Just A Little More Cream

Digging

Lots of new toys here, and this is first attempt at blogging a video, uploading something to You Tube and playing with all the new stuff on my laptop

Good things about Sonora

So there are some good things about living in the Mother Lode in the summer. First of all, this summer hasn't been nearly as unbearable as last summer. We hover around 100 on the hottest days, and I haven't seen those 110 plus days all year this time. Also, the nights have been cool enough to open my window and not have the air conditioning going all night. That is a very good thing!! And then there is the bounty. I should have taken my camera to the Farmers market this morning, but instead had to settle for piling goodies up on my porch bench to remind myself to be grateful. I went to the market early this morning, meeting Stacy and Sean, and wandered around listening to the fiddle music, watching the jugglers, and talking with the vendors. I bought waay too much stuff, including some rather amazing jams that aren't in this photo that I plan to take to my family gathering this week. The tomatoes are heirloom varieties, my favorite of which is the Brandywine, but there are also some Cherokees in here that are pretty amazing as well. And peaches that have juice running down your arm when you try to eat them, and perfect little yellow fleshed tomatoes, and berries that would be insulted by sugar. Ahh warm summer bounty. I must admit that it's hard to find this kind of luscious ripeness and flavor in things grown in our cold inland valleys of Oregon. Probably over on the west side, but still hard to find these kinds of peaches anywhere, even in Wenatchee. I am hooked on the Brandywines now for sure, and bought 20 bucks worth, hoping they will hold for at least part of the week until I get to klamath to share them with everyone.

Trying to remember to be grateful, and since I do talk a lot about the icky stuff, thought I would put in something good for a change about living in the Mother Lode

morning walk thoughts

So walking for an hour stimulates thoughtfulness for me. It's still dawn when I start, and the sun isn't up yet. I pass two old men who are discussing their chemo and levels of something or other related to their prostrate cancer, but everyone else is still sleeping. I like this time of day a lot. In fact, I find if the sun is up too much I really don't want to walk, I don't like running into people and having to smile and be nice and have conversations. I just want to walk in silence and think.

So I thought about this> "what would I be doing in my life if Mo wasn't in it. what decisions would I make if Mo wasn't there at all. if she left the planet, or for some unfathomable reason decided that she didn't want to be in this friendship with me. How would I be living right now, how would I choose."

I thought about this a lot and realized that the most important thing for me to follow all the time when making my decisions is to look very carefully at what I would choose if Mo weren't there. It's an eye opener, believe me. Not just a peripheral "what would I do" but an in depth examination of stepping back and thinking about my life and me in it as just me.

right now I would be doing exactly what I am doing! aha moment. I would still be thinking about choosing that Jan 3 2009 date as the first option. I would still be living in this house. Mo has it committed to my occupancy until I choose to leave, so I can live here without selling it until I am ready to go. Still just paying the rent for the space and utilities. So my living costs are less because Mo bought this place, but I would have it to live in either way.

And the biggest aha was that, yes, I would still sell my house, if Mo weren't in my life and if I were totally on my own, I would still sell it. I would still not want to be stuck paying capital gains on it. If I were not considering sharing a home with Mo, I would want to live closer to my kids, probably wouldn't choose to live in Klamath, as much as I love it, even if I COULD afford the mortgage after retirement, because no one would be there. I would still sell my house and maybe have to work a bit longer to figure out what came next, maybe not retire quite as early, but I would still sell my house and and would still leave california and would still choose to retire somewhere in Oregon and would still have to get creative as to how I would live, where I would live.

I talked to Mo when I got back, a good conversation, and talked about how I needed to be sure that I didn't become dependent on her being there. She brought up something that I had forgotten, however. She asked me, "when in your life have you ever been dependent on someone else? Why would you change now? have you ever been able to depend on anyone to take care of you? haven't you always been the one who had to do it? who had make the choices and make the payments and make sure you and your family had a place to live?"

Hmmm. and I said, never, but I have always wanted it somehow. even in my marriage to Lance, I was the caretaker, the one who made the income and made sure we had a home. He helped, we worked together, but he never took care of me. Except of course now and then with things like warm socks in the winter and a hot mug of something when I was sick. he cared in that way, but stability? that was always me providing it. Mo remembered that part of me that I sometimes forget.

Aha thinking. Guess it's why I love to walk

Lessons

I have been having conversations with a friend lately about life lessons, and how we learn them, and remembering an affirmation that I created long ago, "I choose to learn my lessons gently". So many times we think the only way to learn anything is with pain and incredible adversity. Been there, done that. I am hoping that for the rest of my life, the lessons come in small doses, gently. I don't want to stop growing, but I have had enough of adversity on a big scale.

Today my lessons are about letting go. My daughter has a great analogy that she uses often, "If I buy that bag, dress, car, whatever, I will be smart and pretty and happy and it will change my life". She just talked about that in her blog as she recounted a day off spent wandering around her town looking at Things. Unrelated to the lesson, or her thoughts, I am clearing out closets, practicing the letting go thing. I did it a bunch when I moved here to from Klamath, thinking I was doing a pretty good job of it. But now it's coming up again and I am cleaning closets and giving away stuff with a vengeance. Carloads to the thrift store. They have a big sign saying "absolutely no loads dropped off without approval" but I drive up in the Lexus and they smile and nod and take my boxes without a thought. But that's another lesson to ponder. My attachment to luxury.

Then again, maybe not, maybe it's all related somehow, my attachment to that "thing" luxury. Today I cleared out shoes and purses. I even have the Bare Trap velvet shoes I bought in 1978. So hot. and they are still hot. And my feet have aged and somehow they don't fit well. ah well, and no, Melody, they didn't end up in the box yet. But the box is full. There are several hundred dollars worth of really good shoes, and great leather bags in that box, shoes and bags that I wanted really badly to make my life better, to feel the soft leather and have the label there and to somehow feel like I was OK. with a purse, for pete's sake? So hundreds of dollars of "stuff" that I probably charged on some credit card to feel good about myself are in that box, the box I am carting off to the thrift shop today.

Hopefully, the lesson learned, is that I really don't need it. I really don't. And part of my life lessons have to do with managing my life and my finances. Somehow looking at the valueless dollar value represented by the contents in this box hit me abruptly in the gut.

cat families

I think it takes more than one cat around to really understand the complexity of cat family interactions. Eeven with two, I might not have been really as much aware of this inside stuff as I am after living for a time with a whole houseful of cats a few years ago with Bel. So I came home with a new cat scratcher and Jeremy immediately latched onto it, scratched for a few minutes and then plopped himself down to sleep. In the other room, I heard Teddy complaining loudly, and went in to find this scenario. A grumpy Teddy and a very self satisfied Jeremy on the new scratcher. Gee. think maybe I should have bought two?

So maybe not in my lifetime but it's coming

I was reading this article on AlterNet this morning and somehow it was a bit encouraging to me, that people like Gates and Buffett have a conscience. Read the rest of the article if you are so inclined. It's interesting

http://www.alternet.org/stories/57727/

But this is not just a world of riches gone mad that the rest of America can ignore. The growth of such a large super-rich class, coupled with a deepening poverty in many communities, is starting to tear at the fabric of society. Even some of the most wealthy -- like Gates and Buffett -- have spoken openly of the needs to address the massive "inequality gap" that they have come to exemplify. In effect, some of the very richest Americans are calling for themselves to be taxed. In a speech last month Buffett -- the third richest man in the world -- pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent of his income while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent. "Many of the new super-rich are looking long term at the world and they see a collapsing US education system and health-care system and the disappearance of the middle class and they realize: this is bad for everybody," said Frank.

Working in July

Breakfast in the Mother Lode

this morning the light has changed. yeah, I know, it's still July, and it's still hot, but the light has changed. And the blackberries are ripe along Indian Creek. Breakfast

My Day

Ahh yes, it's a good life when it isn't raining, when the truck is only a few hundred yards away, and the slopes are only 60 percent. It's actually a good life when there are stones this big in the soil profile because when I finally get a stone out, I can be at least 10 inches deeper in the pit! Yes, it's a good life!!

This is a really great soil, by the way, grows big Douglas Fir and has volcanic ash in the upper part. I thought I had to leave all my Andisols behind in the northwest, and lo and behold they are appearing here in the Sierras. Leftovers from the volcanic activity near the top of Sonora Pass, I assume. the tape is in cm and meters by the way, and I go to a meter and a half or 2 meters if the bedrock doesn't stop me as it did in this pit.

Conversations with my online Womens Group

This conversation has been just so good for me personally, and I hope for everyone, to see that these choices and conflicts are really themes that cross over economic boundaries somehow. No matter how much we have or don't have, we are all still trying to figure out how to do it as we age. And the choices we make now have such a great bearing on how we will be as those little old ladies that we watch and wonder. At least I do. How did that person become so alone? How did that happen to this vibrant woman? I have really good mentors on this level and really good examples of how NOT to do it, so I am learning I hope.

Just recently my godmother Wilma let go of her condo, her car, and most of her possessions to move into an assisted living place. She practices yoga often, and has a wonderful outlook on life in general, and trust in a Higher Power. Her take on it all was that she was getting the opportunity to begin the "letting go" of the end of her life. She is 83 now, and her memory is going. She fell last year and broke her hip pulling the cork out of a bottle of good white wine. I went to visit her and she lost Costco, and we drove around her town for a very long time trying to find our way back to her house. I was so relieved when she moved out of her condo and went to the assisted living place. But she is my mentor when it comes to trusting in the ultimate order of the Universe and the power of the Higher Power.


I know that somehow, we will all have a roof over our head. There are a lot of homeless people out there, but I don't think any one of us will go there, even if we are renting a condo or an apartment somewhere. Trust and safety. Just what kind of space do I really need, or do any of us need to feel safe. I know I need to know that I can live somewhere where no one can tell me I can't keep my cats. Big issue with renting, and yet I know people with animals who rent. You figure it out, I guess. My sister rents, and her landlord won't let her paint or put anything on the walls, so she has these velcro thingys and hangs all her colorful quilts on the wall and the place looks like her home did back in the days when she was married and had a home of her own. So that goes back to the stuff part. I will keep just enough stuff to keep my space feeling like my space, and I too have learned here in this last move to California, that I don't need as much. I am clearing out and paring down and letting some things go, and some not. I have a porcelain chicken for pete's sake. I love that chicken. stupid, but somehow it pleases me to walk out into the kitchen in the morning and see the colors on that chicken. Reminds me of the days when I had real chickens, the sound of there gentle clucking and the smell of straw sweet and clean. I will take the chicken to Mo's.

I went through a woman's home after her death, Barb, my grandmother, and things were in such disarray that I vowed to never let my children have to do the same. Letting go of "stuff". Still working on the photos and files and mementos of our lives, and making those choices now. Need vs want. Still not at the point where I could let someone do that for me, though... Not sure about that one at all! I love the piano story. I let my first piano go to pay for my college tuition and I do play the piano. I now have a digital piano, easy to move, and yet I can still play. Did I ever tell anyone here that I played classical piano for the symphony in southern california as a teenager? Couldn't do that now, of course, but I can still play when I am moved to do so. Another retirement dream, but who will I play for?

And like you, Barb, even the move to Mo's place in Rocky Point probably won't be the last one. Mo thought she would build that house and keep it for 10 or 15 years and then sell the property and move into some kind of condo, more easy to care for. If we live long enough, we will probably leave that place eventually. It has lots of grass to mow and wood heat and is a big property. And as you said, I know Mo well enough and trust her to do something reasonable regarding how long I could stay there if she were to pass on first. I wouldn't want to live there anyway if she were gone. I have 4 kids, and if I were alone it would be important to be where some of them are at least. So even though I am trying to plan and prepare, there are still unknowns. Mo planned and prepared for her life so carefully, and then Carol died after they were together 25 years, screwed up the plan considerably, and yet Mo still followed her plan. Stuff happens.

So yeah, the final move may or may not appear, and the plan always has to make room for adjustments and changes, especially as you said earlier about the new realities in economics. Right now owning property or a home is a bit scary, and the investment isn't always going to go up. No guarantees on anything at all. So we can just keep on looking forward, making plans, and knowing those plans are only possibilities and somehow be ready to deal with upsets and shifts, and still have dreams and make more plans. Maybe it's about being attached to the plans and dreams that is the problem. Learning how to have them and yet how to let them go and not be attached when things shift. Barb, you are learning that in such a huge way right now. The shift in plans. So thoughtful when you said you did it too early. A good understanding there, it just wasn't time yet for you.

Charlie and Linda, I love watching you two build your life together, and seeing the love come through as you deal with the adjustments of kids and family and stuff and style. Bottom line is the love and the willingness to adjust.

And Virginia, you and Helen as well, shifting, changing, making adjustments over and over as you deal with place and stuff and choices. I am just trying here to think about the bigger picture, and seeing that economic realities are the surface of things, and there are underlying lessons for all of us that resonate and sound familiar. Things we are supposed to learn about being in this human body doing this human thing. Things I have seen people evolve and learn gracefully, and things other people I have watch kicking and screaming to the end and refusing to learn and grow at all. I guess some of us do and some of us don't. I hope I do. What an incredible blessing to have a place to talk and think about something other than the pragmatic everyday thoughts that seem to take over. Thanks to you beautiful batch of women that I have known for 7 years now!!!! WOW.

Hugs
Malone

Saturday morning

Saturday morning, June 9, 2007

Sun shining in the windows and I am still depressed. Not severely, not sad, just feeling a bit low and unfocused and the tears are close to the surface. Closer than I realized until I started writing. Alone. Although alone isn’t really the problem, because I noticed that I was feeling this way a bit last Saturday as well, even though Mo was here. Just life. Just doing life, the everyday stuff, but doing it alone. Sometimes that is good. Sometimes it isn’t.

I feel out of touch with kids and family. They are all so far away. I went through this last year around this time. I know that I have fun things to look forward to, that I just got to spend some good time with my son, which doesn’t happen very often at all. That soon I will have a short week with my entire family. Good times. Family times. But I want to be right there. I want to go over to Deb’s house and have coffee, or to Melody’s house and sit with her while she deals with the kids and all her stuff. I got a taste of it at Deanna’s. It was truly wonderful being there, having time again with family.

I remember so well how my grandmother complained about being lonely. I am not anything like her, I have work and am so busy, but still I catch that missing family thing that she went through. It’s almost as though the missing family is more of a concept, missing something that no longer exists. Family in the same town, Sunday dinners at Grandma’s house, coffee in the morning on the porch. What porch? I have a porch here that I rarely sit on because I am too busy working. Even if we all lived in the same town, Sunday dinners wouldn’t happen that often because we are all too busy.

So today I am not busy. I have yard things, house things, laundry things waiting, but nothing overbearing. My body is tired and achey from all the hiking and digging that I did this week. Beautiful week actually, cool weather, big puffy clouds in the blue skies. Working in the higher country far north from here, out of the oaks and into the firs and pines. Lovely. Lonely and quiet in the best way possible.

Pensive. Is it just my nature to be pensive? How tiresome is that for the people around me trying to understand. If it’s tiresome for me, I am sure it is tiresome for others to listen to. Mo says, sometimes you just have to go through the motions of everyday living, without anything going on, just do the chores, take care of business, be in life without any big input from anything else. Just everyday life. So today I am doing everyday life.

Loving my "inheritance"

Here is the URL for an article telling about a bit of the history of the Metlox California Poppy Trail "California Ivy".

http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660203519,00.html

I found a way to love my dishes, the ones I grew up with in California. Dorothy gave them to me, along with the silver before she died. These dishes and silver and crystal are part of the really good memories I have of Dorothy. She loved to entertain and set a beautiful table. We were on the very low side of middle class for that era, probably would be considered poor in this day and age, but we had sterling and crystal and knew how to have a truly fine dinner. Thanksgiving wasn't the only time. The dishes are special, but I couldn't figure out how to make them really look wonderful on the table, but today I did it. Bamboo chargers that match the painted vines on the plates, and a tropical tablecloth. So much fun. Now I have to have a dinner for someone!

random

Today I am doing what we call "lab sampling". It means lots of walking and digging and carrying lots of very heavy bags of soil, labeling them, dipping clods of soil in liquid saran, hanging them on clothes lines that have been strung between whatever tree or bush is available and usually a spade jammed into the ground. It means lots of other things as well, and it's actually pretty satisfying work. real.

This afternoon, the review team leader from Davis and I went to a sample location without the rest of the crew to sample a soil in a politically sensitive site. Beautiful day actually, breezy, not too hot, brilliant skies, grass still green, shade of an oak tree to work in. Many miles from any kind of civilization. Not bad at all.

The two Sue's we call ourselves, Valley Sue and I am Sierra Sue. So Valley Sue is writing something down on a label and I am digging away at the pit when, silently, the Easter bunny drops in. No, not a rabbit, not a real bunny. An Easter Bunny Balloon. It just glides in from nowhere and gently lands on the knoll about 10 feet from where we are working. And looks at us. The bunny is grinning and his ears are upside down because he seems to have lost some of his oomph. So he laughs at us. For about five minutes he laughs at us, resting on his little knoll. We look at each other and laugh and say, "Gee, maybe we should take him home". And just as quietly and gently the bunny leaves, lifted into the air by a gust of a breeze, and off he goes.

Now that's just plain random. and weird. and very very funny. We laughed the rest of the day. We never did find the bunny, either.

too busy to even write to myself!

So I am working on a major lab sampling event coming up here in the mother lode with all those bigshot smarties coming from UCDavis to check out my paralithics. I have a really difficult employee who is totally dedicated and makes me want to kill him because he is seriously and completely nuts, and isn't getting his work done at all. I have a totally smart and wonderful employee who is like a sponge and needs my continuous teaching, I have two great guys detailed in from out of my area who are smart and really good soil scientists but need to understand the Mother Lode in order to map a lot of it in a very short time and in the midst of this I am supposed to be finalizing all that stuff I wrote last year for my Basic Soil Survey teaching assignment, coming up way too quickly in May, only again, one more time, in some kind of new format devised by Marc Crouch the Grouch who is the head of training. The man is on a mission. We have to do teacher plans, and student plans, and convert them all to jpegs and then back to ppts, and then, of course, we aren't supposed to use too many ppt's because that isn't really teaching. and for pete's sake, I'm just trying to get a soil survey done for my area and get some lab data to document it! Nuts! I am going slowly or quickly maybe crazy!!! There's my rant for the day. Happy Easter everyone. I'm running off to Oroville to help Maryruth hide eggs for her 13, yes 13 grandchildren. geez. Then next week I am off to meet my own great granddaughter in Wenatchee for the first time finally. Then killer sampling week, and then off to Lincoln to teach the class, traveling there in the MOHO with MO gee, maybe I can call her MIMOtheHO. oops, of course I didn't say that, and taking Shera along in the gourd where she is currently resting. Will finally after more than a year spread her ashes in the canyons on the way home from Nebraska. Have I said all this before somewhere? This is how my life feels at the moment. All one big paragraph with no breaks and no real sentences.

Too funny!

You Were a Coyote

Brutally honest, you encourage people to show their true selves. You laugh at life - none of it can be taken too seriously.

What Animal Were You In a Past Life?

Motherlode Snowstorm

I guess snow happens so rarely here that the infrastructure isn't ready to handle it. This lovely 2 inch very wet snow brought down trees and lef 18,000 people or so, including me, without power for a day. It was beautiful, though, especially since the streets were wet instead of icy and it melted in a day. Not the winter snows I am used to, but enough to be delightful.

Snowstorm

Morning Thoughts

“It Can Happen Here” by Joe Conason

The most salient dissent to be heard in recent years, and especially since Bush's reelection in 2004, has been voiced not by the liberals and moderates who never trusted the Republican leadership, but by conservatives who once did.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for "a totalitarian type regime."

Raining in the Mother Lode

So it's raining in Jamestown, has been for a few days now. That's a good thing. When I moved here I didn't know that the little creek that passed my park would be perennial. It ran all summer and through the dry fall and winter, even without any rain for months. Woods Creek. It was not far from here that someone found a 10 pound gold nugget back in the early 90's.

Quiet Sunday evening. Moana has returned to Oregon, and we are back to talking on the phone, laughing about our days, sharing stuff long distance. I am walking again, in between rain storms. It rained so hard last night that the water came in backwards through the roof between the car port and the house. It rained so hard that the water puddled up 4 inches deep along my walkways and pounded the pavement and bounced 6 inches high. Rain. A good thing. Not sure how long it will rain this year, but if its anything like last year, it will rain for a couple of months now.

The air smelled really fresh when I went for my walk and there were flowers blooming here and there, especially the manzanita in full bloom. Lots of frogs and lots of birds as well. Great smells and sounds. Life is good.

I spent the day, two days actually, working on family photos, trying to sort and organize and scan, getting a photo book put together for Deborah. It's amazing just how much has transpired over the years. Funny to see year that have hundreds of phots, in the mid 80's when the boys were coming in, when we had a good camera. Then back to 1967 when my only photos are a very few tiny little torn strips from the old black and white photo machines.

The Grammy's are in the background. The Dixie Chicks, not ready to make nice. I love their new album. Yes! Guess I'll go watch them.

So I did Melody's Bible Test

And for some reason the HTML wouldn't publish here. But I got 98 percent. Yeah. Without looking any of it up either. So reading the bible does NOT a christian make. Although I hate it when people think that to be a "Christian" means you believe in God and are moral. Christian means a lot of things in a lot of people's minds. Folks not educated in bible thumping evangelical christian theology think it means something as simple as that. My childhood taught me that probably Catholics (where are definitely Christian) weren't "real" christians, and Mormons were definitely not Christian, and on and on ad nauseum.

So maybe the only thing that I agree with is that Buddhists are definitely not Christian, although when I tell Mo I am probably more Buddhist than anything, she says, of course you are not, you are a "christian". ah well. so semantics follow all of us around on this planet, christians, lesbians, whatever.