A Break in Scheduled Programming: Things Are Looking UP!

Hi Everyone!

I hope you're all having a great week. Up here, the week seems to be galloping by, and in all kinds of positive ways. However, with all the extra busyness, I'm especially noticing how hard it is to stay connected and keep blogging with no internet connection in easy reach. And that thus far I've fallen far short of what I promised to write about this week!

So, grabbing a moment between finishing up some editing, finishing up caulking some windows, mulching a raised bed, making lunch, and heading to writers' club in a few minutes, I just wanted to give a little shout that things are turning to the better.

Does anyone else find themselves relying on cacao or caffeine for extra energy and then observe an inappropriately addictive relationship building with it, to the point that you have to quit cold turkey? I can't have caffeinated tea or coffee at all at the moment but have lately been using cacao in that way - and I love the taste, love the antioxidants, and it improves my appetite, which is supposed to be a good thing. But since yesterday, I've been off it cold turkey - no cacao nibs in my barks, no cacao in my morning smoothie, etc. I was starting to get unpleasant itching symptoms as well as just wanting more and more of it. This is maybe the third time I've had that dance with cacao. Would love to hear others' experiences.

So far yesterday and today, my energy has been lower and less consistent, as has my appetite. That's probably partly due to the lack of the 'cacao crutch,' but I'd been going full on for several days with enormously less rest than I'd been needing for a long time previously, and it's likely that that caught up with me a bit too.

Otherwise, my job/money worries seem to have found fairly quick resolution. One translation job that I thought was finished has come through with a lot more work. Some more editing too. And another completely new part-time job that I inquired about seems to have come through (still a couple things to iron out). I'll tell more about it when I know that it's for sure, but suffice it to say, for now, that it'll be a contrast to everything else I'm doing, whilst utilizing my relevant experience and skills, and should be a really good complement to everything else. There are also a couple of unpaid tasks that I'm taking on in addition, to help contribute more to the literary world and the environment-sustaining world.

Do you believe that you'll always find the work that you need, when you need it?

I hope you enjoyed all the photos yesterday! There will be more, from now on! It feels good to add things in and start to get the hang of them.

I Have Photos!!

A phone call to the Canon support team connected me to a real person in quick time, and it turns out that there was an extra step I needed to do to get the computer to 'see' the camera. In his words, Mac OS X.6 is 'a bit of a bear' when it comes to camera interface. He wasn't able to tell me why I'd never had that problem with the couple of cameras I'd tried - I guess that's not his to say.

But anyway - here are some pictures!

Here's Phil, whacking down the rampant horsetail grass in front of the outhouse. (It's rampant everywhere, including where we've pulled roots three feet down!) And yes, that is thin air and the edge of the bluff to his left, beyond the rowan tree. Best view from a toilet anywhere, I suspect!

Here I am in Anchorage last Friday, with a little wild rose Phil gave me. They are so pretty. Do you think my new hat is cute?

This is 'Turnagain Arm,' a long coastal inlet that the road south from Anchorage to Homer passes alongside of for the first 50 miles or so before climbing up into the mountains. This is the south side of the road. If you look closely, you'll see that those sticks of trees are festooned with terns. Right before I took the photo, they were all attacking an eagle, who must have been trying to make a meal from their nests. Eagles are so enormous and powerful, but we've been seeing them beleaguered by much smaller birds over and over these last few days - it's nesting season!
This next photo is the north side of the road in the same place (Girdwood). Still snow around in midsummer, but it is mountainous.

We drove back home with a stove in the back of the truck, which some friends of Phil's daughter had given her. We stopped in at Phil's friend Joe's place in Ninilchik, 40 miles from home. Here are Phil and Joe with Joe's boat and the truck swollen with stove:

Can you believe this photo was taken at 9pm?? And 45 minutes later, here's Phil's daughter, the proud new owner, with her stove:

Now I want to show some pictures of our place. I think I mentioned yesterday that we've actually harvested from our garden! Here's a picture taken from the cabin that we live in up toward the 'new bunker,' Phil's bugbear project, where three of our raised beds are in view:

And lots of our little starts too. And raspberry canes front right. Here's a closeup of the raised beds by the construction site:

The radishes are going great guns! And don't you love those stylish alder branches sticking up on the left? They're intended as trellis for those little baby peas. The garden cart in the background is loaded with about 100lbs of 'eel grass' that Phil harvested from the beach. Smells just like manure and makes great fertilizer!
But look at these mushrooms volunteering amongst the spinach and swiss chard:

Supposedly they are something to do with all the horse manure we mixed into the soil.
Here's my harvest:

And on the right you can see a salad tray that I recycle as a seedling tray.

Finally - I'm running out of time online here - I want to post a couple of pics of the beautiful used bookstore where I work occasionally.

Here's the view as you come in the front door:

Yes, that's quite a bookfilled desk from which to greet customers!

And here's another view of the first floor:

OK - I'd love to hear from regular photo-bloggers how to streamline this process! Maybe my computer and internet connection both are slow - but it's taken a long time to do this indeed. Probably I won't generally put as many pictures in a single post, but will just include a few each time. This is a bit of an overkill after many unillustrated posts.

lots of love.

The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here

Happy Solstice, everyone! The sun is out today! We now have a camera, so internet connections permitting, I'm hoping to illustrate my posts more liberally at least some of the time.

We got our first harvest from our garden yesterday! It's still astonishing to me how quickly stuff grows here considering what a late start it has to get. 

So lovely to curl fingers in the dirt in the raised beds and feel that it's warm in there!

And there I was hoping that the rest of this post would be a bunch of photos of our garden, etc. But whereas with every other camera that I've played with, I've just plugged it into the computer and downloaded the pictures, the computer doesn't seem to recognize this one at all. It did come with a software cd but I was really hoping to be able to use the native Mac software and not clutter up the hard drive with more software. The camera we got is a Canon PowerShot SD 1200 - a slightly older model because Phil felt that having a viewfinder was absolutely necessary and the newer ones don't. Plus, his brother is a professional photographer and won't use anything except Canons or Nikons.  I was pretty sold on the Panasonic Lumix for about the same price - would have adored that 8x zoom - but have to agree that the viewfinder is important. What do other folks have as a camera? Powershot owners: is there something about them that necessitates the special software? 

At any rate, I hope to have pictures up soon.

Up For This Week

Like many people whose blogs I follow, I'm reconciling myself to the realization that I probably can't blog every day at the moment. Not having an internet connection means that even if I do write a post, it doesn't mean that I can automatically get online and put it up. 

My desire to make more room for writing and to take that whole part of life seriously and make it important means that I'm going to have to sacrifice some trips to town, and other things. The garden has an endless amount of work that it would like to have done. 

The State of Alaska is providing an incentive for homeowners to insulate their homes and make them more energy-efficient, by offering to pay for the materials and labor. There is a limited time-window in which this needs to be done. Phil set this in motion for our cabin some time ago and we're coming down toward the deadline. So yesterday, I spent the morning caulking windows. I carved out a little time to work on poetry and felt so much better as a result, but checking email and blogging had to be postponed. 

And it's pretty clear that I need to get a more regular income stream going, so I need to put some time and effort into identifying and securing that.

That said, I want to make sure that I'm posting here at least three times a week. This week, I'll do some more photo posts of all the amazing plants that jump up when they get the chance. Another wordstalk. Possibly another book review. And another 'theme and variations' post, although I may have covered most of the possibilities by now. A product review, and maybe something on our new camera. Ok, I might not get all of this done!

I'm putting my request out there to the universe for any tips on keeping the relationship 'ship' afloat when there's a lot of changes underway and a lot of work to be done. It's one of the most important things in my life and at the moment my heart is very heavy - things are not going well. I would also love and gratefully accept any advice and input on activating income streams, whether it's using the internet for passive income or bringing my special (writing/editing/translating) skills to the notice of the right person. Please - I'd be so grateful. And I wish for everyone a beautiful, sun-filled week.

'Theme and Variation' 5 and a Wordstalk! And Looking for a Job.

'

Theme

This week's 'theme and variations' piece is probably the ultimate and most quintessentially 'variable' item of them all, and also subject for a 'wordstalk' that will come out just from talking about it. This food isn't a single food item, but in its various forms almost everyone eats it, no matter their dietary preference. Of course, I'm talking about SALAD!

The basic 'theme' with salad is generally considered to be a collection of vegetables with a dressing on it. This can be, and has been, extended so that pretty much every food group can take a bow in a salad bowl in some form, whether shredded (like cheese, carrots and other hard veggies), chopped (carrots, lettuce, avocado, tomatoes, fruit, etc), boiled (eggs, potatoes), toasted (bread, nuts) whipped (eggs, avocado, tahini), or fermented (sauerkraut, pickles, olives, capers).

And therein lies a succinct description of many of the possible variations.

However, before I get into my favorite variations, let's do the Wordstalk piece.

See, the word salad, in its glorious nonspecificity, conveys such a tight and yet such a precisely defined area of food, but such a word wasn't even used in the times of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, who ate a lot of fresh vegetables, and in fact the common denominator which is all that 'salad' denotes is the salt - i.e. the flavoring of the dressing! So perhaps a naked salad isn't really a salad!

Not a lot of people realize that salad etymologizes directly as 'salted,' cognate with 'salsa' and also 'salacious' (to Roman sensibilities, adding some salt to something connoted being at least witty and probably risque too). And it may be questionable how relevant the etymology is to salad as we think of it nowadays. (It's an interesting question of its own how important etymologies are to actual current meanings. Some people inveigh against 'abuses' of words being used outside of their etymological context; others welcome this as organic extension of the language's flexibility.) 

In terms of the extension of the word's use, in theoretical Linguistics, 'word salad' refers to a string of words that make no syntactic sense (especially in a language that relies on word order for syntax), and although I haven't been able to track it down, I do remember it being used of a piece of music with a lot of different parts to it.

To make things a little more confusing, in German 'salat' simply means 'lettuce.' I remember when I used to sell produce being confused by a German customer asking for 'a salad,' when we weren't serving any salads, and then a blink later realizing that of course she wanted a head of lettuce. And in English too, a lot of green vegetables are called 'x salad' or 'salad x'  (e.g. 'corn salad,' an alternate name for lambsquarters/mache, and 'salad burnet,' a green that grows wild up here in Alaska and is mostly eaten by spring bears, but that I've also grown in California, with a lightly cucumber taste). But it's usually pretty obvious when it's being used in a 'specific' context, and otherwise variety rules!

Variations

I found it interesting to read about the 'Home Economics' movement in the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries being so concerned with constraining and tidying the food, so that 'salad could not be the wildly exuberant spreading, heaping smorgasbord of all kinds of food that many of us know and love. It was useful to understand some of the aesthetics that lay behind the 'molded/gelled' salad (which I'd never seen before I came to the US and find pretty abhorrent, especially when it's made with lurid green jell-o). The American salads that consist of loads of mayonnaise drenching tuna/celery/capers/peppers probably owe something to the same aesthetic. 

However, what's called 'salad' in the Mediterranean and Middle East is often more like this, or even closer to what we would think of as a dip: baba ghanoush, hummus, taramasalata (NB 'salata') are all considered salads over there. 

I have actually found myself making gelled salads a few times. If you chop in a bunch of okra, within minutes it'll be gelled! Seaweeds work that way too. And I have mixed chia seeds into a salad, especially if it's 'to go' in a trusty mason jar. 

I love to use wild greens - nettles, chickweed, dandelions, wild mustard greens, and here in Alaska there are a whole set of greens that grown only along the shoreline. They tend to taste strong and a little goes a long way, but they're great in a salad. 

Tomatoes or other juicy fruits are great in salads. Phil and I aren't big fans of cucumber but apples or even nectarines or grapefruit pieces (no fruit for me at the moment, though) give a satisfying crunch and moisture. I adore jicama for the same things, but I love it so much that I tend to just munch on it beside the salad. 

I'm trying to get my krauting and sprouting routines down so that I always have both of them: kraut and sprouts are wonderful on salads. I have coconut kefir going pretty consistently, and like to have some of that with salad also, and often use the whey in salad dressings.

But to be honest, my salad is almost always a bunch of greens, a little sliced avocado, kraut and sprouts, a little oil and vinegar, and then a bunch of kefir whey and spirulina/chlorella mixed all over.  It would probably be good to vary that up some! I'm in the process of deciding/recognizing that we can't afford to buy avocados, so probably more seed cheeses and kefirs in the salad. And I'm going to look for a job.

Writers' Conference Aftermath: First Impressions and the Most Important Thing I learned

The conference ended just over three hours ago and I won't pretend to have anything like the distance required for a full and thorough review. I'm exhausted but still excited, and holding a very firm intention that this has been just the beginning - of many new friendships and connections, of more performance poetry happening here in Homer, of my own attendance at conferences like this one, of my wholehearted and unashamed embracing of myself as a poet and a writer.

I remember the years-ago experience of being so jaded by academia and conferences, of being cynical and disappointed, exciting topics not being met as they deserved, panels echoing one another and not really saying anything, books larded with postmodernist jargon and too dense to evoke any real enthusiasm (or even comprehension). Granted, that experience took place when I was still floundering around trying to find my way out of anorexia and not really living at all, when everything palled and galled and fell short. And granted, after I've been to a whole bunch of writers' conferences, my enthusiasm to dive in wholeheartedly, be vulnerable, speak up, sincerely tackle every exercise offered, may wane a little. But I would never want to exchange the childlike enthusiasm that I experienced at this conference for that more somber mode of response. It's been a long time coming, but for these last four and a half days I have really lived the philosophy that life is meant to be enjoyed - something that has usually been a merely intellectual construct for me.

An obvious marker of this enthusiasm was that I felt so spoiled for choice. Every concurrent session, there were at least two presentations that I wanted to attend. Phil was a trooper, and often went to my 'second choice' (which often suited him just right). But I did get the full benefit of two sessions with each of the wonderful Poetry teachers - Maurya Simon, of whom I was already a fan, and Emily Wall and Joan Kane, both of whom were thoroughly inspiring in their different ways. In each of their sessions, we had the opportunity to write a poem of our own - or a draft of one - sometimes we had as little as ten minutes! And this brought home to me the truth of the fact that it's not just the faculty who were inspiring and wonderful: many of my peers in the room wrote the most beautiful, moving, inspiring or otherwise amazing poems!

And here was the golden kernel of what was possibly the most important thing that I learned: no need for value judgment comparison! When we really want to be good at something, it can be tempting to hear someone else who is really good and feel discouraged, think 'why do I bother?' or 'they're so much better than me.' And some such thoughts did pass through my head. But as I saw them passing through, I recognized that as much as I admired these other people's poetry, I didn't wish to have written it! I admired their level of accomplishment and in some cases it inspired me to think about how I could improve my own. But I want to tell my own poems the very best that I can, so that they are as touching/inspiring/beautiful/heart-pulling as they can be, so that they can be their best - not to take on someone else's voice.

This realization was so comforting and so empowering. Academics and poets all the way back to the Ancient Greek world have so often been so highly agonistic: Strife one of the great motive and creative forces, as Hesiod, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and others, all said.

It was great to have the opportunity to ask Michael Cunningham some questions about his writings, and then to have a workshop with him. He is one funny guy! In his workshop, he had the whole room create a character in polyphonic style, demonstrating how much is revealed about a character just from her physiology, attire and affect. We laughed so much, and there were some vigorous disputes too.

Laughter was served further in ample measure by Bill Roorbach, Dinty Moore, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest, but all three of them constantly offered profound, compassionate, deep messages together with the laughter.

I was especially grateful for the short presentation on performance poetry by Joan Wilson: reading poetry aloud, or performing it, seem so central and crucial to understanding it.  

And it was eye-opening and informative to hear from editors Elisabeth Dabney and Jennifer Pooley and from agent April Eberhardt about the business end of things. One of the major take-home messages was that the potential of the internet for communication and promotion is great and merits great attention.

Of course, there were several other presenters that I didn't get to listen to. I feel like I have about a week's worth of research to do online checking through and following up on what I've learned.

Nancy Lord closed with a memorable list of eleven pieces of advice for writers practicing the craft: a well-packaged take-home message to launch our new beginnings.

The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here

After a gloriously sunny weekend that left many conference participants (notably my husband) at least partially regretting the enforced indoor time, it's clouded over again today and is blowing up strongly. Somehow the gray skies seem to accentuate the green everywhere, which is still comparatively new, remember, and hints at the promise of some dearly longed-for rain. The topsoil in our raised beds is so clay-predominant that  it's cracking open if we don't water every day. I'm doing 'we' sneakily: here 'we' mostly means Phil. I'm not so good at hauling 6-gallon jugs, and that's all the irrigation we have. Good job Phil is so strong.

This is Monday evening, just about to have another session of readings that are also open to the public: last night's show was an eclectic mixture of different kinds of laughter and some deep notes and chords struck. 

I'm still super-buzzed by it all but my energy is fading. I should definitely plan some significant downtime after this, no messing around on that score.

Up For This Week

I will definitely post a more thorough review of the Writers' Conference when I have more time and a little more distance from it. 

Of course it's been an intense sensory/social/informational/literary overload, and it will take some time to sort all of it out in my mind. However, a recurrent message from those at the 'business' end of the writing world was that using the internet as a communications tool is a very good thing to be doing as a writer. I've been so excited to be connecting with other writers (of poetry in particular), many of them right here in Homer, and am imagining that I'll be wanting to write about 'writerly' things more in addition to all the food and healing writing. I hope that that doesn't make my blog too eclectic or schizophrenic, but I never wanted it to be a monophonic, one-trick blog: that's not the way life is! That's what 'ulterior harmony' refers to.

So, probably some more musings this week about where I'm going with this blog and this life, and hopefully some putting into practice of those ideas. I know I missed my 'Theme and Variations' post last week and haven't done a 'wordstalk' for a couple of weeks, so time, energy and internet connection permitting, those will come too!

Our camera should also arrive any day now, so hopefully more pictures to come too!

Postcard from The Writers' Conference

Just starting the second full day of the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference. I'm so excited! It has been just awesome so far. The panel discussions have been inspiring and representative of diversely valid perspectives, something for everyone. I've been going to all the poetry workshops, and it feels exhilarating to be in a room with several others who regularly write poetry. They're all so good too, so inspiring. And there are some who live right here in town, so I'm already seeing that we will stay in touch after the conference.

I ended up being the first reader at the open mike. Four minutes each: that is not very long! Having originally planned to read five poems, their juxtaposition forming a structure of its own, I ended up reading just two. It's been a long time since I've been up on stage and I was quite nervous indeed. But just like it always used to be when I did a lot of performing, as soon as I was onstage, I was just fine, happy to be there. And I'm glad to have done it, because I feel like it 'broke the ice' and made me approachable.

Michael Cunningham did an extensive reading from his new novel that's coming out in a few months. I was riveted and didn't want him to stop. Cunningham's writing is always so riveting to me, and it's sometimes surprising to me because all his novels have so very much in common in terms of their trajectories, and yet the characters are so lovingly developed and the prose is so beautiful that I'm always entranced (and don't wish to exit. Sorry, bad pun).

My energy has held out really well so far, although I'm noticing that I'm having more chronic fatigue/adrenal 'symptoms' today, so need to watch out. I've definitely had to pack all my own food and, since I'm trying to get more protein in and since I really need to feel better for this, it's a challenge with these packed days. I'm just so grateful that this is in our home town and that I can fix stuff at home for myself, and I am trying! More on that in another post maybe but I should get back to the writing group that I'm in right now!

But oh my, this really point some directions for life. Lots to think about.