About a year ago, Alice had a litter of kittens we called the Piebeans because of certain characteristics of the place she chose for her nest.  That story is here.  Alice went away when the kittens were weaned, and never came back.  She was sweet, fluffy, blue and lovable, but one less fertile cat around here is a blessing, not a loss.

Starting about twenty hours ago, and into the night, P.K. Piebean (AKA Paring Knife, Petite Kitten) had six kittens, raising the feline population by 50%.  Doug and I had been viewing her increasing girth with amusement which recently shaded over into alarm when she became incapable of slipping through the gap in the dog barrier to reach the cats' feeding station.  We had started calling her "Rotunda."

Two of the new kittens are ginger.  Two are the black and white tuxedo-pattern we call "dinks" in honor of Dickie Marcinko.  One is a gray tabby, and the last-born littlest one is white.  The litter hasn't gained its own designation yet.  They will not be called Piebeans.  That would be wrong for several reasons.  Each litter has to have its own name for genealogical purposes, and P.K. did not go back to the secluded kitchen cabinet nest where she was born.

She did something no cat has done here before.  She had her kittens in a spot that is fully accessible to the dog.  Heretofore, Koji has met new kittens only when they were mature enough to leave their nests.  P.K.'s half dozen are in a battered and cat-chewed cardboard box on a shelf just a few inches off the floor, beneath a cushioned seat a few feet in front of the wood stove.

We use that seat for warming our feet, putting on boots, or just enjoying the glow and radiant heat from the fire.  Several cats, including Pizarro and Tiny Ted, like to curl up on the button-tufted round cushion in front of the fire when it's not occupied by a primate butt.  Koji has curled his massive form on the too-small cushion a few times, to Doug's huge amusement and my frustration at never having gotten a photograph of him there.

Koji apparently loves the new kittens.  Maybe the atmosphere in the nest box is suffused with the oxytocin of mammalian bonding, maybe he has some other way of picking up the mood, or maybe he just loves kittens.  Hilary, who was Alice's mother, P.K.'s grandmother, had been fiercely protective of her kittens, and while she was around Koji experienced pain every time he poked his big snoot into the midst of a pile of nursing kittens.  P.K. just lies there and purrs.

My first move when I got out of bed today was onto the seat by the fire.  I was peering down into the shadows to see the white sausage-like thing born while I slept, when Koji sidled in between my knees and started sniffing kittens.  From head movements, it was obvious that each kitten got its own careful olfactory examination.  Koji's tail was waving gently back and forth the whole time.

Then he pulled his head back out of the kitten box and laid his chin on my knee.  He gazed into my eyes and conveyed, as clearly as if he could speak, his awed affection for the sightless, helpless, wiggling mammalian young in the box under the bench.

Updates and photos will follow, of course.

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I'm feeling battered.  When was my trip to town?  ...last Thursday?!?  A whole week ago, and I'm still exhausted and impaired.  I know I overdid it, loading some heavy bags of cat food into the hatch at the last grocery stop.  And then there was that tense and tiring drive home through the snowstorm.

Doug's sleep cycle is opposite mine now, so I haven't needed to awaken in the night to tend the fire, but I awaken anyway.   I haven't been helping my recovery with the hours I have spent at the computer this week, either.  It would be more restful on the couch playing the PS2 or in bed reading a book, but I have no game that calls to me at present, and the bed is occupied by Doug. 

Maybe I can rig a light somehow, so I can read on the couch... but I'll probably just stay here at the computer because interesting things happen here all the time, and the book will be there whenever I am ready to pick it up.

I have told most of my life story here.  In most cases, I tell something once and move on.  Some things come up again and again, and others might come up two or three times.  I am about to retell an incident from almost forty years ago because I think it might be relevant and helpful to some of you in the current economic climate, and I know it is relevant to another discussion that is ongoing here now.

I stopped wearing a bra in 1969.  I was later compelled to wear one, and to misspell my own name, go without my asthma medication, and was subjected to other senseless personal affronts for the fifteen months that I was in prison.  As soon as I was out of there, I stopped wearing bras again.  Feminism was only a peripheral issue in that choice, and fashion played no part in it at all.  I go into that at length in my most frequently googled Xanga post.

A few months after my release and a few hundred miles farther south, I answered a classified ad for a job doing counter work and food prep at a Dairy Queen.  Of course, I didn't wear a bra to the job interview.  That did not seem to matter at the time.  I was hired.

During my first evening on the job, the same man who had interviewed and hired me told me I would have to wear a bra to work henceforth, or he would have to "let me go." 

I wish I could recall exactly what I said to him.  It was probably not particularly clever, nor exceptionally hostile.  The gist of it was something like, "In that case, I'm outta here."  He worked the rest of that shift alone, as far as I know.

It wasn't the first job I ever walked out on.  It was one of the last because about five years after that, I dropped out of the job market.  That's a part of the memoirs still to be written.  To oversimplify, I discovered that it was easier to live without a job than otherwise.

The lifestyle I chose involves the sort of economic restriction that some people call, "voluntary simplicity," and others call, "poverty."  I am far from poor.  I use the word because I know it conveys the general idea to most people.  I'm rich in the things I value most, and the freedom I experience every day compensates me for the occasional mad scramble to gather enough dough for some essential purpose. 

I'm comfortable enough with the "new anarcho-capitalism" I have been practicing in my profession for the 33 years I've been practicing, so that I no longer even bother reminding people that they promised to pay me.  I noticed years ago that I'm more likely to be paid by someone who doesn't say he will pay than by one who promises to pay, and I will admit that I do sorta cringe each time someone assures me she will pay, but it's no big deal for me if they don't.

Dumpster diving is fun.  I enjoy it more than shopping.  With laundromat prices what they are, and the abundant availability of clothing in the dumpsters at Felony Flats (That link goes to the photoblog that got over 700 hits when it was linked on Wonkette during the McCain/Palin debacle.), it hardly pays to wash my old clothes.  I do it sometimes, anyway, because some of those old things are really comfortable and warm.

My husband, Greyfox, doesn't have a job, but he's no anarcho-capitalist, either.  He's a small businessman, with the accent on small, my ArmsMerchant is.  Frequently, especially after working a particularly lucrative gun show or closing a tough sale, he says with feeling, "I love my work!"  Occasionally he has nightmares about his high-paid former job in the policy and public relations areas of state government in one of the Lower 48.  His transition to voluntary simplicity was bumpy, but he made it.

I tell you these things for several reasons.  The most obvious and direct one is to reassure any of you who have already lost jobs or might soon find yourselves unemployed.  Money does not necessarily equal survival, and certainly does not buy satisfaction or happiness.  A job is not always the best way to earn money.  Many jobs are soul-killing wastes of time.  Many employers are petty tyrants.  Job loss could be an open door to finding your right livelihood and creative fulfillment.

A subtler but no less important message here is that there are many ways to survive in this world without playing head games with petty tyrants, without sacrificing your self-respect, autonomy, mental or physical health.  Think about it, at least.

It was enlightening, educational, fun, stressful, occasionally scary when the money ran out and credit cards maxxed, lots of work, and I felt a restful relief to finally get home, but I'd do it all again.

I started writing the story of our Big Field Trip, but haven't finished it yet.  My son Doug was twelve years old.  We spent roughly half a year putting 28,000 miles on Gina, my 1980 Fiat X1/9.  This entry is nowhere near the whole story, just a brief synopsis.

Starting from home in Alaska's Upper Susitna Valley, we intended to cross into Canada and take the Al-Can Highway through a lot of beautiful forest and around lakes neither of us had ever seen before.  Then a Canadian official at the border scared me spitless by demanding proof that I had legal custody of Doug and about a million dollars more auto liability insurance than I had.  I changed the plan when he said he couldn't stop me there despite my lacking the required documents, but if the Mounties were to stop me along the road they could stick Doug in an orphanage, impound my car and jail me to await deportation proceedings.

After a brief zip by dark of night through Yukon Territory, an even shorter daring daylight sneak through British Columbia, and a small fib to a border guard on the U.S. side about the AR-7 survival rifle broken down, packed into its flotation stock and stowed under my bucket seat, we lined up at the ferry dock outside Haines, Alaska with a herd of bigger vehicles and got on the Marine Highway to Bellingham, Washington.

From Bellingham, we went south through Oregon, to Nevada and back and forth across the California, Nevada, Oregon borders a few times because the more direct routes through mountain passes were closed due to snow.  I found a few days of work doing readings in a coffeehouse in Nevada City, CA, and at a psychic fair in Eureka.

In Redwood National Park, California, our tent was narrowly missed by a drive-by shooting.  In San Andreas, Gina's brakes and suspension needed repair.   Later, farther south, after a stop in Lancaster to spend Thanksgiving with BlueCollarGoddess, we spent a few days in Joshua Tree National Monument, where Doug climbed down onto a ledge, couldn't climb back up, and was rescued by two rock climbers whose campsite was next to ours.  That's also where I bought my Park Pass, which was the best investment of the whole trip and maybe of my entire life.

We took it easy across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, using our National Park Pass at every opportunity along the way, and spent Christmas with Doug's paternal grandmother near Austin.  We were at Cochiti Lake outside Santa Fe, NM for New Years, worrying the rangers by camping out at temperatures that they considered life-threateningly cold, I found sorta uncomfortable, and Doug thought were just fine.

We visited a lot of parks, caves, lava tubes, ancient ruins and cliff dwellings, and geological features in all four of the 4-Corners states until sometime in February when I decided a lower elevation and warmer, sunnier climate would be in order.  Besides, I'd never been to the rock shows at Quartzsite, Arizona.  We camped for a couple of months between Quartzsite and Yuma at the La Posa Long Term Visitor Area, and made several day trips to parks, ruins and attractions around there.  I had to drive to Yuma to replace the tent destroyed in a windstorm, and we saw the old Territorial Prison while we were there.

I had arranged a gig at an ongoing psychic fair at the Crystal Sanctuary in Sedona.  We were there and gone before the season really got going, so mostly I just did readings for the other psychics who were sitting around like I was, waiting for clients to show up.    In Albuquerque before that, Gina's suspension had needed more work and I had to replace a couple of tires.  At Quartzsite I'd had to replace Gina's clutch hydraulics, and finally, in Sedona I had to have the transmission replaced.  The engine waited until we got back home, before it blew.

While we were in Sedona, I did some checking and found out that the South Entrance to Yellowstone would be open in April.  We headed in that direction with plenty of time for a circuitous swing through Canyonlands, Zion, Capitol Reef, Dinosaur Nat'l Monument, a bunch of Anasazi ruins, state parks, and other roadside attractions.

While we were in Yellowstone, Greyfox decided to help us get home.  He learned that the state ferries were all booked up for the entire summer season and our only chance of getting Gina onto a ferry would be to get on the wait list for a cancellation.  Doug and I decided to stay at Yellowstone a while, then continue wandering from park to ruin to cave to tourist trap until we either got a reservation on the ferry or... something.  After less than a week in Yellowstone, we got to the top of the cancellation wait list (having a car only 3.83 m (150.8 in) long helped with that), and I had a wild and speedy drive through blinding rain in Montana and terrifying traffic in Seattle to get to the ferry on time.

The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful, other than some unpleasantness outside Tok.

I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too!

I know that for most of them the behavior is unconscious, and they believe it is benign.  They tell people what they think the others want to hear, and rationalize it one way or another, thinking of it as "keeping the peace," "maintaining a positive work environment," "avoiding hurting people's feelings," and so forth.  Their rationales don't change how I feel about their behavior, and won't impel me to manipulate them in turn, by pretending to approve.

I don't hate such people.  I know that they don't need my approval, even if some of them don't realize that.  Not liking them doesn't keep me from loving them.  I am not judging them as bad.  I see them as sad and somewhat emotionally handicapped.  Manipulative behavior comes out of feelings of powerlessness and fear.  The denial and rationalization with which they excuse their dishonesty likewise arises from fear.  The deeper they get into their denial and rationalization, the more they have to fear from the truth.

Extreme cases, those far enough gone to warrant a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, have even more reasons to fear having their covers yanked, because their manipulative pathology often involves or is used to cover up criminal acts.  Even if one's behavior is not criminally antisocial, trying to juggle several relationships based on lies and manipulation can be stressful.  One of the sweetest things about being an honest person is never having to remember which lie you've told to whom.

I can love manipulators, and I can pity them.  I just don't like them, and I see few reasons to have any respect for them.  Cowardly dodging does not inspire respect.  Courage, intelligence and wisdom are some of the things that inspire me to feel respect for someone.  It takes courage to speak your mind regardless of how another person might feel about what you have to say.  It requires some wisdom to appreciate the intrinsic value of truth in the abstract, and it shows a marked lack of smarts to think you can get away with lying to everyone on a regular basis without eventually being found out.

Last night, I read the following update at the AVO website and decided to save it and post today.  The interesting part is in bold at the end.

I'm not sure I believe that.  I don't doubt that somebody at AVO had been misquoted by the media.  What I doubt is that anyone has a really accurate and informed idea how much ash might fall from any eruption.  It's guesswork, and I'm guessing that estimates are minimized to prevent panic.

Many Anchorage residents, like the one here in 1992, have had to sweep or shovel ash from their roofs, and I remember seeing video of residents of the Kenai Peninsula digging out from 16-18 inches of ash from Augustine three decades ago.  Not until the ash clouds were in the air did anyone have an accurate idea where they were going to fall or how much ash they would dump. 

Ashfall is more that just a mess.  In terms of the work to remove it, it is a lot like heavy snow that never melts.  However, we don't need to wear particle masks while shoveling snow.  Those sharp abrasive particles damage breathing passages and clog lungs.

Internal combustion engines stall when their air filters become clogged, and if they don't have efficient air filters, the ash damages valves and cylinders.

Jet engines are not immune from ash clouds, either.  Nineteen years ago, a jetliner almost crashed near here.

Ash is the reason AVO pays attention to volcanoes and we pay attention to AVO.  Ash clouds are hard to distinguish from ordinary clouds, both visually and on radar.  Seismic monitors have been placed on the slopes of all the more active cones in our portion of the Pacific Ring of Fire, and one or more webcams watch many of them.

With my respiratory condition, I stay alert to what the volcanoes are doing.  When I get the word from AVO about an eruption, with data on the height of the ash cloud, I can use the Puff Volcanic Ash Tracking Model to see if it is blowing my way and how much time I have to prepare before it gets here.  My particle mask is in the same place by my bed as my nebulizer and other "sickroom" equipment.

The map below compares ashfall areas from some historic twentieth century eruptions of Alaska volcanoes.  The map, the  photo below it of a man standing in an ash drift on Kodiak Island, both captions, and the diagram comparing "cubic miles of magma,"  are from USGS Fact Sheet 075-98.

The ash fall from the cataclysmic 1912 eruption of Novarupta (large gray shaded area) dwarfs that produced by recent eruptions of Augustine (blue area), Redoubt (orange area), and Spurr (yellow area) Volcanoes. Old-timers in Alaska can recall dozens of eruptions from these and other Alaskan volcanoes. Within 500 miles of Anchorage, several volcanoes (brown triangles) have exploded in Novarupta-scale eruptions in the past 4,000 years. Beyond the areas shown here, ash fall from these recent eruptions of Augustine, Redoubt, and Spurr Volcanoes was negligible, but ultrafine dust and sulfurous aerosols were held aloft and transported farther by high-altitude winds. Even though relatively small, the volcanic ash clouds from these eruptions still resulted in airport closures and damage to many jet aircraft. Because of the size and frequency of eruptions and prevailing winds, Alaskan volcanoes present a greater threat to aviation on the west coast of the United States than do the volcanoes of the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest.

On the afternoon of June 6, 1912, an ominous cloud rose into the sky above Mount Katmai on the Alaska Peninsula. The cloud quickly reached an altitude of 20 miles, and within 4 hours, ash from a huge volcanic eruption began to fall on the village of Kodiak, 100 miles to the southeast. By the end of the eruption on June 9th, the ash cloud, now thousands of miles across, shrouded southern Alaska and western Canada, and sulfurous ash was falling on Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington. The next day the cloud passed over Virginia, and by June 17th it reached Algeria in Africa.

During the 3 days of the eruption, darkness and suffocating conditions caused by falling ash and sulfur dioxide gas immobilized the population of Kodiak. Sore eyes and respiratory distress were rampant, and water became undrinkable. Radio communications were totally disrupted, and with visibility near zero, ships couldn't dock. Roofs in Kodiak collapsed under the weight of more than a foot of ash, buildings were wrecked by ash avalanches that rushed down from nearby hillslopes, and other structures burned after being struck by lightning from the ash cloud.

The United States Geological Survey's official position is that, "Such massive eruptions will occur again in southern Alaska."  Nobody knows when , and they're only guessing about how big the next one might be.

Since 2000, Modesto, California public schools have required ninth graders to complete a nine-week course in world religions.  The course begins with a study of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Students who took the course have been studied by researchers from Stanford University in California and the College of William and Mary in Virginia.  The researchers tracked their attitudes and their understanding of different religions and of constitutional rights governing the free exercise of religion.

Some of their findings were that students grew to understand and respect others' religious views and they were much more likely to accept that different religions share core moral values.  Educationally and socially, the Modesto program has been considered a success.  Schools in other parts of the country have shown interest in making such studies part of their curricula.  For the most part, it has been an uncontroversial issue.  Constitutional questions were resolved as soon as they came up.  Opposition has come mainly from a few religious leaders.

Apparently, the practitioners of some religions are fearful of the possible effects if their followers become aware of facts concerning other religions.  This much is obvious, I think.  I'm wondering what, precisely, they are afraid of.  They would have to be seriously deluded if they expected such knowledge to breed hatred and conflct between faiths.  If a leader fears an increase of understanding between his followers and some outside group, then it would logically follow that he desires and depends on ignorance, distrust, misunderstanding, conflict and hatred.

Hmmmmm....

Sources:

Day to Day on NPR
First Amendment Center
Catholic News Service

I'm still chuckling over the news report I heard a few minutes ago.  It mentioned that Redoubt Volcano had a period of increased activity in the night, and, "something happened, but they aren't sure what."

The AVO website says,

First of all, when I was very small, "love" meant sugar to me.  I was weaned from my mother's breast at six weeks of age, onto something my mother and her people called a "sugar tit."  It was a scrap of rag, wrapped around a spoonful of sugar and tied with a string, as pictured by Albrecht Dürer in 1506.

Rubber pacifiers existed for at least a hundred years before I was born, but my mother "didn't believe in" them.  She even thought I should have given my own babies a sugar tit instead of my breast, but that's another story, isn't it?  She murmured love to me as she stuck the sugar-filled rag in my mouth to stop my crying.

Sugar tasted like love every time I begged a piece of candy or bottle of pop, or stole a spoonful from the sugar bowl when Mama was out of the kitchen.  Of course, sugar had an addictive opioid kick to it all on its own, so "love" acquired some intoxicating connotations, too.  That was reinforced by popular culture, fairy tales and soap opera.  Love was sweet, intoxicating and sublimely desirable.  All anyone had to do was tell me he loved me and I'd follow him anywhere and bend to his will.

The sexual kind of love had its own intoxicating chemistry, too.  All that oxytocin and dopamine, not to mention the adrenaline stimulated by the forbidden nature of most of my liaisons, got me quickly addicted to love, and particularly to forbidden or dangerous love.  The association of adrenaline with intoxicating love turned me into an adrenaline addict, a chronic risk taker, an anxiety-ridden overachiever, and finally, an amphetamine addict.

That's when things started to turn around for me.  The illicit amphetamines led to jail, then prison.  An environment without men, and with very little stimulation of any kind, gave my body a chance to detoxify and allowed me to turn my mind to contemplation.  The change in my way of viewing love didn't happen overnight, and I didn't do it by myself.

I had a number of good teachers and mentors, and with their help I learned about a love that feels absolutely wonderful without all the dangerous side-effects.  I learned to love unconditionally.  I learned to love myself.  I learned to love shamelessly and unreservedly.  I'm learning to love universally.  I have gotten to where I often experience an elevated sense of oneness with everything, a kind of abstract love of everyone.

It is only in the feet-on-the-ground face-to-face confrontations with a few individuals where I'm having to work at my loving.  I'm still working on perfecting the technique, but I have learned a thing or three about love.

love 1
love 2
love 3

In anticipation of Saint Valentine's Day (or perhaps Extraterrestrial Culture Day) February's Featured Grownups topic is, "What The World Needs Now." [sic]

You, too, can participate by writing about love and leaving a link to your post on the FG site.

 

When I left the computer to Doug last night, Cim Smyth had a 3 minute lead on Lance Mackey.  At latest update this morning, 14 minutes ago, Lance was 13 minutes ahead of him.  Jessica Hendricks, who won the Sheep Mountain 150 in December, is in third position.

All seventeen teams in the race have completed their mandatory 8-hour rests.  Tim Osmar and Wattie McDonald are both still in the race, far back in the pack but not as far back as Rachael Scdoris.

Travis Beals won the Junior T and Dean Osmar won the T-100.

Update:  Out of Caribou Lake, around 10 AM, Lance Mackey was still in the lead, eight minutes ahead of Cim Smyth.

Latest standings here.