31 January, 2012

I shouldn’t mention having a boring life

…because then the universe will decide to get me, even in a minor fashion. Spoiler: the following story ends well.

Yesterday on my way home from work I took the back way, as I often do because it’s shorter and the speed limit is lower so I use less gas, but it’s enough shorter that I don’t lose any time going home. It’s a lovely winding road through a lot of woods, and I was about three miles into it when I saw a big brown bird on the road ahead of me, and then a flash of white as it spread its tail feathers. A bald eagle!

No clue what it was doing there, it might have just nailed some small furry thing because it was struggling to get back into the air but didn’t look broken. As my car got closer, it quit worrying about whatever it was working on in the road and flapped heavily up to a tree branch above the road. And then as my car got really close, it went SWOOPFWOOSHZOOM back to the road, passing right in front of my car.

Three things happened at that point, pretty much simultaneously: I slammed on my brakes (because I have no idea what happens if you hit a bald eagle with your car but I’m pretty sure it involves being stripped of your citizenship and exiled to Canada, and anyway, I didn’t want to hit it!), my eyes bugged nearly out of my head, and I said “AAAAAAAA!”

The eagle landed in the opposite lane, grabbed a dead squirrel, and flapped heavily off into the forest. After giving me a dirty look — did it think I was about to try to steal its dead squirrel? I hyperventilated for a few minutes and then continued on my way home. It took a while for my eyes to stop being all bugged out, though.

In other news, my friend Gowan has a website now! You can find it right here. Gowan is freakin brilliant, I have a necklace she made that I wear on days when I want to feel gorgeous and mysterious. She is also an organic farmer, and is blogging farming, among other things. You should totally check her blog out, because it makes me want to quit my job and stay home and grow vegetables.

29 January, 2012

Rollin rollin rollin…

So anyway, we’re all keepin on here. Siddy continues to be Mr. Brilliant Pants except that yesterday at math class he had a hard time settling. I think some of that was that I was restless and having a hard time concentrating — thanks, fibromyalgia, I love the cognitive impairments.

This has been a lazy weekend after last weekends extravaganza of busy-ness: math class, naps, chicken farming.

My life is strangely non-exciting right now, which makes for poor blog entries.

23 January, 2012

Just dance!

A busybusybusy weekend. Although actually it was only busybusy, as math class was canceled due to ice on the roads. Sid didn’t get the day entirely off, though, as once it had melted off we headed down to Blackthorn Kennel to hang out with Christine for a couple hours and drop off the other three dogs and Roo, then we headed on to Harrisonburg to see my friend Wheelchair Dancer perform with other members of AXIS dance company.

The show was absolutely amazing, two hours of emotion, athleticism, and grace. The humans thoroughly enjoyed it, Sid slept through most of it. This was actually slightly a problem as the burst of applause at the end of the first piece startled him and he launched himself into my lap. Well, his upper half into my lap, which is as much as will fit. There was a Q&A after the show, and then a reception where we managed to hook up with Wheelchair Dancer and get a bit of a chat in between members of her adoring public arriving to talk to her, and people showing up to talk to me about Siddy.

Back at Blackthorn we got some fitful sleep while Roo did laps of the room, periodically trampling us and yelling. He’s lucky he’s cute. Then Sunday it was up and Christine joined us for the trip back to Harrisonburg and brunch with Wheelchair Dancer. Afterward, she and I played in the parking lot of her hotel! Sid worked for us both simultaneously, keeping me upright and providing propulsion for her, moving with a careful sensibility of having two people to watch over. He was beautiful, turning his head to check in with me, then to the other side to check in with her, adjusting speed, and eventually learning to watch for wheelchair clearance on his left side automatically, rather than needing cues from me. Wheelchair Dancer also let me use her chair so Siddy and I could take a solo spin, and it was pretty amazing. Also, Siddy thinks pulling a wheelchair is fun! I see wheels in our future… He also consented to work for Wheelchair Dancer, the first time he’s ever worked for anyone other than me.

After not enough time, we headed back up here and fell over. I’m still tired enough to wish I didn’t have to go to work but what the heck. The chickens and cats all survived our absence, and now it’s back to the grind, at least until AXIS comes back this way in May!

19 January, 2012

Itchitchitch

One thing I did this past weekend was get a new tattoo. I’ve got four already, so this isn’t exactly a new adventure. As any tattooed person can tell you, the first thing people will want to ask you about your tattoos is “Did it hurt?” I don’t know about other people but my answer to this is always yes, yes it did. But it’s not the pain I remember, it’s the ITCHING as the new tattoo heals. Oh god, the itching.

Having a tattoo is mostly like having skinned your knee. Most of us don’t remember skinned knees itching, because if they did itch, we could scratch them. You can’t scratch a healing tattoo as you might damage it, so there’s nothing to do but just keep moisturizing the sucker and wait as patiently as you can for the itching to stop.

Which is not very patiently, in my case. I cannot wait for the thing to heal and stop itching me.

13 January, 2012

O winter, how I loathe thee

I go through this thing, every January and February. This thing where I deeply and grumpily hate the winter, not because it’s terribly cold (it isn’t this year) but because WHERE DID THE SUN GO? It’s odd that this doesn’t trip for me until after the winter solstice. But I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that the light is increasing at the wrong time for me. It’s all being added to the end of the day, while leaving the beginning of my day trapped in bleak and chilly darkness. This chart from timeanddate.com will show you what I mean. Up until the 11th, all the extra daylight was being tacked on at the end of the day. Which is great and all, I am all in favor of extra daylight, but I am also one of those people who needs to get some sun in the morning in order to actually wake up. It may also have to do with the fact that after the solstice, sunrise is still getting later for a few days until it stalls out at that 0727.

I have a sun lamp and I have been known to use it, but the fact is that driving for an hour in the cold black darkness to get to work does absolutely nothing positive for my mood. And then I stay tired all day, and slightly grumpy, and come home and have to force myself at gunpoint[1] to do anything other than just go to bed as soon as I get off work. Really if I could hibernate through the winter, things would be so much better.

And of course, then once I have gotten used to having sunlight again, which reappears in my mornings sometime in February, we hit daylight savings time again and NO SUNLIGHT FOR MY COMMUTE. Again. So I loathe March, too, and also Daylight Savings Time.

I’m not even sure exactly where I’m going with this, except to say that I am a ball of grumpy for months on end and that the obvious answer here is to win the lottery so I can sleep through most of January and February.

[1] I jest. I do not actually force myself to do anything at gunpoint, which is probably why I’ve come home from work and gone directly to bed to loaf around with my tablet and my Kindle for the past four days.

11 January, 2012

Well that was exciting.

On Monday we had actual snow, a quarter inch of wet fluffy white stuff that stuck around just long enough for Daniel to throw snowballs for the Shedders and then started melting away, leaving a muddy swamp of a yard behind. Did I mention Sid got a bath, complete with painted toenails, on Monday? Of course he did, so of course it snowed. Ah, well, it’s not as if Friday Night Sid Grooming isn’t going to be the order of the day now that he’s working regularly on Saturdays.

While the snow wasn’t enough to cause serious problems like multi-day power outages, it did in fact accumulate enough on our internet satellite dish to shut down our connection to the world until mid-morning yesterday, when the last of it melted off. Ah, rural life. While I hated having neighbors practically right on top of me when I was living in town, I will say that inclement weather never accumulated on my cable connection and shut off the internet.

Well, except for that one time when lightning hit the cable junction box in my back yard that served the entire neighborhood and burnt out my cable box and also my laptop, which was no fun whatsoever, not even a little bit.

I have no charming pictures of chickens in the snow because our dedicated winter-proofing of the pens means that no snow could get to the chickens. And I didn’t bother to take dog pictures because there wasn’t enough snow to make them picturesque, so I am afraid that my gentle readers will have to just imagine Siddy frolicking in a quarter inch of snow while I shouted things like “DO NOT GET SID DIRTY OR I WILL COMMIT ATROCITIES!” at the dogs. It’s just possible that the neighbors who are close enough to hear me think I’m kind of weird. Although it’s possible they reached this conclusion due to my habit of shouting threats at deer.

9 January, 2012

Sid’s Academic Debut

Siddy took me to math class on Saturday and performed like a star. I have photographic proof!

Sid's front half as he lies keeled over on his side on the floor in harness, blissfully asleep.

I think if you start asking what the hardest skill to teach is, every service dog owner-trainer will have a different answer for you. For me, the hardest thing to explain to Sid has been how to turn himself off and just chill while I do something that he finds deeply boring. Like algebra. But he’s finally gotten there, so it’s time to start ratcheting up the criteria and teach him to pass out next to me, as opposed to sprawled across the floor a leash-length away.

The only problem we’ve encountered is that one of the things I taught him was to alert on me if I start zoning out — both the fibromyalgia and my meds for it make me a little prone to just staring into space, on standby myself. Why is this a problem? Because apparently to Sid, “zoning out” and “paying attention in math class but not taking notes” look similar enough that he decided he needed to snap me out of it. Whoops.

Still, I’m deeply proud of him. We got the most coveted compliment of all from one of my classmates at the first break: “I didn’t even know there was a dog back there!”

7 January, 2012

Dear old golden rule days…

Today is the start of a new semester! Actually, yesterday was, but today is the start of the one face-to-face class I have, which also happens to be math. Blargh. At least it’s Math 152, which is Math For Liberal Arts People Who Are Convinced Numbers Are A Fascist Conspiracy. I’m kind of excited to go back — although today is also Sid’s debut in a boring (for him, and possibly for me) classroom setting. Hopefully he doesn’t eat another student or a desk or something. Must remember to pack him a quiet, non-rolling chewie toy.

In other Sid news, he had his yearly exam yesterday where he weighed in at 78 pounds, which I believe makes him the largest dog in the house by weight. We’ll know for sure on Monday, when Beowulf gets his yearly exam and gets weighed. There’s no fat on Siddy, either, he is muscle and bone and dorkish enthusiasm for approximately everything ever.

The largest part of Beowulf’s exam will be having the vet feel up all the lumps he’s acquired in the past year. I’m reasonably certain they’re all benign lipomas, just collections of fat cells, but I’m a little worried anyway. We need his eyes checked, as well, since I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a developing cataract in his left eye at least. It sucks when your dog is getting old.

6 January, 2012

Another semester rolls around again…

After taking a year or so off to relax (ha!) it’s back to school today for me. Well, technically it’s back to school tomorrow, since my one in-person class meets on Saturdays. Then there’s three more classes, all online. Once this semester is over, I’ll have just two classes left to finish my associate’s degree, and then I’ve got to figure out what the heck I want to do about a bachelor’s.

Meanwhile, back at the Manor, the hens are providing us with around a dozen eggs a day between the bantams and the standard-sized hens. The dogs are enjoying eggy treats regularly to keep us from being overwhelmed, but we just can’t feed them enough eggs to make a serious dent in the number the hens provide. In another month it will be time to start hatching, but because of the size of my incubator that’s not going to make a serious dent, either. I think we’re going to have to start living on quiche, is all.

2 January, 2012

2011: The Year of Tiny Velociraptors (and also a husband)

Yes, yes, technically Daniel and I got married in 2010 — October, 2010, to be precise — but that meant that we had just barely gotten used to the idea by the time the year incremented. 2011 was the first year we spent together in its entirety, and since we managed to not kill each other at all, not even a little bit, and also not get divorced, I think we did pretty well.

2011, of course, was also The Year of Sid, who came to stay with us for good; and the Year of Juniper, Crispin, Clementine, Cairo, and Mica (formerly known as Coriander), the kittens who passed through our house on their way to their Forever People; likewise the Year of Briar Rose and Beckett, both of whom are now in good homes.

But mostly when I think of 2011 I think about chickens. Like Daniel, our first chickens actually came along in 2010, but it wasn’t until 2011 that the chicken thing got into full swing. Now I’m trying to make breeding plans for 2012, torn between things like showing my silkies at chicken shows as recognized colors, and letting them all just flock together and seeing what I get (while still selecting for type — good conformation is a must!). Merlin, our crele Old English Game Bantam rooster, just got his own little flock in the apex pen. It formerly housed the Modern Game Bantams, but they’ve moved inside for the winter. Merlin is enjoying life and very proud of his flock of three little hens.

Fall 2011 was also When I Started Yelling At The Planet — we had a massive heat wave in August, which broke shortly after the earthquake, which was in its turn followed by Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. We were fortunate enough to only catch the fringes of Irene and Lee, but that still meant an uncomfortable amount of wind and rain. I’m hoping Mother Earth does not decide to follow up the excitements of August and September with a Snowpocalypse or two this winter, for real.

Over all, though, I think 2011 was a pretty good year. And now Daniel has dug chicken poop into the garden beds, since we have a nice window of time when nothing will be growing there for three months, and has even added some of his home-grown compost to them what needs it. 2011 was also the year of the Experimental Garden. We know better what we’re doing this year, and when to plant and what to plant. So we take advantage of this fallow season to dispose of some chicken poop and enrich the soil, looking forward to the lettuces of spring, the tomatoes of summer, and the squashes of fall, as it were.

There is probably some really great metaphor there for life in general, if only I had not started it out with chicken poop.

Hope you survived 2011 in good form, my gentle readers, and I wish you the best as we head into the brave new year of 2012.