classmates in school, it wasn’t
fair for me not to be allowed to join them in social activities.

She set curfews for me, insisted on driving my dates and me to the
movies and dances and either picked us up afterward or, if she was
going on a date that night, had us picked up by a cab for the ride
home.  A few times before my twelfth birthday, I went to movies
with guys who were fourteen or fifteen years old.  I had some
internal conflict each of those times over whether to reveal to them
that I was young enough to get in on a child’s ticket.  Imagining
them being appalled to take a “little girl” on a date, and maybe
turning right around and taking me home instead of to the movie, I kept
my mouth shut and they paid the adult admission price for both of us.

The clothes I wore were determined more by economy than fashion. 
When poodle skirts were the latest thing – full circular felt skirts
with wooly poodle appliques – I got a squirrel skirt with a real fur
tail, because it was marked down as a closeout after all the poodles
were sold.  I  had wanted a poodle skirt because “everyone
had them,” but after wearing my squirrel a few times I was glad I had
it.  It was classier:  black felt instead of the pink of the
poodles.   Poodles went out of fashion as fast as they came
in but my squirrel worked for me for several years, until his tail fell
off.

The only makeup Mama allowed me to wear was lipstick.  She had
been allowing me to use Tangee “natural” lipstick, the kind she always used,
for several years.  This was some odd-smelling translucent orange
stuff that went on transparent and turned pink or red a minute or two
after being applied.  Its color was apparently determined by
individual body chemistry, because it looked different on me than it
did on her.  It wore off quickly, leaving a colored outline
behind. 

In junior high, I talked my mother into letting me buy some coral-color
lipstick that was advertised as “kiss-proof.”  It wasn’t, not at
all.  It would end up smeared all over my face and that of the guy
I was kissing.  I got into the habit of putting on lipstick before
I left on a date because if I didn’t my mother would have been
suspicious.  Then I’d clean it all off before I started kissing
and try to remember to reapply it before I went home.

Bill, the boy I went steady with that year, moved into Granny’s
neighborhood during the summer while Mama and I had been on our trip to
California.  We started dating that summer before Mama got the
live-in job taking care of Mrs. Bull, the old lady who supplied all my
movie passes.  When we moved in with Mrs. Bull, it took me out of
the area for Hamilton, where Bill would be going to school, and put me
into the newly-built Truesdell school.  Bill and I spent a lot of
time on the phone, and had a standing movie date each Friday
night. 

In retrospect, I think that our being separated by that move
intensified our feelings for each other.  Each Friday night that
Mama let us ride home in a cab, Bill would be dropped off at his place
in Granny’s neighborhood before the cab took me on home to Mrs.
Bull’s.  We would cling to each other, hugging and kissing in the
back of the cab, murmuring about how much we would miss each other
until next week.  One night the cabbie told us, “Break it up,
you’re fogging my windows!”

Our summer romance continued up to Christmas and my trip with Mama to
Texas to meet her Bill.  I was emotionally devastated to be
leaving Frenchy and Bill.  I had been eagerly looking forward to
my first opportunity to lose my virginity, and there I was, being
parted from both of my best prospects, never having gotten past second
base.