The world is still a mess, but no diatribe from me this week. I’ll never be a beacon of positivity, but there are many, many things that make me smile, and I fall back on those during these crazy, soul-crushing times.
Sumo took over the last post – that ancient sport has captivated the hub and I. We celebrated this past Sunday when Onosato won his fifth basho by defeating Hoshoryu in a playoff after losing to him in the final round of matches. But this week, no sumo. I’m filling the page with other lights in my life.
Dog walks and wildlife
Poppy gets two walks per day, no exceptions. The hub and I rotate the early-morning walks (dark enough now for hi-vis gear and headlamps), and we take the afternoon walks together, giving us time to decompress from our days, share our frustrations, celebrate successes.
Poppy doesn’t care about success or failure, but she does care about walks. While the hub and I determine the location, she determines the pace, the detours, and the interactions along the way. She’s been amazingly mellow recently – maybe aging takes some of the fight out of her – and aside from one incident with a belligerent asshole who refuses to leash his two dogs, we’ve had no crazed barking or lunging on walks.
No, instead of dogs, we’re encountering wildlife. In the morning, they’re tougher to see. I wear a headlamp but keep it off unless Poppy starts to tug the leash or suddenly pulls up short. Then I flip the switch and look for the reflection of eyes. Usually it’s a deer or an elk, though we’re approaching the season where the bears come into town to raid fruit trees.
I saw a family of racoons in the early morning a few weeks back, at least I think they were racoons. Their bodies seemed narrower, and they carried their tails high as they slunk across the street, like little skunks. If they weren’t racoons, I don’t know what they were. They were too far ahead of us on the road for me to see them properly, and they had disappeared into the bushes by the time we crossed that point.
It’s rutting season for elk, and last week as we were finishing our afternoon walk and approached a regional park path for the short walk back to our car, Poppy pulled up short. She stopped and panted, as she always does, never giving a hint as to why she stopped.
We continued, slowly, warily. Sure enough, there he was. A bull elk, standing just off the path, staring at us, unmoving. He looked small, like a female, but sported a thin rack of antlers atop his head.
I’ve had plenty of encounters with elk. Experience told me to back up and return the way we came – a twenty-minute trip along neighborhood streets rather than the five-minute walk along the path. But stubbornness told me that if the three of us proceeded (counting Poppy, which probably concerns the elk more than us), we might be able to push him back a bit and scoot by him.
No such luck. He didn’t move an inch. Just stood stock still, a solemn sentinel. When we crept forward a bit, he stomped his foot a few times but otherwise remained passive. It wasn’t until he glanced over to his left that I realized: a female lay bedded down in the brush behind him. He was guarding a cow. He may even have been guarding several. The brush was thick, and bull elks often gather females in a harem of sorts.
We realized we were disturbing his rut, so we turned around and walked the twenty-minutes to the car. Bull elk – 1; Humans – 0.
Fall Fair
Woo hoo! I love the fair! We walked to our local fall fair two weekends ago, the fairgrounds being just around the corner from our house. The hub wanted fair food, which, as I explained last year, isn’t my fav.
It kicked off on a Friday evening, and we mistakenly went that night. Turns out Friday’s for the kids. An overwhelming amount of teens and young adults, and the only other couples had toddlers. The hub grabbed some donut holes, I grabbed a lemonade, and we walked home.
We went back Saturday, which was busy and HOT, just in time for the final lawnmower races. We missed the kids’ competition, but the adults were zooming around the track, dirt and pylons flying. I guess it’s the low center of gravity, but I don’t know how they don’t go flying out of those darn machines.
We needed food so scoured our options and stood in a very slow line before squeezing into the shade to watch the bike tricks. All four riders were from Alberta and young, basically kids. They careened down a wooden ramp, hit an inflatable jump and tricked out while falling in mid-air. Nothing I would ever do. A couple of riders even fell once or twice, but the ramp provided a solid cushion, and they slid to the ground and hopped back up before anyone could ask if they were okay. For the grand finale, the bikers shot one after the other down the ramp and up the next, each doing a double back flip before meeting at the bottom for a high five. I couldn’t catch photos of the finale because I was too busy stuffing spring rolls into my mouth.
After lunch and the bike tricks, we cruised around to check out vendors, rides and games. The hub’s brother was a carny for years, and the hub took a turn at it when living with him in the early 2000’s. He wasn’t a natural. “You’re too honest,” the carnival owner said, removing him from games that required heavy sales (“C’mon, ladies and gents! Try your hand at the ring toss! Oh, you’re a man with a good eye….”) to booths that didn’t. He didn’t last long, and the environment wasn’t a healthy one. But you never know what you don’t try.
Writing
I have to admit, often the best part of my day is the first two hours when I write. The Pass, my new novel, is coming along nicely, and feedback from Scribblers has been super helpful. They ask the right questions about setting, or character development, or plot gaps.
I submitted my first page to a Slush Pile at the Wine Country Writer’s Festival last weekend. In a slush pile, a panel of editors listen as a moderator reads the first page of a submitted work. The editors listen for voice, grammar, style, and genre as they would a submission to their magazine or imprint. If it’s something they’d keep reading, they keep listening. If it’s not, they raise their hand. When three of the four panelists raise their hands, the reader stops.
The goal of the slush pile is to get through the entire first page without three panelists raising their hand. My first page didn’t make it. Too much exposition – Save it for later, the editors said. Keep the first scene active and focused on engaging the reader and save any back story for once you’ve already got the reader hooked.
As in previous years, I had a lot of takeaways from the conference, takeaways I’ll share in next week’s Book Report.
Garden
Food
We’ve had bumper crops this year: blueberries, grapes, tomatoes, garlic, butternut squash, beans, kale, and oh, how I love my garden. I’m at a point where I put minimal time into it. But the soil is full of luscious, fertile chicken shit, and I give the garden plentiful water. Turns out that’s the magic formula.
Despite a bumper crop of green grapes, my purple grapes produced hard, tight little balls that tuned purple but never got soft and juicy. Anyone know why?
Not just food
Cannabis became legal across Canada in 2018, a milestone for pot smokers across the country. I’ve previously written about cannabis and rue the double standards around cannabis and alcohol:
And as soon as it became legal to do so, the hub and I decided to grow it. I started the seeds, and he did everything else. I have a vegetable garden to attend to, after all.
Our adventures in pot farming have been comical. Households are legally allowed to grow four plants. In our first year, the hub guessed that we’d lose a few plants to incompetence, so we started extras… way too many extras. We ended up with twelve plants in a tight, 10’ x 8’ greenhouse which turned into wall-to-wall plants – so jam-packed that we couldn’t move between them without the sticky resins clinging to our clothing.
We left for a weeklong planned vacation, and while we were gone, disaster struck. With lots of rain that year and without air flow between the plants, mold took over. A friend who’d been growing pot for years and who’d been coaching us remarked that he’d never seen mold as bad as ours. Yay us!
We repeated this in the next few years, planting too many in fear of losing some. And though each year the mold threatens and the hub has to to yank out a few buds to prevent a fungal disaster, we’ve never lost an entire plant. In fact, our harvests have been so successful, most of our Canadian friends and family get an ounce of weed for Christmas.
This year, we planted our legal limit: four plants. The hub also took a much easier hands-off approach that resulted in healthy plants with healthy buds. It’s probably our best crop yet. Moving into October, the buds are just about ready to harvest, which means spending the next two weeks in the garage after dinner trimming it all up. Trimming somehow makes me feel like a drug dealer, ensconced in the garage with scissors and space heaters, but it’s really just an opportunity to test our eyesight, practice manual dexterity and share a good podcast or two.
The hub
The hub is a part of all of the above. Despite that we have different interests and hobbies and that I have no hesitation leaving him for a week or two to go into the mountains with friends or to fly away to visit family, almost everything is better when we’re together.
Both of us have faced career challenges this year and have taken a few leaps into the unknown as a result. It’s been hard emotionally, even overwhelming at times, but we’ve weathered the challenges, made decisions together, as a team.
A few months ago, when I was at peak frustration and struggling to figure out how to stay positive amidst my churning career field and an unknown future, I found this on my computer keyboard. It made me smile. The hub’s support remains steadfast and true despite the challenges and the unknowns. Lucky me.
Find your solace
Few of us can look at the world right now and relax. It’s a tense, tumultuous, trying time full of fear and frustration (alliteration, too!). So seek out that which gives you solace. Find friends with whom you can relax. Move your body. And remember to support each other: we’re all in this together.