Sunday, 2 April 2006

CSI Kitty
Topic: home




She sure doesn't look like a cold blooded killer, does she? But she's Suspect Number One in a horrible murder that took place right on our front porch.

While the body of the victim was immediately relocated, we documented the crime scene as soon as possible.
That's blood surrounding the doormat, and the outline of the victim shows the placement of the body as it was found. The victim measured approximately 8 inches from nose to tail, and was probably a juvenile. The rear feet measured 2 inches long by 1/2 inch wide. Adults of the same species average 11 inches from nose to tail. Actual cause of death is undetermined, but there was an entry wound in the left side of the victim. (caution! this is an actual picture of the dead baby rabbit. don't click on it if you don't want to see it)


Based on these tracks leading to the crime scene, we immediately suspected Kitty McGoo, the wily character pictured above who is known to frequent this neighborhood. We called her in for questioning, but right from the beginning she was uncooperative, so we decided to go ahead and book her.



We tried to get her prints, but after multiple attempts,


she still refused to cooperate. We decided that if we were able to get dental imprints, we might be able to match them to some damage done to the victim, but she was also unwilling to cooperate with that process.


We decided it was time to try some more harsh techniques, so we took her out to the warehouse for some "interrogation". But even after repeated threats,

she was still unwilling to admit to any involvement in the crime.



With nothing more than circumstantial evidence, we were forced to let her go.

But rest assured, we will be keeping a close eye on her. She's sure to commit another crime, and the CSI team has her under constant surveillance.

Friday, 31 March 2006

Got Pictures of Naked Girls!
Topic: pictures
Yep, that's right, The Girls finally posed for me, after I've been trying to talk them into it for years. We had a totally good time, and an extraordinary percentage of useable shots. More than a third of them were worth correcting (cropping, rotating, etc) and a couple dozen turned out well enough that I'd love to have them up on my website. I sent the cd out to them today along with a couple Model Releases.

So that's what I've been doing for the last couple days after the Festival. I had meant to spend the last few days catching up on e-mails and blog entries and Kamana journals and laundry and dishes, and, and, ... But instead I spent somewhere around 10 hours working through the 150+ pictures of The Girls. Not that I'm complaining ;) It was a great time, and great subjects, and it will be time well spent even if they decide that they don't want to sign releases.

But if they do, well, you all will be in for a real treat once I get the shoot uploaded. Stay tuned.

Got a Blister!
Topic: home
So it's no secret that I'm not the best wood splitter, but I've been improving through the winter. I still can't come anywhere near to Preston's splitting rate, and there is a class of people who are so into making big pieces of wood into small pieces of wood that they have international competitions, but I'm getting better. Through a combination of warmer temperatures the last couple weeks, some drier wood to split, and possibly a little bit of improved technique, I've been splitting enough wood after work to keep the fire going for the evening, thus operating at an equilibrium instead of requiring Preston to split a bunch of wood so that I can burn it.

Today I forgot my gloves and was too lazy to walk back into the house to get them, so swung the maul without them. And I got a blister! I haven't had a blister in years, and I'm quite proud of it. I tried to take a picture, but it didn't come out. You'll have to take my word for it that I really am that hardcore.

Got the Job!
Topic: work
I didn't ever get around to posting about the interview, so you all didn't know to be waiting with 'bated breath the way I was, but if you pretend that you were, then we can all breath a huge sigh of relief and holler "whoo-hoo!" together.

John from Wilderness Awareness School called today to offer me a position as Lead Instructor for the Summer Camp program. All together now, "whoo-hoo!"

This is just half a step away from my dream job. I'm hoping that after doing the summer camp instructor, I can get hired on as a full-time instructor for the rest of the year. The job starts June 19th with a week of paid training. I'm planning to take the first couple weeks of June off to get prepared for the summer. The camps are held at 4 or 5 different locations around the Seattle area, so I won't know for sure how I'm going to schedule my summer until I know where I'll be based. John asked me if I had any preference, and I told him that things are so much up in the air for me that I'm hoping for him to just make up the schedule and I'll use that as my anchor point around which to plan everything else. Chances seem good that I'll be camping out for at least part of the summer, and then the weekends I'll spend down here on the property, since Preston will be based down here. (He's the new Design Engineer for a local compressor manufacturer. Jobs abound all of a sudden.)

So I won't be giving my notice at the current position for a few more weeks (like 6), but it's nice to know that it's not permanent. The current job doesn't suck, but I'm not passionate about it. I guess I'm sorta high maintenance that way. I got paid for making scrapbook pages with custom stencils today. Definitely not a bad way to earn a few bucks, but it doesn't make me feel like I'm improving the world much.

John said he'd be sending out a packet of paperwork in the next week or two with more specific information and a tentative schedule for everyone, and (one of the cooler parts) a cd with several of the schools basic stories that they tell, so that we can be learning them before camp starts. Very cool!

Saturday, 25 March 2006

City Driving with Preston
Topic: made me laugh
Preston: Why aren't these people turning right on the red light? Freakin' SUV drivers.
Me: Umm, I think it might be because of the "No Turn On Red" sign.
(beat)
Preston: Freakin' traffic engineers.

SEAF Update
Topic: work
Things have been a bit crazy around here while we prepared for the SEAF, but I'm really glad to have this experience. I'm actually still in Seattle, staying at The Girls' house. Preston was here the last few days, but is driving back home tonight in order to have a day to recover before starting his NEW JOB (!) on Monday. I'll be hanging out for the last day of the show tomorrow, and then picking up any artwork that didn't sell tomorrow eve before I drive back. Tonight was the auction, which was where one of my pictures was being sold. I had valued it at $100 (a completely arbitrary guess since I'm new at this), and it sold in the auction for $175. I was so distracted watching the cute auctioneer that I forgot to pay attention to who bought it. Hopefully Allena noticed so I can send a thank you or something...I hear this stuff is all about the networking.

A few of my prints have sold from the SEAF Store also. We needed to sell 3 of them in order to come out ahead for all the printing, and by this eve at 9pm we had sold four of them at $13.50 a piece. I get to keep 75% of the sale price from the auction, and 60% from the store, so that makes my take-home more than enough to cover the framing (thanks to a friend who hooked us up with a great deal on custom framing) and the gas money to drive up here a few times. The show goes until 1am today, and then runs for a few hours tomorrow as well, so hopefully we'll sell a few more prints. As of 9pm, Triptych hadn't sold yet, and I'm not holding my breath on that. Lots of people have told me they like it, but I think it has a tendency to get lost in the craziness of the whole show. I need to get a password-protected site set up where I can put up some of the stuff like that and try selling it online. I've really started to realize that, while I like the nature photography, there are a million people doing it and I'm not likely to stand out from the crowd. But there aren't many people doing the erotic art stuff, particularly with male models, and it's a lot easier to become a big fish (or even a medium one) if you start out with a smaller pond.

Overall, this has been a fun process, and I'm glad that we'll see a little bit of profit from it. I'm also looking forward to a mellower day tomorrow, and a chance to hang out and browse a little more. I'd like a chance to hang out somewhere near Triptych and see if I can eavesdrop on what people are saying about it. Yes, I can admit it, I have an ego :) I'm also really looking forward to heading home tomorrow night. I've had enough people for a while, and I'm ready to get back to the quiet and the cedar trees, and the view of the mountains. Not to mention my own bed, and my very own special pillow.

Thursday, 23 March 2006

Quiz for Budding Naturalists
Topic: naturalist
Things have been so crazy for me as we get ready for our show at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival that I haven't been posting as much as I've been thinking about posting. I still don't have time to share much, but I came across this great quiz from someone on my blogroll.

"QUIZ FOR FOR BUDDING NATURALISTS or seasoned botanists reading this blog: put quite a few plant samples in a sack, grab a bandana, cover your eyes, and then draw them out and try to identify them. Keep the blindfold on as you write your answers. Set the samples down in order so you can check your answers visually against what you scrawled. You will never see plants the same way again!"

And you should click on over to his site to read the whole story of his blindfolded day. Great reading.

I tried to go blindfolded for a full weekend once, back in Boise. I made it about 12 hours, and it was rough! I wasn't out in the woods, but in the city. Preston took me to our regular coffee shop, and I met the new barista there. It was funny when I later saw her, and could match up her actual physical self with the image I had created based on her voice. Other than that adventure, I was shocking to realize how limited I was because I relied so completely on vision to stay safe in the city. I wasn't brave enough to go out during most of the day when Preston was at work, but couldn't entertain myself in any of the ways I normally would (reading, surfing the net, coloring, crocheting, birdwatching, etc.) It sure felt good to take that blindfold off at the end of the day.

Saturday, 11 March 2006

Snow Days
Topic: home

We've been snowed in here for the last two days. For those of you who don't live in the Pacific Northwest, you might not realize how extraordinary this is, but it's quite the phenomenon for us. Most folks aren't snowed in, but we have a rather steep and slippery driveway even when it's not snowing. With 6 inches of snow on it, it's a little treacherous just to walk up and get the mail. So the cars have been enjoying a few days off, parked cozily under a blanket of snow in the driveway, and I've been enjoying a tracker's paradise. One of the things that has been really cool, is the chance to get more of an idea of the infrastructure of the trail system on our property. I've known that there are all sorts of interesting animals around, and every once in a while I come across a track, but this weekend I've been able to get a much better sense of where the animals regularly walk. It turns out that their trails often parallel ours, so we only see the occasional track when the paths cross. I've found about a billion new trails, just because having the snow covering all the underbrush makes the trails easier to see. A big swath of white snow is a lot more obvious than some smoothed down leaves underneath a swordfern. I also have a better idea of the range of the skunks from under the woodshed, since I was able to follow their tracks from the den all the way down the hill and to the spring. I have wondered if that was their closest water if the drainpipe in the backyard isn't flowing. It looks like they don't mind wandering that far, even if the upper water source is available. I've taken so many pictures that I'm working on a separate slideshow, but here are a few teaser pics.

I couldn't find my tape measure, so was using my glove as size reference. That finger is 3.5 inches long from tip to the first full break in the yellow patch. From the tip of the yellow patch to the first full break is 2.75 inches. Can you guess whose feet these tracks belong to? Can you believe how lucky I am that I get to live in a place where I see this stuff in my back yard?

Wednesday, 8 March 2006

If You're Uncomfortable With Women's Bodies, You Should Probably Just Skip This One
Topic: naturalist
Okay, let's just get this out here on the table. Women bleed every month. Some of us like clockwork, some of us more erratically, but pretty often and rather a lot compared to the frequency and quantity men bleed. In honor of International Women's Day, and Blog About Sexism day over at BlogHer.org, I thought I'd go ahead and bring up some of the things I've been pondering lately about women and bleeding, and specifically why I never hear about it in the work and studies I'm currently pursuing.

I'm currently both studying and working with native skills. This means that I'm learning about building primitive shelters, about herbal medicine, about wildcrafted foods, and about small group learning environments (the kind that actually work, not the kind that you used to be forced to do in school because the software companies think that their employees don't work together well enough). All of this learning is really awesome, and I love every minute of it. But there is something missing.

The women. The women are missing. We are learning survival skills, and a reconnection with the Earth, which is good, and I highly recommend it. But I am not learning about how the women lived. Most specifically, I'm not learning about how they bled. I have learned about everything else, from tracking coyotes to pooping in the woods. At a kid's summer camp I worked at last year, some of the instructors actually enacted a whole skit about all of the different ways to poop in the woods. It was hilarious and very informative, demonstrating everything from a "1 star poo" to a "5 star poo". Where are the skits about how to bleed in the woods? We are working with kids age 6 to 12. I started my period when I was 12; a lot of girls start theirs even sooner. Why aren't we talking about this? I'm not positive (because no one talks about it), but I'm pretty sure the Native women in the Puget Sound area bled back before the days of Kotex. Heck, probably even before the days of processed cotton.

A flashback: I am 14 years old, and on my first overnight hiking trip. I've been out overnight lots of times, but always on horseback. This is the first time I've actually had to carry all of my own gear. We are a group of women, two adults and 3 young teens. We are sitting around the campfire well after dark, and it's cold like springtime in the Montana Rockies, which is where we are. I am feeling really proud of myself, and excited about a night in the woods, and generally impressed with myself that I carried my pack for a full 8 hour hike today. We are all getting ready to crawl into our sleeping bags, making one last potty run. The other adult woman says, "And if anyone is on their periods, the rest of us can step away from the fire for a minute, if you want to throw anything in the fire when you get back from using the bathroom." Almost before she can finish her sentence, my mom interrupts: "There better not be anyone here on their period!"

There is an awkward silence. Everyone seems a little confused. After a pause of a few beats, someone asks why. "This is bear country!" my mom says. First off, I am really thankful that I'm not on my period. I mean, no one asked me ahead of time. Right now would be an inconvenient time to find out that bleeding women are banned from the woods, if I happened to be bleeding. And immediately following that rush of relief, I feel deflated. I am not powerful. I am only here because...luck? the grace of God?...has arranged it so that I am allowed to be in bear country at the same time as all these other women. I didn't conquer anything by carrying my pack all that way; I was only "allowed" to do it because it was during the three weeks of the month when I wouldn't be a danger to the rest of the group and myself. Wheww!

And then the third thought occurred to me. Does that even make sense? Do healthy bleeding women get eaten by bears more often than anyone else? The Natives used to live in this bear country. Just what did they do before they learned to live in concrete houses, strap a big wad of synthetics and plastic to their crotch for days at a time, and use feminine deodorant spray like civilized women?

I still don't know.

Inga Muscio, in her book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (which I highly highly recommend for anyone who has one, or anyone who knows someone who has one...it's even got a Foreword by Derrick Jensen, and I know some of you are fans), recalls asking her grandmother, "What did ladies bleed on before Kotex dreamed up those thick-as-white-wall-tire pads and elastic security belts?" Her grandmother replies, "Child, where do you think the phrase 'on the rag' comes from?" There are a million things in that book that helped me see my monthly cycle differently, and this is one of them. Following Inga's example, I've stopped supporting the big corporations who are making big bucks off of convincing me that plastic and chemicals are more hygienic than my body's own natural fluids. These days I bleed on washable cotton.

But I'd still sure like to know what the Native women did. As the only woman currently working with the program I work with (along with 3 fabulous, intuitive, gentle, intelligent, caring men), I'd sure like to be able to offer some advice someday when I find myself 2 days out on a week-long wilderness adventure with a group of teenagers and one of the girls starts her first period. After we get past the congratulations, I'd sure like to have an idea about the best back-country way to keep the blood from dripping down your leg and filling up your shoe. And while we're at it, I'd like to know for sure if bleeding in a perfectly healthy way (as opposed to being wounded) makes you more likely to attract predatory attention in the wild.

If anyone knows the answers to any of these questions, or can point me towards resources with relevant information, I would really like to hear about it.

Tuesday, 7 March 2006

How To Charm Me
Topic: how to charm me
Inspired by my brother's "knees down" rule, embark on a plan to document as many things as possible from the knees down.

Newer | Latest | Older