It's Not You, It's Me

I owe all of my fans in the knitting world an explanation. Some of you are wondering if I have dropped off the face of the earth, and I appreciate your concern. A strange thing has happened in my life. Knitting and I aren't seeing much of each other anymore. We still get together in the evenings sometimes for a cup of tea, but the relationship has changed,  and I'm finding it hard to write love poems (or blog posts) about something I don't love as much as I used to. 

Being self-employed takes a lot of energy. If you're self-employed in a field you're passionate about, often that passion wil carry you through the difficult times and mask a lot of the negatives. Unfortunately, passion isn't usually a bottomless well, and when it runs out (as eventually it must), what once brought you joy instead starts to feel like it's sucking all the joy out of your soul. 

There are many things I could say about being a professional knitting designer. Some of them I will say, and some of them I will keep to myself. One of the biggest pluses of being a knitting designer was that I got work from home and be home with my kids. That's huge for me, because having to "go to work" in an office causes me an inordinate amount of personal stress. It makes me nuts, basically, and then I make everyone around me nuts, and that is not good.

Another huge plus was getting to travel and meet people. I do enjoy traveling and teaching, and being able to combine that with knitting was wonderful. I only wish that it weren't such an expensive logistical nightmare to fly in and out of Montana, or I might have traveled more.

So why did I decide to do something else? I can't point to one single reason. It's actually like a whole bunch of reasons converged at the same time. There was the global economic collapse that tsunamied through our lives (the husband is self-employed, too), the fact that my kids are getting older (one of them went to college) and they need different things from me now than they did when they were little, and—here's probably the biggest one for me—the knitting world was beginning to look like a very big version of high school. I didn't enjoy high school. It was a constant game of "who's in, who's out, who's popular, who's not," and the fact that the knitting world was beginning to operate in that fashion made me feel exactly the same way I did when I was 18. I wanted to run in the opposite direction and find a place where I was valued for what I was able to do and not valued for my looks or my ability to schmooze. One e-mail in particular really set me on my heels. It was from someone who had edited a book on finishing techniques, with articles contributed by other designers (I was not asked to contribute). I am not sure why this person felt it was necessary to e-mail me and let me know about this book, but it almost felt like a slap in the face. like this person remembered after the fact that back in 1996, someone self-published a finishing book because no one else would take the chance. Oh yeah, that woman in Montana—what's her name again? 

The choice to do medical transcription was made after a long hard look at the realities of our life here in Montana. Jobs are hard to come by. We live 17 miles from town, so a "town job" would come with a lot of commuting in bad weather and the associated fuel expenses. Training for something else had to be affordable and something that could be completed in a reasonable amount of time. I have a degree in biology and a "life experiences degree" as a cancer survivor, and while I am highly critical of the way the medical profession operates in this country, the workings of the human body fascinate me. The bottom line was that medical transcription was interesting to me, something I could train for quickly (and get money coming in again), and something which would allow me to work from home. If I had to do something besides knitting design, I reasoned, medical transcription was a good second choice. 

You know what? It's really kind of amazing to me how well it has all worked out. I have a job with a great company. They pay well (compared to what I hear a lot of other MTs are making), my account supervisor is a wonderful human being, and I am on an oncology account. That last part blows my mind every morning when I log on to start working. I could have ended up in any one of a hundred different specialties, and I landed a job in the one specialty I wanted more than any other. When people ask me how I like my new job, the first words out of my mouth—without thinking—are, "I love my job." It's mentally challenging—the other morning I spent 20 minutes looking up and familiarizing myself with the cytogenetics tests for leukemia so I could spell them properly (is it FLT-3 or flt-3 or FLT3 or flt3?). It calls on all the skills of writing and proofing that I honed writing knitting patterns. No two days at work are ever the same. I don't have to dress up and drive to work. I only fill up my car once every three weeks or so. The fact that everything fell into place so beautifully has reinforced for me that THIS is where am supposed to be right now, and THIS is what I am supposed to be doing. 

I may come back to knitting at some point. Nothing is set in stone. Five years ago if you had asked me what I would be doing today, medical transcription probably would not have been on the list. But I need the break from knitting, so I am going to take it. There may be some associated changes with the website, too, but I am still working through that.

And now it's time for me to go to work.  

Waiting

There is no work in my transcription queue today, which is very odd. Yesterday was light, too, but at least I managed to get close to my line count by dinnertime. It makes me wonder if something is wrong with the dictation system on the doctors' end. My account manager agrees that this is unusual, but she also let me know that we are getting some new doctors on this account so there should be plenty of work in the coming weeks. 

Oh well. I was able to catch up on some stuff that's been hanging around my desk. 

I went out to the garden to get some lettuce for a salad for lunch. Some of the lettuce under the row covers is bolting pretty badly, so I pulled it up and took it over to the clucks. The chick is out in the chicken yard (a fenced and roofed area off the coop) pretty much all day every day now. The husband had to rig up a barrier system along the bottom of the chicken yard because the chick was simply waltzing through the openings in the wire and wandering around the big yard. The husband went out the other day and found the chick in my herb garden. We do not want it getting picked off by a hawk or one of the dogs, so now it is confined and—thus far—has not figured out how to get out again. 

It's always something around here. 

I took some time this morning to go downstairs and clean and organize my stash room. I have a lot of yarn, and it needed some taming. It also gave me a chance to prioritize my projects, although I am pretty limited in terms of time right now. Mostly I like scarves and shawls and afghans that do not tax my brain too much. I do have to say that it is nice not to have to "design on demand," as I had been doing for the past 10 years. 

And now it's back to laundry and cleaning.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

"Work smarter, not harder," is a phrase that gets a lot of airtime around our house, because the husband and I are no big fans of wasted effort. Sometimes it pops up in odd places.

When I got home from Cleveland on Sunday, I noticed the .30-06 was propped up against the wall in the master bath. A firearm in the bathroom is not in and of itself an odd thing; that window gives us the clearest line of sight to the chicken coop. However, I had forgotten that hunting season started Saturday (I know, I should have my Montana resident license revoked). When I commented that shooting a deer out of the bathroom window did not seem very sporting to me, the husband came back with, "Work smarter, not harder. This way I don't have to haul it in a mile from the woods." 

On Monday morning, the husband walked into my office and said, "There are some deer in the woods." Clearly, I was just not paying attention, because I said, "There are always deer in the woods." "Yes," he said patiently, "but I am going upstairs to shoot one and I didn't want to surprise you." And so the husband went up to the bathroom and shot the first deer of the season. Four weeks to and a couple more tags to go.

(I feel sort of bad for my cousins in Ohio who are having trouble finding places to hunt anymore, while we're picking the darn things off in our backyard.)

If only an elk would walk through . . . .

Some chick pics for you:

Mama hen has finally allowed the baby out in the yard with the other chicks. The husband says he does not know how the other chickens get any sleep, because the chick emits a constant "cheep cheep cheep" that seems to serve as some kind of homing beacon. Truly, it is constant, because the chick is a very adventuresome little thing. 

And even though it has its own feeeder and waterer, it insists on getting into the feeder with the big chickens. 

We have not yet checked to see if this is a male or female chick. It surely is cute, though. And appears to be a solitary accident, as we can't get the hens to set on any more eggs. 

Tired

It has been an exhausting couple of weeks. On October 13, I drove to Corvallis, OR (about an hour south of Portland) to stay with my friend and former tech editor JC Briar. We went out for Indian food, caught up on what's been happening in our lives, and basically had a nice—although too short—visit. The following morning I drove to Beaverton, on the west side of Portland, to teach at the Tigard Knitting Guild's fall retreat. It was at a Catholic retreat center and I had a wonderful time. Those women know how to retreat.

That Sunday morning I got up early and drove two hours north to see DD#1. We had breakfast and then headed to Seattle to meet one of my cousins who recently moved there. She works for Nordstrom. Her parents were in town visiting, so we all spent the day together. It was a lot of fun. DD#1 and I headed back to her dorm that evening and I took her and her significant other out for Indian food. I spent the night at a hotel and then drove back to Montana on Monday.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday here at home, working. My mother called Wednesday morning to tell me that my 94-year-old grandmother had died (she had been ill and this was not unexpected). I made some quick plane reservations, and on Thursday afternoon I flew to Cleveland for the funeral. Friday and Saturday were a whirlwind of family gatherings and the funeral. I said to my husband I must have hugged about 300 people, some of them more than once. I haven't seen some of my relatives since our wedding 21 years ago (it's a very big family). Yesterday morning I hopped back on a plane, arriving here in Kalispell yesterday afternoon. 

I am tired. It's not so much a physical tired as it is a mental and emotional tired. A teaching weekend like that takes a lot out of me, and it was hard for me to find time to recharge my batteries before I had another emotionally draining weekend. I am looking forward to a couple of days of working here at home by myself. I miss my transcription work when I am not doing it. And I really do need to get my batteries recharged because I'll be heading to the Yarn Barn in Lawrence, KS, in the not-too-distant future. 

And here is my big gripe about traveling: people who think they are the only people at the airport (they are probably the same people who drive as though they are the only people at the road). I got off the plane in Denver yesterday at one end of the terminal, and I had 10 minutes to make it to a gate at the opposite end of the terminal approximately one-half mile away. I walk pretty quickly, and I found myself constantly having to say, "excuse me, pardon me" as I was racing through the airport, because people would get on those people movers and plant themselves firmly on the left-hand side so that no one could get around them. At one point, a swarm of people—about 8 family members clearly traveling together—got on the people mover in front of me and the children in the group sat down on the people mover and blocked it altogether!!!!!!!! And they weren't toddlers, either—they were in the 10-12 year-old range and should have known better. I hardly slowed down; I simply said, "excuse me, I have a plane to catch" and walked over them. I said to the husband, at least now they probably won't do that again. It's an airport, people, not Disney World. 

The chick is getting big and mama hen now lets it out in the yard for short periods of time. We thought maybe another hen was setting, but after about a week she abandoned the eggs. That's okay; it's getting cold and now is not a good time to have chicks. 

And now, I am off to work.

Of Chicks and Row Covers

We have reached a new milestone in farming. Our livestock is reproducing itself.

I went out to let the chickens out this morning and almost stepped on the Buff Orpington hen (she is the same color as the straw). She pecked at my foot and got all ruffled, and as I was apologizing to her, I suddenly heard an unfamiliar noise.

"cheep cheep cheep cheep"

I looked down and there was a tiny little Buff Orpington fluffball peeking out from underneath the hen (the rooster is also a Buff Orpington). 

I then ran into the house and upstairs to wake up the husband (and yes, I am aware that there is a persistent theme in these blog posts of me running in and waking the husband up with some momentous news or another) and tell him that we had a chick! A chick! How did that happen? Where was she hiding it?  And what are we going to do with it? And how are we going to keep it from being pecked by the 20 other chickens? 

At which point he said, "No more questions until I have had some coffee." 

I think the husband suspected something was up, because I went out Thursday night to collect eggs (he was at fire training) and he told me when he got home that some of those eggs might be bad because she's been sitting on a bunch of them and wouldn't let him have them. She's been broody for a while. I just don't know where she was hiding the egg that hatched. 

The husband put a wooden box in the coop so that the mama hen has a place to hide the chick. Maybe we will just let her lay eggs in there and set on them. She is the biggest of the hens and quite protective, so I know she could handle a bunch of babies. And it will be nice to have chickens to replace these when they stop laying eggs.

********************************************

My MIL asked for a picture of the fabulous row covers that the husband built to cover the lettuce and tomatoes. Here you go:

The tomatoes are nice and cozy inside:

Center

It has been pouring here for the last five days. I did want a salad last night, though, so I put on my boots and my Carhartt jacked and slogged over to the garden to get some lettuce. It's nice and toasty under those covers. I am kind of worried about my grapevines. Conventional local wisdom holds that the grapes do better if water is withheld in the fall, giving them time to go dormant before it gets cold. It's kind of difficult to turn off nature's overhead shower, though, so they have gotten a lot of water this week. At least (according to the husband) it is not supposed to freeze. 

I'll keep you all posted on how well the row covers work. We are still kicking around the idea of putting up an 18' x 24" greenhouse. 

********************************************

I went for my annual physical exam yesterday. My doctor pronounced me "in excellent health" and then asked me how I felt about getting a mammogram. The last mammogram I had was in 2007. Yes, I should not have gone four years without getting a mammogram, but the last time I had one, they insisted on taking a bunch of extra views of the left side. There are three cysts on that left side. I know exactly where they are, and they are visible on all my previous mammograms. At about film #15 (which I already thought was way excessive) I asked them what they were looking for. "We don't know," the nurse said, "but we want to see what we can find." They would have continued on with the fishing expedition, except that I pitched something of a fit and a few minutes later found myself in a room with the radiologist explaining to him why I don't want excessive radiation exposure. I don't even allow x-rays of my teeth at the dentist. I have had more than my fair share of x-rays in my life, and no one can assure me that all that radiation exposure is not why I ended up getting leukemia. I am not going down THAT road again. 

Interestingly enough, the radiologist agreed with me and not the nurse (who would happily have taken another 15 films), so they stopped. And I refused to go back. I don't do well with nurses who lecture me about the need to allow them to take as many films as they want while completely disregarding my feelings on the subject. However, I understand that mammograms are prudent (and I type oncology reports all day—I know what happens when you ignore things hoping they will go away), so I am scheduled for a mammogram next month. I will probably not resume a yearly mammogram schedule, but I don't think I am going to go four years between again, either. We will see. In any case, we're going to have a discussion up front about limits on mammogram fishing expeditions just because you want to see what you can find.  

When I was having chemo at the Cleveland Clinic, they would send us down every Monday morning for chest x-rays. Aside from the fact that it was a totally demoralizing process (they would take everyone from the floor down to the basement at the same time and line our wheelchairs up outside the Radiology Department), I was not convinced it was necessary. I confronted one of my doctors about the need for these weekly chest x-rays. He said they wanted to make sure we didn't get pneumonia. I said I wanted to make sure I didn't get another potentially-incurable disease. A few days later he came into my room and demanded to know if I had been fomenting revolution on the floor, because apparently one of the other patients had also balked at weekly chest x-rays.

I've often wished I could read what the doctors wrote about me in my charts after I was done having chemo, because I am sure it would have been hysterically funny. I was not a cooperative patient. But hey, I am still here, and still fighting with doctors. 

********************************************

Work was much better this week. I have the most patient account manager. I probably would have fired me long ago for making bonehead mistakes like forgetting to include the cover letter to the report (but only some doctors get cover letters and only for some reports—there's that rules things again). I really do enjoy getting up every morning and doing this. The hard part is finding time for things like grocery shopping and going to the bank and cleaning and cooking. I do go to town, but it's usually really early in the morning or in the evening when nothing is open.  The husband hasn't been able to work this week because of the monsoon, so yesterday he cleaned the house. That was a huge help. I still have beets to pickle and I've been throwing the tomatoes into the freezer until I have time to get them all out and make salsa. We bought a second freezer. The first one, which is in the basement, is full to bursting with garden bounty. We got another freezer, which went out in the garage. That's going to get filled with a side of beef purchased from the neighbors, and hopefully a deer or two (or an elk if we get really lucky). 

So that's all the news from this part of the country. I am glad it is Saturday. I am going to work a bit, but I am also going to take the day and catch up on some things. And maybe tonight I can sit by the fire and knit. 

Why I Love Learning Styles

So I am a big fan of learning styles and how they affect people's daily lives. I teach, and believe me, when it comes to learning styles, there isn't a whole lot of difference between a classroom full of first-graders and a classroom full of adults, except maybe that the adults known how to use Kleenexes.

DD#2 came home with an assignment on learning styles the other night. She had been told to have one of her family members take a learning style assessment test. I've done Myers-Briggs and I know myself pretty well, but she asked me to take the test, so I did.

Unfortunately, she waved it at me and gave me pretty vague directions, so the first time through, I did it wrong. Her instructions were "rank these words using 0, 1, 3, or 5, depending on how strongly the word resonates with you." Her instructions should have been, "These words are in rows of four words. Rank the four words in each row using 0, 1, 3, or 5, depending on how strongly the word resonates with you," but she's 14 and I should have asked for clarification.

I came out strongly dominant in the "sensing-thinking" area, which can be summed up thusly:

The sensor thinker works in an organized, step-by-step, methodical manner.  The ST student learns best alone, thrives on repetitious drill and practice, and has a profound need for timely feedback. These students memorize facts well and often excel at recall tests.  For this student, answers are either right or wrong; "discovery learning" and "cooperative learning" will drive this student to distraction because they crave a clearly defined path to the correct answer.  The ST student should study alone, in a well lit and structured area, with no distractions, utilizing repeated example problems and exercises.  Complex concepts should be broken down into steps or small pieces and each step in the process should be mastered before moving on to the next.

The husband (who is an NT, by the way) loves to tease me about my need for rules. I like rules. Rules—whether they govern grammar, societal behavior, or the workings of the universe—make me very happy.

There are parts of my new job that I've really been struggling with, and I feel bad for my account supervisor because it seems like every other hour I am asking her for clarification on one point or another. It's not the medical terminology that's tripping me up—I am nailing that. It's not a problem understanding the dictators, even the non-English speaking ones (who are actually easier to transcibe because they don't mumble.) No, the problem I am having is with the "acccount specifics," the rules that govern how a particular account is transcribed.

When I was doing my coursework, we were told that they were style guidelines (yay!—and a whole book of them) but that "account specifics" rule the day and may override the style guidelines at any time. That was pounded into our heads, I suspect, to remind us ST's that we should not make an idol out of the AHDI Book of Style, 3rd edition. 

Lucky me, I landed on an account with pretty vague specifics. And I have to give props here to my account manager—she is aware that this account has pretty vague specifics, and she's doing her best to clarify them (probably so I will stop pestering her). I was thrown into the worst kind of situation for an ST to be in and it has caused me no end of angst for the past 6 weeks. Instead of being given a set of clearly-defined expectations, which would allow me to concentrate on creating an accurate report, I was give a set of guidelines that went something like, "The rule for this situation is to do XYZ, unless it's this subset of this situation, in which case you need to do ABC, but if it this subset of this situation, you do 123, and if Mercury is in retrograde and there is a full moon, you should probably just have a glass of wine." 

Arrrrggggggghhhhhhh . . . . . 

I can give you an example that illustrates this perfectly: I was told that the doctor may dictate the date of dictation (and he or she usually does), but I was not to assume that the date of dictation was the same as the date of service (which the doctor does not always dictate). Usually the doctor does dictations the same day or the next day, but sometimes they may get behind by a couple of days. Okay, great, a rule. I carefully jotted down the rule and what to do in that situation: I am to mark the report for client review so that the client can make sure it has the correct date of service on it. 

There are two levels of review for a report. The lower level is QA, which is my account supervisor. I send the report to her if I have questions about terminology or I can't understand what the doctor is saying. The higher level is client review, which is reserved for things like date of service, missing parts of transcription, etc. This past week I happened to send a report marked for both levels. I had a question that I knew my account supervisor could answer, but I had also marked the report because the doctor dictated the date of dictation but not the date of service. I got a note back from her saying I should not have marked it for client review, because the doctor said, "Today's date is . . . " and that should have gone into the date of dictation field. "But," I said, "I was told not to do that." "Yes," she said, "but you can assume for this doctor that the date of service is the date of dictation." "For this doctor only?" I asked, and she said, "Well, for this doctor and for this doctor, but only these doctors."

Rules, with exceptions to the rules. I have a Word document open on my desktop in which I am trying—not always successfully—to create a flow chart for each doctor so that I know what the rules and the subsets of rules are, because if I violate a rule I make my account supervisor unhappy. She has people breathing down her neck, too. I have kicked around the idea of asking for a different account—one with clearly-defined rules—but I really really really like this particular specialty so I am just trying to suck it up. I am now at the end of week 6 and I finally feel like I have a handle on what the rules are, which means that it's about time for somebody to change them again. 

***************************************

There is another side of this coin, too. Not only am I an ST learner, I am an ST teacher, and I have to remember that when I have a room full of knitters. I try very hard to give the "big picture" and the goals for each class and each swatch, so that they people with other learning styles get their needs met, too. I will give opportunity for people to take off on their own and experiment, because some students want to synthesize concepts themselves.

The challenge for me are the people who stop listening when I say, "Here are the instructions for this swatch . . . " as I start to go over them, because those people don't like rules and guidelines and like to puzzle things out for themselves. They are also the people who aske me lots of questions on rows 2, 3, and 4, because they didn't listen to the instructions. Oh well. Class would be boring if everyone were like me. 

***************************************

The funny ending to the story about DD#2's homework assignment was that she had to write a summary of what she learned by giving me that test. She wrote, "My mother needs to have directions clearly explained to her and I did not do that, so she screwed it up the first time." 

We all learn.

Metamorphose

I am beginning to see more and more information cycling about the drawbacks of modern wheat as part of the American diet. The problem, as I said to the husband, is that I cannot tell if I am really seeing more information cycling or if I am seeing more information cycling because I am self-selecting what I read. I am sure the latter plays a large part, although the SixServings blog of the Grain Foods Foundation recently got hammered with 114 comments in defense of a wheat-free diet. Someone said to me recently that "wheat is the new tobacco." I don't know if I would go that far, but the tide seems to be turning.

Certainly all it took for me was one bowl of soup thickened with flour to know that I shouldn't be eating the stuff.

I've learned a few things in the past couple of weeks.

I have figured out that I can have some carbs in limited quantities. One of the meals we love is burritos. Obviously the flour tortillas are out, but my burrito filling has rice and beans in it, along with ground beef. I made it the other night, and enjoyed a bowl of burrito filling topped with cheese, Wholly Guacamole, and sour cream. Yum. And the scale hasn't budged. I am hoping that I will be able to do beans a couple of times a week, as they factor heavily into my winter soup menus. 

I discovered that Greek Gods full-fat plain greek yogurt has fewer carbs in it that the non-fat (remember what I said about adding sugar for flavor?). I was so trained to grab the non-fat variety that I will have to make a conscious effort to pick up the green carton instead of the blue one. I like my greek yogurt with a bit of stevia and some blueberries. 

Cooking is not as difficult as I thought it would be. Cooking for me is easy. Cooking for me and the husband is realtively easy. Cooking for me, the husband, and a picky 14-year-old is a challange. However, she is absent at dinnertime three times a week (see comments below), so on those nights I go hog wild and make the kinds of things I know she won't eat (like Indian food, which I made last night). 

We have friends who own a packing company here in town and make a wonderful line of sausages called Redneck Sausage. We eat Cheddar Dawgs (sauage with cheese), Hot Hens (chicken sausage with jalapenos, the husband's fave), and Italiano Reggiano, which goes into my pasta e fagioli soup. I happened to stop at the grocery store one morning around 6:00 after dropping DD#2 off for cheerleading practice. Who should be there but my friend, restocking the shelves with Redneck Sausage. He commented on my new diet, and I said to him, "You know, the best part of this diet is that I am allowed to eat Cheddar Dawgs. How could that be bad?" (Their stuff is so good that my family always requests a Redneck ham for our Christmas dinner.)

So on balance, I am not missing the wheat or the sugar. I did get a craving for something sweet last night, but a bowl of strawberries took care of that. 

*************************************

Cheerleading season continues apace. One of the things I have had to come to grips with is that DD#2 is bopping around town with way more frequency than her sister did, due in large part to her cheerleading schedule. 

The husband, of course, latched onto this right away and said to me, "You don't have any angst about allowing DD#2 to do things you never would have let DD#1 do at that age?" He and I are both eldest children, and we've had many sessions of lament about the fact that we had to wait to do certain things, only to see our younger siblings given the green light for those same activities at a much younger age. I swore I would never do that to my children—but practicality wins out over principle, at least in this case. 

These are also very different children. DD#1 was much more cautious and introverted at that age. DD#2 is ready to go out and embrace everything the world has to offer and could she please have a tall vanilla latte with whipped cream with that? In that respect she is much more like me and I just have to suck it up and remember that I raised my children to be compentent people and they don't need a hovercraft mother watching their every move. If I feel the need to set a boundary, DD#2 (so far) has been gracious about honoring it. She's cognizant of the fact that she has more freedom than her sister did at that age, and she's not about to risk having it taken away. 

Besdies, the husband and I are getting glimpses of what our life will be like when we don't have kids at home any more, and we rather like what we see. 

My Modern Pterodactyls

I went to my office fairly early this morning to do some work. I have a couple of new-to-me doctors and I wanted to work on their reports while I was still pretty fresh (I tried yesterday afternoon and it was an unqualified disaster). While I was sitting at my desk, I caught sight of a pileated woodpecker flying through the yard. It's actually kind of hard to miss them—they look like pterodactyls flying through the trees.

I went to look out the window and realized there were TWO—no, THREE—no, FIVE!—pileated woodpeckers out on one tree in the front yard. Three were males and two were females. I wondered if perhaps it was a family and mommy and daddy were teaching the youngsters how to find bugs in the trees. From what I have heard, pileated woodpeckers are fairly territorial and I can't imagine that FIVE of them would have been in the same tree if they weren't related.  

I was so excited that I rushed upstairs and rousted the husband out of bed and made him look out the window. While we were watching them, two of the males flew to a tree right outside our bedroom window. Then the third male joined them. I ran back downstairs to get my camera, but by the time I got back upstairs, only two were still in the tree. But I got a picture (it's kind of grainy because I took it through the screen):

We've had pileated woodpeckers here since we bought this property in 1994. They are some of my favorite birds. We have a very tall tree at the back of the property that I refer to as The Woodpecker Tree because the males will go sit at the top of that tree and call to the females. I have forbidden the husband to cut it down, even though it is very dead. If he cuts it down, the woodpeckers will have to find a different tree and none of the rest of the trees are as tall. 

So that was our wildlife excitement for this morning. DD#2 and I saw a black bear the other day at the jobsite where the husband is currently working. He tried to tell me it was a Newfoundland dog that's been hanging around, but DD#2 and I aren't buying it. I've seen enough bears (and enough Newfoundland dogs) to know the difference. It was a bear. 

A Conundrum

We received a pamphlet in the mail the other from our high school. It states,

The federal No Child Left Behind law requires me to notify you that [name of high school] did not fully meet the federal government's targets set for school-wide progress last year. This measure, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is composed of 41 different indicators.

[Name of high school] missed targets in the area of reading for its students identified for special education services and for students who are economically disadvantaged. Achievment level targets in mathmatics were also not met. Additionally, [high school's] graduation rate fell below the targeted level.

I read this pamphlet and said to the husband, "Surely this cannot be the same high school from which our daughter graduated with an IB diploma last year?" But surely, it is. And this just totally and completely reinforces my longstanding assertion that it should not be the job of the public school system (especially at the 9-12 level!) to correct problems that should be dealt with by a) parents and b) society at large. 

I've seen kindergarteners come to school without breakfast (and without a lunch, for that matter), wandering in late because mommy or daddy just couldn't be bothered to bust through their hangover and get them to the bus on time, and unable to stay awake because they didn't get to bed until after midnight (courtesy of mommy and daddy's wild Tuesday night party). I've heard 6th graders cussing at their parents on the phone because "You forgot to make sure I brought my homework to school!" I've seen children with horrible home lives disrupt entire classrooms for hours (sometimes days) on end because they have nowhere to direct all their anger and frustration. I know kids who have been hauled from school to school to school (sometimes 5 or 6 different schools in one year). I even know kids whose parents kept them out of school for months at a time because it was just too hard for them to get them enrolled after they moved to a new district. 

And when years and years and years of neglect and bad parenting pile up, it's the schools that get blamed because Johnny can't read and Susie can't add 2+2. And the loudest criticism comes from those people who haven't set foot in a public school classroom since their own graduations. Schools aren't places of learning anymore. Now schools are places where teachers have to fix childrens' OTHER problems before they can even address the ones that have to do with learning. In addition, they now have to deal with the burden of demands placed on them by the federal government to prove that they can still teach what needs to be taught—all of this while making less per hour than a general laborer without a high school diploma (oh, the irony!) makes working a construction job. 

My children got an EXCELLENT public school education, even in a so-called "poor" state. And they got that education because their father and I took seriously the job of raising our children. (And guess what—it wasn't that hard!) We laid the foundation for learning and they and their teachers built upon it. It is ridiculous to expect teachers in this country—especially at the rates they are paid—to do the job that parents should be doing. And if parents are finding it too difficult to raise their children, then other social issues need to be addressed instead of dumping all the blame on the public school system. 

If schools were filled only with children who came to school well-fed, well-rested, and whose parents took an interest in what was happening in their kids' lives, THEN we would have reason to criticize schools for abysmal test results or low graduation rates. That isn't the reality of the public school system, though, and we need to stop punishing teachers for it. 

Sheridan

I spent this past weekend in Sheridan, WY, teaching three classes to their knitting guild. What a great group of women! They were interested, engaged, asked some terrific questions, and put forth a lot of effort in the classes. I had a good time and I think they did, too. Alas, I managed to leave my whiteboard and easel at the Holiday Inn, but it's replaceable. 

Sheridan is a nine-hour drive from Kalispell. It's nine hours of highway and nine hours of scenery and nine hours of a severe lack of radio stations. I have no doubt that I would have appreciated the trip more if I were a tourist. It's stunning. But I live here and I see it every day, so for most of the trip I was wishing I had borrowed the husband's iPod and loaded it with podcasts to listen to. Thankfully, at least, I wasn't driving in a -20 degree blizzard like I did in February when I went to Billings (Sheridan is 2 hours south of Billings).

I stayed with one of the Sheridan guild members and her husband. They were incredibly gracious and took good care of me. I always volunteer to stay with someone to help save the guild some money, but doing so is always a tricky proposition. Usually it's the very outgoing people who offer to have someone stay with them. I appreciate extroversion in very small doses. After a day of teaching, I usually just want to sit somewhere quiet and knit. My hostess and her husband understood this and were wonderful about giving me some space. 

I have to be honest and say that I was really ambivalent about this trip. Knitting has been on the back burner for most of 2011, and I had to give myself a number of pep talks last week to get myself prepped to teach again. I'm still in the process of finding that balance between what I do and what I used to do. An interesting thing happened, though: I came home more jazzed about knitting and designing than I have been in a long time. It was as though the floodgates opened and I have lots and lots of designing ideas I'd like to try (of course, that also could have been a byproduct of spending nine virtually uninterrupted hours inside my brain on the drive home). We'll see how it pans out. I still have that small issue of "not enough hours in the day" to overcome.  

Next month I head to Beaverton, OR, to teach at the weekend retreat of the Tigard Knitting Guild. That'll be a long weekend for me because after I finish teaching on Saturday, I am heading up to stay with DD#1. She and I are meeting one of my cousins and my aunt and uncle in Seattle the following day. My cousin just moved to Seattle and her parents are flying out to spend some time there. It's a nice bit of serendipity that we will get to see each other and I will get to spend some time catching up with DD#1. I'll come home on Monday. 

And then in November I am heading to Lawrence, KS, to teach at the Yarn Barn. They were one of the first stores to sell my finishing book way back when, so it will be fun to visit them. 

**************************************

It was interesting to try out my new diet "on the road." It's easy enough to eat the way I want to here at home, but not so easy in an unfamiliar environment. My hostess prepared wonderful scrambled eggs and scrapple every morning (the scrapple was made by her husband and he gave me the recipe—I haven't had scrapple since I was in college!).  Lunch at the Holiday Inn would have been hard if I had to eat off the menu (mostly sandwiches) but they had a great soup and salad bar so I did okay there. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant one night and I ordered a taco salad without the shell. And then dinner the next night was a salmon filet and tomato basil soup that is still haunting me, it was so good. 

I did take a cooler with me that had hard-boiled eggs, jerky, almonds, and string cheese, just in case. 

I saw my doctor yesterday and I told him that I am having great fun eating this way. I never feel hungry and I have so much energy it's disconcerting. The only problem I seem to be having is—get this—taking in enough salt. I have to put salt on EVERYTHING or my blood pressure drops and my electrolytes get wonky. He thinks it's just my body adapting to this new way of eating and things will soon normalize. Weird. I think it's because I am eating mostly "raw" foods—raw in the sense that they aren't processed with all the added salt that we normally get in our diets. 

Food, Part 2

Does anyone else remember DuPont Chemical's slogan "Better Living Through Chemistry"? 

Lest you think that I am some anti-technology zealot, you should know that I minored in chemistry in college. That's the one subject whose material I use every single day, because I cook. In fact, we used to refer to a lot of our experiments in chemistry classes as "cooking." There are a great many similarities. 

The benefits of technology and modern tinkering are a two-edged sword. I am aware that I sit here writing this because some drug company came up with a drug called idarubicin that cured my leukemia. Not all strides in technology and medicine are bad. However, just because you can doesn't mean you should. That applies most particularly to our food supply.

I had an interesting conversation about GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) with some friends of mine a while ago. One of them said something to the effect that "humans have been genetically modifying food for thousands of years now, by breeding for certain characteristics." Well, not exactly. There is a big difference between applying selective pressure to a strain of tomatoes to breed for the biggest and juciest ones and actually going in at the molecular level and tinkering with that tomato's genes—or inserting genes not found in tomatoes in nature at all—to get that tomato to do something it wasn't programmed to do. 

The most important thing to remember in all of this is that the structure of our commercial food supply is driven by one thing: money—making more of it. You don't make money if your crop fails. You don't make money if the tomatoes arrive at the market all mushy. You don't make money if the steak is tough. 

Tom Naugton, the creator of the Fathead movie I mentioned in yesterday's post, has a great blog. I spent some time over there this morning and ran across two very interesting things I hadn't known before:

Interesting Tidbt #1. Naughton reviews a recently-released book called Wheat Belly, by Dr. Wiliam Davis (which I plan to read), and takes the following excerpt from that book:

Analyses of proteins expressed by a wheat hybrid compared to its two parent strains have demonstrated that while approximately 95 percent of the proteins expressed in the offspring are the same, five percent are unique, found in neither parent. Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with hybridization. In one hybridization experiment, fourteen new gluten proteins were identified in the offspring that were not present in either parent plant. Moreover, when compared to century-old stains of wheat, modern strains of Triticum aestivum express a higher quantity of genes for gluten proteins that are associated with celiac disease.

Naughton points out, "Like Dr. Frankenstein, the scientists who created today’s wheat had good intentions: the goal was to produce more wheat per acre in a shorter span of time, thus vastly increasing yields and preventing worldwide starvation as the planet’s population swelled. To that extent, they succeeded. Geneticist Dr. Norman Borlaug, who created the short, stocky, fast-growing “dwarf” wheat most of us consume today, is credited with saving perhaps a billion people from starvation.

"The problem is that dwarf wheat varieties were developed through a combination of cross-breeding and gene splicing. The result is a mutant plant with a genetic code that never existed in nature before. In fact, today’s wheat literally can’t survive in a natural setting. Take away the modern pesticides and fertilizers and it’s (pardon the pun) toast."

Wow. Not your grandmother's wheat, indeed. And I have to wonder if perhaps the reason my FIL tested positive for an allergy to beef is because most of the beef we all eat has been grain-fattened. We know he is gluten-intolerant. It's not such a stretch to wonder if the meat from cattle who were fed grain all their lives has somehow been affected by their diet. 

Interesting Tidbit #2. Naughton's brother (who guest blogs on occasion) posted about visiting a local farm where he spent some time talking with a beekeeper there. The beekeeper mentioned that commercial beekeeping operations feed their bees—get this—high fructose corn syrup. Okay, this is second-hand anecdotal evidence, so I went looking for some proof, and I found it. The following is an interview on the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education website:

“Commercial beekeepers use high fructose corn syrup to feed bee colonies during the winter months. It’s inexpensive, easy to obtain, and can be bought in small quantities because of its long shelf life,” said Harris. “However, it’s been suggested that high fructose corn syrup makes bees more susceptible to Nosema, an illness that affects the bee’s digestive tract. It’s like dysentery in people.”

SARE is sponsoring research to determine what the different kinds of feed (HFCS, liquid sucrose, and blends) have on the survival rates and health of commercial beekeeping operations. They should have results next spring, and it will be interesting to see what they find out. 

I've made no bones about the fact that I think HFCS is horrible stuff. Here is a wonderful, succinct article about the corn industry—make sure you take a look at the graph in the middle of the page. HFCS is in everything, and I spend a fair bit of time when shopping reading labels to make sure I don't buy products with added HFCS, most of which has been added gratuitously (please tell me why white kidney beans need HFCS added to them?). Those products touted as "low-fat" are some of the worst offenders. If you take out the fat/flavor, you have to replace it with something, and most "low-fat" products have replaced the fat with sweetener of some sort. Ick ick ick. 

Of course, the medical establishment and Big Pharma are complicit in all of this. Companies only make money if there is someone to buy the products they are producing, and much of what we call marketing is designed to convince people that they need what a particular company is selling, even if they don't. This was taken to ridiculous extremes a few years ago when one of the drug companies began running a series of ads touting the need for a new drug to manage the side effects of another drug. Seriously?!?!?!?! As I recall, there was some backlash and that series of ads didn't run for long. Yes, I need the thyroid medication that I take every day (without it, I die), but there are a lot of people out there on anti-hypertensives, statins, and diabetes drugs that could probably do without them if they were more selective about what they ate. 

Please don't think that I am advocating one form of eating—Paloe, vegetarian, whatever—over another. I firmly believe there is no "one-size-fits-all" diet that fits everyone. I just want people to be aware that there are strong market forces behind what shows up in their grocery stores and those market forces are driven by money, not altruism. And this push for "heart-healthy low-fat diets" has its roots in some very suspicious data. Be skeptical, be vigilant, and don't believe everything you're being told. 

I wanted to take a picture of my breakfast today, but I was hungry and I ate it. I shredded some zucchini and green peppers from the garden, mixed them with some eggs and herbs, then dumped the whole thing into a big buttered frying pan and cooked it on low heat until the eggs were set. It was yummy.

If you stayed with me this far, thanks. I'll return to blogging about other stuff later this week. 

Food, Part 1

This has been the summer that I took a really good, hard look at what I put in my body to nourish it, and I've come to some pretty interesting conclusions. I needed to get this out of my head, so here goes. 

First, gone are the days when I could eat whatever I wanted and not gain a pound. In high school I lived on Pepsi and Fritos. Seriously. I never had a problem with my weight until my thyroid conked out on me, and it's been a struggle ever since. Even now, optimized on thyroid meds, I am physically a different person. I had to accept that and move on.

Second, we've had a rash of allergy testing in our family lately, and lo and behold—my sister is gluten-intolerant and so is my father-in-law (and he is also allergic to beef, the poor man). Now, my FIL is not biologically related to me, but it's interesting that these two people close to me found out they had food intolerances. I suspect that gluten intolerance is more prevalent than we think it is.

Third, I've never been one to accept what mainstream medicine and the media spout as gospel, and I am not going to start now, particularly when what I have experienced empirically does not mesh with what I am being told. The husband and I watched a documentary on Netflix a few months ago called Fathead. If you have Netflix, watch it. And then watch Science For Smart People and see if your paradigm doesn't start shifting a bit. 

Two years ago, I did a 23-day round of the hCG diet to get rid of most of the weight I accumulated when my thyroid went south. An interesting thing has happened over the past two years, though: I started to gain weight again, and it didn't happen gradually. Last summer I suddenly (over the course of two weeks) gained 5 pounds, and this summer the same thing happened. Nothing about my diet changed, and yet all of a sudden I gained weight. And once I gained it, nothing I did would make it come off. In fact, the harder I tried, the harder it was to lose it. How is it possible to eat salads and hike and still gain weight (and not muscle weight, either). My doctor didn't have an answer, although he said I am not the only person experiencing this. 

You might think that the easy answer was the way I was eating. That's partially true, as you'll see in a moment, but not totally. I cook almost everything from scratch. There are NO products with high fructose corn syrup or soybean oil in my house. I bake bread with Wheat Montana flour, eggs from our chickens, and honey from our pastor's bees. My daughter had friends over for dinner one night. I served spaghetti, and they raved about how good the sauce was—it consisted of tomato sauce seasoned with dried herbs from my garden. I was assiduous about watching what went into my mouth. And still I gained weight. 

After we watched Fathead, I started doing some additional research, and ran across the Paleo/Primal diet. There is a ton of information out there (some of it better than others), so I will leave you to do your own exploring. In a nutshell, though, the Paleo/Primal movement is similar to Atkins in that it's low-carb. The reasoning goes that Grok (our Primal ancestor) didn't eat a lot of grains and subsisted mostly on animal flesh, veggies, and berries.

As with any movement, you will find those who are strident about adhering 100% to this diet, eschewing anything that they think Grok didn't eat (but really, how do we know? and also, just because Grok didn't eat grains doesn't mean that Grok was healthy). There are others, though, who take a more moderate view and are willing to eat cheese and drink wine. In any case, grains, legumes, rice, and potatoes (except sweet potatoes) are out. 

I started eating mostly Primal at the beginning of the summer and was able to halt the weight gain, but contrary to the what the Primal proponents were saying, it didn't help me lose weight. Something is still out-of-whack with my body. At the end of July I went back to my doctor and asked him if I could do another round of hCG. He agreed.

The interesting thing about the hCG diet is that after the three weeks of taking hCG are over, you spend the next three weeks (the "stabilzation" phase) eating a LOT of food including good fats, but absolutely no carbs except those that come from veggies. In essence, then, that part of the program is very much like the Primal diet. Some of my friends who have done the hCG diet said that those three weeks were unadulterated hell and they couldn't wait to "eat normally" again. Interestingly enough, once they started "eating normally"—which usually meant adding carbs back in—they started to gain the weight back. 

So I have looked at these past three weeks as a further experiment in Primal eating, paying close attention to how my body feels. Things I've noticed: 

  • I don't get bloated after eating, even when I eat a lot of veggies.
  • My joints don't ache.
  • I need less sleep. This is so interesting to me. I always thought I was one of those people who had to have 9 hours of sleep every night. Apparently I don't. I can easily stay up now until 9:30 and still get up at 5:00 the next morning without an alarm clock, and I don't feel tired. Hmmm.
  • I can eat a fair bit of food, including butter and eggs, and my weight is quite stable. 
  • I am full after eating and I stay that way for a long time. No snacking necessary, although a handful of almonds is good around 3 p.m.

So those are definite pros. The one con is that I seem to have more heartburn than I used to, and for that I am taking apple cider vinegar. It seems to help. 

I suspect I would do even better if I cut out dairy products, but I am not quite ready to give up eating cheese and yogurt. I feel like I've given up so much already. 

So here is my plan for the next 6 months, at least. I think it's important to stick with this for an extended period of time, although eventually I would like to be able to eat a piece of flourless chocolate cake once in a while without it showing up as a pound of weight gain the next day.

  • No wheat, no bread, no pasta.
  • No sugar (although I am not going to get totally neurotic about it; I know there is some added to the bleu cheese dressing I use, and I just deal with it). 
  • No beans (that will be hard, as bean soup in many incarnations is one of my winter staples).
  • As many veggies as possible. Right now that's easy—I just walk to the garden and pick them. This may be more challenging in January. 
  • Grass-fed beef, chicken, and pork. The chicken will be easy when we do our own. I have a friend whose kids do 4-H and she said they would raise a hog for us next year and the price was very reasonable. The grass-fed beef is a bit tougher, but I am working on it. This IS Montana, after all.  

The husband is on board with this, although he pretty much doesn't care as long as the food tastes good and he doesn't have to cook it. Yesterday at noon I stuck a pork loin in the oven to roast and covered it with the spiced red cabbage I canned last fall (I've been trying to find a use for that cabbage and I finally hit on something). After cooking all afternoon, the pork was fork-tender and the cabbage was sweet and tangy. I paired it with some Yukon Gold potatoes out of the garden (for the husband, who never counts calories except to make sure he's getting enough) and a BIG garden salad. He said it was one of the best meals I'd ever made. 

I've also found some great Primal recipe blogs, including Cavewoman Cafe (I want to try the Beet Pickled Eggs because I have beets and I have eggs). 

So stay tuned. In Part 2 I want to put on my tinfoil hat and talk about some of the ways the government gets us to eat things that are bad for us (helped along by the medical establishment).  

A Quick Garden Report

It's September and that means gardening season is winding down. A front came through the other night and took our 85-degree temps with it. It's been cool the last couple of days, but the forecast for the next 10 days is for above-average temps. I think we can squeeze a few more weeks out of the plants yet. 

We planted a variety of sunflowers that are supposed to provide excellent chicken food. They need to get moving and bloom, however. This is the tallest of them, which I plan to save for seed for next year (if it blooms). It is well over 12 feet tall. The others are a measly 8-10 feet. 


 

Back in June the husband went to the hardware store and succumbed to the display of seedlings in front of the store. I teased him about this purchase: cantaloupes. I never thought I would see fruit on them. we may not see RIPE fruit unless it stays hot for most of the month, but it is an accomplishment to have gotten this far. 

Back in June DD#2 and I went to the nursery and succumbed to the display of vegetables. She loves acorn squash and begged me to plant some. We'll get at least half a dozen off this plant, I think. The plant itself is trying to take over the garden. Note to self: It needs about 100 square feet all to itself next year. 


 

I've been sneaking out and eating all the cherry tomatoes (Sweet 100's). I may have to share and put some in the salad tonight, though. 

And yay!—it's a ripe regular tomato! These are the Early Girls. Everyone around here swears by them. I've never had good luck with them but they ARE the first slicing tomatoes to ripen so I may change my mind. 

I need to dig up the beets. I dearly love me some pickled beets, but I just haven't had time to make some. 

We decided we didn't have enough room, so the husband spread out the concrete blankets to kill the grass, and this will get tilled up this fall and planted next spring. I haven't decided yet if we are exercising excellent forethought or just need to have our heads examined. 

We've already dug up some potatoes. It's like hunting for Easter eggs. One row is reds, the other is Yukon Golds. 

The eggplants finally set fruit (I had my doubts). I think they need to get a smidge bigger, but I plan to cook up some of these. 

We've been making notes about what we want to do next year.

1. The husband thinks we should plant more potatoes. I am reserving judgment until I see how many pounds we get from this year's crop.

2. The purple bush beans were lovely to look at, but barely productive. I think we'll skip them next year or find a different variety.

3. The broccoli was awesome and that particular variety (I hope I have the tag somewhere) was nicely resistant to bugs and worms. Ditto on the cauliflower. 

3. I adored the ruby red lettuce I planted. Next year I need to have a more formal succession planting schedule so that we have a regular supply. I also need to plant earlier. It does well in the cool. 

4. I am not sure we need so many beets. Actually, I am not sure we need so much of everything, but we can always put a produce stand out front.

***********************************************

When I began my transcribing job, I had to buya PC. I have had a Mac since 1985 and I don't like PCs. (I still don't.) And yes, I can boot my Mac into Windows but it was too clunky to do that every day. I just bit the bullet and bought a PC and another desk. Now I have two desks, at right angles to each other, and when I type medical reports I have a lovely view out the window of my office to the front yard. The other day I counted 50+ bicyclists riding up or down the road during thye 8 hours I was working. Our road is a popular route for cyclists, but I hadn't realized just how popular. 

***********************************************

Tonight is the first home football game. DD#2 does not have to cheer, but she does have to sell programs. And the husband and I like football and it's a good way to see all of our friends, so we're going to the game. Tomorrow I think I might dig up beets. Maybe. 

We Climb A Mountain (Again)

Yesterday our friend Sheldon and the husband and I went up to Mt. Aeneas, in the Jewel Basin hiking area right across from our house. Mt. Aeneas is a popular hike. We did it last summer, and we wanted to get up there again before they close the road after Labor Day for construction. 

We began our hike around 4 p.m. in an attempt to avoid the worst of the heat. It was still pretty hot. Once we got about halfway there, we stopped seeing other hikers, most of whom had gone up earlier. We had the whole summit to ourselves. That was really nice. Usually it's crowded.

This is a marker pounded into a rock on the summit, just in case you aren't sure where you are.

I took some panorama shots, but there is a fire burning to the south and so it was pretty hazy up there.

The husband is very intrepid and likes to try new ways to get off the mountain, some of which do not include following a trail. We decided to hike along the top of the ridge. If you look at this next picture, you will see Aeneas in the background (that high point), and coming towards the foreground is the ridge we came along. There is a trail about 2/3 of the way along, and then the trail sort of just disappears. At one point, we (Sheldon and I, at least, because the husband appears to be part mountain goat) were scootching along (very sharp) rocks on our butts to get down the ridge. It was a bit challenging but I never felt like we were in danger. We just had to go slowly. I was glad I had my ski pole with me for leverage (I have learned not to hike without it). 

Eventually, led by the sherpa the husband, we got down the ridge and back to one of the real trails. Here's the view looking back up. 

It was actually pretty cool and I said to Sheldon that people pay big bucks to go to national parks and do what we had just spent the last hour doing. Would we go that way again? Maybe not. But it was an adventure. 

We got back to the truck just as the sun was setting in the west. All in all it was a great afternoon. 

********************************************************

Knitting? . . . ah, knitting. It's still going, albeit slowly. DD#2 tried out for and made the junior varsity cheerleading team, so my life has been upended in new and interesting ways. One of her good friends, who lives around the corner, also made the team. Her parents and the husband and I have been trying to share transportation duties. The problem is that the other girl's parents have jobs with schedules that don't always allow them to drive, and there are two smaller kids at home. In some ways it's good, because I either drive very early in the morning (they have to be there by 6 a.m. three days a week), or in the evening (the other two days), so I get a lot of work done during the day. However, when I drive in the evening my knitting time suffers, although I AM teaching a knitting class tonight at Camas Creek, called "How To Read a Knitting Pattern." 

When the kids were little I had a parenting book, and one of the things I remember clearly from that book is a sage piece of advice. The book's author said that one of the challenges of parenting little kids was that they were constantly growing out of one schedule and into another, and that it was important to remember that each stage wouldn't last forever, no matter how awful it might be at the time. I would add that that piece of advice applies as they get older, too. DD#2 grew out of her elementary school schedule and into her high school schedule and the husband and I just have to roll with it. 

This blog may go away for a while, too. I have mixed feelings about that, but I am not writing about knitting and that was the purpose of this blog. It may remain with more infrequent postings that are aimed mostly at reassuring my mother that I didn't fall off a mountain while hiking. 

********************************************************

I am still really enjoying my new line of work. I get better at it every day and every day is completely different. My account managers have been wonderful to work with. I still sort of pinch myself every day that a) I have a job in a field that everyone said I would never find a job in and b) that I like it so much. 

I do want to post again this week with pics of the garden, because we have had a few interesting surprises. Stay tuned. 

Settled

It's been an eventful couple of weeks. The good news is that I found a transcriptionist position, and I couldn't have landed a better one if I had been asked to design it myself. 

There seem to be a number of MT jobs out there, but finding a company who will hire newbies and who will hire newbies for something other than 2nd or 3rd shift is the hard part. I was not looking forward to working later afternoons and evenings, because my brain tends to be winding down just when I would need it the most. I did receive an offer from one company to work a Tuesday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift. But you know what?—I've worked for myself for so long that I just didn't want to be an employee tied to a shift. 

Last Monday, just when I had resigned myself to accepting that position, I received an invitation to do another round of testing with a different company. I went ahead and completed the test and submitted it, and Tuesday morning they sent me an invitation to become an independent contractor with their company. Being an IC means that I get to decide when I want to work. I do have to fulfill a work quota, but when and how I get that done is up to me. 

By Wednesday I was up and rolling. I received my account specs and login information, and when I logged in for the first time, I realized that account I was working on was for an oncology practice. You have no idea how much I was hoping to get an oncology account. I have the background (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), and while I liked most of the different kinds of reports I typed during my coursework (except psychiatry), oncology remains my favorite specialty. 

I have a phenomenal account manager who has been great about helping me get started. Working almost doesn't feel like work because it's so much fun. Cancer treatments have changed a lot in the past 20 years and I am learning a tremendous amount. 

So I've had a much better week this week, and I think it's mostly due to finally having the uncertainty of the past two months out of the way. I feel like I am getting my routine back (it helps that school starts soon for the girls). I even feel like knitting, and that's a bonus. 

*******************************

We've had a good 10 days of really hot weather, punctuated by a few good rainstorms. The garden looks wonderful. So far we haven't been overrun with zucchini, although that may change in the next few days. We've had blueberries and a few raspberries, some beans, and now we've got collards and arugula and another crop of lettuce. The sunflowers are taller than the husband (and he is 6'4"). 

We did have a thunderstorm the other night, with lightning, and now we have a fire up on the mountain above our house. I drove down the road and took a picture for you. I also labelled where the fire is in relation to where we went hiking a few weeks ago. 

DNRC has been flying helicopters with water drops over the fire during daylight hours since last night, but it seems to me that they are having a hard time getting a handle on this one. There are a lot of dead, brown trees up in those woods, and they want to burn despite the amount of moisture we've had this year. And it's going to be hot and dry until the middle of the week, when temps are supposed to cool off some. 

I am almost ready for fall. Not quite, though. I need a few more weeks. Sometime this week I need to pickle the beets from the garden.  

 

Foraging

Before I get to the main part of this post, let me just be up front and say that any discussions of knitting are going to be few and far between for the next couple of weeks. First, this is the time of year I mentally refer to as "dead time," because for as long as I have been in this business. NOTHING happens in August. NOTHING—no orders, no forum discussions in Ravelry, NOTHING. Second, there isn't much knitting happening here, although the afghan is on the needles and I am working on it when I have time. Third, it's just too darn hot to think about knitting right now.

I do have a few more patterns to release, but they are fall patterns and I want to wait until people are thinking about fall knitting.

Okay, now that I have lowered the bar, let's talk about what HAS been happening. The husband and I have entered foraging mode. Foraging is when we find out who around here has orchards they don't pick, or orchards they've abandoned, and we get permission to go pick. Last year we got more apples than we knew what to do with using this method. On Saturday night we took ladders to an abandoned orchard and picked a bucket of sour cherries and a couple of gallons of sweet cherries. That same orchard has an apple tree that is just loaded, and I am hoping it's a tree full of Yellow Transparents or Lodi or some other great pie apple. I usually buy my pie apples but I'd be more than happy to pick them myself this year. We'll know in another couple of weeks. 

The sour cherries became pies yesterday, although—in a spectacular display of what the husband calls "doing many things badly at the same time" and I call "multitasking"—I managed to leave the sugar out of one pie (not good) and burn another one (also not good). The pie that survived my cooking debacle was pronounced "excellent" by quality control (I didn't eat any). 

Last night, DD#1 helped me can 17 pints of sweet cherries for cherry sauce—a very versatile sauce that can be used in cherry crisp, poured over ice cream, or used as a topping for cheescake. 

[The only problem with this time of the year is that an abundance of food means that abundance of food has to be processed. The husband has been great about helping with that—he picked and hulled all the strawberries and got them into the freezer, he's picked and frozen all the peas, and he was so fascinated by the cherry pitter that he pitted most of the cherries for me. But the actual canning (and pie-making) is usually done by me. Fortunately, I have a big kitchen.]

Sunday night, I was struck with the notion that we should go huckleberry picking. Do you know of huckleberries? They are a major part of cuisine here in the northwest. Huckleberries are sort of akin to blueberries (I was once caught in the crossfire of a heated discussion of the huckleberry's righful place on the botanical spectrum and I don't really want to be subject to that again, so let's just say that they are "sort of akin to blueberries" and leave it at that).  I can tell you, though, that they don't really taste like blueberries, and once you've had huckleberries you're kind of spoiled. I would rather have huckleberries than just about anything else for dessert, even chocolate (but I would happily take both together). 

Huckleberries, alas, have not been successfully domesticated, as have blueberries. Huckleberries demand some sort of strange combination of light, shade, soil, charcoal, water, dryness, and phases of the moon to make them happy. They like areas that have been clearcut or burnt over, I know that much. I know how to find them in the woods—what combination of signs to look for to find them (kind of like hunting morels in the spring), but it's always a crapshoot and that is part of the charm. It's also part of the charm that it's entirely possible to run into bears while picking huckleberries because bears are not stupid and they like them as much as we do. That's why I take the husband with me. 

On Sunday night, the husband and DD#1 and I headed out to the woods to some spots I thought would be good for picking. Alas, DD#1 forgot to take her allergy meds, and by the time we got to the huckleberries, she was miserable. We headed back. We found some loaded bushes close to home, though, so we sent her on home and stayed until dark to pick. As we walked home along the edge of our property, I thought to check the few bushes that I knew were there and have been since the day we bought this place. They were full of berries. The husband said that was sort of like hiking 3 miles to shoot a deer, then hauling it home and finding one standing in the yard. 

I went out to that spot again yesterday morning and picked it clean. I was delighted to discover that—because the husband cleared this area out two years ago to make it more wildfire-resistant—there are hundreds of little baby huckleberry plants growing in there. We have our own little huckleberry thicket right on our property, and in another year or two we should be able to pick a couple of gallons without leaving the yard! It's not exactly a cultivated plot, but I'll take it! 

Then the husband joined me and we spent two hours in the woods in a spot where all we had to do was sit down and pick whatever was within arm's reach, like a couple of lazy grizzly bears. We went out again last night and tried to find more, but we had to bushwhack through some heavy brush, and while the husband finds that energizing, I do not. I told him we could go out again later in the week when the berries a little higher up will be ripening. We can do that for the next couple of weeks, although the further it gets into August, the higher up in altitude we have to go to find ripe berries. 

So we have four gallons of huckleberries in our fridge, and when you consider that a gallon of huckleberries typically sells for about $40 a gallon, that is not a bad day's work. I'm going to make them into jam today. The husband says he expects the jam to have the same life expectancy here at our house as that of deer jerky, which is usually gone within a week of bringing it home from the processor. I pointed out that we are well within our rights to declare that only the people who pick get to partake. In huckleberries, as in love and war, all's fair. 

**************************************

The transcription job search is moving along, but more slowly than I would like. I had hoped to be working by now. I've had interest from a couple of companies, but nothing definite. Last week I bought a Windows computer. Those of you who know me know that there are VERY FEW things that could make me work on a Windows machine. Entering a field that is fairly hostile to Macs is one of them. Even though I have a Mac that can be (and has been) booted into Windows, I decided that the easier thing would be to buy a Windows machine and another desk and devote the Windows machine solely to transcription work. I think that's a good solution. I spent a few hours Saturday going through the training for one company that uses a specific program, but I haven't heard back from them yet. That's the thing about this job search—a lot of companies pre-screen by making applicants take fairly extensive proficiency exams, presumably to weed out those who aren't competent or can't learn new software. But it's time-consuming and it comes with no guarantee of a job. 

I also prefer to work as an independent contractor rather than an employee. I don't need or want benefits—because I had cancer 17 years ago, I have to stay on the health insurance policy I am on or I run the risk of forever after being uninsurable (yes, I know, companies aren't going to be allowed to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, but there is nothing that says they can't charge exhorbitant premiums to cover you). And IC positions are usually more flexible in terms of time. But I would take an employee position in order to get some experience. 

 

It's Always in the Last Place You Look

I have some yarn. I want to make an afghan. I apologize to those of you who would like me to design more complicated items like sweaters instead of large rectangles, but at the moment this is what I need, knitting-wise. I want to do some colorwork and it's easier for me with a simple piece of fabric. 

I've had about 60 ideas for this afghan, and along the way, I discarded 59 of them for various reasons (such as, "It might not bother me to knit 40 squares from the center out on dpns with a complicated pattern, but other people might not find that enticing"). I finally sat down yesterday with 6 freshly-wound balls of yarn and the intention of starting an afghan made up of squares featuring different kinds of color and texture stitches. Wouldn't you know it?—I started working the stitch pattern for the first square and decided that it would make a wonderful afghan all on its own. The stitch pattern looks so unprepossessing in the Barbara Walker book (one of the limitations of B&W photography, and this pattern wasn't on the Walker Treasury Project website). It's a slip-stitch pattern with some garter stitches thrown in. I couldn't have asked for anything better. I love serendipity, but I wish she wouldn't take so darn long to show up. 

So I spent almost a week trying and discarding ideas, and the one I finally settled on came out of nowhere. It looks really lovely knit up in the colors I picked. I'm doing it in Berroco Vintage Chunky. I do love that Vintage yarn. 

*******************************************

The husband and our friend Sheldon and I went on a hike this past Saturday. Sheldon is on the fire department with us and he likes to hike. Last year we went to Mount Aeneas, up in the Jewel Basin. We could have done that hike again (finally, now that the snow has melted), but I decided that we should do the hike up to Strawberry Lake. You can see Strawberry Mountain from our front yard. We live right across the street from the road that leads 3 miles up to the trailhead. The husband has done that hike a number of times, including when he's gone elk hunting, but I had never been up there. 

It's a 3.5 mile hike from the trailhead, which is a 3 mile drive from our house. We went up around 11 a.m. and I was surprised to see how many people were already up there, including people on horseback as well as mountain bikes (and the trail isn't that wide). The climb begins with a pretty steeply vertical section through the woods. I didn't count the number of switchbacks, but I am sure there are many. The trail levels out near the top.

When you reach the top, you are rewarded with this (I have no idea who those two guys are):

Just in case the trip up here isn't enough hiking for you, there is a sign here that points the way to other places. It would have been possible (although it would have taken several hours) for us to have headed south from Strawberry Lake along the ridge of the mountain range and ended up at Mount Aeneas. 

The husband, ever on the lookout for wildlife, got out his binoculars. He didn't see anything, though. 

This is a much closer view of Strawberry Mountain than what I see from my front yard. Do you know why it's called Strawberry Mountain?

We spent about an hour up at the lake. Sheldon did some fishing, the husband and I ate trail mix and hard boiled eggs, and we visited with other hikers who came through. Soon, though, it was time to head home. I got to be in the lead on the way down, and I stopped and took this picture. The husband and I stood here and located our house down below us. It is on the bottom middle right of the pic, just beneath a large swath of green which is the meadow behind our property.

The husband and Sheldon on the trail.

 

All in all, a wonderful day. We like hiking here because the views are almost as lovely as those in the park and there is a lot less traffic on the trails. Sheldon wants to do another hike this weekend, a little bit further north of us. The husband suggested that we hike up that other trail, come over to Strawberry Lake from the north, then come down the Strawberry Lake trail. That's a bit more involved because we have to position multiple vehicles in the proper spots, but it would be a fun hike. And a couple other friends from the fire department have said that they'd like to join us. We need to do this now, because all too soon this area is going to be snowed in for another 9 months (we're already hearing predictions of another big snow winter like we had this past winter). 

 

Ebb and Flow–New Pattern

A couple of months ago, I received some sample skeins of yarn from Abuelita Yarns. One of them was Abuelita Merino Lace. It worked up into a wonderfully soft and elegant scarf, which I am calling Ebb and Flow because of the way the lace pattern undulates through the fabric. As an added bonus, the lace pattern biases naturally, forming slightly scalloped  points at the ends of the scarf. 

I'll be putting the pattern up for sale on Ravelry and Patternfish later today. 

This is a beautiful yarn, and I look forward to more offerings from that company. 

****************************************

More gratuitous garden pictures:

A colander full of strawberries (sorry for the blurriness). We've picked about this much every day for a week now. Most of them have gone into the freezer awaiting their transformation into strawberry jam for the husband. 

A cluster of grapes (kind of hard to see in the middle of the picture). I do hope these grapes survive and produce. They seem to be doing well so far.

One of DD#2's sunflowers. This happens to be the overachiever of the bunch. I need to remember to save seed from this plant for next year, if I can keep the dumb birds from eating them. Might be time for a scarecrow. 

And my favorite—one of my cauliflowers. This is almost ready to eat.

 

We had some really hot weather followed by a couple of days of cool and rainy (while the rest of you are sweltering). Now it's going to get hot again. I like the contrast.