The son of a good friend is a mobile mechanic. He came to haul my truck away to work on it, because it is not starting so I cannot drive it away from here. He was a mile or less down the road when his trailer started fishtailing really badly, turned both truck and trailer around 180 degrees and flipped the truck upside down, breaking the truck's frame. He is OK except for a few bruises and a totaled truck. He and his father say that it is not my fault, but I feel terrible. It would not have happened if he hadn't been going out of his way to try to help me. Am beginning to feel that bad luck is spreading from me to those around me. This is irrational.

It makes me glad that you are having nothing at all to do with me.

Never mind food, clothing and shelter. Love, caffeine, internet. Those are essential things. Books, art, plants, animals.

My son's dog is recovering and doing much better. She is on antibiotics; surprisingly they did not put her on any after the spay procedure! Meanwhile, I am nearly done moving everything out and now have a weekend of cleaning of cleaning the old place and settling into the new one. And....a lot more minimizing is necessary. I got rid of so much stuff and there is still way too much.

The owner of the store where I used to work looked surprised and slightly sad when he found out I'd been fired. The owners of the place are really nice people. They just happen to have hired someone as a manager who really is not qualified to manage anything, let alone a deli. She's not a bad person. Not my kind of person (she is passive aggressive and I can't deal with that) but she's not evil or anything....she simply does not have what it takes to manage the deli. No brains, no real knowledge of natural foods and no business sense (such as planning the weekly menus to use produce that is going to be cheap that week, since organic produce is very expensive) and also, no math skills. She said that I am good at math.....that really frightened me. Knowing how to calculate a simple 33% markup using a calculator is not "good at math". It is fundamental math that any deli worker, even a dishwasher, should know.

At any rate...I will never again have to curl up in the corner of that bathroom, trying to feel calm again, trying to feel ok. I will never have to walk on eggshells and wonder when the axe is going to drop. Instead, am going to see if the library ever looked at my application. The one sure thing about working at the library (volunteer or otherwise) is that I will never see the deli manager there. Yeah, that's snide. It's also 100% true.

Sorry for the pity party. Along with everything else, my son's dog got spayed Monday as she was just coming into heat, still had hormones going and mated with my dog and might have peritonitis as a result. The vet is talking about possibly euthanizing her. My son did not want her to get spayed. I talked him into it, and now she is at death's door because my dog screwed her right after she got spayed. She is wonderful, empathetic, loving. She's everything a good dog should be. The thought of having her die, right after her daughter got hit by a car, is just heartbreaking. It has not been a happy week for our family.

I just got fired. The reason they gave: "not a good fit".

I am fighting with all my might, the yawning void of not fitting anywhere, of not being good enough, of being the cast off. I want to belong somewhere, to belong to someone, to really belong, not just be a tolerated presence. I am so tired of being the thing that isn't wanted.

Someone was speeding down the county road my kids live near while they were checking the mail with their puppy. The kids got out of the road in time, the puppy was on the shoulder and got hit. My daughter called me up sobbing and I went over there as fast as I could, hoping that maybe it was only injured. She was gone...the truck hit her in the head. They did not even slow down or stop, despite there being three children on the scene. I am so glad the children are OK, but I really wish there was some way I could undo this for them, that she could be alive again.

Things that are both sad and wonderful about being in love with plants:

• One cannot really have any assurance that they will still be there later on unless you own or have some sort of long term claim to, the soil in which they are planted.
• On the other hand, one is not limited to plants which one can own since they are all over the place and can be appreciated without actually claiming them.
• They change all the time. I was drawing the blooms of my cyclamens once and by the end of the drawing, the petals had twisted and changed very noticeably from their position when I first started drawing them. This seemed to be in response to the change in the position of the sun. I then drew them at night with a lamp as a constant light source... People think that plants are static, unmoving things, but this really is not the case at all. They are very dynamic. Very often, the plant that you see today is not the same plant you will see tomorrow.
• They're so vulnerable but in many cases, so resilient. People think of orchids as frail...but orchids frequently live on tree branches without soil. I have seen very badly neglected orchids that looked mostly dead, revive. If you forget to water a cyclamen and come by and see its blossoms drooping onto the table or countertop, and then water it (from the bottom, always, so as not to rot the corm), you can sit and watch its flowers slowly rise back to their usual position as the plant takes the water in.
• They don't complain, ever. Goats and children will holler and remind you if you forget to do something for them. Plants don't. They just suffer. There is something heartbreaking and reproachful about finding a plant of the verge of death (or past it) simply because I didn't take the time to check on it.

All is well. I will be out by the end of this week and then can start planting my herb garden, etc. Also there is the possibility of staying in this place on a long term basis.

Good lord. The people sitting near me at the library are making me wonder if I'm in a Mr. Bean movie and didn't know it. One is an lady singing out of tune quite audibly and another is a youngish guy guffawing at his computer screen. At least neither of them are the guy who was trying to hit on me and then mentioned that he enjoys sticking bottle rockets in frogs and lighting them off. I'm sorry, was that supposed to be attractive?! Who in their right mind boasts about doing something so heartless and disgusting and expects that to be a turn on?

Edited to add: the trying to sing lady just started snorting and snuffling snot. That is too much.....(fleeing the scene)!

I never did find my Gray's Anatomy book and it's too hefty a tome to be hiding anywhere. Wonder if it's a casualty of the same woman who uprooted my herb and vegetable seedlings. :-(

Dear Friends...and friends who are not Friends but are so inclined...please hold me in the light for the next day or so. I don't even want to talk about it just now because I am not sure what to say.

Wiped out and the day hasn't even really begun yet...but we got so much done yesterday. I have too much stuff.

Lots of work to do, even after I'm all done moving. There is no way that everything we have will fit in this place. I either have to store some of it, get rid of some of it, or build a little shed or lean to to store it in...or more probably some combination of these. Moved most of the creepy stuff out of the house...and the smelly stuff. What kind of smelly stuff? Well, a bucket of filthy, smelly water and a package of what I think may have been rotten meat. A bum had taken up residence there last winter. He apparently was an alcoholic who chewed tobacco and didn't bother to throw out the remains of his habits. A neighbor ran him off, and I guess he didn't stop to take the meat or food with him so it just rotted there. Yuck. Mostly though the place smelled like strange men who didn't bathe often enough. Removed most of the textiles and a mattress, and that really helped. Did some preliminary surface cleaning but not nearly enough yet. These people seem never to have heard of garbage cans or dumps. Luckily most of the garbage was outside.

I have to hurry and plant the herbs since they were dug up rather precipitously thanks to losing my temper....Best solution I can think of is to move a pile of logs, revealing a patch of soil without grass or other vegetation, so it would be easy to plant. I would have to carry water farther to them....but this will be OK. Then there will be the vegetable plants I have...some are in buckets so location is not critical for those. It is still early enough to plant greens, peas and root vegetables for a late summer early fall harvest, if I plant them within the next month or so.

Then there's the Yearly Quaker meeting, which I am already looking forward to. Friends will be there who were not present at the Women's Conference and I'll be taking two of the children for this. And...my employer is treating each employee to tickets for the Festival at Sandpoint. We each had to pick one concert (of a week, different group or artist each week). Allison Krauss has a lovely voice, but she's country and her songs are sad....Counting Crows is OK but that's a dance concert and the thought of being alone in the midst of a large crowd of people in random motion is daunting, so I picked the Spokane Symphony. This will probably be more sedate and I haven't been to a classical concert since I lived in Chicago. Nobody else at work had picked this one when I wrote the selection down on the list. At any rate, it is very generous of our bosses to do this for us. It's too bad Allison Krauss isn't bringing Robert Plant with her- that I would love to go to.

My littlest son is talking to his dad on the phone about fishing and hearing his side of the conversation is a hoot.

"Do you have fake swimming worms to trick the fish?"

Heh. I never thought of fishing lures that way...

Also: was able to get 2 of the pottery fish into the Artwalk exhibit! And...there is a painting of me also (different artist, obviously). That was a bit awkward, but it isn't that recognizable as me. The only way I knew for sure was that I remembered that pose and what I was thinking about at the time.

Am reading this book, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms. I cannot read it quickly enough to do it justice and return it to the library on time. If it can be had used, I might buy it, because it's very interesting stuff. There is more about plasmids, and endosymbiotic theory and lateral evolution. It makes me want to take the microbiology class......although some of this was covered in Zoology, Bio 115 and General Botany. Having seen chloroplasts bustling around actively inside plant cells, it is easy to believe that they were once their own organisms before pairing up with others, to make plants. I'll never forget the sense of wonder upon seeing them move, circulating around the cell. That was awesome. :-)

Moved stuff to the new place today, packed the creepy stuff that was in the house, away. There was, for example, most of a dead bird, dried, hanging from a wire affixed to the wall. That's just morbid...and honestly, had it been a mounted skeleton, or an animal skull, I could have found that interesting. But a dried head+wings+tail (feet? not sure), all feathered, bound together and dangling from the wall was too much even for me.

And...I lost my temper in a major way this evening. My son grew a pansy from seed, grew it to the blooming stage to give me a Mother's Day present. My neighbor came over and dumped that pansy out onto the compost pile, leaving it to wilt, so that she could use the nice clay pot for the lavender plant she was stealing from my herd garden! Then she uprooted a lot of other herbs...some were just stems with no roots even...just wanton destruction and plant cruelty....and took those as well, just laid them on her picnic table, roots in the air, drying out, wilting. I am not usually brave about confrontations. But if someone hurts a person or life form that I love, get out of my way. I was just furious, not because she stole from me, but because she hurt those plants and for no other reason than greed and selfishness. They weren't even planted...just getting ready to die. The thyme and pansy might not make it. I wanted to leave that herb garden for other people to enjoy...but clearly that isn't an option. She would just strip it bare anyway. So I dug up every single plant I cared about and moved them all. I don't care that they're "only plants", that people say plants can't perceive pain or damage, etc. They're alive, they suffer, they die, I love them. Hurting them is not acceptable!

I'm so tired. Need coffee before starting in on the packing marathon this morning.

This new place is going to work out better than I had thought. I am allowed to build things such as chicken coops, sheds, pole barns...garden fence... I have also been granted an extra week of time in which to move.

Here is a cool link about some green building techniques: Artesano

Your quiet ways. You speak quietly, walk quietly, move with quiet motions. You move like someone who is used to working with nervous, flighty animals that are easily frightened. You have a calming presence.

I know about these things, because I've worked with animals for a good part of my life. There are people who spend years with flighty animals who never do learn to behave in a a totally non-threatening, non-alarming manner around their goats, horses, etc. I've tried to explain how to act in order to win the trust of a goat who hasn't been tamed, have spent hours trying to explain it. A lot of them claim it can't be done. They end up selling the animal, maybe for meat...others take the heavy handed route, deciding that they can simply impose their will by force.

What they miss is that the goat doesn't want to be afraid. It doesn't try to be anxious and reactive. All one really has to do is to make it easy and comfortable for the animal to come closer, to see if it's safe, to show it that things really aren't so bad. But this requires patience, restraint, a willingness to make the taming process a joint venture of cooperation, the ability not to rush the animal past its threshold of tolerance, to build trust slowly.

But I digress. Another thing is that your words tended not to be extraneous. I liked that. And, it was clear that you thought about things before distilling them into a few sentences. That's so rare in this shallow, babbling world.

When you manage to screw up your blog on Blogger, it's pretty sad. This place is close to foolproof. Except for having to make paragraph spaces using HTML, I have no complaints. Also, it is considerably better than it was when I started this. Anyway, now I know: you can switch from post to draft, but switching back from draft to post screws up the dates so it loses the original post date. This can be fixed manually if one remembers to type in the date where it is supposed to be....

Anyway, I am exhausted. Been packing, stressing, working, chasing children, throwing stuff out, telling them what goes where and to prioritize in case there is not room for it all....I have too much stuff, but about half of my own things are books, and over a fourth of it is wool, fabric, art supplies, etc. Luckily, wool is lightweight even though voluminous. The remaining fourth would be seashells, clothing, pottery, etc. Books, being both very heavy and bulky (somehow I managed to get them in here and seem to have lost muscle since then) are a sensible place to cut back, and I've really tried...but...books... I don't wear all those clothes, or need all of that fabric, either. Can't bear to dispose of many more books.