Rachael

Went for a great walk the other day with the dogs. Every walk is a great walk, usually, but this one was super because I finally remembered the camera!

Harriet, at 16 years old, is very sad that I make her walk. I also don’t love her, nor does Lala, and neither of us ever feed her or rub her belly. Ever.

They make me walk on stones in the cold. Oh, my bones.

Or maybe she’s LYING:

She is very tall on the picnic table.

She might ignore me and the camera for a minute:

But she can’t ignore me forever.

That might be too much loving, really.

I would have taken more pictures of Clara, but really she’s just a blur. I caught this as she ran past, drool flying in wild strings from her jowls, racing after the next dog — always the next dog is the best dog, the only dog, the dog that will make all her games-of-tag dreams come true:

HI! HI! HI! BYE!

One moment is unnerving, though. I am busy throwing the ball for Clara, or talking to someone, not paying total attention. I walk on, then I hear someone say, "Hey, isn’t that your dog?"  I look behind me to see Harriet flying down the walkway, along the water, going the wrong way. And you wouldn’t think it, but those little legs can get a move on when they want to. So I call her. And I call her louder. And then I remember that recently she’s gone pretty damn deaf, so I scream her name. People start to look at me.

Harriet is still running hell for leather away from me, obviously looking for me and Clara, and she’s about to round the turn where I’ll lose sight of her, so I start to step it up. I run, Clara  leaping at my heels thinking it’s a great new game, and I’m yelling as loudly as I can "HARRIET!" while taking a brief second to explain to each person I zoom past "She’s sixteen, she’s deaf," because I feel somehow embarrassed that they’re watching me chase a dog who obviously doesn’t want to be caught.

Then the onlookers start to help, and there is a chorus of Harriets all around me. She finally hears all of us, and turns around, still far ahead of me. OH BOY THERE YOU ARE!  She runs back to me, thrilled with her sleuthing skills.

I JUST TURNED AROUND AND YAY! HERE YOU ARE!

This is proof. Harriet, although low, can streak along at the sound of a fast-flying biscuit.

Dogs is good.

 

I seriously just spent my whole day off, between running errands and having lunch with family, trying to crochet a cloche.

To. Crochet. A. Cloche.

And finally, when I realized my crochet gauge is as crazy-loose as my knitting gauge, and after I’d gone up in size four times in both yarn weight and hook size, and when I’d finished said hat at almost ten, and when I put it on, I realized, yep. I looked exactly as if I should be selling hemp products on Telegraph Avenue with my dog and pet rat playing at my feet (no offense to hemp, Telegraph, dogs, or rats). Strangely, I did NOT (even with bangs) look like Amelie. I was not suddenly eating creme brulee, or skipping stones across St. Martins Canal. Parisian birds were not singing. Harriet burped at my feet as I looked at myself, and I vaguely wondered where my Birkenstocks were.

No I will not show you. Oh-ho, no.

Crochet is for the weak. Or the very, very strong. And I am neither. I’m going to go knit now. Solace.

Are you looking for something to read? Something interesting and real and exotic and inspiring?

I have been ADDICTED to Joy’s blog, Road Blog Ahead. I can’t even remember how I got there, probably via a comment or something, but it’s truly something else. Originally from Oakland/Bay Area, she’s been living in Rewalsar, India for the last year or so, and she and her partners get up to SUCH INTERESTING THINGS. Seriously, for the first time ever, I’m starting at the very beginning of her blog, when she was still living in my ‘hood, and moving toward present day.

If you have a minute (or several, it’s a loooong entry), you should read THIS entry. It’s a good intro to who she is and what they do.

And lifting shamelessly from this post, I’ll share a bit that made me howl. Joy is making a birthday cake for a friend in the village. She is making it in a stovetop tandoor on a propane stove, using cobbled-together ingredients. The power goes out, so she lights a fire, and struggles with the second layer in the dark. She accidentally mixes the wet with the frosting, and forgets the flour, so she and her wife Lena kind of fix that, and then struggle to frost it.

At some point during this, Lena, who is trying to fill in  rapidly
growing craters, looks over her shoulder, gasps and says to me, “Joy
quick, put the cat out!!” This cat is a pain in the ass as he is
lactose intolerant and we’re constantly on guard against him getting
into milk. Thinking he’s found some cream, I look around and ask, “Why?
What’s he got into now?” She points to my feet and goes, “”No no, Put
it out, put it out! His tail is on fire!” Sure enough, Mr. Leopard has
gotten his backside too close to the blazing hearth and is so busy
hunting hunks of spilled butter that he hasn’t noticed that his tail is
now smouldering. He gets really indignant when I grab his tail and put
out the glowing red ember simultaneously smothering it in the chocolate
icing that’s all over my hand. I hope there’s no cat hair or ashes in
the final product.

Or, then there’s this post, from back when they were living in Kathmandu, Nepal last year during the demonstrations for democracy. Joy says, "Yeah, old activists don’t die, they just move to Nepal and get in trouble there."  A little scene-setting: Joy is taking shelter in an internet cafe as the soldiers are arresting people and "moving" them to "safer" places, foreigners included. Lena is bound and determined to take pictures, so she’s out in the melee, in her element. 

A half hour later, Lena comes in as I said above. I can tell by her hot, dusty, sweaty face that she’s been running.

“Over two walls,” she grins, dropping into the chair beside me and
fanning herself with her hat. “Through a hotel, out their back door,
over the wall. The hotel guys saved my ass. The soldiers were chasing
me and two others. I ducked into this little hotel and said, ‘You got a
back door?’ Once the guy realized what was happening, he was pleased to
help. He showed me out the door into the dead end alley and said, ‘Can
you climb?’ I nodded and he gave me a leg up over the wall. I almost
landed in a poker game on the other side when I dropped down. The guys
there got it immediately. One fellow picked up my hat and said
pointedly with a smile and averted eyes, ‘I don’t see you.’ ‘Right,’ I
said and ran, scaling the next wall, down and alley and back around to
the main street from the other direction."

I do believe, from what Joy’s said that Lena is probably over fifty (forgive me if I’m wrong, Lena), and I have a new goal: to be that fucking cool at her age. Dude. You can see the pictures she took that day at the gallery here, under the Kathmandu section.

Lena is the doctor to a Tibetan Buddhist guru (a close friend of theirs for many, many years), who lives with his cave-dwelling community at the top of a mountain. I mean, really. What a cool sentence that is.

They maintain the Tso Pema Medical Emergency Fund for the people around them, and this one in particular really moved me.

On the topic of gifts and the spirit of the holidays, I’m going to
single out one particular story. We have received several donations to
the Medical/Emergency Fund. I thank each of you whose compassion and
kindness have led you to write to me privately or to click the PayPal
button so that we can continue to help people. This week, Catherine
donated some money to the Emergency Fund (see sidebar) with this note:

“This is a gift from my family … to a family in Tso Pema
(whoever you think needs it) in the spirit of the holidays. … I think
it’s cool that you are providing this little link between us in Maine
and everyone in Tso Pema, way up there in the mountains, on the other
side of the world."

Lena and I knew IMMEDIATELY who this will go to.

I may have posted this photo before. The woman’s name is Tashi Paldron and her daughter is Tenzin Zomkyi. Tashi Paldron escaped from Tibet on foot while pregnant and the birth was terribly difficult. She and her daughter are all the family each other has.

The girl is in one of the government boarding schools and it’s hard for them to be separated. The mother, who has taken nun’s vows, is living in a small damp, cave just outside town. It had a bad case of fleas last time we were there.

For a while, someone in Denmark sponsored them, sending subsistence living money a couple of times a year. Then they stopped. This spring, we thought we’d found them another sponsor but that person never wrote back. So they’ve been pretty stuck. My own daughter, Veronica, who has stepchildren the same age as Tenzin Zomkyi, pulled what she could out of her family’s Christmas budget and sent it so that the child could get a bus ticket home to Tso Pema for the winter holidays. Tashi cried with relief.

Catherine, I’m giving your gift to them also, so that they can eat and keep warm for the next month while they are together. There are a lot of needy individuals and families, particularly in the cold of winter (it was 9 degrees this morning) but we felt that these two, right this moment, have the greatest need.

There are more stories of this kind of help in THIS post from which I lifted this bit, and all over her blog.

I have the biggest blog-crush I think I’ve ever had. And as you’ve seen from the above, they’re out there, doing good. I’m heading over to the Paypal link (accessible from the front page HERE) right now, to give a little money. They’re at $7,959 of a goal $10,000. You wanna help me get them nearer that goal? I can’t afford much, none of us can. But I know what happened with my boy, Digit, and how small and heartfelt $5 and $10 dollar donations added up into all his vet expenses paid in full. What could that same response do for them?

MWAH.

 

because you know I usually  don’t, but please.

Mike Huckabee would like to change the Constitution to reflect God’s standards. That’s great. And now he’s comparing homosexuality to bestiality. Fantastic.

From an interview in Beliefnet:

BN: Is it your goal to bring the Constitution into strict
conformity with the Bible? Some people would consider that a kind of
dangerous undertaking, particularly given the variety of biblical
interpretations.

Huckabee: Well, I don’t think that’s a radical
view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is
to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it
can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child,
a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is
open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a
change in what’s been historic.

Wow. Ever heard of Rick Santorum, Mike? What will the word Huckabee come to mean? Any good ideas, Dan Savage?

*Edited to add: It’s started! Thanks, Dan. (Warning, links might be offensive to some. That’s the point.)

It’s super foggy outside — can’t even see the hill where I walk the dogs. I’m drinking my tea. It’s weird, I lost my taste for coffee about three or four weeks ago, something I do every once in a while. My acupuncturist calls it liver stagnation. I call it coffee-tastes-bad. And I love coffee, so it’s quite strange when that happens. But I’m loving my tea, and I really need a tea cozy for the pot. Wish I would just make one, but there are so many other things demanding my attention today!

For example, today I would like to:

1. Go for a run with Clara
2. Clean the house
3. Do laundry
4. Make oatmeal-raisin cookies
5. Grocery shop
6. Dye my hair/cut bangs
7. SPIN!
8. KNIT!

Those last two things are the things I want to do most, and I want to do them while watching stupid TV. But what will happen, what always happens, is I will put off doing the fun things until all the chores are out of the way (and many more chores will occur to me as I’m moving through the house) and then it will be seven o’clock, and I’ll be tired and rather grumpy from being So Busy on a day off.

So what do I do? Combat it by spinning right now? Watch a little TV? I know, logically, that if I do that, I will be happy and content, and then I will move easily into house-cleaning — a little here, a little there. But I have such a stubborn streak about "getting things over with" that I always feel like I should do the icky stuff first, then have the reward. Although like I said, the reward is always moving away as the day slips by.

So yes. I will compromise — I’ll put in some laundry, and maybe clean the couches of dog hair and THEN spin for a bit (not with the dog hair! No! With the luscious camel/silk I’m dying to play with). And maybe knit a cozy later.

GOOD MORNING!

Whoops. My caps were on lock, but I suppose that’s a nice, loud way to greet you, so I’ll let it stand.

Just for fun, a picture from the never-blogged archives (or was it? Don’t remember. But it’s cute! Here you go!)

        Everyone say cheese!

And how are you?

Me, I’m pretty sleepy. But happy, because I did my soy test last night (while I’m going to see an allergist when they can get me in, I’m also practically a doctor what with my Masters in English and EMD certificate, so I enjoy diagnosing myself) and I was very scientiffik about it. I had avoided ALL sources of soy completely for two full weeks (which meant no eating out, because seriously, it’s in things like hamburger buns and pasta. Please). And then last night I did my GO BIG OR GO HOME sushi feed, and I ate all the sushi I could fit in my mouth, dripping with wasabi soy saucey goodness.

And no problem. No reaction. No swollen lip/eye/tongue, no itching at all. I really think it is just a soy lecithin problem, which, while it is pretty awful to have to avoid things like chocolate and sweets, it’s not as bad as also avoiding all soy. Hooray!

Today, I’m helping a friend clean out her dad’s house — he just died, and I think I’m more moral support than muscle, although I’m happy to be both. So she’s picking me up in a little while, and it’s off to the city for us, and it’s a gorgeous, clear day, and I’m happy to not be at work. Yep. I hope your day is lovely and your teapot stays cozy.

https://rachaelherron.com/good-morning-wh/