This picture isn’t great (I’m still getting the hang of my new camera) but this is a petrified tree trunk in a cave. Over the weekend, Chuck took me up to a secret spot he found a few months ago where there is a lot of petrified wood, and a number of these big tree trunks either hanging on the cliffs, or inside of erosion caves like this one. I promised I wouldn’t tell exactly where it is, but it was a lovely afternoon hike while big thunderstorms blew across the Paradise Valley. There was just enough cloud cover to…
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I’ve come late to mysteries, but this is the summer I seem to have discovered them, in particular, mysteries in translation. It’s partially because Chuck buys a lot of books at yard sales and discovered these two guys — one of the things we have in common is houses full of books. We’re both also really happy not to turn the TV on in the evenings, and to read books. It’s been lovely, especially since I feel like I’m still sort of in recovery, and that I’m rebuilding my stores of energy for whatever is going to come next. So…
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So far, so good on the unemployment thing. While it’s never ideal to be the one voted off the island, I find I don’t miss the job at all — I miss the people I worked with, but I don’t miss being chained to my desk from eight in the morning until six at night; I don’t miss the anxiety of thinking someone might send you an instant message while you were getting a cup of tea and then decide you’re slacking; I don’t miss being treated as an incompetent by my manager, and I’m beginning to get over the…
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Well, it finally happened — the layoff genie landed on my shoulder last Thursday. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, however, it was quite a shock to log in for that meeting and see an unfamiliar name on the call — an HR person. Nine years I’ve been at that job, and frankly, the past several have been pretty unpleasant. But it was a good job in a bad economy, and so I stuck it out until they decided that they don’t need editors any more, or they don’t like remote workers, or whatever corporate algebra goes into deciding who to vote…
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Last night after putting up these 12 pints of rhubarb-ginger-orange preserves (9 pounds rhubarb, 6 pounds sugar, zest and juice of 4 oranges, one thumb of ginger chopped very fine) I settled in on the couch and flipped open my laptop and found this slightly annoying article over on Salon: Can It. The tag line reads: “I leapt on the new pickling and preserving. Is it a money saver in a busted economy, or a luxury craft?” I was annoyed because the author makes the somewhat specious argument that because she made very expensive jam with fruit from the greenmarket,…
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Looks like another hen managed to escape via the compost heap this morning, because when I went out to see if there were any new eggs, there were feathers in the yard. Raymond had gotten another one — and had her hidden between the tall iris and the rhubarb. It’s my fault really, I didn’t insist on building an enclosed chicken run like I thought we probably should because a) Chuck was being nice enough to build it for me in the first place and b) we had the recycled chain link, and I hoped it would work. But it…
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The two surviving hens are laying eggs. On Saturday, Chuck put in the fence for the chicken yard (which is great — photos to come) and he was rewarded by finding the very first egg. Since then, they’ve each been laying one a day — little eggs, about half the size of a commercial egg, but then again, they’re still sort of little hens. Here’s a photo of an egg in the nesting box. It’s like a prize every time I find one — very cool. We also let them wander around the yard, which seemed to entertain them mightily.…