Next week, I will be heading out to the desert with a group of sophomore girls for the second year in a row. I wrote about it last year and I hope for it to be as good this year. Mostly, I am really looking forward to some camping and being outside. I am hoping to go into it with the idea of just modeling excitement about being there, and less intent to actually “teach” anything. I think I am moving further and further away from the idea that kids need to be taught. Mostly, they learn exactly what they need to if you can just create space where adults will step back and let them learn. And also model that the “cool” thing to do is to learn new stuff. The more I learn about skateboard culture, the more I realize that these kids are incredibly motivated to learn new things and strive to attain goals. No one has to force them or grade them or ground them if they don’t practice for a certain number of hours every day. And mostly that’s because people that they like and respect have modeled for them that skating is cool and worth pursuing. People who make money on skate-related products do so because they utilize the voices of those role models to encourage skaters to keep pursuing their goals.

I think educators could learn a lot from those marketers. And I realize what a crazy thing that is to say.

So anyway, I’ll be out in the desert camping and climbing for the next week. Possibly there will be stories when I get back. Also possibly there will be pictures of knitting and spinning that I will be working on during the drive. Also possibly there will be pictures of the garden that I started this morning.

I had just got to my spot in the backyard, next to the garden, when I saw a dandelion leap into the air all by itself! It leapt up along with all the dirt around it in a neat mound and then settle back down into the ground looking as if nothing had happened. This seemed like unusual behavior for a dandelion, so I kept watching. This action repeated several times, and seemed to be moving underground across the garden bed, leaving a trail of slightly mounded dirt on the surface. A mole in the garden!

Or was it a gopher? It didn’t move any dirt to the surface, and I didn’t see any dirt hills nearby.

While it was fascinating to watch, I also don’t really want moles cavorting about in the garden, so I thought I might try a little test. I’ve seen those nature documentaries where the coyotes dig madly after some burrowing rodent and often come up empty-handed. But how fast can a mole really move? They don’t even really have legs to speak of, just big hands attached right to their bodies. So I thought I’d see if I could catch a mole, and also maybe give it a little scare to convince it that it would rather dig somewhere other than my garden.

I didn’t come anywhere close. The first time, I didn’t think strategically, and just started digging where I saw the motion. Of course, it had plenty of time to retreat before I got as deep as it’s tunnel (about 8 to 10 inches deep, but I didn’t measure so I’m just guessing). After uncovering its tunnel, and realizing it was long gone, I want back to sitting quietly. In only a few minutes I saw dirt being pushed into the exposed hole of the tunnel from the inside, blocking the entrance. And shortly after that, I saw the earth moving from further excavations in the same spot, only about 8 inches deeper. This time I waited for it to get a little ways further than where I expected the new tunnel to be and started digging behind the guy, thinking that I would collapse the escape tunnel and have him trapped. I’m not sure what went wrong with that plan, but there was definitely no mole or gopher or any other critter in the tunnel when I got to it.

I waited several minutes to see if he would come back again, but either he had moved his construction plans for the morning, or he simply outwaited me, and I eventually had to get up and go to work. I left the second tunnel uncovered, and I’m curious to see how the area looks when I get home this eve.

Also, I’m using this month as a kick in the pants to choose a new sit spot, since I haven’t done so after the last time I moved. I wonder if this is one vote against using the garden as a sit spot. Rather than just observing what’s going on, I have a vested interest in who resides in my garden and I am tempted to intervene.

I bought myself a banjo for xmas! That’s right, and I’m even practicing and everything. This morning I stopped at the music store on my way to work and got a set of those nifty banjo picks that slide over your fingers like big ol goth fingernails. I can’t strictly say that I know how to play any songs yet, but I’m working on Wildwood Flower, which is one of my favorites. And I’m learning chords and finger-picking rolls. Oddly enough, I just learned from my mom that she spent most of the time that she was pregnant with me learning how to play the banjo! And then when I was born, she gave the banjo away so I never had any idea that she played it.

I also got my number one most wanted thing for xmas, a spinning wheel!Oddly, I don’t have a good picture of it, but it’s an Ashford Traveller and you can see a picture of one here. It took a few weeks to get it here from Boise. It’s too big for a carry-on and too fragile for checked luggage. I thought we would have to drive all the way back to Boise in the snow to get it, but then Craigslist came to the rescue. Someone was advertising a rideshare from Boise to Portland, I offered to pay some gas money if they would bring over my wheel. It worked great, we met them in Portland, and I got my wheel! (And also some other stuff that I’m sure Preston thought was very important, but whatever cuz this isn’t his blog). So I’ve been spinning and spinning for the last couple weeks.

That’s Pavi down there in the left corner. He likes to help with the spinning very much. I made a trip up to Weaving Works in Seattle to buy some more roving (after I spun all of the dark brown roving that Kathy had supplied me with, and that I thought was a lifetime supply, in a few days). I’ve learned that I can spin and ply about 2 ounces of prepared merino roving in about 3 hours. At around $2 per ounce for the roving, that’s not a bad price for a few hours entertainment. But since I want to do it ALL THE TIME, it’s starting to cost more than I really want to spend regularly. One solution has been to buy white roving instead of the color dyes. I’ll either dye it myself (which I’m a little overwhelmed by) or just use it white. I’m spinning up some of the white stuff now, doing it as fine as I can, and I think it’s very beautiful. (click for bigger)

I’m also planning to go to the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in a week and a half. I’m interested in buying a whole fleece and just getting it processed into roving (rather than trying to hand card the whole thing). I found this little processing facility called Big Sky Quality Wool whose prices don’t seem too bad. Also, I know Kathy sent of her fleeces somewhere to be processed, so I’ll get some info from her about the pricing and if she was happy with the quality of their work. Anyway, it’s possible to buy a fleece online for a fairly good price, but I don’t know enough about the different kinds of wool to know which kind to get. I know I don’t need a Merino fleece (super-nice, but expensive) but I don’t know what other kinds are soft and good to work with. So I’m planning to go to the Fiber Arts Festival and take a notebook and start educating myself about different kinds of wool in a place where I can actually touchy-feely a lot of different breeds. And while I’m sending stuff off to be processed anyway, someone in my knitting group offered to give me a whole alpaca fleece! She said someone gave it to her more than a year ago and she just doesn’t think she’s going to get around to doing anything with it. Alpaca roving is a lot more than $2 per ounce, so it would be a raging deal to get a free fleece and send it off for processing. I can’t wait!

Bonus picture for the fiber folks out there (click for bigger):

I signed up for a membership for the next couple months. Been feeling like sitting at a desk all day and then being stuck inside because of the rain and cold the rest of the time is wearing me down. So I thought a little indoor exercise would be a great thing. When you sign up for a membership, one of the “perks” is a fitness orientation. Naively, I thought this would be some sort of you know…orientation. And maybe it would have something to do with getting fit.

Him: “What are your goals? Why did you decide to sign up for a membership?”

I explain about how I’ve been doing wilderness education for a couple years, and just switched to a desk job and feeling like I need to have some exercise to keep from going crazy in the dark wet winter. He blinked at me a few times. “so…would you say that you’re more interested in losing weight or in building muscle?” I explain again that neither of those categories really apply to me. I understand that both of those things are side effects of exercise, but I would not say that either of those things are my goals. He blinks at me some more.
Him: “Do you take any supplements or multi-vitamins?”
Me: “No.”
Him: “Well, everyone can really benefit from taking a multi-vitamin…”
Me: (mildly) “I disagree with you, but that’s okay.”
Him: (blink, blink) “Why do you disagree?”
Me: “The human body is highly evolved to harvest the nutrients it needs out of the food that it was designed to eat. If a person eats food that their body was designed to digest, they have no need of supplements.”
Him: (blink,blink) “But everyone can use more vitamins, even if it just means that you might live longer, I mean it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are unhealthy, but you could always be more healthy.”
Me: “I disagree.”
Him: “Well, I’m not going to argue with you about it!”
Me: “Okay.”

(Note: I am not claiming that I eat the diet my body was designed to digest, just that it’s possible to do so.)

He’s obviously feeling really frustrated now. He hasn’t managed to get me to fit into one of the two boxes he understands for why people exercise, and he hasn’t even got me to listen to his schpiel about vitamins. He shuffles some papers around on his desk for a minute, and then offers to take some measurements in order to give me a sense of my “current fitness level”. (Cuz, apparently, I’m not capable of knowing about my current fitness level by how I feel.)
And here’s the part where it gets really shitty. Up until now, the story has to do with this particular employee’s ineptness as a salesman, but from here on out, it’s a systemic process designed to make you Feel Bad™ about yourself. This is where the management of 24Hour Fitness has decided that the process all of their salespeople follow should involve as much humiliation and degradation as they can get away with.

To start, he’s going to take my measurements. And in order to understand how this is set up to make a person Feel Bad™ from the first, you should know that the sales desk isn’t in some nice little office in the corner of the gym. It is in an open space centrally located so that when you are at the sales desk you are in plain view of the rows and rows of stairsteppers, treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary bikes. Dozens of people have nothing better to do than watch whatever happens to be going on at the sales desk while they puff away on their going-nowhere machines. So we proceed with the measurements: neck, bust, bicep, waist (but not the dressmaker’s waist, they make it a point to measure the biggest part of your belly), hips, thigh, and calf. He writes all those numbers down as we go.

And then he pulls out these huge cheap-ass plastic calipers. This is what he’s going to use to calculate my body fat percentage. So keep in mind that we are standing right in front of the whole gym while he lifts up the side of my shirt, grabs a big fold of love handle as he can grab, and “measures” the thickness with these plastic calipers. Fortunately for me, I don’t have a whole lot of body-consciousness, and I feel pretty okay with the way I look. In fact, some of the folks I hang with might even get off on the whole “degradation in front of strangers” scene. But I think the vast majority of women would be mortified and humiliated to have their naked love handles measured in front of a crowd of strangers. And I assume y’all are smart enough to know that the thickness of your love handles has very little correlation to your percentage of body fat.
But whatever, I mean he took all these other measurements, so I was thinking maybe he had some complex formula to relate all those different measurements. We also go around the corner to the height/weight scale (hidden in a little Closet of Shame, because now that we’ve just shown the world my naked love handles, they want to hammer home the point that your weight is something you should be ashamed of).
So then we head back to his desk in the middle of everywhere to look over all these figures. So we’ve got height, weight, measurements from neck to calf, and the love handle measurement. And I’m really curious what he’s going to do with all these numbers, and I’m watching him do some figuring on his scratch paper. I can see that the only numbers he’s using are the height, weight, and love handle thickness numbers. All the rest of those measurements were taken to heighten the sense of exposure (and possibly to make it seem like he was actually doing something scientific).So he comes up with a number and turns to this chart next to his desk. It’s basically a simplified version of the BMI. The 24Hour Fitness version has been converted from weight ranges to body fat ranges (how? I don’t know…probably by applying some sort of generalized formula about common body fat to weight ratios, thereby making it even less accurate than the BMI was to start with). And then they’ve added pretty colors to separate the Good (green), Fair (Blue), and Unhealthy (red, of course). And each little box in the chart is super-precise, like 19.7, 22,3, 24,1, 26.9, etc. So according to this guy’s calculations, I fall right in the middle of the red range. He points to my number, and then looking directly at me with a Sense of Deep Caring and Concern™, he says “That’s not good.” And I think here is where I am supposed to wilt into a Ball of Humiliation and Shame and throw myself into his professional hands to tell me what I can do to gain his approval and that of the whole world and I don’t care how much it costs.

But I don’t. In fact, I don’t respond at all. (blink,blink).

Him: “So where on this chart would you like to be?”
Me: “Sure, somewhere up there in the blue range, that would be great.” (read: Whatever, I’m really ready to be done with this now, and let’s just finish up your schpiel in a hurry.)
Him: “Go ahead and pick one of the actual numbers.”
Me: (sigh) “This is a chart designed based on averages. Since it is a chart that doesn’t apply specifically to me, it doesn’t seem relevant for me to choose a specific number. The 31.2 doesn’t really have anything to do with me as an individual.”
Him: (blink,blink)

And then he starts trying to tell me about how the only accurate way to find body fat is with the dunk tank method, but this caliper method gets close so blah blah blah. I interrupt.

Me: “Actually, a couple years ago I worked in a research facility where we studied women’s health and where we had a very fancy and expensive machine similar to a CAT scan that actually analyzed each molecule in your body and gave you an in-depth readout of body fat percentage, bone density, calcium percentage, body organs by weight, and much much more. So I do actually have pretty good sense of where I am in terms of body composition, and also to what extent this chart doesn’t apply to me.”
Him: (long pause) “Okay, how about we just choose this largest number in the blue range, 31.5.”
Me: “Okay, sure.”

We turn back to his desk and he starts punching some numbers on his calculator. After some concentration and application of some apparently highly specialized knowledge on his part he pronounces, “It will take 6.2 weeks for you to accomplish this goal.”

Now it’s my turn to blink. I consider briefly trying to explain to him just how many ways that is bullshit, but I drop the idea quickly. In that pause, he decides to dive in for the kill.

Him: (with a Sense of Deep Caring and Concern™) “I’d really like to help you with that. I have designed a personal training program along with a diet program that will help you reach your goal.”

Um, hello? What planet are you living on? Cuz, it apparently is not even in the same dimension as the planet I am living on…you know, the one where I started out by saying that my goal was to get some exercise. But yes, he would like me to pay him $1000 (yes, that’s right one thousand dollars) for personal training. And he seems genuinely surprised that I am not responding to his sales techniques. It seems that the only two lines he can remember from his sales training class are “I would really like to help you with that” and “is that something you would be interested in?” The second line he keeps throwing out every time I say no. He goes back to the basic idea of personal training and ask if that’s something I would be interested in, desperate to get me to say yes to *something* that he can upsell from.

And of course, if things had gone according to plan, I would have been so humiliated by this point that I would have been willing to pay any amount to have someone help me become presentable to the general public. Too bad for him that I have a solid sense of self-esteem and I don’t buy in to popular bullshit about there being one way to look if you’re healthy. And too bad for so many people that this sales technique is probably very successful.