Cat inna box

She doesn't seem to realize that she doesn't fit.

Rain, rain, go away

I love autumn in western Washington so very very much, what with the pretty colors and the crisp days and the sunshine in cool blue skies. Its just fabulous. [/sarcasm]

These floods aren't anywhere near where I live, don't worry, and anyway they happen every year and don't usually cause too much damage.


The cat, unlike the weather, is pretty adorable, even when she's going insane with boredom because the rain keeps her inside and she's forced to rely on pouncing on people's feet for entertainment. You can't really tell from the picture, but this is her wiggling her butt in preparation for a pounce.

I have a sort of bleg: I have been feeling quite under the weather lately, so I've decided to do something out of the ordinary to make my life more interesting. I do this every so often; sometimes I just read a book about something I know nothing about, but previous attempts at excitement have led me to learn to knit and take a pottery class. This time, I am endeavoring to educate myself about rap music. I have very eclectic musical tastes, and mostly listen to indie rock bands with cult followings (think Modest Mouse, Joanna Newsome, Belle and Sebastian), but I think I would like rap too. The problem is, the most accessible rap, on radio stations and the like, has about as much appeal to me as, well, the kind of rock you find on radio stations. I know there's neat stuff out there, though, and I've decided to go out and find it. I've ordered quite a few CDs from the library, but if you have any ideas for artists to check out, I'd love to hear them. I'm looking for anything in the hip-hop or rap categories that you might call thoughtful, philosophical, political, or odd.

I can't believe the news today

My life has been abnormally busy lately, and my writing energies have been focused elsewhere, but I hope to soon return to blogging on a more regular basis. For now, here is a picture of the pumpkin I carved today, inspired by PZ Myers and his obsession with squid. Also, a link to the place my writing energy has ended up: Crow Woman House, a blog about the end of the world. I'm having fun writing melodramatic fiction.

Three Beautiful Things

My sister's cat, Annie, having valiantly fought and subdued this gardening glove, carried its corpse to the back door as a gift to her favorite humans.

A wicked wind will blow

There are spiders everywhere, and its cold and gloomy. I hate the weather in this state.

cross your fingers, hold your toes

I complain a lot about my family and how they're a bunch of wacky religious fundamentalists, but really they're great people to hang out with. Yesterday I went out with my two little sisters and my mother and my sisters' friend to the Puyallup Fair, which is the biggest fair in Washington state and is apparently an annual outing for my family. Its a sign of how far away from them I've been the last several years that I didn't even know that my mother takes my siblings to the fair every year. Anyway, we went, and now I'm totally exhausted from walking around for five hours and eating too much cotton candy. I got some neat pictures.

There were cows

and goats

and more goats

and cuddly piglets


and gnomes

and I got a cane that folds out into a chair, about which I am very excited, and which is the reason I am able to function today and am not stuck in bed writhing about in pain.



This is my sister modeling the cane. She has homeschooled her entire life, is pro-life and goes to church a couple times a week. She is brilliant: she's 17, and will be getting her AA degree from the local community college in two quarters. Once she does that, she wants to go on a Mission Year, because she believes in service. As you can see, she has dreadlocks and a snappy attitude. What you can't see is that she plays the piano and the harp, paints and tutors a kid in math three times a week, reads science fiction and listens to obscure folk music while she bakes cookies just because she wants to. She really is one of my favorite people.

I forget, sometimes, that the people with whom I find myself disagreeing, on issues as important as the definition of truth, are real people. They are complex, with motivations I may not currently understand but would probably find sympathetic. They create beautiful things and mean well for the world and love and are loved. They may be ordinary, or be extraordinarily talented and brilliant and wrong about some things but not about everything.

Its easier to oppose caricatures, or at least, its easier to be angry with an enemy that is mad, unreasonable, greedy and evil. In a country as big as the US, it gets much easier to keep these caricatures close to our hearts, because with so many people around there is always a way to find the people who think like you do and shut out those who disagree. This is a false way of seeing the world, though. No one is actually a caricature, and in the long run holding on to an untruthful vision of the enemy contributes as much to the divisions between people as the actual differences of opinion do. I know my own enlightenment in this respect isn't going to change the state of society- I wonder if anything can change things, when a society is this big- but I try to remember it anyway.

a tiny prayer to father time

I was going to write a bit of a rant about the framing of Gov Palin's decision not to abort her youngest son, who has Down's Syndrome, but this post at Shakesville pretty much says it better than I was going to.

Instead of my fascinating thoughts on politics, then, here are some pictures of my latest project, Lion Brand's #1100. The yarn is so thick that it only took me a few days to knit it, even though my first version ended up too big and I redid the front and back pieces. The sweater is still pretty bulky, but its oh so warm, and it suits me.




Now that that sweater is done, I'm starting on another one, for my little brother. My grandmother used to knit quite a bit, and when she died my mother inherited a half-finished sweater, which has been sitting in the closet for at least fifteen years. My mother never did anything with it, because there isn't enough yarn to finish the original sweater, but I have a new pattern (Durrow) and I'm excited to start working on it. The cables on this pattern are much more difficult than anything I've done before and the yarn is antique and if I keep this up I may one day produce a sweater that's actually stylish.


I am becoming quite the knitting geek. I have an account on Ravelry (my username there is Tayi also) and the last few books I got from the library are books on tape so I can listen to them and knit at the same time. I wonder if this is some flaw inherent in my personality, that I am apparently unable to do anything part-time, even knitting.

well everything is eclipsed

So Elizabeth challenged her readers to do two things over the holiday weekend: go outside and have some fun, and give someone something. I'm still working on the second part (I need to go to a yarn store, but that means getting gas and driving and finding my way around an unfamiliar part of town and I just haven't done it yet), but yesterday I went up the mountains with my dad and my little brother to pick out a truck full of rocks with flat surfaces so my dad can pave a walkway in his back yard. As you can imagine, I wasn't much help with picking up the rocks and carrying them to the truck, but I spotted some good ones, carried a few little ones, and stood around taking pictures.

The pictures are really the exciting part. We drove several miles up an old logging road to a spot where a rock slide came down almost to the road. There are quite a few slides on top of these mountains; whether they're from clear-cut logging or occur naturally I'm not sure, but they're all over the place, even in spots where the old clear-cuts have grown in over twenty-five years or so. The rocks here are mostly granite, with some kind of shale in spots, and there is at least one gravel quarry across the mountain from where we were.

Anyway, the view from the rock slide was really great. There were no trees in the way, so we could see down into the valley for miles. It was freezing, and for a while we were inside a cloud, but these pictures are worth it.

When we got home, we went over to a neighbor's yard and picked plums off their plum tree, and today we're canning and drying peaches and plums. So maybe, if helping with a project counts as a gift, I've got that covered too.

I could learn to swim

This picture is kind of dark, but its the best one I have of my recently finished laptop sized over the shoulder bag. I've been doing a lot of knitting, finishing up some small projects and such, but this is my real accomplishment from the past couple weeks. I'm quite proud of this bag since it seems so useful. It even has a side pocket for a waterbottle, although it doesn't show well in this photo.

I also made five cat toys, one for each kitten, but I didn't take pictures of them before and now I can't because the kittens have all been given to new homes. Its heartbreaking. I honestly believe that the past month or so would have been hard for me to get through without these kittens cheering up my life. Even when every other aspect of life sucks, kittens make everything better.

While I knit, I like to watch TV, but since I hate commercials and I'm picky about the shows I like I usually get shows from the library, or occasionally I watch illegal copies online. However, since I've been living with my parents, its a bit awkward to watch TV shows that make them uncomfortable with sex and violence and such- and they're such nice people that most TV shows do. The solution is to watch documentaries. In the past couple weeks, I've watched documentaries on deep sea volcanoes, autism, the atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and two BBC videos from the Walking With Dinosaurs series, Walking with Monsters, which is a kind of prequel, and Allosaurus.

Documentaries are interesting, but since they're produced for a general audience, you don't usually get the kind of details that are really fascinating. Allosaurus was neat, because it got into the forensic work behind the knowledge scientists have about dinosaurs, but I would love to get a similar DVD collection that really aimed to teach methods and detailed facts. I've ordered a lecture series from the library on biology, The Science of Life, from the Teaching Company, and I have high hopes.

My father pointed out to me the other day that since I was previously enrolled at the University of Washington, I could re-enroll with minimal effort and start taking classes again, one at a time maybe. The idea of going back to school intrigues me. I'm still resisting settling down in my parents' house for any long period of time, but if I did, I could go to school. Its an attractive idea.

Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers

That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away.

Its raining, and I am in pain. My brain is a bit switched off, so here are some photos of my father's garden.

back in the world that moves

I haven't posted in several days due to preparation for/celebration of/recovery from the Fourth of July. Obviously, since you're reading this blog, you know this. I would like to write more often. My head is abuzz and I have several posts I would like to empty out of my tired brain, but I have been wasting time sitting on the floor of the laundry room petting kittens. So, in lieu of grand thoughts, here are some pictures of kittens. They're four weeks old and within the past couple of days transitioned into the phase where they attack their own shadows.



Regular posting may resume soon.

Just Peonies

J's cat's kittens

They're almost two weeks old, most of their eyes are most of the way open, and they're starting to get feisty although of course they're not strong at all yet. When they're in their box they totter around on wobbly legs, crawling all over each other, but for some reason when you hold them up in the air to take their picture, they cry. They won't look at the camera any other way, though: they can't hold their heads up consistently yet. I'm sure it will only be a couple of days before they're out and about causing trouble, though. These kittens have been growing up awfully fast.

Some Pictures from the Trip

Some people say South Dakota prairie is boring, but I have to disagree. The way the wind blows the grass makes it look like the ground itself is alive.

The hills in Wyoming reminded me of Brokeback Mountain, and I teared up, again. I'm such a sucker for sad stories.

Montana was a bit colder than I expected- that's snow on the hills there.

And even more snow!

I love the Decemberists, so when I saw Tarkio's namesake I had to stop.

Turns out Tarkio is on a river that is absolutely gorgeous.

I believe this may be the Columbia River. There was a turnout by the highway with this incredible vantage point. The eastern Washington desert is just brilliant.

You know you're home when the trees are bigger around than you are tall. Also when the temperature drops and everything becomes shrouded in mist. Western Washington's climate is a real downer, but it does produce some beautiful landscapes.

dumbstruck with the sweetness of being

My sleep is all messed up again, so this morning at about 5:45, as the sun was just starting to shine through the haze on the horizon, I took a walk around the block with my trusty camera. I took fewer pictures than I would have liked, since apparently civilized people get up and go to work as the sun rises, and I thought I might get caught examining someone's garden as they came outside, and I chickened out.

Here's a few of my favorites though. I really am fortunate to live in a place where people have space to grow gardens; well, I suppose I'm fortunate to live anywhere at all.

Count every beautiful thing we can see

Elizabeth asked her readers- her friends- to go out this weekend and do something living. I scrounged up some batteries for my camera and went to the park. I got some really crappy pictures, and this one.


These plants are dry and brittle and brown. Dead.

When I uploaded this photo and saw it full size, I was reminded of this piece of art, a sculpture by Richard Johnson titled "Parasite (The Thing Within My Spine)." Wheelchair Dancer pointed me to this exhibit of artwork on pain, and I've been meaning to write about it in terms of the success of the representation of physical pain in art, but I've been putting it off because although most of the art in this exhibit is very good, only a couple pieces even come close to actually evoking physical pain. This sculpture is good- seriously, go look at it, read the artist's description- and I love that this photo resembles it, because in this photo Pain is Beauty.

I need that today. I guess this doesn't really fit the directive to go out and do something fun; this post is fundamentally depressing. But, my head feels like I've been run over by something larger than a golf cart but smaller than a semi-truck, my throat is on fire with heartburn and the antacids are doing nothing, my hands are bruised and aching, my neck is radiating pain down to my lower back, my hips are out because I walked around the park this morning, and like a goddamn idiot I went and got a massive sunburn on top of everything else. I am the incarnation of pain, I am panting with it, and in this picture pain is elegance, delicate and architectural.

Subodhani

I've written a lot on here the past couple of months about religion, and my generally negative view of the whole deal, so I though I would mention something to balance that out a bit. Although I don't believe that religious stories about the world are true in some larger, factual sense, that doesn't mean I don't see any value in telling these stories. Religious ideas can motivate people to horrible cruelty, but they can also motivate kindness and wisdom. One of the more common instances of this is when people use religion to focus the impulse to help other people. Religious charity is sometimes an excuse to bribe or coerce people into accepting a religion, but not always.

One of the better examples of this is World Vision. They are explicitly Christian; you can donate money to them specifically for the purpose of distributing Bibles and so on, and their newsletters are chock full of Bible verses. But they also do things like distribute emergency food aid in disaster areas, and support long term development in impoverished areas worldwide by building schools, roads, medical clinics, water pumps, and giving out micro loans and small business training/advice to help people start businesses. There are secular charities that do these things, too. But I would hate to see the world deprived of even one organization that gives people practical help to improve their lives, and in this case religion is what drives this charity.

I sponsor a kid through World Vision. She turned four a few days ago, lives in a village in Sri Lanka, and is pretty much the most adorable thing in the world. Today I figured out how to get her picture online, hence this post!

Subodhani K.

By land, by sea, by dirigible

I got my paraffin melter today, a nice young UPS man brought it to my door, but it was a bright and beautiful day even before that. In spite of everything, I'm so glad to be alive.