Last Post from Alaska -- Eight Pictures, Five Anticipated Changes, Unifier of Friends

After another stunning drive, I reached Haines in the middle of yesterday, and this evening I'll be on the ferry bound for Bellingham and the Lower 48.
That ferry ride neatly bisects my trip, and I've been reflecting on some of the changes to expect.

 Change 1: I expect to exchange empty roads and very cold weather for increasingly warmer weather and more heavily trafficked roads. "Cold and empty roads" means one can pull over--gawk, breathe; pee, even--wherever one pleases.
At sites like Lake Dezadeash, just south of Haines Junction...

 Turning around and photographing from the same spot...

Cold means descending a stairwell of spruce back into the US, to a sudden cathedral of winter-bare cottonwoods.

 Just past the ferry terminal east of Haines is Lake Chilkoot. I hiked there yesterday afternoon, getting my final lungfuls of glacial air. The air was above freezing, but you can see how deep the snow is: check out that buried interpretive sign.

 This is the outflow from the lake--thaw underway; check out that straight and sheer drop of frozen waterfall.

Other changes involve how what gear I have on hand and how available it is.
Change 2: No more cleats and boots. Normally, my very heavy duty ice cleats live in the gutter of my driver-side door--sometimes I can't get out of the car without putting them on. I wouldn't have been able to hike without them yesterday.
Don't think I'm going to need them that handy anymore! Likewise the kneeboots I've been wearing all winter. My sneakers will probably come out come Bellingham!

Change 3: No more snow shovel and ice scraper! I have a small snow shovel and good-sized ice scraper in the back of the car, and even as loaded as it is now, those items are up at the top of the pile. Some repacking soon will disappear them, I think.

Change 4: Coats. Usually I wear my North Face down jacket with a heavy duty (and very high visibility!) fisherman's waterproof coat over the top of it. And a fleece vest underneath, and a sweater, a long-sleeve, and a T-shirt under that. The pocket-patting dance as I try to figure out where my keys/wallet/phone/notebook got slung is pure comedy, I'm sure. Now we're going for streamlined.

Likewise, my cooler up to this point has been for preventing apples and carrots from freezing (while trying to keep frozen peas frozen); onward, I suspect the cooler will reflect its name more accurately.

Change 5: Plethora. The flip side of being in a more densely populated area will be the plethora of offerings available. More high-speed Internet, more organic produce--more produce period; more cellphone coverage...More old friends too, although I'm going to miss so many friends in Homer and Anchorage.

That's the common thread. Dear friends here, dear friends there, dear friends wherever I go. As introvert as I am; as poor at expressing this appreciation, I am so thankful for the love by which I feel myself surrounded and protected and blessed on this journey.

Thank you.

MOVING--and FUEL

I'm MOVING! That much is obvious from the previous post. And I was naughty--I put a teaser on Facebook about having booked passage on the ferry. But where, when?
The "why" is well known. Living in Alaska has been an unscheduled blessing of opportunity; not one this chilly willy would ever have sought out. I am deeply grateful, but I'm not one of those who came eagerly to Alaska and could never imagine being based anywhere else. My intention when this house-sitting opportunity came to me was that at the end of it, I'd have a destination "Outside."

I'm heading to this country:

The outskirts of Tucson, AZ!
Yay for Israel-like warm weather, gardens and permaculture, a good university, writers, friends--and a lovely couple whose land I'll be living on and whose gardens and heritage poultry birds I'll help out with.

When I bought my car a year ago, I had the fantasy that I would drive away from AK, take the ferry down the Inside Passage, and onward to my new place. Here I come!
When I bought the car--my biggest ever investment in myself aside from going to school--I was also very clear, on this blog and elsewhere, that having a "good" car, ten years old as opposed to a beater, was a declaration of intent to be safe and sound, not marginal, and that the car should symbolize my own bodily vehicle.
My car was at the mechanic's today, getting mileage-appropriate work done, being thoroughly checked over, even little details like replacing the battery in the door opener taken care of.
When my car runs low on gas, I fill it up as soon as I can.

Why is it so much harder to refuel myself?
Guys, it is much harder than gassing up a car. If you leave a car underfueled, as far as I know it'll simply run better once fueled appropriately. When you underfuel a body, the stomach produces less acid because there's less call for it, and the pancreas and intestines produce fewer enzymes. Less stomach acid means nasty things are more likely to survive into the intestines, so infections are more likely. Without the enzymes, digestion doesn't happen smoothly If you're purging by whatever means it increases the chance of inflammation, which leads to water retention and even more dilute acids, and it can appear as if you gained weight fasted so you freak out because your body doesn't seem to be following the laws of physics. On top of all this, you're stressed. And you're probably eating really bizarre concoctions because of what your brain says is okay to eat. So when you do eat, it hurts, it's exhausting, it often leads to pain/gas/bloat; it often seems like too much to deal with, it doesn't feel good, it leads to behaviors that are physically painful and feel out of control.

Yes. All of the above.  But if I tell you that my low energy in recent months may well be largely due to my frequently not making the effort to eat, or getting rid of what I did eat, you would probably say, as they say in Israel, "Good morning, Eliyahu!"

I'm ready and excited to move, and the road trip is an adventure I can't wait to share on this blog. I'm already contacting old friends I may drive by, already eagerly anticipating catching up with some dear ones I haven't seen in years. And I love my car, and my shiny new atlas, and my ferry ticket--but they won't get me there--I need to be fueled and strong and stable. I OWN this! The last week has been better.

Now, consider the gates open. I welcome all your road trip anecdotes, advice, warnings, tales, "never do this"s, suggestions on packing/planning/shipping/how to say farewell to beloved friends here and to Homer that has been such a kind home to me these past few years.

Onward!

Winter, Green Shoots, Purple Corn and Grain and Green

Hello from sunny Alaska! Still unseasonably springlike here--we've seen green grass, mosquitoes, gnats; I was out hiking this afternoon and ran into a friend, whose friend was carrying bear spray! I guess the cue to hibernate isn't very strong just at the moment. Strange this weather has been. Homer is subarctic, but it is also maritime, which means that even in less bizarre winters there's usually a couple of thawing spells, hence icier roads than if everything just froze nice and tight for the duration. Since I'm shy of ice driving, I tend to be semi-glued to the ten-day forecast on Weather Underground throughout the winter, trying to prepare myself for what's to come. To which I should add, having lived in maritime climates in CA and HI too: meteorologists do their best with these weather systems blowing in from far out in the Pacific, but it's always somewhat of a crapshoot. Weather Underground are by far the most consistent, but they don't always get it right; sometimes the incoming weather system never makes it to land mass. For the past month, I've been amazed to see above-freezing temperatures all the way to the end of the ten-day forecast every time I look, repeatedly and repeatedly, the tail end of those ten days inching toward the end of the month. But now it's inching colder and should be 20 degrees and snowing by Friday, apparently. Hopefully nobody's bees or peonies will have come too far out of dormancy.

My own little dining-room-table garden continues. Sunflower sprouts reach for the light continually. I have a couple sad little parsley sprouts. Clover makes a nice cover crop, indoors as well as out in farmers' fields, but it's easy to eat as a sprout too. I've had some buckwheat greens, but one shouldn't consume those with any regularity because the greens (not the seeds, which have their own issues) contain fagopyrin, which can cause a photosensitive rash, and we have all kinds of light up here, haha. My milk thistle was a bust--old seeds, very poor germination.
I'm no kind of corn fanatic as so many people are--I don't care for popcorn. I'm suspicious of baked goods with corn grain for celiac reasons (non-gluten grains mess me up too). As far as corn in its "fruit" rather than "grain" phase I like fresh corn on the cob but not with the devoted adoration of many people; I love corn kernels but honestly I'm afraid of their calories (as ridiculous as that might seem)... But this 'ere purple corn is the graminaceous version of those magic beans Jack got. 

I'd been hearing about "purple corn" and "purple corn extract" as a superfood for years and had been skeptical. You can get purple corn tortilla chips--that's mainstream novelty, far beyond the superfood universe in its own gimmick-prone spectrum. But I got hold of some purple corn for very cheap, and I was curious.

All purple foods are high in antioxidants. Anthocyanins, resveratrol. Heart healthy, cell protective. Ultra violet, crown chakra. Have you noticed how many purple foods come in a paler version? Grapes, eggplants, tomatillos, berries, cabbage and pretty much all cabbage family veggies, potatoes, beets...The darker version is always more delicious, richer tasting, antioxidant-richer. Green is my favorite color, but purple is my next favorite, and with all my indoor gardening, I felt drawn to see if those magic kernels would sprout, to green the purple.

Um. They were about 100% germination. And it's fascinating, the contrast of this monocot, this grass, looking like some sort of goofy insect, roots everywhere and that one intent shoot; so singleminded in comparison with the sunflowers with their gentle dicot pairs of leaves cauled in prayer by the black husk.

You can see them here. The sunflower sprouts, leggy with their two leaves at the top, still look prayerful, expansive, reaching out this way and that. The corn is the green fuse unfurling like a sword, looking just one way. Up. I snip sunflower greens and the stalks languish useless. I snip the corn; it keeps right on growing. It doesn't taste like corn whatsoever; it tastes more like wheatgrass, go figure.

And oh my goodness, check out those roots! That's corn roots with the gentle little clover cover crop making nitrogen up top, the corn purplish in the stalk, swording up into green. Green sward, green sword.

Wheatgrass and barleygrass are famous for their enormous wealth of minerals. Grasses don't contain gluten, and their ratio of omega 3 to 6 is much better than that of grains. Amazing the transformations a plant can undergo. I think of trying to be a grass rather than a grain, of being an anti-inflammatory omega-3 rather than pro-inflammatory omega-6, vibrantly growing, full of minerals rather than dormant and protected with phytates to prevent me sprouting when winter pretends to be spring... Of course, the other big difference between grains and grass is that grains are highly caloric and grasses minimally so. But nobody's going to be surprised to hear that I'd rather be mineral rich and calorie poor than the other way around. So, that's how I'm going to be eating that corn! And I'm going to need more growing space!

Stepping Into 2014: What Can I Offer You?

Well, hello! Happy New Year! 
At a time when I'm conscious of being in transition, and also in a state of fragility and parlousness, my thoughts are all over the traditional questions--What should my intentions be? --What is truly my passion? --If I can ask the right questions, won't all the intentions finally stick? and finally, When push comes to shove, what do I really have to offer? --because of course I want to give.

I'm half a lifetime away from the sparky straight-A student who could generally assume her resume would fit her for any opportunity she might be interested in. And having maintained such diversified interests (read: not having settled down to any one thing) I find it too easy nowadays to assume that I can't do whatever occurs to my interest--because I lack relevant experience or skills, or because there's a flip side to whatever it is that I wouldn't want to deal with, or because I assume no one would give me a reference.

But one afternoon this week, a series of events and reflections showed me what I needed to know as a theme for this year.
Back in England, I bought a beautiful little inlayed box, miniature mosaic, the beautiful geometrics of Islamic art--from a thrift shop, for the equivalent of about three and a half dollars. I wanted it as a box for writerly inspiration, and just for its beauty. My mom's friend, who owns several such boxes, told me to be sure and varnish it; otherwise, the tiny mosaic tiles would start to fall out. 

So, I came back to AK, I settled in, it sat there. Phil loaned me two cans of varnish, one of them better than the other but he didn't know which, together with a few brushes. The box sat with my semi-unpacked luggage; the cans of varnish and the brushes sat in the back of my station wagon.

After a few days of this, on a day just above freezing with no snow in the air, I took the box, the brushes, and the cans of varnish, and slip-slid up the road to where a bench overlooks the bluff and the bay.

I could only get one of the cans open. 

Well, guess what? The can I could get open was better than the one I couldn't open.

 

I varnished the bottom of the box to make sure it wasn't some weird color, then started on the top. As I worked, I realized it wasn't shiny clean--that I was varnishing over some grime. How beautiful it might have been if I'd buffed it up pristine!

But I was varnishing it at all, rather than procrastinating the job--good enough.

It's not perfect. But now I have a beautiful box, whose tiles will not fall out, in which to store writing prompts, or pens, or love letters from the beyond, or whatever! And I returned the varnish and brushes to Phil right away, rather than driving them around for weeks without having used them.
Most of all, I had the lived experience that taking care of something then and there can be more perfect--and more empowering--than waiting to do that thing perfectly, and the exhilaration of seeing something through without inertia. 

And so, since then my email inbox has been emptied immediately rather than allowed to brim. Books and magazines are being read and returned/recycled steadily. 
And so, here's this post, still with my two blog urls, even though I don't yet have my website set up as I want it to be after an embarrassingly long time like that. Here's this story, even though the box is still drying and not yet brimming with great writing prompts or love letters from my favorite literary magazines.

As I embrace imperfection, I also feel a deeper assurance that I do have much to offer. Why would I write a blog at all if I didn't have anything to give? I certainly don't intend it as a narcissistic navel-gazing exercise. So, please keep me honest! Don't let me go there. 
Since my interests are various, "what I have to give" might be multifarious also. Which is against all marketing advice--I don't have a "brand" or any such thing. But for now, please let me give to you, and please let me know what I can give you.

Acceptance of imperfection, asking of myself what I have to give and where my true passion lies--realizing that these two things are one and the same--and creating an environment in motion where material does not accumulate or get stuck--these are the watchwords I bring to the new year. Hopefully this will also mean a more united and logical website situation. I'm looking for help. I'm looking to help.

So, Where Was I?

Ooh, that's a multiply-entendred question/title!

The important thing is I'm back, in the flesh at least. Also gradually spiriting into the flesh, or fleshing out the spirit, or something like that. I have this persistent image of a rigid container with a flexible liner, perhaps to hold water. All the water has drained out, so the flexible liner has collapsed. My spirit is the flexible liner (although the rigid shell of my body has undergone some abrading also). Or, the rigid container is the room into which I've moved, already populated by the books and ornaments and papers of another writer, liver of an active life, participant in the very building of the house. My possessions are a flexible liner superimposed on the room and its paraphernalia, presenting a temporary home for my person, who is a Picasso-painting dot down in the bottom corner. Or, the shape of the 24-hour day (setting aside the concertina of Alaska's light and dark) is the rigid container; the daily schedule I've been urged to create and adhere to is the flexible/variegated liner to contain my wayward self.

Where was I...The "place of no shoelaces" was perplexing this time. The familiar faces were a comfort in most cases. Two staff members I hadn't met before were problems for me--and vice versa, I'm sure, but some of what I received at their hands was horrendous/abusive and wrong. Inconsistency, too, in much of the actual treatment information, and outright misrepresentation of several things in my discharge notes. Even with my level of education and reasoning skills, I am/was fragmented enough that I had to assemble this inconsistency and misrepresentation from my own fragmented consciousness. Piece by piece in my notebook, writing helped me to understand what I hadn't in a conversation, or to juxtapose what was said at one time and another and cognize the shortfall. Imagine how someone with less education and reasoning habitus, a non-writer--i.e. a typical patient in that institution--would cope with these treatment issues. As is probably obvious, it's unclear to me how much detail I'm comfortable sharing on this. Trying not to get myself started, or I'll go on for hours and cry, and it might be inappropriate. But I'm troubled.

Where was I with summer? This past week up in Anchorage was the warmest I've known AK to be. Close to 80 degrees! We were let out in the courtyard as much as possible--lovely. When I left, the house looked like this:

a week later, all the snow is gone. We're going to plant potatoes! Yes, it's June...

And where was I with unpacking and that creation of a flexible but strong container for myself up here? Tormented by feeling I should shed more stuff, of course. There's a whole post to be written on the fallacy of economies of scale, a lesson I keep having to relearn. But I'm also finding ways to be okay with having "stuff" through innovative storage. The main thing I have a lot of is books. I am looking into more reliance on electronics but the fact remains that I love books. I'm a classical scholar, after all. And an MFA student, not to be forgotten. Times in the past I've moved and let all my books go, there have been those that are irreplaceable and many that I've missed. So, I present: moving-boxes that double as shelving!

This isn't all of them (two bigger boxes on the floor, and maybe a box-worth more still at the cabin), and I haven't by any stretch finished organizing them. I won't be able to alphabetize; it'll have to be by size. And the stacking of boxes definitely needs more thought. Probably to go on my schedule as fun activity that's also productive.

So. I've missed y'all and I've missed this blog, as disconnected from it as I may have seemed. How precious it was to find comments from dear friends amid the 90-ish spam comments I waded through before writing this post. Precious to see your names there; precious to read your thoughts and advice.

Love and words...

Canticle of Cold; Weight Dilemma

(In which Ela sets off at 6.30 to drive to Anchorage for a psych appointment)

Canticle of Cold
Thirty miles into my 220 mile drive, I accepted that the Warthog's heater wasn't working. Fan on highest setting, temperature up on maximum; my feet were numb; and I could feel just a little warmth if I held my hands to the vents.Sunrise isn't until after 8am right now, and I had to get over the mountains before there was a chance of getting out of the shade to be warmed. I think I wove as I drove, trying to give each hand a turn at clenching inside the glove to de-numb, trying to stomp my feet a bit (hard when you're on the gas)!

When I stopped in Soldotna, 72 miles in, for gas and to put another quart of oil in the 'hog, outside temperatures were 0 degrees Fahrenheit. And it was almost sunrise, so must have been even colder. Did I mention it was a cold morning? But fortunately, this is Alaska, so the car is stocked with blankets, down clothes, sleeping bags, in case of getting caught out. 

I used the rest room and stomped some feeling back into my feet, then wrapped up in blankets and drove on, recognizing I would be cold most of the way. I had some hot tea, a race between drinking it avidly and saving some to warm my hands with the steam. 

When it's so frigid and there's too little snow on the ground to insulate, it's deeper cold; crisp and dry, inviting the water of your own being to sublime into air. As the dawn twilight lost its pinkish glow and I could see the road clearly, I noticed the deciduous trees, completely leafless now, so stiff and dignified. Still some very brown and ragged leaves blowing around, reminding: alder, cottonwood, aspen, birch.

My toes were still numb; otherwise, things were better. Turning the heat off for as long as I could bear it and turning it back on again seemed to warm things above tepid, but it was probably my imagination. There were bands of fog, some of them filmy and pervasive, some hanging like bridges above the road, and after I passed through one small band, I could see nothing through the windshield. Freezing fog. A great time to have a faulty heat system! 

I survived the cold. I survived the even greater cold of the mountains, and drove Turnagain Arm with sunglasses on, grateful for the car windows absorbing all the warmth of this winter sun that shines at such an acute angle, it's always right in your eyes or windows. Once in town, I tried out Phil's best ideas on fixing, had a friend in town look the Warthog over, and ended up having the radiator flushed. I'm hoping for a warmer ride home tomorrow, but I'll keep the blankets up front in any case!

Edited to add: The most miraculous thing in this gelid adventure, mundane though it might seem...Evidently, when I stopped in Soldotna to add gas, oil, and blankets, I was so addlepated and chilled, and probably overdue for breakfast, I managed to leave the cap off the oil and the gas intakes. I didn't discover this until town, 150 miles further. The gas cap was still on the roof of the car. The oil cap was still under the hood. They can be expensive to replace, and this had been a journey not devoid of headwinds or bumps like to dislodge such objects. Small graces, minor providences...what was the purpose of this trip? =>

Weight Dilemma
I feel sick to my stomach even typing this, but I've been very open lately, and want to continue to share. 
I saw my psych today.
I've lost weight since I saw her last month. 
She was already unhappy about my weight, but was willing to work with it so long as it was stable.
"Steady downward trend" does not equal "stable."
If my weight isn't stable, she doesn't feel safe prescribing me lithium, although she strongly believes I need it.
Lithium is a salt, so it's implicated in electrolytes; the lower a person's weight goes below what's considered the safe range, the more likely there are to be electrolyte imbalances. These can kill a person just by themselves; they could also cause lithium levels to become toxic.
So, if I haven't gained x amount of weight by my next appointment with her, she will have to take me off lithium because in her professional opinion it's too risky. 

What a mess, eh? How would you handle being told you have to drastically change your behaviors or else be deprived of something that has been making a significant and positive difference in your life and the lives of people around you?

My options are: 
I could gain this significant amount of weight, on my own, on purpose.
Or: I could find another psychiatrist who doesn't share that anxiety about lithium/electrolytes
Or: I could take a different medication, (but why would I do that when this one works so well)?
Or: I could just go back to my earlier anti-medications philosophy and not take any

I'm thinking many people who know me well would be horrified at option 4, concerned about option 3, lukewarm on option 2 (this is Alaska; we have lots of cold weather, but we don't have a lot of very good psychiatrists like this one), and inclined toward option 1. Is that true?

There are probably some things I can do differently food-wise. I'm not going to list what I have been doing, to avoid triggering. Just one little feature: I have some extremely bitter white stevia powder: a brand I wouldn't buy again. Before I left for treatment, I was practically addicted to it. When I got out of treatment, I could barely stand the taste of it. Lately, I am putting it in everything again.

I like the sounds of "Canticle" and "Dilemma" -- I like the sensation of being warm.
And you?

Bee Musings

Happy Midweek everyone! Mittwoch - that's what Wednesday's called in German - no getting over the fact that you get past today and you're on your way home, so to speak. I like how I see people calling it 'hump day' - a different visual for the same concept.

I'm at the Safeway and the internet is much faster than it was at the library yesterday, so no browser-collapse mayhem and I've successfully uploaded the pictures for yesterday's post - a very stubby maca plant and two oddly angled photos.

Today, I wanted to talk about bees a bit. I spent a large amount of my time working bees when I lived in Hawaii, and I got into it because I found myself eating a lot of raw honey. At that stage, it really seemed to help my digestion. Specifically - and I have no good explanation for this - it seemed to enable me to digest fat better than I had been able to. At that point, I was a high-fruit raw foodist and deathly afraid of fat, partly for the good reason that any kind of fat made me feel sick. In Hawaii, eating honey, I found myself eating more avocado and coconut without difficulty and built some muscle for the first time in a very long time. Probably the best explanation is that it was partly in my head, partly that local avocados and young coconuts were more easily digested than the nuts I'd been eating in California, and partly that it stimulated my appetite a bit and enabled me to eat a bit more. That said, the communion with bees piece, the connection with such a different species that can teach us so much, was a big draw for me too. I read The Shamanic Way of the Bee and some other books like that, and was very influenced by that too. But for many people it's just another form of farming. And some of the diseases that afflict modern honeybees send one into a vicious cycle of overmanagement and overdependence.

I still love bees. But I can't eat honey anymore - I don't know if I ever will, although I eat some bee pollen, and I truly believe in honey's magical and healing potentials. And now I live in Alaska. I'm very mixed about the whole thing...

Bees. There are people who have been keeping bees up in Alaska for decades. The Russians first introduced them here in the early 1800's. So it's a well-hallowed practice. But rather like growing tomatoes in a greenhouse here, you can only keep bees in very well-insulated hives, and even then many hives don't make it through the long winters. Homer's maritime winters, which often feature spells of thawing lasting up to two weeks, are even worse for beekeeping than the bitter months of unbroken 40-below of the Interior. In the latter case, the bees simply hibernate solidly for more than half the year. But in the freeze-and-thaw scenario, they can often wake up, move around, feed, only for the temperature to drop again, at which point they can often either freeze or run out of food and starve. And this is even when they're well-managed. 

In other words, of course there are no feral honeybees in Alaska. Yes, people keep bees over winter successfully, but most bees are brought up from California in the spring. Just like the tomato, growing something that can't live wild here is something that I feel uneasy about. And even more so, because of the level of interference in their natural cycle of activity involved in managing them. 

When I took advantage of the sunshine on Monday and went to work a friend's pair of strong overwintered hives, what I was essentially doing was castrating the hives. Bees want to swarm in summer. A colony of bees is an organism that reproduces itself by rearing a new queen, who flies out to mate with drones - hopefully a non-incestuous union bringing in new blood - and then the old queen flies away, taking many of the old bees with her, to found a new colony. Swarming is discouraged in the lower 48 (and elsewhere) too, because it interferes with the honey harvest - making a new home and putting stores in the current one are two opposed activities. But if they swarm here, there are no wild drones around to mate with (although in there may be drones from managed hives if you're not too remote), and more importantly, once they've flown off, there's nowhere for them to set up home that they could possibly last the winter - or even the late summer night time temperatures.

So, there I was, barehanded but with a veil over my head, going through every frame of the two hives, removing every drone cell and queen cell that I could find and so retarding any efforts at colonization in this inhospitable land. I was doing 'the right thing,' as no swarm could ever survive up here, and the colony left behind would be weakened by their departure to the point of diminishing its chances of survival too, but it felt so…rude. On the one hand, I'm being as gentle with my hands as possible, trusting them barehanded and seeking the thrumming bee communion that I've always loved about working bees, but on the other, whenever I find drone cells or queen cells (which was extremely often on Monday - on almost every side of every frame, in fact), I'm brushing aside the bees to scrape off their inanimate infants with the sharp point of the hive tool!

I've heard that some folks up here remove the queen and a skeleton staff of workers when the flowers are in full bloom, so that the workers can focus on gathering as much nectar and pollen as possible, rather than being distracted by the reproductive/swarming business. But I've never known hives to be happy not having a queen for long…

Meanwhile, my own two hives with their difficult start and nightmare journey here… I need to merge them, their numbers are so depleted they don't have a chance as two separate entities… But I've been dragging my feet over getting it done, partly because I was going to do it at the same time as moving them, which is best done at night and I'm generally wiped out in the evenings, and partly because I was loath to kill the queen of the weaker hive, which is what I'd have to do to merge them. When I checked them on Monday, the weaker hive no longer had a queen. Did she swarm? She'd certainly made some drones earlier on… She wouldn't have had a moth's hope in a candelabrum if she did that. 

It makes me a little sad, but despite today's sunshine it's been a cool and wet summer so far, which is unlucky for trying out something so chancy. 

The View From Here/Up For This Week

Announcement!

First, an announcement. If you are a food-minded reader, please take a look at the new online magazine 'Eighty Percent Raw:' it's going to be packed with interesting articles, recipes, exercise advice and other discussions from a balanced perspective, and I'm going to be writing for it too! I'll be writing an article each month and I also have a blog over there that's just getting started. It has a discussion forum attached too, and I'll try to look in there as I'm able. 

For this week, I'm going to continue with my series on the no-sugar treats and I anticipate that I'll still talk about food and food issues a fair bit here, but since my other blog will be mostly about food, it will give me more space here to talk about everything else as well! (Well, that's the theory - amazing how there's always more to write about and not always the time to write it.) I will post a link here when I blog over there and vice versa. 

I want to talk about food issues and eating-disorder-recovery a bit here this week too, because I haven't much and because right now it feels relevant. There will also definitely be another 'wordstalk' this week, and I also have a post mostly written in the back of my head about making do when you have less-than-ideal equipment.

The View From Here

Starting from this post, I'd like to start each week with a 'view from here' post. (Unfortunately and super-ironically, the day after I finally learned to post pictures here, our camera stopped working! But we'll see if we can remedy that so that there will be more photos.) I remember saying last summer, when we were looking ahead to what it would be like to live here in the winter, that living in a place with this kind of climate is like traveling without going anywhere: the same places look so very different in the different seasons. As the days lengthen apace and the snow and ice inexorably melt and people have their seeds started indoors and there is even some green grass beginning to poke up amid all the brown, snow-bruised leftovers from last time, it feels like we're moving a little faster right now. 

And the view from my writing spot - from our whole cabin, perched as it is 30ft from the bluff - is perhaps incomparable as a vantage point for seeing transformation in action. All that said, I wrote my sister-in-law a couple days ago that we were definitely in 'Break-Up' now, as opposed to winter (a between-season that isn't quite Spring) and that very night it snowed 5 inches up the hill from us, and has been snowing and sleeting at our lower elevation. This morning our heater has quit working so I sit here in down coat, hat, down booties bigger than my head - and am quite happy. [update: Phil fixed the heater! He is so awesome in every way.]

We'll probably have some sunshine today: it just stopped snowing and you can at least see where the sun is through the clouds. These days of sun and cloud remind me of the constant imperative to pay attention to the gradations of light that is one of the most enduringly fascinating aspects of being here.

It's mating season for ravens, eagles, squirrels and it's lively out there! We didn't know that juvenile eagles bred, but we've seen two juveniles who definitely seem to be at least playing at it together. Yesterday they swooped out in wonderful, synchronous unison far out over the ocean, then parted and came back together in amazing symmetry, and twice we saw one flip all the way over! I see ravens do that all the time, but I'd never seen an eagle flip over before and nor had Phil.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, last week Phil and I were hiking the beach one evening and there were two mature eagles mating on the beach, who got interrupted by a flock of maybe 40 crows flying right over them - buzzing them, very deliberately - cawing in full voice! How rude…