Part One

In my last post, I talked about my relationship with my local Outdoor Learning Center, and I how I consciously need to realign that relationship in order to continue with it.

I have an — unhealthy — impulse to want to claim some ownership of things I love, even if those things aren’t my things. I’m not talking about creating external power struggles. It’s more that I tend to develop an odd sense of attachment, with a martyr complex thrown into the mix.

The brand of dysfunction that I grew up with declared, in no uncertain terms, that I was not allowed to have desires or goals for myself (because that would be selfish), but I could enthusiastically support others in their endeavors.

Seeing it in black and white makes it seem… unhealthy and weird, kind of like institutionalized neediness. (Because it *is* weird. If you don’t have your own stuff, you’re going to get caught up in other people’s stuff. It’s not appropriate.)

I love the OLC. I have loved the OLC from the time I first set foot on the grounds. It is a magical place, and the staff does magical work. And sometimes, I get to help out with some of that work. Mostly, I get to hang out with the most awesome birds in the world, and sometimes with a very cute chinchilla.

But here’s the thing, and it is a thing: no matter how much time I spend as a volunteer, I am not a person with any decision-making capacity. I am not responsible for any part of the OLC except my work on Thursdays (or whatever day I’m working). My name is not on the door.

Further, I don’t want those things. I love the kids, but the thought of teaching full-time makes me a little bit woozy — effective classroom management is a skill and a gift I do not possess. It’s overstimulating. Fundraising is not my jam. I am not equipped, temperamentally or by skillset, for the main work of this place.

I *am* well equipped to work with the birds. I love them. I don’t mind the work of caring for them. Being a part of keeping the sanctuary running is a really neat thing. But that’s where it begins and ends for me.

I am deeply privileged to get to be a part of this organization. I want to continue to be a part of this amazing work, even while recognizing that, aside from a small part of it, it is not my work.

Now I am on a quest to find my work… to create my project.

I do not know what it will be. That’s OK. It took some time to get here; it will take some time to move on from here.

2023 Edition

I am not a fan of new year’s resolutions. I’m a person prone to waiting, for the right time, for permission, for inspiration… it’s not workable for me to hold onto a specific date that way. There’s all the anticipation, and then, all of the sudden, it’s an obligation and, for whatever reason, procrastination kicks in, and then… failure. Right at the beginning.

This year I’m striving for continuity:

• Continuing my education and experience as a master naturalist;
• Continuing the habit of doing yoga 5-6x/week for 30 – 45 minutes at a time;
• Continuing — and expanding — a nascent sketchbook habit (that has been nascent for years — I’ve been playing at it for a long time);
• Finding new recipes, and continuing to tweak the ones I found last year;
• Settling into working with the OLC’s birds on my time and on my terms, rather than trying to be the “best volunteer of all time, ever in the history of the world.” (Don’t get me wrong, I want to be a good volunteer, in the sense that I try to make things easier for the people I work with… or at least not make things harder. But I need to — consciously — take a step back from the impulse to try to claim ownership of any of it, because it’s really — and I cannot stress this enough — not. my. project.)

There are some new things on the horizon, of course:

• I start graduate school in January. That will be fun, and hugely challenging… not just the content, but the structure. I’m looking forward to placing my existing skills into a new context, and learning new skills.
• I want to buckle down and spend some time learning animal anatomy, animal drawing and rendering, and creature design. This is another thing I’ve been playing at, and I want to stop playing at it and take it seriously. Because it’s fun. (And it can be somewhat related to master naturalist stuff, so there’s that…)

I guess I have one, sort of, resolution, and that is to limit my time on social media. There’s *a lot* of great stuff on social media — don’t get me wrong — but there’s also some really not great stuff, and I find myself spending more of my time and attention on the not great stuff, and it’s bumming me out. So there’s that.

The first order of business?

Get rid of this godawful cold, that I’ve now had for *checks notes* TEN DAYS. It’s in my lungs AND my sinuses, and it’s miserable. (It’s also not Covid — five negative tests over nine days — and while I have no doubt that it’s a virulent respiratory illness, it’s not THAT PARTICULAR virulent respiratory illness… I’m wearing a mask when I leave the house.)

Our coffee grinder jammed before Thanksgiving. We figured out how to clear it.

It jammed again.

After cleaning it out one more time — and having it jam one more time — I decided to try to replace the conical burr…

… it turned into a project, with new tool acquisition, and a few more parts.

I took it apart. There was so much coffee… everywhere.

I downloaded PDFs from Baratza. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos.

There was gnashing of teeth. There was swearing. It took a bunch of restraint to not just give up and order a new one.

But this machine had become my white whale. Fabulous and talented husband called it my quest.

I did it.

Time to test it.

It works! Coffee ground to specification. No blockages.

We’ll see if it lasts.

A fair amount of snow in this neck of the woods. We’re lucky to live in a neighborhood where almost everyone shovels, or we all have awesome neighbors who like to use their big snow blowers. It means that, with a good set of traction (looking at you, Kahtoola), walking is pleasant.

I’m amazed that there are so many treasures to be found on a walk. Little things that are just fun to see. And I’m glad that phone cameras are so readily available!

Today I learned the difference between rime and hoar frost. Rime ice is formed when water droplets in freezing fog adhere to objects as ice — that’s the “fuzzy” (not snow) stuff you see in these photos (we’ve had freezing fog and drizzle for the last few days). Hoar frost happens when water vapor in cold, clear air forms crystals on objects. (We get plenty of that, too.)

In other news, the Christmas decorations are up. I’m not feeling super festive this year, but it’s good to have a few more lights in the house on dark nights.

I am done with my Christmas shopping. Gifts for family were wrapped and left with them in Portland after Thanksgiving.

This is not like me. I’m not, in this or any other universe, that organized… in a normal year. I don’t wait until the last minute, but I generally don’t get everything sent away until around mid-December.

This bout of organization has nothing to do with planning or goal setting, though. I simply do not have the bandwidth to manage chaos at the moment, and so I shopped early because my goal for the end of this year is not to create avoidable chaos. (I’ll have to leave space for the unavoidable… nothing I can do about that.)

2022 has been hard… after a couple of hard years. I had a six week long non-Covid respiratory situation that required a ton of meds to mitigate (some of which made things worse), lots of volunteering at the OLC (then less, then more, and now less), some drawing classes and the master naturalist course, applying to grad school. The hardest bit — that lasted almost the whole year: our sweet elderly dog Lilo got really sick in mid-January, and early February, and early April, then struggled with progressive disease — with attending vet and vet tech appointments — until she passed in early October.

I am not generally a high energy person. Over several years, I’ve learned that I’ve never really had the capacity to manage being busy all the time — even in the best of times. But I have always been able to push through, far beyond my limits, until I get sick or burn out. Whether my chronic health conditions (thankfully manageable with medication) are a result of a lifetime of cycling like that or not, that way of living is no longer on the table for me.

Something has to give.

This month, I’m doing what my brother calls “turtling.” I’m curling up in my house, taking it easy (shoveling snow as necessary), volunteering a little bit, drawing and painting and cooking… and taking care.

One year, after we had been in Spokane for a couple of years, we had a storm dump 18 inches of snow in 24 hours.

We don’t get lake effect snow. This is not Buffalo. It’s not uncommon for us to have storms drop 6″ – 8″ in a go, but 18 inches was a bit much.

The next day, we had a much less unusual 6″ snowfall. But, let’s see (counts on fingers), that’s 24″ of snow in 48 hours.

I was not prepared. Not logistically. Not emotionally.

I used to be one of those “wait until the snow stops before you shovel.”

NO MORE. Now I go out and shovel every few hours in daylight during a snow event. Active snow events make me nervous. Plus, it’s easier for me to shovel 2-3″ at a time, than 6-8″ (or 18″), because let’s face it; my back and shoulders are not what they were when I was in my 20s (and I haven’t been in my 20s for a very long time). Anything more than 6″ takes forever and I’m sore for the rest of the day.

We have a walk, front sidewalk (with no hell strip), the cars, side alley, back patio, back stairs… and the sun room roof. (We have a sun room with a roof that isn’t pitched properly, so ice dams form at the gutter if you don’t rake the roof after big storms.)

[Fortunately for us, we have a couple of amazing neighbors with big snow blowers, and it’s not uncommon to come outside to find a path blown down the sidewalk. (So thankful.)]

Thanks to said amazing neighbors, the job isn’t as huge as it might be otherwise… but it’s still a big job that isn’t much fun. It’s one of those things that I hate to have to do, but I allow myself to hate it and carry on with it, because the longer you leave snow sitting around, the harder it becomes to move. It can get heavy because there’s a lot of it, because it’s wet, or because it has compacted from sitting around too long.

We got ~6.5″ of snow last night, between midnight and 7:30a. Our amazing neighbor plowed a path, so all I had to do was shovel around it in front. I cleared the front porch, the walk, the alley and half of the patio, the back stairs, and raked the roof. Fabulous and talented husband, finished the patio with our little snow blower and cleared the cars.

As I type this is 9:45a, and it’s still snowing — projected to continue for the next several hours (although it looks like we’ve had the bulk of the snow already, so my next few forays shouldn’t be as intense).

I’ll be out at lunchtime, and again after dinner. And we’ll do it all over again tomorrow, if necessary.

On Saturday I decided that I wanted to create some gift tags for Christmas… and I decided I would print them…

… but not on a printer… intaglio (dry point), on a press.

Specifically, a tiny press.

This little gadget is wonderful — it’s 3D printed, and so much fun to use. It’s great to have a press that can exert enough pressure to make intaglio prints at home.

Lovely, professional etching presses weigh a lot and take up a bunch of space. Tabletop presses are usually heavy. This is a nice way to be able to participate in an activity I’m new to (and not great at… yet) without overcommitting.

My first prints weren’t great though.

As I’m sure you can tell, I’m not an expert printmaker. And I don’t practice that often. I tried to do too much on my 4 cm x 6 cm plate, a sheet of heavy Dura-Lar. (I’m sure a competent printmaker could have pulled it off; I needed more space to to what I wanted to do.)

Next attempt is closer. I upsized my plate a little bit and ran it through the “big” press, which, in my house, is a pasta machine.

Getting there. I’m going to give this sheet time to dry completely and see if I can add some watercolor to it. We’ll see how it works out.

Maybe someday I’ll upgrade to a Sizzix machine, or join the print center to get access to the beautiful big press. But for now, the pasta machine and my tiny press will do.

For the master naturalist class I’m taking, one of the assignments was to do some nature journaling… it’s one of the reasons I took this class in this format. One of the other reasons is that this course was 12 weeks long, so I had an opportunity to sit with the information after it was presented.

Here are some of my favorite entries.

We covered A LOT of ground in 12 weeks — birds, plants, fire ecology, mammal tracking, mushrooms, biogeography, geology — frankly, it underscored how much there is to learn, and how little any one of us knows.

It has been an amazing experience.

I wrote an entire post about narcissism this morning, and then decided I probably shouldn’t post it.

Years of social media have turned my brain to mush, in some respects. Look at me, out here, thinking I actually have something important to say about something I’m not remotely qualified to talk about. I have a narcissist in my orbit, and that’s a situation that requires careful navigation, but generally speaking, I can’t speak with authority or certainty about it. So probably best not to wade in those waters.

And frankly, I don’t want my little, tiny corner of the internet to be devoted to other people’s bullshit. There are *plenty* of other spaces devoted to that kind of thing.

So here’s what I’ve been doing lately:

Going to the Bluff

The bluff is my little natural spot for my Montana Master Naturalist class, so I’ve been spending a little more time there, among the Ponderosa Pine and the spotted knapweed (boo!).

Drawing Animals

I’m taking an animal sketching/creature design class — beginner — on Sunday afternoons. It is super fun, even if I’m not great at it. I love it.

Learning a smidge of ASL

My grandmother lost almost all of her hearing as she aged (both my grandparents did), and times being what they were, she tried to ignore it as long as possible and avoided wearing hearing aids (which, admittedly weren’t all that great to begin with). Her hearing loss became a barrier to social interaction in her later years, which exacerbated her depression and anxiety.

Near the end of her life, she developed a form of dementia, and while her hearing loss likely didn’t cause it, it may have contributed to some of her struggles with it.

My hearing is still good for a person my age, although because of injury or infection, I have tinnitus (and some hearing loss) in my left ear.

This is a start. I don’t know if I’ll ever be in a position to converse in ASL, but I’ll at least know some fingerspelling.

The self-paced, online course is from Ashley Clark Fry, and it can be found here: https://signedwithheart.teachable.com/p/fingerspelling101

(She has a neat Instagram account, too.)

I was awake very early this morning, and to occupy my mind until I could fall asleep again, I practiced fingerspelling animal names… a-l-l-i-g-a-t-o-r… b-i-s-o-n… slowly and haltingly.

We’ll see where it goes.

(And yeah, I’ll be making use of whatever assistive devices are available to me as I need them. Goal for 2023: hearing test and consultation with someone who knows about these things.)

Before:

I try to get the kind of candy I enjoyed seeing in my bucket when I was a kid… and Skittles, for people who don’t like/can’t eat chocolate. It was enough to fill our fruit bowl.

… and let’s face it, the Almond Joy is for me, because I like them. Whatever is left by Halloween will get “shared” with parents, I’m sure.

After:

We shut down at 8p, because that’s when our parrot quiets down for the night and we don’t want lots of interruption after then (because irritated parrots are a little bit like tired small children… miserable). It rained a bit during the day, and our block isn’t very active on Halloween, so we weren’t sure we’d get any visits at all. It turned out to be a fairly light night, but the costumes were amazing, it was good to see some parents and dogs along for the ride, and everyone got a decent handful of candy.

Until next year!