Local Waterfowl

 More waterfowl from the local park last Sunday.

I couldn't help but think of my Aunt running out of her house to shout at heron angling for her koi whenever I took a photo of one.

Signs of Writing

I'm sitting  in the car and editing a short story while The Child is at an event.  Over the summer is was easier to edit because the sun shone well after we would get home--but it was in some ways more difficult because of other park patrons' music, noise, or cigarette smoke.   In November, I have a small camping light hanging from the driver's sun screen illuminating the manuscript.

I'm finding that I'm more likely to catch problems with a piece if I'm working with hard copy, so I've been marking up the paragraphs and sentences and now I'm thinking about how the ending needs something.  When I reviewed the piece last week, I liked the ending because it seemed bittersweet, a little funny, and totally in character.  Reading it again this week, it seems off... I think I can make the end talk to the beginning of the story more, which would help.

The other day, I was writing in a ... okay, it was a  pizza place, not a cafe, but it's particularly empty when I go to write there, and the staff doesn't appear to mind that I'm hanging out there writing.  In fact, I was speaking with one of the cashiers, and it turned out he was familiar with various SFWA short story markets.  I was surprised that he had actually heard of "On the Premises" (semi-pro) -- he wanted to be a published author, too -- and my street cred went up several notches when I told him I'd placed three stories there.  It was one of those Hermit Moments, when you're standing on a rocky trail raising your lantern high and looking upward for a sign from above, and you turn around and realize there are folks looking at your lamp and taking it for their sign.

The radio show I've got on the car radio is currently featuring the works of Purcell.  A trio of men was singing, "welcome to all the pleasures there are?"   But the chorus has moved on to  "Then lift up your voices ye organs of nature...something-something... Whose charms rule the drama of... what??"  What was going on in 1660 England?  Obviously, I need to find the libretto.  

Post Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was small and quiet this year around.  

We went walking along the paths east of the Willamette river on Sunday.  Mark wanted to get outside, and it seemed like a good time to take pictures of various aquatic animals.

The first animals we saw were a bunch of turtles on a log.  The log was anchored to the middle of the pond.  The sun was playing hind-and-seek with the clouds, but was out long enough to coax the turtles into basking.  The camera's autofocus focused on the log or something, so most of my turtle shots came out blurry -- the farther away from a subject I zoom in on, the shallower the plane of focus -- and the camera has a penchant for focusing on stray twigs instead of birds or flowers.

Mark hoped that we'd see beavers, but we didn't even see a nutria.  There were lots of ducks and geese.  Then Mark pointed out an egret fishing along the shore.  

I took a few shots, but most of them were also out of focus.  Later, I took some pictures of Mark and The Child from across a body of water; the camera outlined their faces, which supposedly means that's where it was focused, but the very long shots I got were blurry.  It's not entirely the camera's fault:  at that distance having a tripod to shoot with helps to cut down on burrs from a shaky photographer. 

Eventually, we happened along a heron and a bald eagle.   The eagle was backlit by the sun, but you can tell it's a bald eagle in the pictures.  

On the gym front:  I managed to get to the gym both last Friday, this Monday, and Wednesday.  The usually elliptical and free-weight stuff.  

On the cat front:  Cicero got into a scrap with something and has bite marks on his tail.  The puncture marks are doing the usual gross cat inflamed lump thing, and I've been applying a hot compress to it (when he lets me).  He seems to be on the mend.

Gym and Slanting Sunlight

Went to the gym Monday.   Ran on the elliptical for about 20 minutes, followed by a sideways elliptical machine for another 5 for about 275 calories burned.  15x(60+2x70lbs) on the lat pulldown, 3x15 Roman Chair curl-ups, 3x12x10lbs combination of 45degree inclined 10lb dumbbell presses, interspersed with 8x10lbs dumbbell curls.  12x(20+30+30lb) triceps pull-downs.  5lbs dumbbell side-and-front arm raises... um, I think I did about 10.  Not too sore today...

I got a two-day rejection yesterday.  I was surprised at the speed of the response, and surprised and pleased that there was a quick note saying why the story was rejected.   Even a line of text with a specific reason is a heck of a lot better than the usual "Guess Which of Twenty Reasons Why Your Story May Suck" form rejections I've been getting lately.   Oh well... I'll see if I can get it sold some place else.

Mark and I went for a walk Sunday to enjoy the slanting sunlight of the late afternoon.  The sun shone sideways and turned the west sides of trees ruddy.  I thought maybe I could take some photos of birds, but the shadows were wrong, or the robins and jays mostly hid behind twigs that the autofocus zeroed on.  It was a nice walk anyway.

Sunday Mid-November

We're only four weeks away from the Winter Solstice and that means that twilight (at least in our back yard) starts at 3:30 pm.  If we were on the west side of the hill, it would be a different story.  Yesterday, I took a quick catnap around 2 and the shadow of the telephone pole fell across my face, and then by 2:30 the sunlight was stealing out of the yard.  It's not  that the sun has left the sky so much as it's only about twenty degrees above the horizon until official sunset.  I think I'm glad we don't live in Seattle or Northern Washington or Norway or Iceland, because the daylight hours would be shorter.

The child and I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody today.  In was interesting, with some funny moments, and I think the Evil Boyfriend's character progression was done well.  It was long, but I didn't notice that much.  I think the movie could have been a little faster, but the pace was okay.  I learned a few things about Queen and Freddie Mercury that I hadn't known.  Being late or on time seemed to be a theme, as was family.  The sex and drugs aspects of the movie were fairly sanitized, and thinking about it, the actor playing Freddie was wearing more clothing during the male-male kisses than he was during the scene where he proposed to his wife. 

On the gym front:  I managed to hit the gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday last week, doing the usual:  The elliptical thing for about 25 minutes, followed by a sideways elliptical machine .  The machines report 250-300 calories burned.   Downstairs a typical routine is 12x(50+60+70lbs) on the lat pulldown, 3x12 Roman Chair curl-ups, 3x12x10lbs combination of 45degree inclined 10lb dumbbell presses and dumbell flies, interspersed with 8x10lbs dumbbell curls.  If I have enough time and my joints feel okay, I'll add 5lbs dumbbell side-and-front arm raises (usually about eight each).  End with 12x(20+30+30lb) triceps pull-downs.  Wednesday, someone had replaced the triceps pull-down bar with a rope, which bothered my elbows... also, the incline bench was in use, so I was feeling my pectorals on Thursday. 

Channeling Norman Thayer

In the 1990's, when I lived in Arizona, I used to skydive. Yes, it's true: for about two years every other week or so I'd go to a drop zone, spend too much money, and throw myself out of an airplane at an altitude of 13,000 feet. It was lots of fun.

One time, I was practicing back-flips in the air. I exited the plane and was falling through the sky. Freestyle skydiving was the New Thing, and I was practicing something called a stag pose (one foot down, one foot back, arms out in what I think was supposed to look like deer antlers). Then it was time for a back-flip. "Okay!" I said to myself. "I'm going to do a back-flip." I continued to fall through the air in a box stance. "Back-flip!" I had just practiced them on the ground twenty minutes ago. "No. Really; I'm going to do a back-flip now." And then the most curious thing happened.

A strong mental image appeared before my eyes, momentarily blocking out the Tucson mountains and the sun and the moon and the wispy clouds. In my mind's eye, I saw a string trailing along the ground--it disappeared into a dark hole.  I continued to fall a mile a minute through the sky.  Okay, I thought, I'm going to file this away for later and go back to stag poses.

On the ground, of course, I knew that jerking my knees to my chest in free-fall would cause a back-flip.  The next time around, I managed to one.  Memory and thinking were different while skydiving; I used to call time spent in free-fall "jumping into my sky-mind."  I think my sky-mind was using the image to say, "Look, I don't know what this phrase your saying means, so I'm going to use the symbol of strings into darkness to tell you."  Sometimes I could remember dreams of skydiving more clearly than actually skydiving.

Fast forward to 2018.  We were going to beach for the weekend. I volunteered to drive the first fairly straight part, from Eugene to Corvallis, because the winding coastal mountain roads bothers Mark's stomach less if he drives them. We had a short discussion about the merits of taking I-5 verses Highway 99W.

I got behind the wheel of our new car and adjusted the mirrors. It's different from the smaller car I've been driving for the last fifteen years. The newer car doesn't have a parking break lever: it's got a toggle that you have to press down to release the break or pull up to set--if I pretend the toggle switch is a break lever I can keep the break settings straight. It doesn't have an analogue speedometer dial: instead, it's got a digital readout. The clock is in the upper right-hand corner of a LCD screen instead of centered over an analog radio-CD player combo. The new car's body is just a little wider and longer than the old car, and the hood sits in a valley between two large headlight bulges--so there's a wider blind spot along the front sides of the car than I'm used to.

None of this is bad, only different--like wearing boots after wearing flip-flops. But it meant I'm thinking about how to drive the car instead of automatically driving it, sort of like thinking of e a c h  l e t t e r   i n   t h i s   s e n t e n c e   as I type it instead of wiggling my fingers and having whole words and phrases magically appear.

I signal, pull out, drive about a half block to a stop sign, and realize that A) I know I want to drive to Corvallis, but that B) I can't remember which way to turn to begin a trip I've made twelve times a year for the last twenty years. Some crossing pedestrians buy me time, and I play the journey backwards in my head, starting at Corvallis and heading past the airport toward Eugene. I can see a stretch of Highway 99W in my mind's eye, but I can't stitch the path from where I'm currently at a stop sign to the place on the highway. I tried again, and I get farther, to the Expressway, but I was still having an "A to B, B to C, therefore A to C" disconnect.

"Um," I said. "I've forgotten how to get to Corvallis." I heard those words come out of my mouth and tried not to freak out. "Which way do I turn?" Both ways seem equally wrong somehow. I'm hoped that going through the motions will jump-start the procedure.

"Are you impaired?" Mark asks. "Can you drive?"

"I'm fine," I said, although I felt like an Alzheimer's patent. "I just need to know which way to go."

"Turn left," he said, and I did. There was no resultant ah-ha moment as I drove along the street (in hindsight, we were facing east instead of west and I would have turned right then right again).

I played the travel tape in my head backward once more and the topology of the valley unfolded in my head like the full, four-part chorus of a song--but I needed to sing the opening verse, and I couldn't recall the first words.

I tried to recall harder, and the image of a dark hole opened up in my mind, with strings or highways disappearing into them.

I pulled the car to the side. "I still can't remember."

Mark and I traded spots, and as he took his usual route (I've never understood why he takes this particular way), I watched, and waited a few blocks for recognition. It's not exactly an ah-ha moment, more like a oh-right with a whole lot of "Holy crap, I'm going to become one of those Old People Who Have To Be Driven Everywhere Because They Get Lost And Had Their Driver's License Revoked." Before I'm 55.

Crap. Is this Golden Pond Norman Thayer Moment early-onset Alzheimer's? Is Mark going to have to watch over me so I don't wander? Should I send him away on a cool vacation now while I can still function on my own? Should I arrange a companion for him now so I can go into a Happy Memories Fake Village knowing he'll be with someone?  (My friend Ellen laughed and said "How like a Capricorn to order someone else's life from an old folk's home" when I shared this with her.)  Can I even afford a Happy Memories Fake Village from age 55 onward? Damn, how long did Terry Pratchett have to live once he got Alzheimer's? Damn, damn, damn.

Except... that string into a shadow image felt more like that sky-diving moment than like being lost. I knew where I was--but I was stuck trying to find the starting point in the procedure... sort of like getting stuck thinking too hard about the difference between the clutch, the brake, and the gas.

Maybe this is a Frankie from Grace and Frankie style stroke. Except that I can smile on both sides of my face and raise both arms. And I'm not a 80-something Lillian Tomlin.

Maybe it was state-dependent learning--a new environment (and starting east instead of west) interfered with the recall of a normally automatic behavior. Maybe thinking about driving instead of simply driving resulted in "choking" on automatic behavior. I'm going with this explanation, because the others rattle the hell out of me. When I correctly remembered when we hit the coastal highway in Philomath at 13th street, I felt a little better.

At a stop a couple of hours later, I thanked Mark for driving and he brushed it off with a "You've always had difficulties going places." (This is true; my Adventures in Geographical Impairment are a source of frequent mirth). "You're old, you had a brain-fart." And then he followed it up with a comparison between the look on my face and that of my Grandmother in one of her less lucid moments.  (Which made me feel oh-so-sexy....)

The next day, I drove us back home. Because I could. Because when you fall off a horse, you have to get back on.  And the next day after that, I'm drove the old car around Eugene and thought, cautiously, "Yeah. It was the car."

November Jack-O-Lantern Prophecy

November 1, I hung the tiny jack-o-lanterns from the tree out back.  I think I'd like to fill the tree with about three times as many pumpkins next year (although they would be tempting for the stupid squirrels and I'd have to practice just accepting that a few of the jack-o-lanturns would be mauled for seeds.  

But having a tree filled with glowing faces and illuminated with flickering candlelight would be worth it, I think.  I keep thinking that I'd like to have an outside Tarot reading table for Halloween night, but the logistics of getting folks into our yard are tricky.

Cicero was uncharacteristically cooperative with the camera, and I got a few good black-cats-and-pumpkin shots.  Mark was unimpressed because A) what's the big deal about Halloween and B) yet another cat photo on the Internet.  Oh well.   

Now it's been a week and The Child was wistfully wondering if he could take a baseball bat to the hanging jack-o-lanterns, one of which has had its face gnawed off by squirrels.  I told him no because A) it's post-Halloween and B) beating effigy heads is for the uncouth and ignorant.

Besides, I think there's a kind of prophesy at work -- the first jack-o-lantern to fall off the tree was the one with the jagged smile, and the one with the mauled hole for a face looked like a knight, and will frowny one be the last?  There must be a meaning in there.  

 

I'm guessing that if this were one hundred years ago, the last jack-o-lantern hanging would turn out to be my husband.  It sounds like researching crow counting rhymes and other folk oracles may be in order.

Paper Clip at Shadowspinners

Today I'm the guest blogger over at ShadowSpinners.  They published my "tale of mystery, inspiration, and not-so-ordinary objects."

Larison Creek Hike

Over the weekend we went to Larison Creek to hunt for mushrooms.  There weren't so many this time; either we were too late for them, or the weather had been too dry or too cold.  The creek bed is part of a large reservoir, and the slopes above the creek's banks are terraced by previous higher levels.










The most obvious mushrooms were the shelf mushrooms growing on the sides of trees.  Slightly less obvious, but ubiquitous once you started to look for them were some teeny-tiny ones growing out of moss-covered logs. 

At the parking lot there was a dead dear carcass.  Something about the empty eye sockets made it look oracular from its position between the worlds.  If we had been in a Grimm fairytale, we would have nailed the head to a gate and asked it questions--but it was old and gross and the rest of the family wouldn't entertain the thought of dead deer bits in the car.








The more coral-like ones remind me of Sheri S Tepper's novel, Raising the Stones. 

 These were growing about eight feet up on a tree.

Near our turn-around point, we came upon a kind of cascade of mushrooms.












This was my first mushroom hike with the new camera, and I'm still running into situations where the focal length and the zoom confuse the auto-focus of the images.  The flip-screen does make it easier to get at difficult angles without having to lie in mud or damp forest litter.

  

Halloween Gym Report

Gym report:  I've been getting back into a gym routine, which is nice.  I did the usual elliptical thing for about 20 minutes, followed by a sideways elliptical thing on a different machine (I've decided it feels a little like RollerBlading).  The machines report 250 calories burned.   Downstairs a typical routine is 12x(50+60+70lbs) on the lat pulldown, 3x12 Roman Chair curl-ups, 3x12x10lbs combination of 45degree inclined 10lb dumbbell presses and dumbell flies, interspersed with 8x10lbs dumbbell curls.  If I have enough time and my joints feel okay, I'll add 5lbs dumbbell side-and-front arm raises (usually about eight each).  End with 12x(20+30+30lb) triceps pull-downs.   I've been keeping the weights on the low end, and so far my left elbow has remained happy. 

Went the Monday before Halloween, skipped Halloween, the Friday after Halloween, and a catch-up session Saturday.  Went yesterday.  Even with all the candy of the last week, I think I've managed to stay pretty close to my current set point (although it would be nice to get down about four more pounds). 

Tarot Spread

I dealt out some Tarot cards for myself Halloween night.  As I shuffled, I was thinking of of people who have passed in the last year, specifically Ursula Le Guin (who I've met for 20 seconds), Kate Wilhelm (who used to host a critique workshop at her house), and Dianna Rodgers (a fellow writer and Wordo). I wasn't asking any particular question, and the card spread lends itself to a general statement more than a collection of proscribed action.  Here it is:

The bottom line is typically read past-present-future or situation, reaction, outcome.  The top is a kind of "you are here," the bottom card is symbolic of one's role or general feeling, and the crossing card an obstacle (or at best a distracting by-product).   

As I wrote earlier, this spread is saying, "work hard, focus on one thing, and stay grounded in order to manifest things from the realm of the imagination" reading.  ("But darlin', you knew that already, didn't ya.")   More specifically....

The Queen of Cups is the intuitive dreamer who is focused on an interior world or crystal visions.  The Lovers Reversed is about choosing; it also is associated with bringing opposites together to make a unified whole--but it's reversed so integrating things is blocked.  The King of Pentacles reversed is someone who manufactures and has built up a kingdom (of works) -- another blocked card; so fire isn't being expressed as earth here.  The Moon is energy of the Crystal Vision the Queen is seeing, and the challenge is to bring that inner vision to the physical realm where it can be expressed.  But, oh, no!  The Chariot, which symbolizing unifying conflicting drives through poise and will is reversed.

So... the watery vision needs some structure to crystallize.

More Halloween

At the eleventh hour I finished carving pumpkins and got them put up and lit and everything.  Whew.  The Child didn't go trick-or-treating this year (well... maybe a little) so he stayed home to hand out candy and Mark and I went on a pumpkin walk through the neighborhood. 

I don't know if the weather or another event had drawn folks away, but the streets were much less crowded with folks than they have been in past years.  Maybe Mark and I missed the peak time.  In any case, the whole scene seemed more subdued than I remember from the past.  It's also possible that Halloween on a Wednesday had something to do with it and I'm recalling Friday and Weekend Holliday masses.

Later, I did a five-card Tarot spread for myself -- and got the usual "work hard, focus on one thing, and stay grounded in order to manifest things from the realm of the imagination" reading.  Cue Miss Cleo saying, "But darlin', you knew that already, didn't ya."