The Mercury - Mars - Jupiter weirdness continues.  It would be pointless to try and describe it.  Maybe after it passes I can get some coherent perspective on it.  The T-square is right smack in line with my good ol' "intensity pattern," and Pluto right now is in the pattern too, conjunct my Ascendant and trine transiting Saturn.  No matter what I do:  meditate, walk around the neighborhood, surf the web - I keep ending up in weird places.  It's fun.  It would be more fun if I had words to describe it.

In this way, I have learned that Yahoo and Google search engines like some of my cat images, coming back to them frequently.  I discovered that many people searching for cookie recipes find my FUBARS -- and I often wish some of them would leave comments and tell me what they think.  I observed that the frequent site traffic I was getting from the Ukraine stopped shortly after I privatized that old photo of me combing my hair when fresh out of the shower.  First, there was a brief interval during which a lot of hits from the Ukraine went to Xanga's "bug" page.

I know I've said this before, but here it comes again:  generally, I don't like repeating myself.  Often, though, something I want to say is something I've already said.  This morning, one of the recent trails of Footprints led to The Tightrope Walk.  Everything in there is relevant and applicable to here and now for me, and it's already there so I don't have to repeat it here.

This week's subject is suggested by LadyLioness1973:

Pose for the camera!

I'm participating, but I have a point to make.  Posing is better left to professional models.

No, wait a minute... I just recalled that my beloved Old Fart, spouse, soulmate and partner in crime, Greyfox (not the name on his birth certificate, but his real name all the same), AKA ArmsMerchant, could be considered a professional model, since he got paid for sitting nude for an art class while we were on our honeymoon.

Still, when shooting him, I try to catch him unawares because it often means the difference between this:

and this:

Same man, same time, same place (City of Rocks State Park, New Mexico, during the aforementioned honeymoon).  The upper one was captured before he noticed that I had the camera pointed at him.

Doug captured these images of me, posed -

and candid -

Not that I do much better when posing for my own camera.

This was my first attempt at a digital self-portrait.  I captured the light, anyway.

Naaah... posing is for posers.

I'm not all here.  I am aware of these energies, recognize where and how I was carried along with them earlier in the week.  As this influence intensified, however, I did some kind of metaphorical explosion/implosion thing.  I pulled a Billy Pilgrim, came unstuck in time.  I feel like a tethered balloon, floating about in the breeze, but still connected by a thin thread.

It is fun getting this high without having to do drugs to get here.   I cannot avoid seeing multiple aspects of every issue.  I like this.  All the dualistic traps inherent in language and culture are highlighted and I fly over them almost before I'm aware of them. 

Poignant sadness for my dear one's lost opportunities is a "good" feeling because to be numb would be such a loss to us both and for him not to recognize the loss would make it all for nothing.

Nothing matters precisely because everything matters so very much.  Email overlooked for weeks makes much more sense and has more usefulness now than it could have done if read and deleted weeks ago.  Time is the very real and tangible foundation of everything, from a tadpole's metamorphosis into a frog, to the urgent need for roof repair before this year's snowfall, and yet time is meaningless.

I laugh at the way I used to try so hard to stop struggling... at that phase I went through upon learning of the pointless destructiveness of fear, when I was afraid to be afraid.  It doesn't matter whether I'm laughing at my own foolishness and foibles or shedding tears of joy because I am present to feel the pain.  Like everything else, this will pass, in time, where it always was and always will be, so it won't, really.

The big waterfowl are leaving.  I have been listening to cranes today, flying over, headed south.  Weather for three days has varied from drizzle to downpour, with periods of mist and fog in between.  I will wait a few days, hoping for sunshine, before attempting to work on the roof in the rain.

I am pleased that slave_slutangel brought the word, "fantasy," into the discussion of romance and male-female relations.  I think that "fantasy" is the most appropriate word to follow the word, "romantic," but it hadn't occurred to me in that context yesterday.

To me, that sounds like a healthy attitude, one that, if I understand her correctly, I share.  People who don't have fantasies are missing a piece of their consciousness.  The ones who seem to me to be nuts, and dangerous in the aggregate to whatever extent the culture is influenced by them, are those who feel threatened by reality and deny it, who guard their fantasies, believing in them despite evidence to the contrary, and trying to make them their reality.

I was googling around this morning, trying to find a particular quotation whose author I didn't remember, the words of which I had misremembered.  It took a while, and the search took me off on several delightful side trips on one of which fantasy came up again.  I looked up the definition of "fantasy."

Eventually, I did find that quote I had been seeking:

Kierkegaard also said:

Another nineteenth century philosopher said:

Do you know who said those things?  If those quotes didn't give it away, the next two probably will.

I suppose I'll get over it.  I'll choose, at some point, to put it out of my mind, at least temporarily, and move on.  I wouldn't want to live in the constant keen realization of the illogic and injustice of it all for very long, so before very long I will focus on the more pleasant aspects of reality and let the depressing bullshit go.  That's how it usually happens:  to begin with, something hits me and sets off a chain of associations.

Today it started when I woke from a dream about a man who was cheating on both his wife and his mistress.  The mistress found out and, after a sequence of scenes that were visually reminiscent of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and dramatically similar to any number of soaps, she had the guy dangling by a rope from a cliff, screaming for her to pull him up.  She got into her car, with the rope tied to its rear bumper, and it appeared that she was going to pull the guy up, when she lit the fuses on the explosives strapped to her thighs, and blew her legs off.  I guess that showed him, eh?

The first thought to cross my conscious mind when I woke from that was, "WTF?!"  Then my mind wandered through a series of associations ranging from myth (the book I'm reading now continually refers to Medea, who murdered her own children to get revenge on their father for straying from the marriage bed) through fairy tales, cultural mores, religion, and soap opera, and into neuroelectrochemistry.  It is becoming a familiar pathway for me.  I start out marveling and puzzling over human stupidity and end up with some logical perspective on it but no assurance that we are going to see things improve for at least several generations yet, if at all.

Viewed from an anthropological, zoological or biological perspective, we know that the most favorable reproductive strategy for a female is to choose the best available male for a mate, one who not only has healthy genetic material to pass along, but who can protect and provide for his mate and their offspring.  In current cultural terms, this usually translates into good looks and money.  This strategy has the best potential for assuring that a woman's children will survive long enough to reproduce and her DNA will endure through a maximum number of generations.

The optimal reproductive strategy for a male to ensure the propagation and perpetuation of his DNA is to inseminate the maximum number of healthy females, "healthy," again, being defined as "good looking."  We are hardwired to find beauty in physical symmetry, strength, grace, and the various outward signs of robust health, such as shiny hair and clear skin.  Neurochemists have discovered that we also respond to olfactory signals, which would tend to explain why so many people who don't fit all the common criteria for physical beauty are nevertheless very sexy.  Robert A. Heinlein went on at length, in several of his books, about the sexy body odor of redheads.  We're an eye-brained species, so that many people consciously focus on the visual aspects while being unconsciously led around by their noses.

At the dawn of human history, when people started carving records in stone that have endured into the present, the institution of marriage existed in a form that had by then certainly been developing over many generations, for millennia.  Rich, powerful, strong men had many wives, and generally had their pick of the choicest specimens.  These guys were civilized, of course, and some of those wives were chosen for strategic political purposes, to form alliances between powerful families, for example

After politics and priesthoods got involved, and limitations were placed on the numbers of wives a man could have, the bigger fish and fatter cats supplemented those numbers with a theoretically unlimited number of concubines.  A king, chieftain or warlord would end up with a mixed brood of offspring, including beautiful bastards from gorgeous concubines and ill-formed or funny looking heirs from the politically expedient wives.  If you have ever wondered how some of the royal families of Europe, or the richest ones in the U.S., got to be so funny looking, wonder no more.  Some of it is inbreeding, of course, and some of it is politicoeconomic expediency, which has always been able to find mates for otherwise unattractive boys and girls.

By the time of the European Middle Ages, the situation had grown so absurd that nobles were specifically expected to marry not for love but for political advantage, and a new kind of love, "courtly love," came into vogue.  Highborn ladies were recognized as the property, first, of their fathers and, then, of the husbands to whom their fathers sold or traded them.  Women were not expected to love their husbands.  That much was realistic and practical.  The less practical aspect of courtly love was that lovers were expected to love each other from afar, to respect the one-sided bonds of matrimony that kept a woman in a chastity belt and exerted no similar restraint upon her husband.  Of course, biology will find its way; witness Lancelot and Guinevere.

Just think of all the suffering and destruction that has occurred because of the unreasonable expectations set up in the rules and strictures of marriage as we know it.  Medea's solution is a fine example.  The old double standard makes a sort of one-sided sense, because it allows for a man to spread his seed far and wide the way he is biologically set up to do.  Such mores and customs are problematic only because the myth of marriage, and the vows that men and women exchange, lead a woman to expect a man to save it all for her. 

Likewise, the institution as it exists tends to discourage a woman from moving on to the next guy when one comes along who is obviously a better catch than the one she's currently stuck with.  Husbands have gotten away with double murders in such cases, and continue to do so when they keep their wits about them sufficiently to avoid leaving evidence of premeditation.  That is civilized behavior, in that it is endemic in urban culture.  It is not very highly evolved behavior, but it is civilized, and it is condoned by religious and political authorities.

Don't get the idea here that I'm condoning "marital infidelity," "sexual promiscuity," or any similar invidious pejorative dyslogisms.  Such phrases simply codify judgmentalism and give ammunition to moralistic morons.  I also don't want to give the impression that I believe men and women are incapable of mating for life.  It happens, and there are definite neuroelectrochemical analogs for companionable bonding, just as there are for sexual attraction and mating, but such bonding is much more optional, while the buzz and rush of infatuation and lust can take us unawares and all unwilling.

I am in favor of knowledge and understanding, and I understand that it is not an easy task to shove the facts down the throats of a populace reared on soap opera and indoctrinated with fairy tales and religious myths.  I view these culturally entrenched false and limiting beliefs as a disease state.  There is a minority of people who recognize the pathology in the mythology and attempt to live their lives free of it.  However, laws, customs and mores tend to interfere with their freedom.  Those who have chosen to live in chains would prefer to see everyone chained, so the free ones have to homeschool their kids and keep them away from mass media, which is difficult at best and practically impossible.   The myth is so seductive that I have friends who get defensive about it when I bring up the role of brain chemistry in romantic love.  They admit that the biological facts are "interesting," but they prefer to believe in fairy tales.

It is probably too late to help such incurable romantics.  If someone has been practicing serial monogamy into middle age and still keeps looking for Prince Charming, the only cure for her is menopause.  She has most likely already infected her daughters, but we can try to inoculate the grandkids with a dose of neuroelectrochemical data and a few courses of history, psychology and sociology.  As long as I look at the situation that way, and think of the potential for a more rational culture, I can live with today's bullshit.  And as long as I can occasionally rant about it, I may be able to avoid going postal and walloping my Cinderella friends with their own squirrel fur slippers.

I read a lot, and I have noticed that many of my favorite authors, in dedications and acknowledgments, express their appreciation for editors and other readers who have helped them produce something readable that made sense.  You guys are my editors.  Your comments let me know when I'm giving a false impression, or not getting my point across.  I have already said that I am going to dedicate my memoirs, when I
publish them, to Xanga, and especially to a few of you who have made
either editorial or financial contributions.  It has become apparent that I'll probably have to resort to the, "too numerous to mention," cop out.

I'm not as concerned as the fiction writers are with having my story make sense.  As Mark Twain said, "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."  My concern is that the story tell my truth, without distortion, evasion, denial or lies.  If you've never tried to do this, you have no idea how difficult it is.  The biggest pitfall for me seems to be a set of things that are obvious, self-evident, and needless to say, from my perspective, but which turn out to be not so obvious to the rest of you. 

One complicating factor is that those who are coming in on the story relatively late don't have the back story and the perspective on my life that long time readers do.  Sorting this out so that I give enough background as I go along to allow each episode to stand alone, and don't repeat myself so much that it will require a lot of editing when I compile these stories into a book, is a big challenge.

Comments on the birth of my first daughter turned out to be a mixed bag.  Betty and Michelle, who have been with me almost as long as I have been on Xanga, left me some simple atta-girls, which I appreciate because it's nice knowing that old friends are still around following the story.  A few newer readers just said "Wow!" or the equivalent, also welcome acknowledgments that somebody's paying attention.  And some of the comments suggested that the events were somehow scary, or that I was brave and strong.

I have already edited and revised that entry to reflect some of the feelings I hadn't made explicit, and to correct a misstatement and expand on other bits.  I also need to address that "brave" business and what WYRMFaery said: "
I would've been terrified to deliver my own baby."

My mother used to say that I "didn't have sense enough to be scared."  My father had taught me to be brave, and had ridiculed my mother's fears.  In retrospect, I think it is more sensible not to be afraid, especially in dangerous or life-threatening situations.  Much better, I think, to keep one's wits about one and deal with the emergency, than to run scared.

When my first daughter was born, I didn't have time to get scared, or to be brave.  Marie's arrival surprised me as much as anyone.  The doctor said I'd be in labor for eight hours or more, and I believed him.  Sister Diane said I had "good hips," shaped for easy birthing, and I had been reassured by that.  I was excited, exhilarated, my bloodstream awash with adrenaline,  dopamine, endorphin and oxytocin.  There's no way I could have felt anything but carried away with the experience.

I have birthed five babies, four of them alive and one stillbirth.  That first one, alone and unattended, with nobody there to interfere with my natural processes or to come between me and my new baby, was the easiest and best.  The next one, my second daughter, Carol, AKA Angie, was born on a gurney outside the emergency room just moments after a hurried taxicab ride to the hospital.  Those experiences of precipitous labor (which I still consider a gift or a special talent, and obstetricians consider a "complication") led me to persuade my second husband to buy a car so that my first son wouldn't be born on the back of a motorcycle.

The next one was my stillborn son.  If you're at all curious, read the story.  It's a long one, as that labor was, but not nearly so difficult to tell as it was to live through.  Nine years after that horrendous experience, I got pregnant again.  My history of complicated pregnancies (I'd had twice as many early term miscarriages as successful fullterm pregnancies) and the stillbirth, had my obstetrician in Anchorage monitoring me closely.  I think I have written about Doug's birth, but didn't save the link.  It was a scary pregnancy, with several panicked trips to the hospital when he'd stop moving around for several hours at a time.  One of the sweetest sounds in the world is a heartbeat over a fetal monitor, demonstrating that a baby, whose survival was uncertain, is alive.  The birth itself was uncomplicated, though the labor was the longest for any of my live births:  about three hours.

Based on all my experiences of birthing, if I were going to do it again, my preference would be to do it all naturally, at home, and alone except for the child's father, with a competent midwife on hand in case of problems.  Hospitals are not appropriate places for births, and not much better for deaths.  The rise of birthing centers and hospices shows that I am not alone in that feeling.  Statistics on the numbers of unnecessary and elective (!?WTF?) caesarian surgeries are horrifying to me.   Childbirth is as natural a part of life as is puberty, sex, conception, or death.  Surgery is unnatural, and I cannot imagine electing to have it if I didn't need it.  No matter how much technology or how many "expert" professionals we allow to intervene in the process, ultimately, one way or another, we all birth our own babies.

This episode comes after another inept suicide attempt.

Back "home" at Mama's house after having my stomach pumped and being read the Riot Act by Sister Diane at the hospital, I was in a bleak frame of mind.  The baby in my belly wasn't truly real to me even though I had been feeling independent movement down there for months.  Occasionally, I'd be awakened by an unusually strong spasmodic kick, but usually it was pressure on my bladder that woke me.  Sometimes a book I was reading would be jostled by some pointy part of the miniature anatomy and I would watch the little bulge creep across my abdomen, then disappear.

As with all new experiences, it was very interesting.  It was also increasingly uncomfortable, especially after the false labor began.  After, first, the ambulance run to the hospital in Amarillo to prevent a miscarriage brought on by pushing Ford's lover's Buick, and then being hauled unconscious into Vernon's Christ the King Hospital to have my stomach pumped, I started making frequent trips to the doctor (or to the hospital out of office hours) because my mother thought I was in labor.

Sister Diane told her (and me) that it was, "false labor."  I don't recall hearing anyone at that time mention Braxton Hicks.  Even the doctor referred to it as false labor.  My mother-in-law, whose daughter Sandy was born about that time, said she had experienced it with each of her pregnancies.  The general impression I got was that nobody except my mother thought much of it, but it put her into a panic of fear that I'd "lose the baby."   Since Mama seemed to be the only one entertaining such fears, and I had long ago given up on her as a total and hopeless moron, I wasn't scared... at least not of that.

My fears were of a different sort.  I was afraid that Mama had been right about the inadvisability of my getting married so young, that nobody would ever love me, that people would think I was stupid or foolish for having married a man who knocked me up, knocked me around and then dumped me, or that they would think I had been a bad wife and that was why my husband didn't love me.  In other words, I didn't know what was going on, what I should think about it, or how to cope.  Business as usual, for me at that time of my life.

We were not sure of my due date.  The first doc to examine me, in Amarillo, had assigned an arbitrary date because his exam indicated that the date of my last menstrual period couldn't have been right.  In retrospect, based on my baby's birthdate and birth weight, we decided I'd had two periods after I became pregnant.  As subsequent pregnancies and babies came along, I got used to "spotting" in the early months of my pregnancies and learned to recognize that I was pregnant by the nausea, and my nipples turning from pink to brown.

I also subsequently got used to Braxton Hicks contractions and finally, by the time Doug was born twenty-two years later, to appreciate them.  My Lamaze instructor in 1981 said they get the uterine muscles toned and in shape for the real thing, and shorten labor times.  Short labor has always been something I appreciated, although I never met an obstetrician or delivery room nurse who liked it.  It catches them by surprise and makes them scramble.

In early September, someone had the bright idea of throwing me a baby shower.  The women who showed up for it included two former landladies of my mother's and mine, her employer's wife, my mother-in-law and some of my husband's step-cousins and aunts, and the Spanish teacher who had tried to talk me out of quitting school to get married.  I got a pretty good haul of new baby clothes, in white, green and yellow: sex-neutral colors.  My mother-in-law had already given me some infant-sized hand-me downs that Sandy had outgrown.

Most, if not all, of the women at my shower were mothers, and it's a law of the universe that in any group of women that includes both mothers and at least one woman in her first pregnancy, there are going to be labor and delivery stories told.  My mother told the story I'd heard a thousand times, of my birth.  She was in labor for three days, I was born butt-first, helped along with forceps, and for a while nobody was sure if either of us would survive.  The women who didn't have scary enough stories of their own to tell recounted horror stories they had heard from other women. 

Maybe they scared me.  I don't think so, don't recall feeling scared.  They certainly seemed to be trying to scare me.  I recall thinking that they were trying to scare me, that it was like telling ghost stories around the fire at Scout camp.  I also recall thinking that it was already more than nine months since my wedding and my baby wasn't born yet, and wondering if anyone had been counting.  Part of me was hoping that everyone would realize that I hadn't "had to" get married.  Another part of me was feeling smug and superior because I knew the whole story and they didn't.

On my fifteenth birthday in mid-September,1959, Ford showed up on my mother's doorstep with a gift of fancy lingerie, and talked his way back into my life.  It wasn't difficult.  He said all the right things:  that he loved me, he was sorry, Sarah hadn't meant a thing to him, he couldn't live without me, it would never happen again, and he wanted to care and provide for me and our baby.  Although his professions of love pushed my very prominent insecurity button, none of that was as compelling a reason for me to take him back as my need to show my mother that my marriage hadn't been a mistake after all. 

At the time, Ford was jobless.  He moved into my room at Mama's house.  Within a day or two, he was just as verbally abusive as ever, using rough sex and oral rape to assert his dominance, as usual.  Within a couple of weeks, he had found a job doing unskilled work on a road construction crew.  With his first paycheck, we rented a house next to the one on Indian Street where my mother and I had lived, owned by our wonderful, motherly landlady Marie.  The rooms were large, and for the first time we had a house with a bedroom, and not a "studio" style with the bed in the living room.  The lot was shady and our floors were a cement slab, making the place blessedly cool and comfortable.

One Saturday in the middle of October, on my father's birthday, my contractions kept growing stronger and closer together.  In the early afternoon, Ford decided we should call my mother.  She came and gave me a ride to the hospital.  Sister Diane put me on a table in the ER, with my feet in the stirrups, and examined me.  She said it looked like the real thing that time, and that I had "good hips" and should have an easy time of it.  She called my doctor.  He told her to admit me, and he'd be there as soon as he finished that round of golf.

By the time he got there, about 2:30 that afternoon, my contractions had stopped.  We all waited around a while, and after he did a thorough exam, he decided to break my water and get the process going again.  He had Sister Diane prep me and shave my pubes there in my hospital room, which was semi-private with another bed sitting empty by the windows.  Then, with a little poke and a pinch and a gush of warm fluid, the procedure was done a little after four o'clock.  He waited a while more.  When I had a nice strong contraction, he told me that I'd probably have the baby about two the next morning, told Sister Diane to call him when I was five to eight centimeters dilated, and went home to supper.

Mama and Ford had been waiting in the hospital lobby.  She stayed there, not allowed by hospital rules to be in the labor room with me, and Ford left for his mother's house to eat with the family, promising to bring my mother a hamburger when he returned.  The hospital was an old stone and brick two-story building, and that Saturday evening there were only two nuns on duty.  An old man fell out of bed upstairs and the other nun came and got Sister Diane to help her get him back into bed.

Diane had been instructing me that when I felt the urge to push, I should push hard.  I felt the urge, so I pushed, and felt my baby's head and shoulders emerge.  I threw back the sheet so I could see,  propped myself on an elbow and reached down between my thighs, waving my hand in front of those wide-open eyes, needing first of all to find out if the nun had been right and I had blinded my baby by drinking rubbing alcohol.  The eyes followed the movement of my hand.

Then there was another strong contraction, I pushed some more, and the rest of her popped out.  It was a girl.  I was reclining there on my elbow for maybe five or ten minutes, gazing down at my daughter and stroking her face, shoulder, arm and belly, when her cries overcame my mother's lawful obedience to the rules. By the time she entered the room, my baby and I had bonded.  Mama was all flustered and frightened, ran back into the hall screaming for Sister Diane, then back in the room, where she stood back by the door and looked, as if she was scared to get close. 

Sister Diane was there not long after Mama yelled for her.  She tied off the cord and cut it, took the baby to the nursery, and came back in a while to clean me up and change my sheets.  The doctor, called away from his supper, examined me when he got there, declared everything to be okay, and left again.  I was starving because I'd not been allowed any food all afternoon.  The only thing Sister Diane had to offer me was juice and Jello, so Mama called Ford at his mother's house and had him bring two hamburgers instead of just the one for her.  It was delicious.

Dorris Marie (named after my mother, Dorris, with Ford's mother's middle name), was born at 5:30 PM (approximately - that's about the time Mama heard her first cries), weighed six pounds, fourteen ounces, and was eighteen inches long.  My labor had lasted about an hour and a half, if you don't count the months of Braxton Hicks contractions.

When we moved into this place, it had a leaky roof.  It was autumn of 1998, and we were housesitting for a neighbor who was spending the winter somewhere warmer.  The following year, we knew we would be here at least one more winter because the owner wasn't ready to come back.  He told us what he had used to seal the roof, and we got a big bucket full of waterproofing goop and spread it in the areas where the leaks were.

By the turn of the century, he had decided not to return.  He made me a gift of this trailer, just handed over the title to it, leaky roof and all.  For a couple more years we kept using the sealing goop on the roof, but it wasn't satisfactory, so we decided to do a typically rural Alaskan fix:  tarps.  Alaska is held together by duct tape and kept dry under tarps - mostly blue tarps.  They have proven to be about twice as satisfactory as the goop, meaning that we only need a new set of tarps every two or three years, instead of a new coat of goo each year.

It is that time again.  The first time, in 2002, economy was the main concern, and I ended up getting five tarps because their dimensions added up to the total I needed, without a lot of extra stuff hanging down over the windows, and at the lowest price.  One tarp that would have covered the whole roof would have covered way more than just the roof because tarps in standard sizes are not as long and narrow as this 15'x55' trailer.  I used rope to lace the tarps together at the seams, and sealed those seams with leftover waterproof goop. 

It was a lot of work and, due to breaks for wet weather, four weeks from start (above) to finish (below), but Doug and I had fun with it.  Greyfox still lived here then, but his acrophobia and dislike for physical labor kept him on the ground, where he took pictures.

In 2005, a full year after the roof needed a new coat of tarps, it got one.  Money wasn't a concern that time, because Greyfox had won $100 worth of merchandise from a building supply store.  They had tarps.  I got three that more or less added up to the dimensions we needed, and Doug and I covered the battered green layer with a fresh layer of blue. 

We reused the ropes with which we had tied down the edges of the first layer.  We didn't lace up the seams, and did minimal sealing because none of that had done much good the time before.  The job went fast, and since we didn't wait until the leaves were falling before we started, it wasn't too unpleasant.

Doug did a more or less straight, serious sweeping job for about half a minute, before he started dancing and twirling the broom.

Then we decided that a tree overhanging some of the back portion of the roof would need to be trimmed before the sweeping could be finished.

So he climbed down the ladder, got the bow saw off its hook, and limbed the offending tree.

When he stretched out in the shade after climbing back up the ladder, I could tell it was break time.  I used the time to try and come up with a plan of attack.  That's my Nike in the picture there.  The Reebok is on my right foot.

Mom:  I want your opinion.
Doug:  You know I don't have opinions.
Mom:  C'mon, let's discuss this and decide how to do it.
Doug:  You decide.
Mom:  You help.
Doug:  What do you need to know?
Mom:  (pause) Well... should we start at the front or the back...?
Doug:  Is that what you want my opinion on?
Mom:  (with some exasperation creeping into the voice) Consider yourself a consultant.  I will supply a string of questions or options, and you can provide a series of opinions.
Doug:  Okay.  I think Bush is doing a horrible job.
After the laughter, we continued:
Mom:  We can secure each tarp at the ends first, and work toward the middle where they'll overlap.
Doug:  Okay, sounds good.
Mom:  The labels say these are "2-color tarps".  Green is the color showing.  I guess the other side is probably blue.  The guy in the store who was showing me to the tarps went into a big rap about how they'd gone over from blue tarps to green ones and what that was going to do to Alaska, like when somebody's lost and the Troopers fly over and don't see their tarp 'cause it's green....  I agreed with the guy that green tarps would change the whole face of Alaska.
Doug:  How come all the tarps were blue in the first place?
Mom:  (pointing down to the wood pile with its patchy covering of old tarps of black, brown, gray, silver, etc.) They weren't, at first.  The cheap tarps were blue.  Different makers used different colors, but the cheapest ones were that bright blue that has become ubiquitous.  I guess some marketing genius noticed that more blue tarps were selling than other colors, so everyone started making their tarps blue, when all along the blue ones were outselling the rest because they were cheaper.  Now we've got a collection of sturdy, durable old tarps in various colors, and we've thrown away dozens of holey old cheap blue ones.
Doug:  (mumbled response)
Mom:  So, what are you going to do next?
Doug:  I guess I'll go on (mumble)...eeping.
Mom:  What?
Doug:  (mumble)
Mom:  Did you say, "sleeping"... with an "L"?
Doug:  No... "sweeping"   ...W!
Mom:  It always comes back to politics.
*cue laugh track*

Eventually, we got up and got back to work and I was too busy with hammer, fid (equivalent), crowbar, etc., to take pictures for a while.  The crowbar came in when we got to the tie-down phase and ran up against the old TV antenna mast that was secured to the side of the trailer with plumber's strap, around which we had had to fuss and fit the two previous layers of tarps.  There had been no antenna on that mast, a straight and skinny birch tree with its bark still on, last time we did this job, but we worked around it anyway because we thought we might someday fix the antenna.  This time, I decided there was no reason to leave the mast there, 'cause we're quite over the TV addiction by now and if we ever decide to relapse it will be with a satellite dish.

That's how far we got today before the clouds moved in and the wind came up.  The front (east) edge is nailed down and the south side of the first tarp is tied down.  We had a somewhat lengthy discussion on whether to lay it green side up or blue, and finally went with blue only because we would be looking at it until the job is done and both of us like the bright blue better than the sorta sickly shade of green that is backing it.

For some unknown reason, or no reason at all, Doug stuck a couple of sixteen penny nails in his ears.  For a reason equally unknown or nonexistent, I took a picture of it.

This week's subject is suggested by Closethippie:

Vegetables

This is more of a challenge than you might think.  I am not going to make a trip to town to take some pics in the supermarket, and the only photogenic non-wild vegetable I've got growing now is one that most people think is a fruit because it is usually sweetened and eaten in pie.

Less than 3 weeks ago, the newly transplanted rhubarb that I have named Hulk looked like ^that.  A couple of days ago, it had grown to look like this./

It's a vegetable, really.  I swear it.  People also make pies out of pickles and pinto beans... honest... in Utah, they do, and in Texas, too.

Romaine is unequivocally a vegetable.  Just disregard the bowl of raspberries keeping my fresh-from-the-farmer's-market romaine company above.  There are vegetables, fruits, magnificent buildings, and people, in the shots below, taken last week at the Wasilla Farmer's Market.

Most people think of zucchini as a vegetable, but it isn't.  It's a fruit.  I will not, however, hesitate to post its picture with the vegetables, since the almighty USDA (dept. of agriculture) has declared for purposes of school lunches that ketchup is a vegie.  I might as well toss in a few peppers and tomatoes, too.  I know they are fruit, but does the USDA know it?

 
(Above images of fruit are all from Wasilla Farmer's Market.)

Puffballs and other mushrooms are fungi, not vegetables, but how many people know or care about such fine distinctions?  They are not animals or minerals, we eat them, so they're vegies, yes?

 

It is okay to eat puffballs (above), if you find them before the center begins to darken the way that one has.  They are not toxic, but once the spores start to form and they turn dark inside, they don't taste so good.  I'm not really sure about the LBM (little brown mushroom) below, but it's small and I'd risk eating one of them, just to see if it made me feel any weird tingles in my extremities, or see colors, or whatever.

Below is my favorite vegetable of all, wild or domestic, green or fruity or fungal, and it grows in profusion in my yard, where all I have to do for a snack any time between May and  September is bend over and grab a handfull:

  
CHICKWEED.
 

I spent my morning today considering whether I could feasibly go berrypicking.  The blueberries I found growing alongside the road yesterday were delicious.  Their abundance was clear evidence that I might find a great crop of berries out in the muskeg.  At some time near noonish, unable to bear being indoors on such a beautiful day, I decided to go in quest of blueberries.

I had thought it through thoroughly.  I promised myself (and that invisible caretaker who nags me to take care of myself and scolds when I endanger my wellbeing) that I would go slow, take it easy, rest if I needed to, and not get so far off the road that getting back would be more than I could handle.  I put on old jeans, a long sleeved shirt and hiking boots, slung my camera over my shoulder, picked up my berry bucket and some water to drink, and limped out of the yard.

Berry picking is ideal exercise for a nature-loving Virgo with chronic fatigue syndrome / myalgic encephalomyelitis ("fibromyalgia").  Exercise for its own sake is something I can force myself to do if I see a need for it, but I'd rather get my exercise in the course of some productive activity.  I spent a lot of time earlier this year out there walking around looking for wildflowers to photograph.  This time, I was looking for berries to eat, but I was prepared to photograph them, too.

They are way larger than life in this picture.  If you have an image in your mind of cultivated or storebought blueberries, think much smaller.  The biggest of these wild berries isn't as big as the smallest of those I've bought from supermarkets.  They are not as sweet as the cultivated ones, and considering the time and trouble to get them, they aren't free, either.  I guess all they are is nutritious and nontoxic... and a reason to venture into the muskeg.

The bushes along the edge of the periodically flooded part of the muskeg, near the 4-wheeler trail, had no berries.  As I moved away from the open ground and easy traveling, I found many berries.  Someone has been picking, but not working very hard at it.  I was out there maybe half an hour, moving slow and taking it easy, before I started feeling tired.  I sat on the ground and looked at the pitiful collection of berries in my bucket.  I told myself I wouldn't quit until I had at least enough berries to cover the bottom of the bucket.

I pick blueberries by cupping my hand under the berry I'm after, and tickling it into my palm.  If they are ripe, they fall at the slightest touch.  I soon learned that I'd have to dip by bending my knees, rather than bending from the waist, because the camera slung on my back would tumble down and clobber me in the head if I bent over.   I'd go along that way, picking one berry here, two or three there, until I'd see a rich patch.  Then I'd sit down in the middle of it and get some rest while I picked everything within reach, getting up on my knees if necessary to extend my reach.

It was in one of those rich patches where I got to spend some quality time communing with my cat Val.  At least I think that's the way he perceived it.  I was actually physically restraining him from romping through a thick patch of ripe berries and knocking them all to the ground, but the action was indistinguishable from an ordinary petting and purring session. 

Four cats had followed me into the muskeg:  Val, his uncle Jones, and the two old ladies, Muffin and Granny Mousebreath.  Jones turned back as soon as I got into the heavy brush.  Val would spend some time with me, then go charging off after something... or nothing.  For a while, Granny was staying ahead of me.  I'd look up from my picking and see her ahead, dozing in the sun or resting in the shade.  Then after a while she wasn't around any more.  The only one who stayed with me all the way was Muffin.  A few times she'd lose sight of me and I'd hear her breathy little, "Aack," call.  She hasn't much of a voice, and never says anything remotely close to "miaow."  When I'd hear her calling, I'd call back and talk her to me through the thick brush.

Research on this disease has shown that mild exercise is beneficial
unless it goes over the line into fatigue, in which case it can cause
the disease to progress. Getting out of the house, especially on sunny days, is essential to my mental health.  Some part of me also craves to get off the beaten track and over some rough ground, but I have to be careful not to go beyond my ability to get back safely.  I learned something out there today:  stay out of the thick stands of dwarf birch.  Where those bushes are thick, blueberry bushes grow among them, but don't bear much fruit, and my feet get all tangled in the birch bushes. 

By the time I'd covered the bottom of my bucket about two berries deep and was ready to turn for home, I wasn't having to think much about the route I was taking.  I was scanning for blueberries and ready to pick up on any targets of opportunity such as bog cranberries (got a few) or crowberries (saw none, darnit).  If I came to a thicket of dwarf birch, I turned aside and took whichever way seemed easiest and led in the general direction of home.  Poor Muffin, to judge by the frequency and plaintive tone of her "ack" cries, was more than ready to head back this way.

I probably overdid it.  My right leg is in spasm all the way to my waist, pulling my back out of alignment and giving me a tremendous case of Igor syndrome ("Maaster... a brain...").  I have a bowl of berries, about a pint, mostly blues with a few crans and a sprinkling of fat, choice, bunchberries.  If I'm up to going out again within the next few days, there will still be blueberries to pick.  If not, the lowbush in the dense shady woods will be ripening soon, and I know a couple of places where I can find crowberries (my favorite), too.  This year's berry crop is more plentiful than I have seen it since the 1980s.  Gotta gettum while I can.