The quarters of an astronomically determined pagan year, out
of phase with the mainstream calendar, are marked by feasts.  The
major
observances occur between equinoxes and solstices, at the Cross-Quarter
days.   Imbolc or Candlemas (Setsubun in Japan), a fire festival,
lies between Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox.   Between the
Equinox of Spring and the Summer Solstice is the fertility festival of
Beltaine (May Day or Whitsuntide).  The Cross-Quarter between
Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox is Lughnasad or Lammas, a
celebration of the sun, when crops are thriving and there is playtime
leisure between the labors of planting and harvesting.

The last Cross-Quarter day of the year is Samhain, the harvest
festival, Halloween, when the veil between the worlds is at its
thinnest and the spirits of the dead walk the Earth.  To some,
Samhain is the Feast of the Dragon.

  

Welcome to the Dragon’s Feast

  It seems to me that one
prevailing theme of this celebration is facing one’s fears.   I
suppose that makes sense, given that we are celebrating the time of
year when things die, ice and snow take over the land, and we must
depend for survival on those crops we can manage to store — if they
don’t rot — or on whatever animals we can hunt or trap.   What better
time could there be for focusing on fear?

I
have always enjoyed Halloween.  When I was little, it was the
opportunity to impersonate someone or something else — other –
different from my everyday self.  And, of course, there was the
candy.  I also got off on the thrills and chills of the generally spooky atmosphere of traditional Halloween celebrations.   In a younger body, with healthier adrenals, I sought out scary situations for the exhilaration of it.

Now
I no longer have the adrenal capacity to enjoy being scared. 
Coincidentally (or synchronistically, or due to simple
cause-and-effect) I am no longer easy to scare.  I am an ace facer
of fears.
That may seem  like a non-sequitur, but there’s a clear connection
between an ability or tendency to face fears, to not deny  or shy
away from things that scare us, and a consequent tendency not to be
scared.

 I have found to my delight that my no longer being frightened of
“scary” things such as spooks, storms, bats, spiders, bones (and the death
symbolized by them) has not taken away any of my enjoyment of
Halloween.  Even my abstinence from sugar and the fact that my
days of trick-or-treating are over can’t dull my pleasure in this
holiday. 

This is not a new occurrence for me.  I guess that Greyfox’s attitude toward Halloween was something like mine at the time we met, over sixteen years ago.  Neither of us had any qualms about being married on Halloween, when that day (a Thursday that year) turned out to be the most
convenient time to break off our preparations for the move to Alaska
long enough to cross the line from Pennsylvania to Virginia,  where we could marry without a waiting period or blood tests for syphilis.

 That evening, after the
brief formality of vows spoken before a magistrate, a little bit of
touristic poking about in the historic town of Winchester, and a visit to a civic club’s “haunted house,” Doug
got dressed up in his Ninja Turtle costume and we led him to a succession of big old houses along tree-lined
streets surrounding a neighborhood park.

Bear in mind that he had spent his entire life up to that point in Alaska. 
Meandering along sidewalks among trees shedding leaves in full fall
colors, going from door to door in a flimsy polyester turtle suit,
collecting a big bag of candy, were awesome novelties to the Kid. 
Here, trees have long been bare and there’s snow on the ground. Temperatures at Halloween can be near zero.  One year, it was twenty-five degrees below zero.

  Families pile into a car for the drive from one isolated dwelling to
the next, usually visiting no more than half a dozen places.  Householders either open the door quickly to toss candy
out, then shut the door to conserve heat, or they invite the trick-or-treaters in to show their costumes.  The costumes don’t show until the kids open their parkas for a
display.  When the kids get back home, they have to wait for the
candy to thaw out so they can eat it.  Of course the Kid was
impressed by a temperate zone Halloween.  He still remembers it.

 

Enjoy the

Don’t be frightened by

Remember the sacred aspect.

…and lay off the candy.  It’s not  healthful.

For animations, I owe thanks and a link to:   http://jsmagic.net/

I seldom mention the frequent conflicts between my son Doug and
me.  One reason for that is because conflicts come and go all the
time and are nothing extraordinarily notable.  Another reason is
that in my mind the ongoing harmony between us outweighs those
conflicts that flare up and pass quickly.  Even so, I am often at
odds with him over things that I want done RIGHT NOW and he doesn’t do
when I ask, tell, beg, nag, etc.  In contrast to those
aggravations, I know that he routinely takes care of the tasks such as
firewood that he knows are necessary, and I have the reassuring
confidence, born of a quarter century of experience, that he will come
through for me in a crisis.  He is often better in crises than I
am.

So, it all balances out, but I’m more Virgo than Libra so I am never
really satisfied with halvsies.  Our most recent of these
procrastination conflicts involved maintaining the cats’
litterboxes.  In summer, we leave a window open and the cats come
and go at will.  Mostly they prefer the great outdoors for their
deposits and we can let the poop scooping slide a day or two. 
Once that window is closed due to cold weather, that job becomes a
daily necessity.  With over a dozen cats, there are three litter
boxes.  Generally, unless I’m under the weather, I scoop the most
popular one in the hallway, and Doug takes care of the one behind the
sofa between the computer and the PS2, and the one in his room.

Recently, the combination of the seasonal shift and my illness left
Doug in charge of all three boxes and out of the habit of doing it
regularly.  Add to that the fact that he is running the current
fanfic writing tournament (time-consuming, demanding, and distracting)
in addition to his usual weekly online DM gig.  The upshot was
that litter boxes were neglected too long.  We clashed over it,
and additionally there has been a minor undercurrent of discontent
coming from me over his neglecting dishwashing during the
tournament.  It is minor
because I expect nothing else during these things, and it exists anyway
because I prefer tidy stacks of clean dishes over untidy piles of dirty
dishes.  But, frankly, either of those is preferable to washing
dishes myself, so….

Anyway, we’ve had a series of minor clashes lately, with me flaring up
over my unfulfilled expectations and Doug lashing out at me
occasionally for interrupting him, breaking his concentration, pulling
him away from his chosen activities and prior commitments.  Some
of these flareups work their way into full-blown confrontations, always
a productive course.  It is far preferable to discuss our
differences and resolve them than to snipe at each other in passing and
let the issues ferment as we quietly fume.

Yesterday when he got up, he surprised me with his reaction when I told
him that he needed to shovel snow off the roof before dark.  He
responded amicably as usual, but that didn’t give me any assurance that
he’d follow through.  He will frequently and skillfully blow me
off and shine me on with smiles, nods, and yesses.  That time, he
ate his breakfast at the keyboard as he dealt with the tournament
activity that had taken place as he slept.  Then he cleared the
roof of snow and went on to brush off my car and clear the driveway.

In keeping with my current state of relative well-being, I went out and
shoveled the footpath to the outhouse and from the front door out to
the part of the driveway that he was clearing.  That was the first
time I’ve been up to that task in years, and was the limit of my
physical activity for the day  We finished up the snoveling after
sunset as the light was fading.  Before I went to bed I persuaded
Doug to split some moderate-sized rounds instead of trying to burn them
whole, because that practice had caused the fire to go out the night
before.  He agreed, and complied.  I scooped my usual litter
box and reminded him to do the other two.  He said he would, but
then he never does say he won’t, even when he doesn’t.

The fire lasted through the night as I slept and he did his online
tasks.  As I was getting up before dawn this morning, he was
finishing up the kitty litter scooping in preparation for retiring for
his “night”.  Passing his bedroom door just after the light had
gone out, I thanked him for his recent prompt and cheerful
cooperation.  He recognized the subtext implying its novelty, and
muttered something that equated to, “you’re welcome.”  Then he
added, “I’ll slack off later.  That’s the best kind of
procrastination.”

First Snow

This is not my favorite time of year.  I don’t have a single
favorite season, but this one doesn’t even make the list of faves at
all.  It hasn’t always been that way for me.  When Doug was
in school and we had to walk about half a mile before dawn to the
school bus stop, first snow brightened the place,  made the road
easier to see, and provided contrast for any moose there that we might
have needed to avoid.

I’m feeling satisfied and virtuous for having gotten out there during
recent weeks and gleaned all the stray firewood that had accumulated in
the yard for several years.  It’s too late now, with everything
covered in snow, but that’s okay because I got the last of it hauled
inside a couple of days ago to begin drying out.

The feelings from having made a water run yesterday are just as
satisfied, but not so virtuous because this was something that just had
to be done, a routine task.  I was weak, wobbly and uncoordinated
from the aftermath of my recent wood chopping, so Doug did the heavy
work and I just recorded the event.

There wasn’t much to differentiate this run from any winter water
run.  A lid was stuck on its bucket with ice and Doug tugged at it
until, in frustration, he swung it around and mimed smashing it onto the
outlet pipe.  Then he tapped it a few times and pried off the
lid.  Nothing unusual in that.  One thing that was a bit
different was that cold weather hasn’t been here long enough to have
built up a mass of ice on the freight pallet platform.  It was
just a semi-slushy crust.  Doug stomped around to break it up,
then kicked it away.

Bleak, isn’t it?

---

In the news:
Corpse worship rears its ugly skull.

Two German Soldiers in Afghanistan have been suspended
for being photographed “playing” with a human skull.  To me, and
to Greyfox with whom I discussed the story yesterday as well, I am
certain, as to Doug with whom I don’t need to discuss this latest
incident to know his stance, this is absurd.

If it had been the inert remains of a horse or a dog, for example, the
photos would have passed without comment.  But because that skull
might have belonged to someone’s granny in a past now gone, these
supposedly formerly adequate soldiers are disgraced and unemployed.

Garbage!  Refuse, cast-offs, more durable than flesh but not quite
as permanent as rocks:  that’s what bones are.  A lot of
false and limiting beliefs, probably originating in the far prehistoric
past from well-founded fears of contagion, have endured and expanded
into superstitious reverence for mortal remains.

If you disagree with me, I’d be willing to discuss the matter further.  Otherwise, enough said.

Those are not my words.  I heard that statement yesterday, from a
news analyst on public radio.  I think news analysts have similar
job descriptions to those of the people that were called commentators,
once upon a time.  His commentary was built upon something that
Rush Limbaugh said about Michael J. Fox.

They played a sound bite from a political TV spot made by Michael J.
Fox, in which his voice quavered from his Parkinsonian tremor. 
Apparently, his disorder was even more evident in the video.  The
candidate whom Mr. Fox was endorsing supports embryonic stem cell
research.  (So, by the way, do I.)  His point, I suppose, was
that stem cell research currently offers more hope than any other for a
possible cure for such disorders as Parkinson’s disease, and is
deserving of the same governmental financial support as less promising
avenues of research are receiving.

The list of disorders without cures, for which many people think stem
cells might hold the answer, is a long one.  I  have heard
optimistic researchers say that stem cell research has potential
benefits we have not yet imagined.  That ignorance, superstition,
and political manipulation (AKA “public diplomacy” [in Newspeak] or
old-fashioned propaganda) are preventing such research from going on is
an offense against humanity, but that is not my point here and now.

Rush Limbaugh reportedly accused Michael J. Fox of avoiding his
medication in order to exaggerate his symptoms for that political ad,
and that his tremor was also exaggerated through “acting.”  He was
said to have later issued a conditional apology, in case his original
accusation was false.  But he went on to say that Mr. Fox was
exploiting his disability, and implied (if not stated outright) that
such “exploitation” is wrong.

Limbaugh’s implied subtext, that disabilities should not be publicly
displayed, reveals that his attitudes have not been keeping up with
social progress.  In my youth, people with physical or mental
disabilities were kept closeted in the family home or warehoused in
institutions, out of the public eye.

I see signs of the aformentioned religious
superstitious ignorance and fear in that cultural practice.  Since
(it was believed) imperfections and disabilities were the signs of
God’s displeasure, nobody wanted to reveal to their neighbors that
their family did not enjoy the Lord’s favor.  In some communities,
such facts, if made public, could lead to ostracism and worse. 
The family business might be boycotted, their family home burned, or
family members attacked and even sometimes killed.

I’m glad our cultural mores are becoming more enlightened.  I used
to take pride in the fact that some of my friends and acquaintances
didn’t know that I was handicapped, even as I missed a lot of school
due to illness and then lost job after job because of frequent
absences.  All that has changed for me, through influences such as
National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week.  I certainly take no pride in my illness, nor am I ashamed to let it show.

I don’t mean that I go out of my way to tell just anyone and everyone
(except you, my readers here) that my limping, whimpering and frequent
absences are manifestations of myalgic encephalomyelopathy / chronic
fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome.  But I do communicate openly
with friends and neighbors, largely to convey to those with similar
“invisible” disabilities the message that it’s okay to let it show.

Yesterday, when I heard that radio commentary, I had just returned from
taking a sugar-free, gluten-free custard pie up the highway to Lois at
her bake shop.  Months ago, when our casual conversation had
revealed that both of us have sensitivities to wheat gluten and her
husband is diabetic, I had promised I’d bring her a sample of one of
the gluten-free recipes I’d developed through my experimentation.

It took me this long to get around to doing it, because I have “good
days” and “bad days” and all summer I had been using the energy of
those good ones for other work.  Lois understood; in fact she was
surprised to learn that I’d actually meant it when I made that
promise. 

Carol, another neighbor with food sensitivities who dropped in while I
was there, also understood about the “bad” days.  She has them,
too.  Our conversation, which probably wouldn’t have taken place
in the old days of that hide-the-gimps paradigm, provided to us all a
sense of community and included an exchange of information that can be
beneficial to each of us.

I find it odd, as did the commentator yesterday, that Limbaugh has been
so public about “exploiting” his own addictive disorders and yet is so
judgmental about another man’s Parkinsonism.  Go figure. :-}

I applaud Mr. Fox for his stance on funding for stem cell
research.  Regarding his disease, I admire his openness, as I did
when Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali went public with their
disabilities.  The fact that I am not equally impressed with Rush
Limbaugh’s openness about his illness has nothing to do with its being
addictive in nature.  When you get to the bottom line of all these
disorders it’s ABC, all brain chemistry.

I’m a sucker for a bargain.  These brown corduroy pants were
reduced for quick sale at the thrift shop, only fifty cents.  The
elastic waistband still has stretch in it and the knees aren’t
threadbare.  What more could I want in a pair of pants? 
Well, about six more inches of length in the legs, for starters. 
These pants would fit a much shorter woman than me.

But the pants are soft and comfy.  They fit, even if they do show
a lot of shin above my shoes.  They’re okay for pajamas, I said to
myself.  Then I slept in them.  If you’ve never slept in
loose corduroy pants, it’s a real experience.  When I roll over in
bed, I roll over in the pants because the inside is smooth and the ribs
on the outside drag on the sheets and keep the pants in place.

Live and learn.

[EDIT]

Mercury is slowing down for its retrograde station this weekend. 
That’s my excuse.  The pants with great traction were not all I
had to blog about today.  I also wanted to mention the
weather.  It’s solidly frozen out there, after three days of
below-freezing temps.  We have been burning up a lot of old, wet,
rotting wood to save the good stuff for when it’s truly cold and we
need more heat.  I have to put one of those heavy wet chunks in
the stove about three hours before we want it to burn.  It takes
that long for it to dry out enough to burn.  I’ve spent a lot of
my time feeding the stove, but there’s some perverse pleasure in
knowing that I’ve cleaned a lot of rotting wood out of the yard and
saved some of the good stuff for later.

The winter dark is coming on.  Today, we have nine hours and nine minutes of daylight.  *sigh*

PPS:

adifferentkindofbeautiful
asked how cold it is now.  That sounds like the setup for a joke:  “It’s so cold….” 

It is 18.7 F, -7.4 C.  Night temps have been in the teens and
daytime temps in the twenties for days and daze.  I’m waiting for
the ice on the muskeg to get thick enough to walk on.  It’s rare
to have ice out there without snow.

The muskeg had an eerie look about it just after sunrise today, before the fog burned off and the thin layer of ice melted.

By the time I was out there, the frost was melted in sunny areas, but still showing in shady places.

Lastly, there’s the shot below, which was in the camera’s memory when I
saved these pictures today.  I captured it a few days ago when I’d
gotten outside too late to catch the most intense color of the sunrise
and didn’t feel it would be worth posting.  Was it?

Greyfox is working a gun show this
weekend, and Doug is hanging out here waiting for me to finish this so
he can get on the computer for his weekly Saturday D&D
session. 

I have had a comeuppance of sorts, but I’m stubbornly refusing to call
it a relapse.  I think I overdid this week, got overconfident and
expended more energy than I really had.  Today, nothing is working
right, including eyes and ears.  I spill things, miss what I’m
reaching for, and I stumbled and fell onto the woodstove this
morning.  No burns, but as I told Greyfox, it’s not exactly the
softest object in the room.

I am humbly resuming some of the asthma meds, the Singulair pills, but
do not intend to resume regular use of the more dangerous Advair. 
I’ll continue the tapering-off on that one.

“Cursed Memories” is the subtitle of the PS2 game, Disgaea 2, that I’m
currently playing.  I suppose it’s natural enough that those words
would have come to mind today as the work I was doing in the yard
reminded me of a time seven years ago when I was doing a similar task.

At that time, I had been in an extended period of remission.  I
had been capable of nearly normal levels of activity, even if I did
occasionally need extra time to recover from fatigue.  I had been
completely off asthma medication for about eight years, except for an
occasional use of an over-the-counter inhaler if heavy exertion or
laughing too hard, for example, triggered a rare attack.

Doug, Greyfox and I had been getting in firewood for the winter. 
We had bought a load of birch rounds, which had been dumped beside the
driveway.  The three of us were working on getting it split,
hauled closer to the house in a wheelbarrow, and stacked.  We
worked together at times, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes one of us
would get out there alone and shift some wood.  That day, Doug was
in school and Greyfox was in Talkeetna at his stand, working.

I had split several rounds, probably enough wood to fill the
wheelbarrow twice.  It was piling up around the chopping block, so
I put down the axe and moved the wheelbarrow over to where I was
working.  As I bent to pick up a piece of wood, I pitched forward
onto my face.  I didn’t even feel dizzy until after I’d gotten up
again.  The most severe M.E. exacerbation to date hit me that
suddenly.

It was probably a viral infection that hit me.  There is a
widespread belief that myalgic encephalomyelopathy / chronic fatigue
immunodysfunction syndrome occurs as a sequel to viral
infections.  Whatever it was, I was in bad shape.  For months
I could not get from room to room without hanging onto something or
someone.  I cruised around the walls and furniture like an infant
learning to walk.  The effort of disentangling the covers to roll
over in bed was more than I could manage without triggering an asthma
attack.

Remembering this is unpleasant, for sure.  But that’s not what
triggered the “cursed memories” thought.  Remembering how ill I
have been might tend to get me back into thinking of myself as being
ill.  I am walking a fine line here between denial and
defeatism.  Realistically, I’m not as strong and healthy as I had
been before that relapse, but neither am I as sick and helpless as I
had been immediately after it.

Today, I worked until I got out of breath.  I was picking up split
wood and small rounds from the ground around the big woodpile. 
The spruce and hemlock, I piled next to Doug’s chopping block to be
split for kindling.  The few pieces of useless poplar, and
anything too rotten to burn, I tossed off into the woods.  The
birch, I pitched toward the cabin, where Doug has started a stack under
the roof overhang at the end of the porch.  I couldn’t pitch it
all the way.  It’s about three pitches from the woodpile to the
porch.

Aware that my energy is limited, I tried to work smart.  I
switched between overhand and underhand pitches, and used both hands on
bigger pieces.  I said to myself a couple of times, “Work smarter,
not harder.”  I need such advice, really I do.  I noticed as
I worked that I made more distance underhanded than overhanded.  I
got more distance with my left arm than with the right, but with less
accuracy.  The greater distance might have been because my right
arm had begun to fatigue before I started using the left.

I enjoyed the exercise and activity.  Beyond the physical exhilaration, I enjoy the idea 
of recovery, remission, or whatever is going on here.  I started
gradually withdrawing from my asthma medications a few months
ago.  I stopped the Singulair pills all at once, cold turkey, but
tapered off on the Advair inhalers, going down first to every two days
and then to every three days.  Now I only use Advair when I feel
the burning sensation in my lungs, which has been about once a week
this month.  Today’s exertions did render me short of breath for a
while, but I recovered from that without even resorting to any
albuterol.

I feel the burn in my muscles, but that’s something I often feel even
when I’m not exerting myself.  That might be the only plus to this
disorder:  muscles don’t atrophy with inactivity, because the
motor neurons are firing all the time.  It’s the reason we have
the fatigue, muscle spasms, and discomfort, but there is that one
advantageous aspect to it, and Mama always told me to look on the
bright side.

I can hear thumping noises, so I know Doug is either pitching wood at
the porch or splitting some.  I need, first of all, to get
something to eat.  Then I will decide whether I’ll go back out and
do more work today.  This is what makes my day:  having the
option, not being so sick that the decision is already made for me.

This has been an extraordinarily wet and cloudy season.  Today,
there is harsh weather all over the state.  Seward and Cordova are
flooded and media are broadcasting warnings about water contamination
and instructions for decontaminating it, basically boil before
use. 

High winds have been tearing up towns on all sides of us.  Down
the valley in Wasilla, Greyfox had to close his stand, which he hasn’t
been able to open most days this summer, when high wind and heavy rain
moved in.  Here, we live in open country where although the wind
does blow, it doesn’t have the wind tunnel effect that accelerates it
excessively in hillside areas.

After a brief, gusty hailstorm today, there were a few breaks in the clouds, so I took a walk.

It would take no more than a few more inches of water to overflow the
road in this section of the muskeg that was dammed when the subdividers
put in this short road to nowhere… nowhere except the turnaround
circle at the end of the cul de sac.  That “relief valve”, this
time of year, would prevent the water from overflowing the street where
we live, which is a bit higher than the cul de sac.  Early spring
runoff, on the other hand, tends to overflow our road first because
this nowhere track doesn’t get plowed and accumulates a higher dam of
ice and snow.

After I’d been out there in the wind a while, watching the clouds move
across the sky, one of those breaks in the clouds let a little sunshine
through.