Clouds cleared out yesterday afternoon and before dark the snowmelt dripping off the roof had turned to icicles.  Temps last night got down into the low teens.  As the rising sun was casting interesting shadows across the fresh snow, I realized what I had out there:  a chance to go crustwalking.  The slushy old snow, under that dusting of clean white, is now frozen hard enough to support my weight.

I put on a hat and sweater, picked up the camera, and went out.  The cool air wasn't too cold for my fingers, but my lungs didn't like it.  I was a bit short of breath even before I took my first tentative steps up onto the crusted snow.  Prudence ruled.  I realized that if I hit a thin spot or came down on my heel first and drove it like a wedge into the crust, I'd sink in up to my hip and have a hard time getting out again.  If I'd been breathing okay I would have risked it, but I wasn't.

I shot some pictures (above) of the moose tracks in the yard.  Then I climbed over the woodpile at the mouth of the driveway and walked in the tire tracks up to the break in the tree line for a shot of the muskeg.  In the snow on the road, I got a closeup of the moose's hoofprint.  It was a small moose, bigger than a calf, probably a yearling.  I had to stop and catch my breath before climbing back over the woodpile.

Alice was nursing the Piebeans when I came in.  I captured good shots of two more kittens:  Mandy is on the left, and her sister Colander or "Linda," on the right.  In the group shot below, Count Spatula, "Spats" for short, is at the bottom, and you can see little P.K.'s ear sticking up where she is still plugged into Alice.

Yesterday, I climbed over the firewood at the end of my driveway and walked up the road a bit, about 50 feet, I guess.  

Until I went out there, I hadn't known that the latest cord of firewood had been unloaded behind my car.  It was either there or into the deep berm thrown up by the snowplow.  I guess it made sense to do it this way.

Doug's plan is to, first, move enough of the wood to clear a path so we don't have to climb over the pile to get out of here.  Then he will split the big chunks and stack them under the roof overhang on the end of the cabin's porch.  By then, the packed snow path will probably be thawed to the point that we will need to put some of those smaller rounds as stepping stones to get through, first, the slush, and then the mud that comes after.

At the end of the day, I was fatigued, and I'd been short of breath by the time I was back from the little walk, but just getting out there was a great step forward.

This is my new desktop wallpaper, at least until Doug sees it and changes it.  I just wanted to see how it looks full-size.  I think I agree with him that there's enough snow outside without having it on the desktop.  Maybe I'll go now and change the wallpaper to the lake and beaver dam shot I took four or five summers ago... or maybe one of the waterlily shots from last summer.

I could use an occasional reminder that summer does happen.

Best snow crystals I've captured yet, I think.

I almost forgot this news I wanted to share:  Lance Mackey's dog Zorro is back in Alaska, and he's walking and wagging his tail again.

Meet the Piebeans

These are aluminum pie weights, devised to keep unfilled pastry shells from warping and bubbling in baking.  We call them "pie beans" because years ago I got a bag of them to replace some disgusting organic beans I had been using and reusing for that purpose.  They were washable and theoretically infinitely reusable, and served their purpose admirably until the Dumpster Deva bestowed upon me some perforated pans which fit inside the pastry crusts and serve the purpose just as well with less fuss.

The aluminum "beans" went into a zipper sandwich bag and into the bottom drawer beside my kitchen stove along with measuring spoons, measuring cups, egg separators, bamboo skewers, teakwood chopsticks, and various other kitchen gear.  Then the bag split and the back fell out of the drawer, and before I fixed the drawer many of my "beans" had fallen into Limbo beneath and behind those drawers.

In January, an obviously pregnant Alice, the cat who previously had gone feral and bore a litter of kittens in an unheated space that once held a water heater here, then moved back in with us, bringing with her Val, Bagel, and Emmett, started hanging out in a "shelf" that had been the top kitchen drawer at some era of the distant past.  The front of that drawer had been missing when we moved in, and I had used the resulting opening to hold kitchen towels.  The towels vanished, and we assumed that Alice was building a nest somewhere in the nether regions with the pie beans.

Obviously, the kittens would have to be named for kitchen gadgets.  Before they were born, Doug and I came up with three names:  Mandolin (my favorite kitchen tool), Colander, and Spatula.    Greyfox supplied a fourth, Paring Knife, when the litter was born and Doug excavated the nest, discovering that a fourth name would be needed.  Even before their birth on Valentine's Day, we had been referring to the litter collectively as the "Piebeans," because they were born among the spilled aluminum "beans."

 This is Count Spatula, the lone male of the litter.  His sisters, Mandy, Colander, and P.K. (Petite Kitten, the runt) are active and elusive.  If I am ever to get photos of them, I will need to set aside a time for it, keep the camera turned on and my eyes on the cats.  Each time I have seen the perfect kitten shot, by the time I get the camera and turn it on, they have vanished.

Big, wet snowflakes fell as Doug, standing where the woodpile had been, dug out all the stray firewood he could find around the edges, before we ordered another cord to be delivered.  Now we are burning wet green birch and working just as hard to keep the fire going as we did during cold weather, because the new wood is resistant to fire and hard to light if we don't have a hot bed of coals on which to place it.

Last night it was raining when I went to sleep.  This morning when I woke there was an inch or so of new snow.  There is no "old" snow.  It is all slush, and about two feet deep in the open flat areas.

You Are Disturbingly Profound

You're contemplative, thoughtful, and very intense. Taking time to figure out the meaning of life is a priority for you. Because you're so introspective, you often react in ways that surprise people. No one can really understand how you are on the inside... and that disturbs them.

You Are 84% Gross

Ewwww! You really have some disgusting habits. Now go take a shower... with extra soap.

Men See You As Choosy

Men notice you light years before you notice them You take a selective approach to dating, and you can afford to be picky You aren't looking for a quick flirt - but a memorable encounter It may take men a while to ask you out, but it's worth the wait

You Are Not Prissy

You're the furthest thing from a princess - and you probably stay far away from any princess types you know. You have an easygoing approach to living. It doesn't take a lot to make you happy. And when life requires it, you're ready to get your hand a little dirty. There's no problem you're too prissy to tackle!

You Are 50% Left Brained, 50% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Your Thinking is Abstract and Sequential

You like to do research and collect lots of information. The more facts you have, the easier it is for you to learn. You need to figure things out for yourself and consider all possibilities. You tend to become an expert in the subjects that you study. It's difficult for you to work with people who know less than you do. You aren't a very patient teacher, and you don't like convincing people that you're right.

This weeks subject was suggested by Assipassi

Fall Colours

During a London ban-the-bomb march, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament publicly introduced the symbol that during the 1960s came to symbolize the peace movement.  Peace out, brothers and sisters.

On a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed.  James Earl Ray confessed to the killing, but forty years later, some people doubt that Ray was the assassin.

I got some defensive comments to yesterday's entry on confronting denial and defensiveness, just as I knew I would.  You know who you are, or else you don't.  If you are defensive and don't know it, you are in denial and/or delusional.

But that's not my concern.  My concern is the smugness, the oh, so unevolved and unworthy self-satisfied smugness, that flashed over me.  To evolve, I must transcend that shit.

Lessee if I can do this.... 

Neale says that God says, "What you resist, persists," so if I TRY not to be smug, then SMUGNESS R Us-uns.  Besides, Yoda said, "Do or do not.  There is no try."

If I am going to BE other than smug, I need something to be besides that.  BlueCollarGoddess says I can be a doorknob.  That is acceptable.  We need a doorknob.

Okay... I'm a doorknob.

I don't look like a doorknob.  I don't feel like a doorknob.  I don't function as a doorknob.  Great!!  Now I'm a dysfunctional, delusional doorknob. *sigh*

At least I'm not feeling smug about it.
 

The strongest tradition in my family appears to be one of consciously breaking with tradition.  We had been families of farmers, on both maternal and paternal branches of the tree, at the time of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression during my parents' and grandparents' lifetimes, when most of them left the farms and went to work in cities.  Very few remained on the land, and few of the offspring of the ones who migrated to the cities ever tried to go back to the land.

In the fourth generation back, in both maternal and paternal lines, there are Native American Grandmothers.  Two of my great-great-grandmothers, one of the Hunkpapa tribe of the Lakota nation, and the other reputedly Cherokee but possibly Comanche, broke with their traditions and married Americans of European descent.  Their halfbreed children had such a rough time of it, ostracized by both the Anglos and the Indians, that their children, my grandparents, denied their Native heritage and passed for white.

Seven generations back on my father's side, and six generations back on my mother's side, my genealogically inclined cousins have been able to track down men who arrived in America from Europe.  They so thoroughly cut their ties with their homelands that none of us has been able to trace our roots farther back.

My mother's family had a tradition of women dying in childbirth, from which my mother and I were pleased to have broken.  From somewhere, either from a German ancestor on my father's side or from popular culture, my parents got the tradition of Christmas trees.  I have broken with that, and my son sees no point in trying to continue it.  My parents carried on, from some remote source or sources, a number of practices related to making wishes:  wishing wells, wishing on a star, breaking a turkey's wishbone, etc.  That kind of tradition had horrendous, emotionally-crippling repercussions for me, and I did not inflict it on my children.

I asked my son if he could think of anything learned or inherited from me or from his father that he would consider a family tradition.  He said he couldn't think of any.  Then I asked him if any of the routines or practices we do have enough value or significance to him so that he would want to turn them into traditions.  He said, "no," to that.  I dug a little deeper and learned that he has already retold stories that were passed on to him by me, so it seems that the bardic storytelling tradition might be the only one, besides the practical ones born of generations of poverty, of conserving, fixing things, and making do, to survive beyond his generation and mine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is my entry for the Featured Grownups challenge:  Family Traditions.

Defense mechanisms of any kind are tricky to confront, because they are unconscious.  Telling the average person that he or she is in denial about something is more likely to offend than to inform.  Even so, therapists must confront denial and defensiveness, and even if one wants only to be a true friend to someone it is sometimes necessary to stop supporting his pathological behavior.

I have been wrestling with this issue for decades.  I do not like the social conventions that encourage people to reinforce their friends' psychopathology, and make it a faux pas to confront someone's denial or defensiveness.  During the first twelve and a half years of my marriage to Greyfox, I routinely confronted his defensiveness by saying simply, "You don't need to be defensive about it."

He hated that.  Routinely, he would deny having gotten defensive.  I would then point out just where in the conversation he had gotten defensive, what had triggered it, and what he was trying to defend, and he'd then accuse me of trying to "beat a point into the ground."  At some point Doug, who grew up being promptly and consistently confronted for his denial and defensiveness, would enter the discussion, adding his view, which was helpful.  In therapeutic confrontations or interventions, it is always helpful to have support.

Greyfox has changed since he stopped drinking.  He shows ever more signs of mental health as the years pass.  Best of all, he's not nearly as defensive as he used to be.  When he does get defensive, he usually notices it himself without my needing to confront him on it.  If I say something to him that triggers a defense, his reply is often, "__*blah blah blah*__, he said, defensively," accompanied usually by a rueful chuckle.  The wit with which he handles it is charming, and the self-awareness it demonstrates is validating as well as heartwarming.  The work that Doug and I have put into confronting his bullshit has paid off for all of us.

I confront denial and defensiveness for all my friends and clients, but the rewards there are few and far between.  Without close association and continual confrontation, one cannot expect to be very effective.  One place where I sorely wish I could confront pathological bullshit is NA meetings.  They overflow with psychopathology and I itch to confront it, but the serial monologue format makes it impossible and the unwritten traditions promote acceptance and reinforcement of bullshit, not confrontation.

Considering how little effect my confrontations have most of the time, and the near total lack of appreciation for them, I might be tempted to give it up if not for the simple fact that I am so damned good at it.  One of my friends (yes, you, Anam Cara), after almost two decades of infrequent low-key confrontations and being offended and "hurt" by my words, has begun to experience some of the therapeutic effect because, for some reason nobody knows, she kept coming back for more.

I have already written about the therapy group where I got my denial and defensiveness confronted and knocked out of me, and had my life turned around.  I don't need to tell that story again.  That's where I learned the technique, and it was also where I got the other essential trait that makes me so good at doing it.  It is one thing to know how to spot defensiveness and confront it, but it is something else entirely to be able to face the consequences. 

When a defensive person has his or her denial challenged, usually he or she either withdraws or attacks.  The Family Rap group's Reality Attack Therapy and the Work on Self  I did, there and on my own subsequently, gave me the self-esteem and self-confidence to accept rejection without getting my feelings hurt.  If the response to my confrontation is attack rather than withdrawal, I can handle that, too, without hostility or anger, without feeling threatened or hurt.  At this stage of my development, what I most need to guard against is feeling smug when someone reacts just as I anticipated and predicted.

I'm still working on that.
 
(A followup to this post and
to feedback it received, is
HERE.)

The lead-in to this episode is Len, Len, and Lynn.

Working for Len and "babysitting" his teenage son Len was more fun than work.  Not that it wasn't a lot of work, it was just more fun than anything.  The work was made easy by appliances I'd never had before:  a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher, a washer and dryer in the garage.  It was suburban heaven and I was a Working Woman, somewhat of a rarity
at the time.  Sure, I was doing a housewife's work, but I was getting
paid for it, and I got days off.
 
Clothes and linens would be washing themselves while I cooked and cleaned, instead of my having to do them by hand or pack everything off to the laundromat and spend hours there.  Of course, if I didn't hear the washer stop spinning, I'd often forget that I had a load to transfer to the dryer, and the bell that signaled the end of the dryer cycle wasn't loud enough to be heard in the kitchen, so I often had to stand by while I re-ran a load long enough to get the wrinkles out.

Permapress was a new thing, then.  My boss's work clothes and the kid's school clothes didn't need ironing, but their Sunday clothes had to be ironed.  At first, all my clothes were old, so until I bought a few new things, I had to iron all of them, but I could get all the ironing done in a single afternoon once a week.

The vacuum was a Rainbow, and I was too ignorant to realize what a treasure it was.  I had to fill the bottom of it with water before using, and clean mud out of it afterward, and not for years after that did I realize how much less airborne dust I was breathing, and how much less dusting I had to do thanks to that muddy mess.

Len and Len shared their ham radio in much the same way that Doug and I now share this computer.  The kid got home from school about the time his dad left for work.  He would be on the radio as soon as he had done his homework and eaten dinner.  Until his bedtime, he'd be in that back bedroom, saying, "CQ... CQ...," giving his call letters (which are still listed in the online amateur directory I found, with the same old phone number I remember) and the band he was using, until somebody somewhere responded.  Then would follow a conversation, followed by another, "CQ," when they ran out of things to say, or the signal was lost.

When his father got home from work around 2 AM, he would spend several hours on the radio and go to bed around dawn.  The schedule suited him because "skip" (ionospheric propagation) is better at night and his contacts on the other side of the planet were awake.  He would sometimes talk to his local buddies and old friends in other states, but the thrill they all sought was a new QSL, and the more distant the better.

I was studying for the amateur radio license and practicing Morse code, but the few times that Len or Len tried to put me on the mic to talk to someone, I didn't have much to say.  I was mike shy.  I was just shy, period, highly adept at socially inept introversion.  I guess I figured that once I learned the drill and got the license, that would work itself out.  I don't know.  For all I know now, I never even thought about that at the time.

I was writing letters to Al two or three times a week.  They were long letters.  I'd tell him every little thing Marie was doing or saying, and all about my job and the Lens.  I also wrote about politics and things I read in the newspaper.  His letters were shorter and less frequent, mentioning very little about what he was doing or the people there.  He did tell me that one of his buddies had a guitar and he had learned to play some chords.  Mostly, his letters were about how much he missed us and how happy he would be when we could be together again.

One of the tasks Len the elder asked me to help him with was cleaning out his garage.  Overhead, on one of the rails for the garage door, was a battered old C.F.Martin guitar.  He was going to throw it away, so I asked him if I could have it.  I took it to a music shop.  The man there thumped the body, tightened the three strings it had, strummed it, and said it was sound.  He sold me a steel and plastic key to replace the one that was missing from the head, a few brass frets that the fingerboard needed, and a new set of strings.  After getting his advice about finishes, I went to a paint store and bought glue, varnish and a brush.

There was a workbench along one side of the garage, with clamps and all the tools I needed to repair the guitar.  I got it put together, sanded off the old finish and smoothed the rough edges of a few gouges, then refinished it.  I did a better job on it than I had done on my Girl Scout woodworking project, a plywood 3-ring binder.  I added Al's name up near the neck on the back, and set it aside to give to him for a birthday surprise.

I got acquainted with a neighbor, a young woman a few years older than I, single, out of school, living at home with her parents, on an allowance and in no hurry to get a job or go to college.  She'd come over for coffee in the morning and hang around while I was cleaning house after young Len had left for school.  Al (That's Alfred, the husband formerly known as "Ford.") invited me to an Open House weekend at Fort Ord during a break in his training, and whatshername looked at my clothes and said I needed a new dress or two.  I looked at my healthy bank balance and decided that wouldn't be a bad idea.

We got on a city bus together and went to the mall... Sunset Plaza??? -- maybe, if memory serves.  I tried on a lot of dresses, didn't like any of the ones I could afford, have always preferred wearing pants anyhow.  I bought the one that my neighbor and the sales clerk liked best.  My mother would have thought it totally unsuitable because of the color, all wrong for redheads, in her opinion, which was probably an additional selling point for me.  Mama had always wanted to dress me in green, but would let me wear blue if I insisted.  The new dress was orange polished cotton, and had a matching nylon cardigan.  It made me monochromatic.

I left Marie with Uncle Frank and Aunt Katherine for the weekend, and rode a bus to Fort Ord carrying the guitar.  I had no case for it, and had to endure a few brief attempts at conversations for which it had provided openings.  I spent Saturday night in the post guesthouse, walked around on post with Al and made my first visit to a PX, then caught the bus back to Sacramento.  While I was gone, Marie had taken her first steps, from Katherine to Frank, across their living room.

While going through my photos, when I found this shot of Marie, my first thought was, "fecal fingerpainting."  I was astounded and mildly appalled that I had taken a picture of her all beshat, for just a moment, until I recalled what had really happened.

Al had given me a box of chocolates when he met the bus at Fort Ord.  Back at Len and Len's, on Monday morning when I awoke, I found her in her crib, besmirched with brown.  Until I smelled the chocolate and saw the open box on the dressing table beside her crib, I thought she had been fingerpainting.  She had only been eating chocolate cremes, though.  Just look at those glassy little sugar crazed eyes.

Al finished basic training and was transferred to Missouri for combat engineer training.  His letters became longer and more frequent.  There was a little more content about his friends and his activities, and a lot more sweet talkin'.  He had a best buddy named Bob, from Wyoming.  He had a sergeant he liked and a lieutenant he despised.  He had my name tattooed on his arm.

I was ambivalent.  I was attached to him, and maybe even more strongly attached to the idea of being married.  We both had our egos invested in proving to our elders that they had been wrong when they said our marriage wouldn't last.  But we had little in common in terms of intellectual interests, I had realized how relatively dull-witted he was, and the sexual chemistry that had existed in the beginning was gone.  I was too insecure to try living on my own, and there was no knight in shining armor eager to rescue me.  If some sexy, witty and brainy guy had been there and available, I might have made the break from Al at that time.

The girl next door fixed me up for a date with a guy she knew.  He was kinda weird, nonverbal, awkward, uglier than my husband and sorta scary... almost made me appreciate what I had.  My boss was a slight, skinny, geeky guy with thick glasses and thinning hair, polite and considerate, but completely obsessed with electronics and religion.  I had no romantic interest in him, never did go for older men.  His son was bigger, more muscular, more attractive to me than the father, but he was just a kid, no romantic interest there either.

The elder Len made it clear that I was welcome to stay around the house on my days off if I had nothing better to do.  He would order out for pizza or pick up Chinese takeout on my days off, and get enough for Marie and me, too.  A guy he worked with had a little Cessna he kept at a nearby airfield where a lot of sky divers played on weekends.  One Saturday, Len invited me to bring Marie along, watch the skydivers, and go for a flight in the Cessna.

Marie and I were strapped in together in the seat beside the pilot and we took off for our first flight.  The guy just took off and flew for a while, and Marie and I rubbernecked.  We flew over Len's house, and I pointed it out to her.  She was loving it and so was I.  The guy asked me if I'd like him to do some "tricks."  I said, "sure."  He did loops, rolls, dives and stalls.  Marie giggled and squealed and I probably did, too.  It was such fun neither of us wanted to go back to the ground.  When my feet did touch ground again, though, I was shaky and rubber-legged from the adrenaline letdown.  Roller coasters were never so much fun after that, and big commercial flights are just dead dull and boring.

After declining several invitations to go to church with Len, one Sunday evening I let him talk me into it.  Marie stayed home, with the younger Len as her babysitter.  I didn't have any idea what I was letting myself in for.  It was a Pentecostal church.  People rolled in the aisles, spoke in tongues, and did a lot of  hallelujah shouting and waving of arms in the air.  The preacher screamed about Hell and damnation and the congregation foamed at the mouth and yelled, "AMEN!"

When it was over, we had refreshments and Len schmoozed with the preacher and some friends.  We were among the last to leave.  Len's car was blocked by some others and we sat and waited for the driveway to clear behind us.  When the last set of headlights had turned away, he scooted across the seat, and in a move that was swift but not at all smooth, wrapped his right arm around my neck and pulled me to him as his left hand went into my bra.  I turned my head away from his sloppy kiss, grabbed the door handle and prepared to make my escape, and he backed off.

We sat there in that car I don't know how long, while he cried and alternated between apologizing for groping me and trying to talk me into going to a motel with him.  Finally, I talked him into going home, and I started making my plans to get out of there.  It didn't take long, and it's a good thing that it didn't.  Things got awkward after that.  I didn't want to be in the same room with him.  He wouldn't make eye contact with me on the rare occasions that he spoke to me, and the younger Len was asking embarrassing questions about why his dad kept using him as a go-between to bring messages to me.

Al found a small house for us right outside Fort Leonard Wood, in Waynesville, MO, and Marie and I caught an eastbound bus.  I never did get my amateur radio license.

I stumbled out of bed, fumbled around at the keyboard a bit, feeling wrung-out and leaden, while my coffee was brewing, then took breakfast back to bed with me, took my vitamins, sat there a while and got a burst of energy.

I'm back.

I might blog twice today, if I can get both things written before I have to move out to let Doug in here for the game session he skipped yesterday.