Abby

Ok, I can't believe I have really fallen for a dog. Her name is Abby and she is a dog from the shelter in Bend Oregon. Amazing actually that she knows so well how to mind, how to heel, to come, to sit, to stay. The best part is that she is playful and fun without being a pain. She loves to play with her toys, and somehow manages to completely destroy them in a matter of minutes. She especially loves anything soft like a stuffed toy. The most amazing thing, however, is that she only tears up HER toys. I have stuffed santas and snowmen lying around on the floor for Christmas, pillow everywhere, socks, shoes, slippers lying around sometimes and she doesn't touch them. Amazing. If we show her that it is hers, it will be shredded in minutes. She even managed to shred a 'Kong" for those of you who are dog people and know what that is.

Ahh well, count my blessings. Mo was determined to have another dog so I am at least lucky that I really like this one! She walks with me every morning on my little 3.5 mile jaunt in the dark around the mobile home park. Loves it. Nice thing here is that there isn't any dirt around so she doesn't track stuff into the house and is basically a house dog unless we take her out. Couldn't have been any luckier with this, I am sure.

Yeah, it's a hard life

Gee, too bad I have to take off work again tomorrow to drive to Reno for out of state delivery of Mo's car since she is not about to pay California sales tax when she lives in Oregon! Like riding on glass surrounded by cream colored butter leather. I am such a pushover for luxury, I am embarrassed to admit. My back hurts today. Too many hours in a GM car which somehow doesn't seem to fit my body. Any surprise that Lexus fits my body just fine??

Christmas

So, Christmas was fine. I didn't even get weird until the very last part of the day. I missed being with my family, but wasn't depressed and made the best of it. I knew all my kids were happy and in a good space. Even Deanna, who is having a time of it trying to deal with sharing her kids and grandkids and not being with family on the day. She and I kindof in the same space. No kids, no family, but she had Keith, I had Mo and we both had basically a good time.

It was 66 degrees in Jamestown yesterday, a little bit cloudy, some sun showing up now and then. We drove up to Calaveras Big Trees for a hike in the Sequoias. Took lots of photos and walked a few miles with the dog. There is often snow there in the winter, but not this time, so we drove higher on Highway 4, all the way up to Bear Valley Resort. Ebbets Pass is closed over the Sierra's not far from where we turned around, but just before you get to the valley is this great overlook. I felt like a stupic californian, tottering over the snow in my tennis shoes from the highway overlook to get a snow photo. "Going to the Snow". I used to do that when I was a kid growing up in Southern California. We would drive up to Big Bear for a day with coats and mittens and shoes that were basically worthless. Lots of sledding and yelling and getting very very cold and wet before we drove back down the hill. Maybe 2 hours from 60 degree days and sunshine on Christmas Day.

The Sierra Crest was beautiful, however, even in the overcast, and every once in awhile the sun would light up the distant mountains with gold. Speaking of lights, I have to go take a photo of the house in Jamestown. Melody and Kevin stopped at Halloween to see it with the kids and now at Christmas those people have outdone themselves again. I don't think I ever saw so many lights on one little house. All lit up it reminded me of a Thailand temple in the sun. Still working on the Thailand photos. I may never get them done. I keep wishing that somehow I could have captured that sparkling moving sunlight over all those mirrors, but photos just can't quite get it.

And speaking of photos, Deanna made a great collage of my great grandkids for me all done up and framed in black. Wonderful. Funny. we both did photos for each other this year.

Back to work today and trying to stay focused. But it's lunch time so I thought I would drop a note to myself.

midnight and can't sleep

It's midnight on a Friday night and I can't sleep. Went to bed at 830 and now I'm awake with a mind spinning full of thoughts. "Monkey mind". Choices. Do I take an Ambien? Do I lie awake just letting the thoughts come? Do I work on the Thailand photos? Instead I write.

It's amazing to me what kinds of thoughts come in the dark alone. Slippers. I am wearing some slippers that Lance bought for me back sometime in the mid 80's. More than 20 year old slippers. Bright warm wool mukluks with leather bottoms. Still perfect. Lance was so sweet that way. He loved to buy special things for me that he knew I would love. He always had the best of taste as well. Lance. Talking with Melody the other day, I reminded her that I had been divorced from Lance as long as I was married to him, that our marriage, that seemed such a huge part of my life, was becoming more of a blip on the screen. Just a chapter in a very complex story that doesn't seem to really have much of a pattern to it, just separate and yet very interesting but unrelated chapters.

Other thoughts. Do any of the chapters really matter? For so long I have thought that I needed to write the stories. Not only my own, but my mother's and my grandmother's stories. But in the dark alone, I wonder what is the point of the stories. My children will care, but what about those that come after. Do the stories matter at all to Hillary and Elric, Matthew and Steven, Jeremy, the great grandbabies? In the whole scheme of things, the stories are all just blips in the lives of people who are blips in the hugeness of the universe. All with our stories, so many of them.

Shera, a life now past, Dorothy, a huge story, and yet now almost irrelevant it seems. Goggie, who will remember her, who that is still alive will remember her? The people that I have loved and all those stories. I am not my story.

Memoirs are all the rage now, classes exist in teaching the proper way to write a memoir. Not a sequential story, but a part of your life that somehow affected you and has a theme and a conclusion. I don't have a clue how to do that. Autobiographies. There are classes in those as well, teaching how to find the theme and make it interesting, not just a litany of happenings. Learning how to find the parts that matter and letting the detail slip away. So things like slippers. Are they the detail or are they part of something that matters, part of the memories, and symbols of a good marriage that once was.

Families. In Thailand it was such an eye opener to see how close families remained. No one moved across the country, they didn't even move across the town. They lived in big family compounds. We visited one such family, and the rest of our group visited several others, in small groups of 6 or 7 people. The story was all the same. Mother was a public relations specialist for a big company, Father brokered coffee beans. Their home was spotless, lighted with flourescent bulbs that are bright and dim at the same time. Two children, 20 months and three. Little girls that were the apple of their eye. Mother's mother had a pumpkin farm nearby but stayed with the kids while mom worked and Fathers mother stayed when grandma one was away at the farm. Auntie and Nephew were there for dinner as well, and lived upstairs. Various grandparents lived in the houses next door, and other assorted relatives. All sharing common values and common lives, picking the papayas and bananas from their compound trees, eating fresh vegetables, taking food to the monks at 6am.

We sat on her floor and made pyramid cakes, special food that the monks loved. Father had been a monk for several years. It is expected in Thailand that men will serve as monks for at least some time in the lives, from months to years. As monks, they learn the proper way to live. They learn the 8 precepts of Buddhism, and how to live in peace and equanimity. We asked how the women learn these values since they can't be monks, and were told that all people are taught from childhood the peaceful, calm, gentle way of the middle path.

The pyramid cakes are made from a paste that is kind of grayish purple, a bit like poi, but made from sticky rice flour and palm sugar, about half as sweet as american sugar. You brush oil on a perfectly cut banana leaf, form a patty of the paste, put in a spoonful of shredded deep fried coconut that has some kind of other stuff in it, and then wrap it perfectly with specific folds that end up in a perfectly folded little package. Amazing. They are then steamed for 15 minutes and served up warm for dessert or saved for the next mornings offerings to the monks.

I thought about my family, and how scattered we are, and this very different way of living and how good it felt, how close they are, how strongly they support their families. If I were Thai, I would have taken my grandmother and dorothy into my home, I would have cared for them no matter what it took. I couldn't do that, and I don't expect my kids to do that. And yet I wondered at what we have given yp with all our independence. That kind of family and community.

The back side of the lack of conflict is the lack of self expression. It is considered uncouth and totally unacceptable to speak poorly of your family, or to raise your voice. Conflict is avoided at all costs. What is lost in this is really having any idea what anyone really thinks. Can these people be any different than all the rest of us, with anger and frustration, and grupmy thoughts about all the expectations? Probably not, but you would never know it. Sitting in a huge gridlock traffic jam that Bangkok is well known for, I saw that calm and peaceful demeanor of the Thai people. Bikes and trucks and even a cement truck pushing in for space, people not exactly getting cut off, but gently pushed as the gridlock got tighter and tighter. No horns honking, except that little toot to let someone know you may be a quarter inch from their bumper.

Lessons and experiences I won't forget, thoughts that flow past my monkey mind at midnight on a winter night of Christmas Eve Eve.

Dorothy Lucille Schultz October 2006

Dorothy at her home in 1975

Dorothy Lucille Schultz 1919 to 2006

Dorothy Schultz, "mom" to me since 1952, wnen my own mother died, has passed away. She went to a care home because her Parkinson's suddenly advanced and her husband David could no longer care for her. They brought her back home after 5 days with help from hospice nurses. She passed away Thursday morning, at home, in the same house I left in 1962, with David and her 50 year old child like adopted son David with her. She actually died Thursday and her husband didn't call me because he thought I said "I didn't want to be bothered". For pete's sake. All I said to him was that I wouldn't be able to cancel my trip so I hoped she didn't die while I was gone. I only found out because I was calling and checking in. If I had returned from Thailand and discovered she had been dead a month I would have been furious.

I won't be at the funeral. Maybe that's why he didn't call. He knew I wouldn't come. He is doing some of the guilting thing for sure, but to be expected since he is hurting. I will be sending flowers for "mom" and a written something that David will have read for me.

At the moment I feel completely out of touch with any feelings I may have about this, but they do come in here and there. I learned over the years that many women have relationships with their mothers similar to the relationship that I had with Dorothy, it often has nothing to do with the genetic thing as I used to think. I know what it is to love my children, I know how that feels for me. I know Dorothy thought she loved me and mine as much as she would have loved us had we all been her blood. I believe that, it was just her own way of loving that I never understood. So many people of that era were so damaged. I did forgive her a long time ago, and she said she forgave me. I know I hurt her horribly, and disappointed her over and over again. She never really had a clue why. I had the benefit of therapy, she only had the benefit of her church and her religeon. I was the lucky one there.

Well, enough of all that. At least I am beginning to see that I might actually have some feelings here and that is a good thing. I will be leaving for San Francisco in the morning, and then for Thailand Monday morning. Mo is here and I am glad. Life just does what it is going to do and people come and people go. I guess what I feel most is the deep awareness that stories happen and those stories have a beginning and an end. But maybe not really. I know Melody and her story with Donna certainly hasn't ended. Our family story with Goggie will live as long as any of us who knew her will live. The Dorothy story is such a huge part of the bigger saga, the whole Connie, Evelyn, Bob, and "the Bentz's". In any life there are so many layers of overlapping stories that I wonder at the relevance of any of them. We are not our story, and yet....who in the hell would we be, really, without out story.

Dorothy is a huge part of my story.

Even later on a Friday Night

warning. this post is completely irrelevant so just ignore it if you are anyone but me. I'm rambling and trying to find the writer that used to live in here somewhere. She's out to lunch for the moment.

So I keep wondering if I should move all this blog stuff over to Melody's Live Journal where I go all the time. Maybe she can tell me whatever reasons people use to do different blogs. I haven't written anything of substance in a very long time, in spite of the ever changing season. Winter has already come to Klamath. Here in Jamestown, winter is just a breath of cold air on the morning walk, some frost on the pavement, 32 degrees on the car thermometer. Still sun coming in the office windows in the afternoon.

Today I actually felt cold enough to wear a sweater. Poor Stacy, my new soil scientist is from Southern California. She works in the office in a huge sweater, a long scarf doubled around her neck and down her back, a hat that looks like something out of a Russian fairytale and gloves. Yes, gloves. Fingerless ones that let her still type. I am still in sandals most of the time, and usually forget socks. But today I remembered, socks AND a sweater.

I am supposed to be packing for my trip to Thailand. My grandson is home from Iraq at last, amazingly safe back on US soil after a scary sojourn. Relatively safe at least, as safe as anyone is living in a city and driving in traffic. We are so lucky sometimes to live this life with so few really bad things going on for our family. Little troubles, emotional emergencies that are really so small considering the state of the world. I am grateful.

I wonder if my life really started turning around back a few years ago when I was doing my gratitude journals all the time. I found one today, with day after day of lovely things, sometimes 2, sometimes a dozen, things I was grateful for in a time when I was broke and living in a house with no plumbing. Amazingly, that was also a very long time ago.

Bel is still living in that world of doing without. Now and then I send her money, try to help her a bit. She so deserves so much more. Another lost person going down the tubes, between the cracks of life. Her money is pretty much gone, she is now making a meager living selling "stuff" at her daily garage sale. Good thing she has spent so much of her life collecting stuff, I guess.

So, my house is going to be vacant, and I feel like I am broke, but it's all so relative. I'm not really broke at all. I have more than enough of every little thing, everything. I'm even going to Thailand.

Ahh well.

winter fun

So, Friday night, and I finally finished the project. Just a small piece of the project, actually, but enough that Deanna will get a nice surprise for Christmas. It will come early, and I will already be gone, but she will know I am thinking of her. And hopefully she is waaay toooo busy to read this blog in the next week or so! HA! 

Hazardous Waste or just Poison Oak???

As I discovered in the most uncomfortable way, I am seriously allergic to poison oak, the bane of mapping soils in the California foothills. My review team leader is also allergic, and we had a review recently right in the middle of the stuff. I knew I had to do something to avoid the steroid shots and trips to the hospital, so came up with the chemically inert TyVek suits sold at the paint store. Obviously they were a hit. For some unknown reason, there are three MLRA Project Leaders and Team Leaders in California named Sue. Hence the photo here of Sierra Sue (me) with my technical leader Valley Sue from Davis at the head office in Davis. Got an email today from Valley Sue extolling the virtues of the suits and thanking me for helping her avoid one more painful encounter with the evil beast. She even sent a photo out to the California soil survey crew saying, "Don't laugh, it worked!!" Fun

Six weeks on NutriSystem and still going strong

Although I'll see how things will no doubt slow down as I try to deal with traveling to Albany for Thanksgiving! The shorterm goal is another 6 pounds before I leave for Thailand in December. I have this idea that great Thai food and lots of exploring will keep me from gaining during my travels! Yes!!

Halloween in Mill Villa

First day off since I returned from my daughter's wedding cruise. Took some time to go for a walk in the daylight instead of in the dark as I usually do in the mornings before work. Fall here is different, more like I remember Halloween in my growing up days in southern california. Crisp but not cold, still dry, and most of the color comes from all the planted trees, but still, it's color, and it's amazing. Melody has written so much about our cruise and is still writing away on her blog. I love it, and love reading it. Almost like living it over again. SO very much fun and good family time together, even though some of us couldn't be there, I'm grateful for the time we got for those of us that were. I'll upload my walk around the park to Shutterfly and put the link to my photos in here soon. http://kyotesue.shutterfly.com/action/?a=8AaMWLdu5Zs2zc&notag=1

Molly's last swim

For my birthday, Mo came to Jamestown and we drove to Yosemite and over Tioga Pass. Molly was with us, as usual, and as usual, we let her swim in the chilly Stanislaus River. She loved swimming so much, always was ready to jump in the water. She wasn't doing too well, though and the current almost got her. It was scary, and she dragged her tired little body out, shook off, and ambled up the trail with us to the warm car.

Mo knew Molly was ill, she was even cooking special food to try to offset the kidney disease that the doctor had ordered. In spite of all the extra care, at 13 years old, on October 15, Molly left, with a little help from the doctor. Mo was ok with it. The time was right. She hadn't eaten in two weeks and hadn't had water for days. She could barely make it up the steps. I guess it's healthy when you can let go when it's time to let go. Something I never learned very well. Mo misses Molly. I miss Molly.

Yet she found a new dog already (writing this in late November) and already our sweet new girl is filling up the place that Molly left behind. Another lesson in mortality, I guess.

workin'it

The Harvard Mine in Jamestown and photos of the Mother Lode, as in the real thing, the actual quartz vein that grew all the gold. Not the area called the "Mother Lode" as in the foothills of the Sierra.

Got a great chance to go behind the fence of the off limits area of the biggest gold producing mine in this area, now idle except for arsenic and sulphur laced water that will hopefully someday be treated well enough to provide another water source for this water hungry country.

Rapelling down the cliff was scary for me, but just at the beginning where the first step down was as high as my waist. Kinda hard to get back up that thing, but it was a lot easier than backing down! Glad I went down in there, though, because I got to see the amazing quartz vein that is along the Melones Fault and tons of really great rocks, including serpentinite, and mariposite, the gorgeous green stuff with the quartz veins running through it. The sheer wall in the photo to the left is the serpentinite that is so soft and incoherent that it tumbles down and the benches that they built for mining are completely gone.

The leader of the tour has spent a career in mining and is still trying to find another bit of gold, but it's hard to find any more. Not like the huge chunks of free gold that came out of here. It was a good trip.


 

SO what's new?

It seems that there is always something new going on. I'm almost a little bit tired of that, but not really, or I wouldn't keep doing things to make change in my life. It's the weekend, and instead of hanging around and relaxing, I am off to a geology tour put on by the Geoscience Teachers Association. Still don't know what the N in front of NAGT stands for, but it should be a good day of traveling around the foothills and listening to a bunch of geologists talk about s2 and s2 foliations and such gobbledy gook. I am sure when I start talking soil science it's just as strange to people outsied the field, but I laughed last night thinking about how we all get so caught up in our jargon and like to use the words to prove that we know what we are talking about.

So I can say accretionary tectonics of the metamorphic belt and talk about the comparisons throughout the cordillera now. And finally I have heard someone say "cordillara" instead of just reading it. Ah well. Maybe John and I can talk about something equally as esoteric while we travel about today.

In the mean time, I don't have time for photos yet, but hope to have some goodies up for myself as the weekend comes to a completion. Yippee.

And, one more change. I started NutriSystem two days ago. Trying to not talk about this very much, just between me and Mo, but I do want to chart my progress and document the path. I think it will work, I am motivated and have just enough help to make it work. Mo paid for the first month to get me going, so that's like some motivation. I don't want to let her down. In a good way. She doesn't pressure me to lose weight any more than I pressure myself when I look in the scale.

So, my computer is screaming away. sigh. I keep hoping it will hold out just a little bit longer, like at least until spring. If I get any kind of award from Dave, however, it will go for a computer I am sure. In the mean time, I keep backing everything up to my flash and external drives and am glad that all my writing lately is going to blogs so I won't lose them on the hard drive when it finally gives up the ghost.

Ah well. Another Saturday morning

So this morning I feel like writing and reflecting just a bit. New for me, since for the last few weeks I haven't really been looking very deeply. It's darker in the mornings as the season progresses into fall. Today is the Fall Equinox, this evening sometime after 9pm pacific time.

Mo is sleeping still. Molly wakes at 4:30 and needs to go out, so of course everyone else, including the cats, simply go back to sleep, but me? No, of course not. So here I am.

I just had my 61st birthday. Somehow 61 seems a lot older than 60. I'm really IN my 60's now, not just getting there. Sixty was closer to 59 and 61 is closer to 65. Go figure.

Usually I write about my year sometime around my birthday, try to reflect and remember and think of all that the previous birth year has brought to me. This birthday is momentous in that it actually represents the very last vestiges of my Death year, and the last of my 10 year cycle in the Emperor. All the male stuff, the integration of my own personal power, my inner male, outer males in my life. Done. Finished with my first experience of a Death year. I always say that Death isn't about real physical death, but is about transformation. Ha. Interesting to me how we dance around the death thing with fancy words about transforming. It may be transformation, but it is still death. My Death year was marked by the death of my soul friend, and my birthday is marked by the arrival of her ashes in my mail box. Funny timing. She told Jerri that I was to have her ashes because I would know where to take them. Shera died last February, and only now was Jerri ready to let go that much. So they are in a box, a white cardboard box filled with a plastic bag. Geez. Today I will make some kind of a funnel and put them in a container that at least seems a little more respectable. I do have a lovely gourd, painted black with images of goddesses around it and feathers and beads at the entrance. A very small entrance, hence the funnel. Such a passage.

Weather has finally cooled. Now it's in the mid 80's during the day and while that feels warm to me, I just have to remember those 115 degree temperatures to realize that it really has cooled. Mo and I have been working on house projects in the midst of me going to work every day, but today I am off, and will be home for the next three days while we finish up all that we can together on the house. Last weekend was for play time and this weekend is for working.

Last weekend I actually went to Yosemite and over the Tioga Road. A nice return to a place I grew up loving. Incredibly, the air was a crystal clear and fresh as I remembered from my childhood. There's a quality of light in Yosemite that seems unparalleled anywhere else. I thought it might have something to do with the granite, the whiteness of the granite and the way it looks almost blue in the shadows. And there is so much of it, and so much sky. Maybe it had to do with the nearly 10,000 foot elevation over the pass. It was a blessing, a dream, hiking to a high mountain lake, as pure and pristine as anything I have ever seen. A lovely way to spend a birthday.

The year really did bring some rather incredible changes to me. Most significantly, the loss of my friend, the move to Sonora, the first trip overseas, my grandson in Iraq. Other small milestones were everywhere, but these were the big ones. Again, in the midst of it, there doesn't seem much to write about. It's just a life progressing, going through shifts and changes, and as I look back, full of surprises and unexpected turns and twists. Maybe it's the end of the cycle and the next few years will not be so full of surprises, and then again maybe it's just the nature of life and the unexpected things are what make it interesting.

I know I am not bored. Not even close. I am challenged every day with the demands of my work, my new job here in Sonora, with the differences of living here, challenged every day in ways that keep me from ever thinking I am bored. That's a good thing. I think I could find lots of people in their 60's who might be tired and bored and not doing much that is very different from their old patterns. I'm trying to stay away from that place. I want to create stability in my life but I also want to keep it fresh and interesting, full of enough challenge that I am stimulated, but not so much that I crash and burn. A fine line.

Enough for today

Back to Klamath

I guess I miss the water and the lake more than anything else. I'm home again in Sonora and remembering the clear air, the cool temperatures, the water, the light, the lack of smog. It's all pretty amazing and I am glad to say that I never really took it for granted when I lived there. It is still hot in Sonora, and still crowded, and still expensive. I'm just glad that I can go home now and then and see moments like this one. I was on my way to work, driving in to town from Rocky Point, and thought, oh my gosh, I have to stop, I don't care what time it is, I have to stop and get a photo of this moment. I took several actually, and they are all wonderful and it's hard to decide which ones to put up here. But I suppose it's irrelevant. I shared them with shutterful and sent them off to friends and family. This blog is basically irrelevant as well, but I just thought maybe I should put something up here. Maybe I can get into writing about the diatomaceous tour in Klamath, or soil survey in Tuolumne County, anything, something other than whining about missing my home. Maybe I can remember winter in Klamath and be glad that this year I will be here. Mabye then it will feel better than it does right now. Mabye then I will appreciate it all. Who knows. I hope so.
This is a shot of Medicine Lake in the Highlands, actually in the lovely state of California, about 6000 feet high and as clear and clean as you could ask for. 5 days of quiet, still water, ospreys, ducks, all sorts of little birds, chipmunks stealing food from the dog dish. Rejuvenation. Healing. Respite. A gift






And then of course there are the mornings on the lake and the polygonum in bloom. Silly pink flowers growing on 6 foot long underwater stems looking for all the world like a field of flamingos. Life should be so simple. Someday it will be. I wonder what I will think of it then?

I am reading my daughter's blog, so full of life and questions and amazing things that she writes about. Thoughtful, intellectual, interesting. I think I had that in me once, but maybe never really like she does. She amazes me. If you haven't found her blog yet, go there. She is Penitence69 on LiveJournal.com. I guess I should know how to link this but of course I don't! LOL Guess I really am into a different stage of life. 

Testing my new google toys

Well, I have to say that Deanna and Steven were right. My daughter who is a whiz at just about everything, and my grandson who is a computer geek who excells at everything as well kept telling me about google gmail. I finally succumbed and have been playing with toys all weekend, including the shared calendars, and the cool automatic blogging tools, automatic photo emails and just about everything else that appears on the screen. I even changed my browser to Firefox. Now I'm an old broad, and didn't realize how resistant to change I am. (OK I can hear my youngest guffawing) But this is downright fun.

So, Youngest Daughter, how bout some change for you now as well. Sign up for GMAIL and lets all get going into the 21st century! Oh yes. Forgot to say the the photo subject of this blog is really my new wall that I papered with an amazing product called Paper Illusion. You just tear and paste randomly and voila! a sandstone wall right in my living room with cracks to match my favorite print! What fun!!

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