Writing Ruminations

Oregon Spring

2009-03-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

This was one of those weekends where I remind myself that if I got the same workout at a gym, I'd have to pay a lot of money. But then, if I was getting that same workout at the gym, it probably wouldn't be raining and hailing on me. But hey, that final shower finished with a rainbow (while it was still raining on me), so it was at least, quite pretty. And not very cold. Since I was doing Chainsaw Calisthenics, I stayed pretty warm. You know that old saying about firewood and warming you twice, right? I was dealing with one of those 'gifts' that come with a bit of a price tag. I have all these big branches you can have for firewood translates to I don't want to have to deal with all those twigs so you can have 'em. So I trimmed off all the really fine twigs (and I burn stuff down to a size smaller than a broomstick) and my beloved chipper even started, first time out after its winter sit. So it was a good day, rain, hail, and all. And I don't even have a pile of branches blocking my driveway. Woohoo.

Then, today was a good flight. We had the Scappoose airpark to ourselves, mostly because everything else was already getting weather, and I got in one really nice crosswind landing (they've been giving me trouble) before rapidly decreasing visibility and rain chased us back to Troutdale, where I got to perfect my crosswind style a bit more. I've been having to unlearn my winter's worth of landing in 30 mph headwinds.... The rain came in on our heels. Classic Oregon spring, but cold. My calendar is what's growing, and right now, according to that calendar, it's early March, not late March. Ah well, the seasons do what the seasons do. We're the ones with the inflexible calendar.

Nice Writing News

2009-02-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

I got a great call today. Was a classic Oregon February day; rain, wind, sun, more wind. So I was working on students. And Deborah Ross called, editor of the Lace and Blade anthologies, very nice fantasy collections. I've written two stories for her -- Night Wind in the first anthology, and Dragon Wind in the second (not out yet). She called to tell me that Night Wind, a sort of historical fantasy (well, they both are) was on the final Nebula ballot! I had to pry my jaw off my chest. That's way cool. I really enjoyed writing that story.

Slow Spring

2009-02-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

Well, my ewe delivered twin ram lambs and now all four of the lambs are out bounding about together in between snow showers, violating at least a couple of laws of physics with their antics. Two more ewes to lamb yet. They're keeping their legs crossed for the moment. Cricket has decided my chickens aren't enough of a herding challenge and is eyeing up on the sheep. But when I took her out to walk steers around with Trudy and her brother, she wasn't quite so sure about those big critters. Dunno why. She's quite ready to keep watch on George's horses and they're much larger than the yearling steers. We'll try again next week and I'll bring Annie along. She loves to make steers move.

Winter Lambing Reality Check

2009-02-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

We've had our lovely February break from winter -- sun, mild temperatures. I planted peas and fava beans. Two ewes lambed and I wondered if I even needed to put them in the lambing pen, why not let them stay out in the new spring grass?

Then, my black ewe decided that Today was The Day. She dwadled around in the mild temperatures, not really sure it was time to lie down and Do It yet. And the clouds gathered and the light waned and it sprinkled and yes, we're likely to...again...get snow tonight. Sigh. With a wind, and 30 degree temps. Lamb killing weather, when you're wet and newborn and out in the field.

So it's crunch time. She's pawing, lying down, not really pushing the lambs out yet, but thinking that it's soon. Do I leave her out? Then I have to go out in the dark with a light, which spooks the rest of the sheep and probably her as I pick up her new lambs and coax her to come with me to the warm, dry, lambing pen. Or do I get Annie The Enforcer out there and let her put the ewe in? That's pretty stressful for the ewe. I don't want to do that. So I went out to feed the rest in the waning light, fingers crossed. If she' s not really ready to push she'll come in. I serve alfalfa at night. They love that.

I put out the hay. And hear her bleat 'wait for me'. Closer than the far back of the paddock where I've been keeping them penned (major coyote pressure this year). She's coming! I wait until she's in, everybody is nose deep in the manger, slip through and close the barn gate. Then I have to get her into the lambing pen. No Thank You! She weighs 200 lb, she is wet, and not at ALL interested, never mind clean straw, alfalfa in the feeder and fresh water. Bruce, the ram, watches me balefully, but I snapped a lead to his collar while he was happily eating and tied him, so he can't butt me, like he really wants to.

A bit of wet-sheep wrestling later, she is in and I'm panting. She immediately starts munching on the alfalfa, quite happy to be here. I mutter a couple of not-for-family-viewing comments under my breath as I latch the door. Now, she's FINE with being in there. Hay all to herself!

Sheep!

That is not what I muttered. I am quite soaked (winter fleeces hold a lot of cold rain) and the ram is letting me know that as soon as I unsnap the lead he's going to Discuss my behavior with me. I call Annie in to ride shotgun as I unsnap him. They face off, he decides that really, he'd be better off eating, Annie and I depart. Cricket The Puppy is Really Disappointed that she didn't get to help. I tell her 'later'. Annie tells her 'I'll handle the ram, squirt'. I agree with Annie.

So I'll sneak down there in another hour or two and see what's up. Or out, should I say. It can snow tonight, that's fine. Lambing season is never dull.

Spring Arrival with Lamb and Skies

2009-02-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

Well, I declare it officially spring. Two of my ewes have now lambed, each with a single lamb -- I'm blaming the nasty weather earlier, they usually twin. But both are nice, large lambs, one ewe, one ram lamb. This is the first born, the official 'spring is here' announcement. He's a couple of hours old in this picture, nice and dry and already has his belly full.

It has been quite the week. Crocuses blooming, lambs. George is doing great, his surgeon calls him 'one tough guy' and said he could go back to flying at the end of the month. Nice to see him looking good. I miss my rides in the back seat of the twin Comanche he flies. The season has really changed. The sheep always know. So happy spring to you all, even if you do have snow up to your backside.

Puppy Herding

2009-02-01T18:51:00.000-08:00

This has been a tough couple of weeks. A lot of things converged and I didn't have enough hours. But hey, life is like that sometimes. And today, I had a date with Trudy, my Aussie puppy Cricket's breeder, to put her on ducks. And I went. Cricket's mom, Tick, is a stunning herder with a lot of herding trial trophies and I wanted to see how she measured up.

So today, on a foggy, cold afternoon, Trudy sorted five ducks out into the small paddock and I...with some trepidation...took a VERY interested Cricket out into the arena. We're looking for natural behavior right now. You can add a lot of training as a pup gets older, but right now, you get what that pup has, unadulterated. And it can be good...or bad. Trying for duck cutlets is bad. So is saying 'uh, got other things to do'. It's a test of what ya got under the hood.

Well, the 'got other things to do' was not an option. Miz Cricket was fighting the lead, ready to party. I grabbed the plastic leaf rake (for scooping puppies off stock), took a deep breath and let her go.

The ideal in herding dogs is one who stays just on the fight/flight zone so that the stock doesn't bolt, but will 'give' to that pressure, especially if the dog uses 'eye' and stares aggressively, and will move off the dog in a calm and organized fashion. Rather than in a panicked route. The ideal dog will find 'balance', positioning the stock between it and the handler (we gotcha!). Mostly you get much less perfection than that. The pup charges into the flock, grips, scatters the stock, what have you. You can fix it later, but it's nice if you don't have to.

So. Miz Cricket. She took off and flanked around the ducks like a pro, came to balance, eyed up. When a duck bit her...twice!....she just backed up a step, stared hard, and pushed it back into the flock. Naughty duck! Now if that had been a rottie puppy, I'd be having you for dinner tonight. Even when a single duck took off screeching, she flanked out and brought him back to the flock, stopping on balance to me and simply holding them.

Wow. Who trained this dog while I wasn't looking?? Trudy was VERY happy. She says she has never seen a pup work this well. Cricket was very happy. Until I finally got hold of her and made her stop working. I think we'd still be out there. Sheep are next. She was all ready when we went down to feed tonight. Well, I'll have a nice lamb crop for her shortly. Just her size.

New New Millenium

2009-01-21T20:18:00.000-08:00

Tuesday was quite the party. I found myself wishing I was there on the crowded mall, freezing my patooty off, and at the same time, looking back to life and riots in Pittsburgh in the late sixties, I found myself tearing up. After being amazed at my grandmother, who rode a steam train in India in the last years of the 1800s and lived to see a man walk on the moon, we have indeed seen some major changes in my lifetime, too.
It was quite the party.
My friend, and another SF writer (and glider pilot) Alexis Glynn Latner summed it up just fine, so I'll let her speak for me tonight. Her blog post says it all.

New Start

2009-01-16T18:55:00.000-08:00

Well, after the snow and drama of the turn of the year, things are looking much more sunny. George got out of the hospital Tuesday and his niece is staying with him at the house. The horse routines have settled in. Clean stalls and put them out to pasture if it's nice in the AM. Bring them in at night. Cricketthepuppy plays wildly with Rockythefat, George's overweight mini-aussie. Annie is happy to let Cricketthepuppy chew on Rocky (who has a nice thick coat to protect him) and only steps in to smack Rocky once in awhile when he gets too rough. Annie can beat up the puppy. It's her puppy. He can't.

George is looking good and doing WAY more than most people do a week or so after open heart surgery. Keeping him away from cleaning the stalls is gonna be a challenge. Meanwhile, I've managed to get airborne in spite of the river of rough wind spilling down the Gorge. I've got to get a little more precise with my roundout and flare on landing and then I think my instructor is going to solo me. I'm just about there. That will be cool. Very.

I think I'll try to plant peas this next week. My weather sense tells me that serious winter is over, even if we get the brief deep freeze. Of course, planting anything with a puppy is SO fun. As I said, I'll try.

Beneficence and Wings

2009-01-09T20:19:00.000-08:00

Well, the weather gods, after punishing us for a solid month decided to give us a breather. Sun. Wow. The pasture, protected by snow, survived the cold and is actually growing. My sheep are dissing the very nice grass hay I give them, and my Cheviot cross ewe, the one I never saw get bred, is giving me 'any day' signals. So the lambing pen is ready. Spring. Maybe I'll plant my peas. I do that this time of year. With a puppy. Oh...yeah... that's right. She'll LOVE it.

George came through open heart surgery just fine. I visited less than 48 hours after. His nurses do NOT love him. He feels fine. Why can't he just get up and use the toilet when he needs to? I suggested that their 'we'll find you on the floor' threats were probably valid. When that man hits his call light, the nurses show up quickly. As I said, they do not love him. But I cheered him up today. After getting grounded by either an unplowed runway or pouring rain or gale force winds or all three, I finally made it back into the air today. Perfect day. No wind, lots of visibility. Gee, I may not have mentioned that I'm a student pilot at the moment? George's doing. He got tired of my 'I always wanted...' riff and bought me a first couple of hours, knowing full well, sneaky guy, that I'd be hooked. (He just wants someone to talk flying with). Well, he got his pilot's certificate a month before I was born. And still flies...and will, after this. So now he has someone to talk flying with.

So anyway, everything came together today. Everything. All the stuff I've been working at...altitude, airspeed, banks, stalls, final approach, roundout, flare, landing... Everything stopped being 'stuff to work at' and just became 'doing'. Even the power on stalls, where the little Cessna 152 that I fly wants to corkscrew into a righthand spin, worked just fine. What a good feeling. I love it up there.

And George's barn is dry, the drain I dug is working. And I have the sheep barn clean and the lambing pen ready. And it's time to plant peas. Okay. I declare it spring.

Not Dull, Farm Life

2009-01-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

Well, the next big wave of super rain is on its way. George is in surgery today and this morning I'm looking at the weather and thinking flooded barn event number four, coming right up now. The pile of soaked shavings waiting to be hauled down to my place (where they become nice garden soil) is getting scary. So I took my trusty and recently sharpened shovel up there, determined to figure out just why this barn, dry for thirty years now, is flooding. Prowling the uphill, southwest side, where the water seems to be coming from, I spy a bit of water welling up through the grass. Stuck the shovel blade in. Eureka! Someone turns on a fire hose down below and it spurts into the air. A mole hole. Carrying, apparently, the entire drainage of the development at the top of the hill right down to the corner of the barn. Woohooo!! Gotcha, you sucker!
So now, I dig. It's warm, raining and blowing, but I'm wearing my totally uncool and totally practical saddle slicker with cape shoulders and my sou'wester. I look like a hybrid between a lobsterman and a resident of Dodge City in the 1800s, but you know what? I can work and stay dry so nyah! So I'm digging and the fire hose, er mole hole, is pouring into the ditch I'm aiming toward the south pasture sloping down to Mitchell Creek. Meanwhile, Annie is doing the Pasture Check and Cricket, the fuzzy puppy, is bouncing in her wake.
We were at it pretty much all morning. Five acres of pasture checking took ''em awhile. Then Annie taught Cricket how to dig mole holes which Cricket loved because most are running water on this saturated slope and she loves water. And of course if they aren't running water, then you can dig in all the nice mud. So finally, I get the ditch nice and deep and sloped out to the pasture where the water spreads out and heads for the creek a 1/4 mile away. By now, Cricket is sort of a soggy mudball and she really looks like a Rottweiler. White feet? White chest? What white? So we head back to the barn to put the shovel inside, so I can deepen the ditch some more when I do evening chores (I want a mini Grand Canyon by the time that big storm hits!) Ah, the shavings pile! Cricket dashes up to the top and tumbles down a couple of times. She does a really good soccer ball imitation, which delights Annie by the way. Annie is really good at soccer, Cricket and I have discovered. So now, we have a black, wet, soggy, muddy puppy well frosted with sawdust. At this point I am leaning against the wall of the barn laughing like a loon and really really sorry that I didn't bring my camera up with me. I think when I do chores this evening, I'll just bring a nice big five gallon water bucket up with me and fill it up. Before we head home, I'll just grab her by the scruff, slosh her around in it and we'll walk home through the nice, clean, grassy field. That should get the mud off!

Right now she is sleeping quite peacefully. And looks remarkably clean. Well, this is why we have vacuums and brooms.

Off to work while the working is peaceful.

Moving Forward

2009-01-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks all, for your comments. I really appreciate them. Well, George was looking and feeling great today when I brought him his mail and his reading glasses. They're going to do a triple bypass on Tuesday, as long as they're in there. The prognosis is still for a return to that active life and his flying. I hope I am in as good shape when I'm 83. I'm working on it! This is going to be the only holiday season when I end up weighing less after than before! And the puppy loves the 1/4 mile hike to and from George's place. She sleeps VERY well. An added benefit.

Movie plug. If you have not watched Black Sheep, do so. This is the 'killer sheep' movie from New Zealand . I rolled my eyes when I heard of a horror movie where sheep eat people. How dumb. But you know what? It's not dumb. It's a total riff on all horror movie tropes..every last one of them. With some private jabs tossed in to boot. (Not real fond of the enviro-types are we?) I kept repeatedly falling off my seat laughing, and when I wasn't laughing I was having fun figuring out who was doing what to get the real sheep to do that. :-) The gore is SO over the top it doesn't have much impact. Do rent it. It's a total hoot.

New Years Pay It Forward

2009-01-03T21:22:00.000-08:00

New Years night, the wee hours after, actually, I got the dreaded phone call. My neighbor, George, who lives up the hill a bit. Eighty three years old, more than 50 years as a pilot, loves planes and horses, has two. Wife dead, keeps the place immaculate. He, sneaky guy, bought me my first two hours up in the air, knowing, I swear, that it would be enough. 'I'm in trouble," he says to my groggy, 2:30 AM ears. "I'm having trouble breathing." So I bolt into clothes, downstairs. To find three inches of snow, coming down hard. Lovely. Jump into the truck, slither up his 1/4 mile driveway and miraculously did not slide off the narrow place and roll. I take one look and do 911.

Long story short, Clackamas Fire arrived quickly in spite of the snow, he ended up in the hospital, (although the ambulance had to do three runs at the top of our street to get out and nearly took out the fence corner on the SE side). He will get a new heart valve, and his doc, a pilot (of course) says he can even pass his FAA medical after. Everything will be fine.

It matters to me. Well, George is a very nice guy, he does the Right Thing no matter what anyone else on the planet might think about that. And if I'm ever in a plane in trouble, I want George in the cockpit. He'll consider the options, make the right decision, and get everyone down in one piece if it's at all possible. If it isn't, he'll still be trying when it hits.

Partly, it's that he, like me, lives alone, has acreage and animals, is very independent. He has no family this side of the Rockies. And doesn't like to ask for help.

Sigh, there but for thirty years go I.

So I'm feeding the horses, mucking the stalls, letting the dog out and I'm really glad that George is coming home. Pay it forward. In any way you can.

New Year With Puppy

2008-12-31T18:20:00.000-08:00

How did it get to be the last day of 2008? I don't think we had Christmas yet, did we? Oh yeah, that's right. That happened while we were buried under two feet of snow up here, bermed in by the one snow plow that scraped the first 18 inches off Clatsop Road. And then I got The Puppy and of course all spare time vanished instantly as I kept track of my small whirlwind of exuberant Australian Shepherd. Actually, she -- Cricket -- who arrived Sunday evening, has spoiled me for puppies forever. She looked for the list of rules posted by the door, read them, said 'okay, sure' and that was that. Well, yeah, she still rockets around the house like that tasmanian devil out of the Bugs Bunny cartoons when she does the puppy equivalent of the two-year-old windup for a crash. And she has proved that Annie, my four year old Rottie, has a sterling temprament, considering that Cricket much prefers to swing from Annie's jowls than bite my ankels. I growl louder.

Cricket is from a very strong line of working Aussies, destined to work sheep, cattle, and ducks (actually she has already worked ducks a bit). She loves to retrieve, but I think that's written into the Aussie genetic code. And she's rottie color, of course. With white feet. Which aren't white very long, once we get out into the now-muddy pasture. My friend Trudy's bitch, Tick, had her just for me, of course.

So I'm too busy to notice that we've finished up a year...especially since I have two weeks worth of Long Ridge students, sent by Second Day Air, lost in one of what the UPS guy (who delivered THIS week's worth on time) told me is four huge semi trailers full of undeliverable stuff. Oh well, gonna be a long week, and when I come up for air, it'll be time to plant peas and hey, that means spring has started eh?

I hope so. Happy New Year!

Bachelorism

2008-12-29T20:40:00.000-08:00

I am a bachelor. Okay, I know that's considered to be a masculine noun. But bachelorette just doesn't have the same connotation. Makes one think of someone jumping out of a cake or something. So why have I decided that a: Bachelor is a neuter gender noun and b: I am one? Well it had to do with Christmas. I do a brunch for family. Everybody arrives, I have fun food -- home made sausage rolls always, plus good cheeses, pate, olives of various sorts, something sweet and interesting, not fruitcake (although really well brandied fruitcake has been known to be on the table), you know. Eat, drink, be merry, including ME, open gifts, no kitchen drudgery required. But this involves cleaning the house. Well, cleaning off the table at least, which is my hardcopy workspace, as opposed to my digital workspace, my computer desk. So I have all kinds of orderly (yes, really!) piles of things like the financial stuff for my stepmom's estate, magazines that aren't read yet, manuscript that need that final hardcopy read, critique manuscript, and various things that need to be dealt with not now but soon. And some of these piles have been moved to other available spaces, such as the floor.

So, now it's family brunch time AND I'm getting a new puppy the day after. Well, the obvious thing to do, the one that makes me a bachelor, is to move all piles from the table to the floor, out of sight in my office would be fine. Uh, except for the puppy. So now I have to put away, file, find some home for the piles already on the floor, and then I have to do the same with the piles on the table. And on other horozontal spaces. Good thing we had a nice, week long, serious snow storm that left us all snowbound. I needed it! Cabin fever? Didn't have time. I was too busy taking care of piles.

But hey, it's my house and I'm happy with the pile system. So I'm sure that after the puppy is past the Eat Everything stage and my life once more has order, the piles will return. Good thing I do that Christmas brunch every year!

More Winter Fun

2008-12-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

Well, we're up to two feet of snow now, but today it's above freezing and ice is falling from the trees. Woohoo! Of course, right at dusk, after shoveling a path up my neighbor George's 1/4 mile long STEEP gravel driveway, I went down to feed the sheep only to find that a rafter with rot had given way and my roof was buckling. Oh joy. I could just see the whole section coming down as the rains started and the light, dry snow turned wet and heavy. But it was dark, in the twenties and I figured it would keep until morning and I could get it fixed before the thaw started. So this morning I was out there, up on a ladder, scraping two feet of snow and ice off the buckling section. Heavy stuff. I didn't dare add my weight to the roof, so I couldn't clear as much as I wanted. Gonna be a new roof this summer for sure. I was going to do it, but then the development juggernaut seemed poised on my western boundary and why spend the money if I'm going to sell and move in a matter of a year? But now...I don't know that we'll get forced off any time soon. So. New roof. Next summer. For now, I got the buckled rafter braced back into place, the weight off it. The whole thing is going to be a soggy mess as all this snow thaws and seeps but my hay is tarped and off the ground so we'll live. And after we got done...well, hey. It's above freezing, the dry snow is now damp and sticky and it's perfect for a snow man! How many times do you get to build a snow man in Western Oregon? When I take my midnight walk tonight, I think I'll bring a big rubbermaid bin and slid down the nice sled track the kids have made near the top of our street. Can't let the snow melt without at least one sled ride! Preferably at midnight. What a great way to celebrate Christmas Eve!

Snowlight Magic

2008-12-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

It’s eleven thirty and I just came in from a walk in the snow light with Annie. I didn’t mean to take a walk. I spent much of the day shoveling my truck out, chaining up, shoveling paths so the sheep could get water and I could bring them food. Shoveling a path up my 83 year old neighbor, George's, steep drifted over driveway. Done with the snow!!! All done! Blasted stuff, I moved here so that I wouldn’t have to shovel….and so on.

And then I booted up, put on my parka, the old Alyeska one from Prudhoe Bay that my friend Page gave me, the one that always feels like a warm embrace, and took my wood carrier out for the nightly ritual of bringing in the morning’s load of wood for the stove.

Only the night was bright with reflected snow light, there was no wind, tomorrow...well pretty soon now, is Christmas Eve, and the cold felt crisp and clean. I dropped the wood bag and headed for the gate with Annie bounding gleefully ahead of me. My neighbor had chained up to take his wife shopping for Christmas dinner and the tracks gave us a path in the 14 inch deep snow. Instead of floundering we could stroll.

It was beautiful. Nobody has been out, no tracks, only a single set of tire tread in the whiteness. My neighbor’s icicle lights painted the swelling mounds of white with yellow light. As we left them behind and walked along the road toward Clatsop, the paved main road, the trees took my breath away. Rimed with ice, the heavy Douglas fir branches iced with white snow, backed by low, misty clouds, the scene was right off a Christmas card. Wow.

And then Annie alerted at one of the drives that leads to a few houses on the western slope above our street. A man shoveled snow. We said hello and I made a pleasantry about being out late in the snow. He wanted to get tout in the AM. And I walked up to Clatsop, promising him a road report when I got back. Packed snow on Clatsop, no sign of asphalt or other civilized accoutrements. It might have been a cart track though the Sweedish countryside. We talked a bit more…me about '79 and the week long power outage, he about '68 ‘when he was a kid’ andsix foot drifts blocked the county roads then Annie and I walked on and took Koelhers old driveway, watching for coyote spoor. Annie found plenty, I did not.

What a beautiful night!

2008-12-22T16:25:00.000-08:00

Well, we're over 12 inches of snow now, in a city that doesn't get snow. Even TriMet is having trouble keeping the buses running and never mind on time. Annie and I spent the day shoveling out barn doors and gates so they work, shoveling a new path to the heated water tank since the four inches of snow had drifted in the path I shoveled yesterday. Filling the feeder and thawing the hummingbird feeder so that my cold little Anna hummers didn't starve (and one Black Chin who should have gone south looong ago). As I was shoveling out the truck to chain it up for when it was finally less nasty and worth getting out, a big V of geese went over just above treetop level, staying below the very low clouds. Clearly they were flying VRF. I hope they found some open water. It's still in the low 20s. So now that my shoveling is done and all critters are fed I can go back to learning CS4, a remarkable version of Dreamweaver and a program that makes Adobe Photoshop seem highly intuitive. My head hurts!

Snow-Sheep Convergence with Dog

2008-12-22T09:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I need to dust off the blog that's for sure. I never have been good at keeping any kind of diary. Too bad.

We're in the midst of a rather amazing snow event. So far I have almost a foot with two foot and better drifts. Somewhere in there, a few inches down, is a 3/4 layer of ice. Very pretty, but not nearly as much fun when you have to deal with livestock. Yesterday, as I crunched my way to the barn to feed the sheep, they panicked at the unfamiliar sound (sheep really like to panic for some reason). Bounding from the barn to escape the noisy monster approaching, they hit the new ice, which of course panicked them further. Sliding, floundering, and bounding, they made it across the pasture and out into the field about 1/4 mile away where they huddled together, terrified to set foot on the slippery ground. Sigh. That's 1/4 mile from shelter, hay, grain, and warm water. So I dutifully, good sheep keeper than I am, broke a nice path out to them. Think I could get 'em to use it? Grain didn't work. Shouting and waving my arms behind them didn't work. So I slogged back to the barn and returned with some hay. To tide them over. When you get thirsty come in, I told them. It wasn't windy, wasn't snowing, I figured they'd be fine in the dry, powdery snow until they got over their fright.

Ha. I totally underestimated the stubborn fear response of sheep.

Fast forward to three PM. Freezing rain/snow is forecast for the night, the east wind is picking up, they have no water out there and it's 20 F. Time for the big guns. So I tap Annie, who is hopefully recovered enough from her knee surgery that she can work sheep without damaging herself. And frankly, I had run out of other options, short of managing to warm up the terrain and melt all the snow. And all my mental efforts to shift the arctic high to the eastward and let in our nice, warm, wet Pacific weather had failed miserably. So. Back to the Big Guns. Or Gun rather.

Annie was SO up for the task. Sheep are usually so EASY. You give them an 'I want to eat you' look and they run where you want 'em to go. Not this time. She stared, she snapped, she barked. The sheep weren't going to go back in her direction but they did NOT want to go forward. I poked, prodded, whacked hocks with a switch and Annie kept 'em from bolting past me to the safety of their trampled snow. Foot by foot, yard by yard, we made the very slow trek back to the barn. A ewe would bound forward, slip, and break through the ice. The flock would inch forward. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. But we made it. They're in the barn, they have a shoveled path to the heated water tank, they have a bale of hay in the manger, and I'm not going to go near them until I figure they need more hay! Whew! Bless Annie (who seems no worse for wear this morning). I couldn't have gotten them in without her.

Coming Up For Air And Not Starbucks

2008-07-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

Sigh, I have to rant. I had NPR on and came up for air from the novel plot summary I’m working on to hear a segment about the closure of a few Starbucks and a resulting public outcry. I happened to hear a woman from ‘rural Iowa’ who stated that she drove 1.5 hours to visit Starbucks and did so ‘for its consistency’. YIKES!!! Not only is she putting a LOT of carbon into the air in her quest for a consistent cup of coffee (she can’t make consistent coffee?) but that ‘I want it to be always the same’ attitude terrifies me. Is that what we are becoming? A nation of McDonaldites? Let’s go to Paris and have our coffee at Starbucks and dinner at Micky D’s? Ignore that new, locally owned, coffee shop on the corner, it might not taste like Starbucks? I know this isn’t everyone, but it seems an indication of an increasing national fear of ‘anything other’. That’s a disturbing attitude since our planet seems to be shrinking every day. Where does this tendency to withdraw into the safe confines of the ‘familiar’ come from? And what is it doing to us as a nation?

Post Clarion

2008-07-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

My week teaching at the Clarion West Writers Workshop was wonderful...and utterly exhausting! It was a great full-circle for me, since I started my writing career there when I attended it back in 1988. And oh, boy, is it a lot more plush now! Where we slept in a very spartan Seattle U dorm and hiked eight blocks to the community college classroom we used (uphill BOTH ways as I kept telling the students), the workshop now takes place in a lovely pair of sorority houses and comes with three meals a day no less. (I remember living on tuna, ramen noodles, and cabbage for six weeks).

Big discovery. It's a lot harder to be an instructor than it is to be a student! It's not just a matter of critiquing, it's a matter of teaching through that critique, keeping everything in mind that you want to get across and pulling those teaching points from the manuscripts you've been handed. Whole different ball game. But it's a really talented group this year with a nice diversity of writing interests, styles, and goals and excellent critique skills. They're lucky to have each other. And it is going to be so fun watching how these folk develop!

It's a great program, very well run, very focused on giving the students maximum experience and learning in that intense six weeks. One dark note...someone broke into the house while we were in class on Friday and stole four laptops. The SF community rallied impressively and within 48 hours enough money had been donated to replace the stolen laptops. That says a lot about the writing and reading community right there.

So it was a wonderful week, I'm not sure I would have survived a second one without collapsing, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Star Ship Sofa and Clarion

2008-06-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

Well, I have been very quiet. Mostly because I've been reading 100,000 words of Clarion West mss before my week as instructor at that excellent workshop, and between that and making about a 1/2 ton of hay by hand to keep my sheep fed for a week, there hasn't been a lot of energy left over. Except for selling a new story Lion's Walk to Asimov's. But I'm back with writing news instead of garden news or an environmental rant this time. Starshipsofa a VERY cool audio ezine, is posting a reading of RainMaker, one of my drylands stories from the past. They'll have a live discussion on July 2 and then the story, read by a professional, not by stumbling me, will be up on the site on July 5.

If you have a few minutes, drop in on the discussion or hear Rain Maker read aloud. And do check out Starshipsofa. The 'zine of the future. :-)

http://www.starshipsofa.com

Meat Miles Oversimplification in Science News

2008-06-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

In the latest issue of Science News (May 24,2008) I turned to an article in their ‘Environment’ section on the global warming impact of food purchases. Their position was that in terms of meat, buying local has little importance, that only 4% of the carbon emissions come from transport and 86% come from fertilizers used to raise feet, methane and nitrous oxide from rumination and manure decomposition. I find most articles in Science News to be well researched and balanced, but the oversimplification of this particular piece disturbed me quite a bit.

As a major proponent of the eat local and grow sustainably movement, this quick dismissal of local meat particularly worries me. Yes, their suggestion that everybody should eat less red meat is a good one for many reasons. But it also suggests that there’s no particular benefit to buying from a local meat producer and that there’s no particular difference between a cow or lamb raised locally and one feedlotted in another state.

BUT…all is NOT equal here. The carbon footprint of an Angus steer raised to slaughter in a crowded feedlot, fed on corn that has been raised using a lot of fertilizer and tractor power is one thing. Certainly the manure pits from large scale dairy and feedlot facilities are a major producer of nitrous oxide among other things. BUT…what about the small livestock producer who raises a few steers on pasture, where the manure is scattered on the pasture by the animals and broken down more quickly and with a different biochemical environment than you see in a concrete manure bunker? They are grass fed only and the pasture has received minimal if any fertilizer application and minimal if any diesel equipment work.

The local pasture raised meat industry is small and new. I would hate to see it get lumped in with large feedlot practices in terms of carbon footprint. If consumers feel that it makes no difference whether that meat comes from a local pasture or a feed lot in Nebraska, the local farmers who lack the economies of scale are going to suffer. Think it about it folks! All meat is not equal, even if the personal contentment of the animals isn’t important to you!

Bio-Fuel Alternative....ZAP!

2008-04-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

As world food shortages continue, thanks in a large part to the diversion of cereal crops for bio-fuel production, lo, a ray of hope glimmers through the murk! Technology Review reports that a novel lithium-ion battery has been developed by A123 Systems, a startup in Watertown, MA--one of a handful of companies working on similar technology. The company's batteries store more than twice as much energy as nickel-metal hydride batteries, the type used in today's hybrid cars, while delivering the bursts of power that will let people feel as if they're actually driving a car rather than a kid's toy. There is hope for an electric car after all, since the real hold-back has been battery technology. Apparently General Motors is testing them for their Volt, an electric car and may have them in mass production in 2010. Boy, I hope. Using food for fuel is...as we are immediately finding out...a serious ethical and humanitarian conundrum. You want to drive or eat? Unfortunately the wealthier populations get to make the choice, and the poorest populations get to suffer the result. This really cannot go on.

Algae Biofuel Anyone?

2008-04-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

CSInman commented on my tree rant that algae is less sexy than trees but very efficient at dealing with CO2. So true. Blue-green algae would be one way to terraform Mars, producing oxygen for us folk. Hey, I AM a SF writer after all. But speak of the devil, or algae for that matter, and what did I turn up in the IEEE Spectrum online, but a very cool little project to vertically raise algae for biofuel production. Not only is is a smaller footprint than a soybean field, those soybeans, or rice, or wheat can have their good, arable soil. All you really need for the algae is solar energy, nutrients, and water. Take a look!

The Trees Are Coming!

2008-04-22T15:30:00.000-07:00

All right, I can’t stand it. Turn on the radio, hoping for a ray of sunshine from the weather guy, maybe duck yet another report of vitriolic Clinton-Obama sparring, and what do I get? A bit about bottled water shipped to the US from Fiji. And you know what? They are planting so many trees that the plastic bottles, shipped 9000 miles or so are carbon negative! Wow, drink up. But wait, now I’m remembering those automobile manufacturers who promise that they’re planting enough trees for every gas guzzling, pollution belching SUV they sell to make their cars carbon neutral, at least for a couple of years (and then you’ll sell it and buy a new carbon neutral model, right?) And what about all those other companies and clubs and schools and suburban SUV owners paying to plant trees and thus become carbon neutral and guilt free. My gosh…I have this image of every square meter of the planet bristling with densely planted forests.

You know, these are great numbers. What do people think ‘planting a tree’ means? That this tree will grow up to a nice, healthy mature specimen and suck up that CO2? Obviously. What really happens? Bet you a bunch of low-pay laborers mostly range over all kinds of terrain with a pack full of 6 inch seedlings or rooted cuttings, chopping ‘em into the clay/sand/mud/ with one stroke of the mattock in their other hand. And then they move on. Because that’s all they’re getting paid to do.

I watched thousands of trees get planted along the Johnson Creek watershed. Made me shake my head as they were planted in dense shade where that species had no chance of survival, in open fields where the blackberries and tamarisk overgrew them long before they got taller than the grass. Deer ate a lot. Beaver ate some. A lot died because it was dry that summer and they were too small to survive without water. A very few have survived. Rough estimate? Maybe one in fifty? Maybe far less than that. What about that logged-over and eroded rainforest or parched savanna a few thousand miles away from the company happily shelling out to buy those ‘carbon credits’. How careful do you think those folk are? Maybe you have people selling ‘forests’ on the carbon market, planting the same 1000 acres over and over again because who really looks? I’d sure like to see a more realistic measure of carbon credit= planted tree. Right now it’s a very easy way to banish the guilt of that carbon footprint. I’m just not sure it’s very realistic.