Fresh Calendar

Well, you know how it is. I put all these images into Shutterfly, and they let you add a photo in every day of the year plus those empty boxes at the start and end of the month, plus add your own text. I spent an enjoyable few hours (I might check my computer history for how long this actually was) basically looking at my dog and was so enamoured that I would have liked to buy the calendar. It was not discounting very much. I think Christmas is the only time that Shutterfly is at capacity and doesn't have to give good deals. One calendar chock full of my dog was a little more than $40 altogether. This is comparable to the upper range price of the planners I would have already bought if their spiral hole spacing was correct, so very reasonable, but high enough that I would be willing to wait past January 1st to see if it would come down. 

While I was waiting I made a second calendar. This was making my Shutterfly cart show a price of $70+ but also a banner saying that I needed $16 more dollars to reach their free shipping threshold of $79. That is close to my whole planner budget for the year so there is no way I would spend it, even though they had a picture of my dog on his gotcha day. 

The planner budget is not really about money, but more of a limit on how much energy I am putting into procuring. I felt that leaving this open ended up until and past New Year's Eve was going to take too much mental energy. I started looking for when they went on sale the last couple years so I could set a reminder and stop thinking about it. Instead, I found that you can buy them on Groupon for the price of a regular drugstore calendar. (And I found that these really don't have a baseline price. Sometimes they are free with shipping. The lowest price besides free was $8.) This was not difficult but a little legwork with declining "offers" and entering info and going from site to site. So I paid $25 to groupon and $13 to shutterfly. This meant I spent almost the amount of the original price tag but for three calendars. 

They (Shutterfly specifically, but also online shops) make it so confusing. I had to ask myself what it was worth to me and stick to it. 

I also was inconsistent at using my wall calendar this year even when I really needed to, so I am hoping one that is so sweet will be helpful. My current job has been different locations and hours every day, and I am in a weekly filofax whereas I need monthly to keep everything in mind, so I had to draw a little chart of days and dates in my jotter so I'd have it. Actually I guess I still will but can transfer the info to a more permanent form when I get home each day. 

Who wouldn't look forward to California Statehood if they got to see 1 old chihuahua. 

 

Veg tan leather bag

Research 

Seaglass Green Wall Hanging

This little cotton rug from Dharma Trading  Company is brightening up our living room. Well, it’s little for a rug, not little to manipulate and boil. The initial shibori was a little more of a backdrop than a feature. 

I bundled it up with jute. I just used some rules of thumb for a pleasing design. 

Non symmetrical- automatically has more movement and interest. 

Pick up the same color in multiple parts of the piece- this might be the most used transferrable skill I learned from painting classes. This lets you do a LOT and still have a cohesive viewing experience. 

Gradient- I let the dye strike and boil for a little while on the topologically lowest parts of the bundled rug before using my laundry stick to push more of the piece in. I think this piece could use a little more of the lightest most exhausted dye bath but of course you can’t really tell through the steam. This gives depth and interest. 

Resist: keeping some parts of the fabric reserved is why it is visually interesting enough to be a hanging. I also enjoy the evidence of handwork. 

IKEA sheepskin dyed blue

I’ve been wanting to dye these little rugs for ages, but, I think natural colors and especially white are the perfect color for a sheepskin. A dilemma which was solved when I was using the rug as a trivet for another dye bath and some navy leaked onto it. Now, I stead of a gorgeous cream I had cream and blotchy navy to work with. Perfect. I mixed up true turquoise acid dye in the dye pot, took it off heat, and put the sheepskin in hair side down and gathered. I saw some gorgeous patterning as the wool wicked up the dye but, as I let it rest it became more uniform.

 Oh, well, it still got it out of my system and the piece kept its glossy glow. 

Bear does like sleeping on it but not at a time of day with good light. I had to coax him into this photo and now he is recuperating from doing one task by sleeping tucked under one of my shins. 

Sharing the Ice

Tuesday night intermediate adult learn to skate has a half NHL rink to ourselves. I think we were doing backwards crossovers around the perimeter for 20 minutes. We didn’t get our whole free time, which our instructor tells us she “doesn’t call playtime” for adults, I know that. I’m not sure how you normally explain crossovers but if you want to turn left you lean left on your left foot and then put your right foot on the left side of your left foot, next weight on the right foot, and then pick up the left to uncross back to the starting position. And it is easier said than done. 

Anyway, I have backwards crossovers normally after I have warmed up. Today I did zero. First the ice felt sticky and then staying out of everyone’s way took most of my focus. You would think that everyone careening around in a circle would really lend itself to some psychosomatic centripetal force. I am definitely not good enough at backward crossovers to purposely vary my speed and direction so as to overtake other skaters. Practicing on my own I like to do maybe one pump, one glide, two crossovers, then glide or stumble. So I go through a cycle of different speeds that wouldn’t have been reasonable to subject my classmates to. 

Tonight I just did backward pumps, sometimes bringing the working foot to my ankle as a baby step. 

Then we spread out in 4 rows of four to practice our edges. Edges is, if you lean your weight toward your inseam, your path along the ice curves toward yourself, whereas if you lean out, the path you travel curves away from the midline of your body. Which is crazy! 

We had a different spacing problem with edges than with crossovers. In theory I was supposed to describe a perfect semicircle, pause, and describe another. In practice I had a bunch of space to my sides so I could make the arc of my circle really exaggerated and then bring it in when I got close to the shared space of the line. But then I still had to do my second semicircle with my lane mate even closer and skating toward me. So I solved this by doing the smallest little lobe. 

I don’t have full control of the tracing my line makes down to the millimeter, but I can hold all my forward edges. I have perhaps never felt a backwards edge. During Not Playtime I was trying to hold either backward outside edge for any length of time. Once it turned out a semicircle was out of reach I tried just describing any curve. I told myself very girly that it is okay to fall, and I leaned further that I had before. But my fall started too slowly and I stabbed my toe pick in the ground automatically to stop it and I tweaked my knee. Oh. I didn’t know I would do that. Typically when I fall I find out afterward. 

Overall I am getting a lot out of this class. It was amazing to break a real sweat on the ice after passively sweating all day. And all the time to know that outside, the heat was breaking. 

Urban foraging rosemary

Grabbed some rosemary on my way out of the ice rink. This grows so well in our area but I haven’t seen any around recently. This was new growth that peaked up past where the plant was hedge trimmed so I know it is fresh and a little unwanted. 

It was resinous so the car smelled crazy and I’ll need to rinse the sprigs in vinegar water before drying them. 

That’s the thing about the grocery store spice aisle, it has almost no smell. Very antiseptic. 

Nopales take 2

I haven’t been eating our paddle cactus because it’s not a main food for me, but I have been propagating a paddle that fell off and watching the fruits ripen. Our neighbor put out hundreds of pounds of cactus so I thought it was a good time to give it a try. Processing it went okay. Locally we have spineless cactus but once you start touching it you can feel the spines. 

Propagating this little fellow 

Our lovely, healthy specimen plant isn’t overgrown or terribly crowded so there is no urgent need to harvest paddles. 

My first attempt at incorporating the nopales. Homemade tortillas with refried beans, cheese, and nopales. The nopales were slimy and masked the rest of the flavors. I still had around 14 ounces of cactus left over after this recipe. 

For my second attempt I reheated the already cooked cactus by sautéing it in oil with too much spices to compensate for the flavor subduing property of the cactus. Onion, garlic, and cayenne. It was pretty good. 

Learn to Skate

Ice skating was different today. 

I was able to tell what was happening. Up til now I have been really only able to repeat something on the same side in the same direction because flipping everything mentally for every repetition is harder than just resetting to skate it the same way. We were just doing an inside edge half circle with switching our arms at the top of the half circle. But I was able to start them facing toward or away from the clock and standing on either foot. This sounds so reasonable but to date if I so much as switch my arms it forces out any knowledge of what else I am doing. 

Class was also a bit different format. They had us drill this for 20 minutes and I sort of had to stop skating eventually because I had to stop using my burning knees and I don’t know any skating that doesn’t use the knees. However after standing around a bit I realized I could still stroke around forward casually. 

My crossovers were also different today. They make us skate forward crossovers on half the ice sheet for several minutes in each side. Previously I have had kind of erratic crossovers where I would be falling if I didn’t keep taking steps and get a little speed going. Today every once in a while I would stagger around but I could also stand and glide with feet parallel, my left foot on the right and my right foot on the left, and then uncross them. So for much of the time I had a good deal of control of my carriage and then, who knows why I’d falter, avoiding a skater or a weird patch of ice or experiementing with a little tweak. 

Spinning Seacell

This little skein is pure cellulose fiber. I’m spinning as much seacell as I can stand before taking a little break and spinning bamboo for a few yards to calm down. If you draft the sea cell fibers 2 cm it comes apart. At the same time it is so luminously beautiful. 

Hypertufa wreath

Succulents were living for years in this wreath. They were so stunted and dried up you couldn’t see them, but they were alive. I’m thinking I can get a healthier living wreath if I give rainwater someplace to kind of stick before it dries out. 

So, I built sort of a flower pot around my succulent wreath using cement. 

When you read about hypertufa they say just to leave it out in the rain to leach. Well, the rains will be here in four months. So I have this under the spigot to kind of get a little wet each day. 

Foraged Bay Leaves

I have never used a bay leaf in my life. So while I am pretty plant-aware I didn’t have any bay trees on my mental map. I drove around looking for one which didn’t work at all since the first tree I stopped to check was eucalyptus and the second was perhaps olive. Plus I set out close to sunset for temperature reasons and the trees turned into shadowy masses real quick.

I honestly tried to visualize my different regular hikes and see if there was a bay tree. There was not. So I went to one of our less usual spots, a walk which I had not memorized, up at Merritt College. I didn’t see a thing until I was nearly under a bay tree. 

Bear was a big help. 

Urban foraging

Today’s survival food- dandelion. 

Our garden has half the footprint of our house and has to be used for grilling, storage, a dog run, shade, and planting. So I can’t have everything my own way and grow whatever I want wherever I want. I have identified the produce I buy the most- tomatoes- and the produce that is most frustrating to buy and store- lettuce. I am focusing my growing efforts on these. 

I’m toying with the idea of only eating homegrown lettuce but at the same time as my lettuces are one quarter inch big, I still have to have salad. I bought a bag of baby spinach because it keeps longer. Part of the bag froze and soiled and the other part stayed fine. I had one more salad from the unspoiled part and then let it go. This waste and short fridge lifespan is why I am prioritizing growing lettuce. Every bag I buy at the the store I hope is the last. I also have a system where if I let something go bad I skip buying it next time. So my next lettuce purchase was butter lettuce. 

Then I got home to cook up salmon and had no spinach to go with it. I went to the front yard (because it is not a dog run) and picked all the clean and young looking dandelions for an experiment. Rinsed in vinegar and water, simmered in two changes of water, added more vinegar. Tasted it- it was sharp, and the leaves didn’t really get smaller when chewed. 

While the salmon was cooking I looked up whether dandelions are safe to eat. I found they upset stomachs sometimes. I decided not to eat all the greens I gathered. 

Mixed with the salmon they were perfect. Exactly right. Delicious. 

Turnout

Briefly- in dance you hold your body in different shapes, for safety, power, beauty. One is called turn out, and it is both fundamental and I think lifelong. The idea is, while standing upright, your hips would turn so far from the center line of your body as to make a straight, 180 degree line from your left toes through your left heel through your right heel to your right toes. 

This is a line I essentially have never seen myself make. Somehow I carry on, and live a rich, full life. In ballet class I just do something different. But on the ice... they told us to do it so I am trying. I am too new to know if there is a workaround. 

 

I’ve been working on my turnout. I check it at home standing on a rug that has a floral design laid out 8 points. I go from a scant 90 degrees before stretching, to similar to what you see above. I don't know if other people with this turnout self select out of these disciplines, or what, but this is a bit of an outlier in the direction of bad. What you also can't see is that I am using friction from the ground to hold this position, and once I raise a foot in the air on the ice my toe swivels in. 

However! I think I was only using turn out in class because other, more intermediate students were working on it, and I have much to work on before I get there properly myself. 

I did not need my wrist guards today at Coffee Club. From what I can see, the ethos at Snoopy's Home Ice is conservative for adults. We are really drilling the fundamentals so there is very little opportunity to fall down. Our coach even joked that falling out of an outside edge is "a hard fall" (so don't) which is the opposite of what they tell us in Oakland which is to fall forward only and never backward. I literally love that there is a life stage where you just hang out at the rink with your friends for thirty years after your kids are grown, I love to see seniors like glowing with vitality and following their dreams. And, I am learning that they have a different relationship to their knees, hips, and feet than I do, with different considerations. 

Okay there were millions of places to stretch my hips but they were kind of too nice. Like the barrier plexiglass was pristine, I can't put my skate on that. I ended up in like the saddest unintentionally weighted (from the skates) pigeon pose on a carpeted bench. Then class started but I didn't realize so I just used the totally empty outside of the rink to do very ill advised ballet barre leg swings in skates (ill advised because of the momentum and the blade. They felt great.) until my eyes focussed through the barrier and I saw classes forming and I hustled onto the ice. 

I guess I also just feel at home in Oakland in general so I can just pop my foot up wherever. I do avoid purpose built handrails out of courtesy but I will use a balustrade bar that could double as a handrail. 

Mermaiding Eureka Slough

 

I got my mermaid costume optimized for water- minimal ornaments plus hair twisted and stitched and steamed in place. This is my first year having a foam head and it has made a huge difference in how easy it is to work on the wig. 

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Set off on my drive to meet the team. At the last second I realized none of my dark colored makeup had been extensively water tested except my mascara. So I had to draw my eyeliner on with mascara. I think it looks pretty good and especially since the alternative was letting it run down my face. 

The tail is ready, the fin is ready, the chihuahua is resigned. 

I didn't take any photos because I wanted to stay in character. But I made my way through such mud, swam out amongst the kayakers (who were delighted), watched a few teams splash down, and made my way back to shore. I had selected the side of the ramp behind the judges as being fairly private to transform back from a mermaid. And it was. It probably had five or ten percent as many spectators as the rest of the park. However, this was about 75 people. So I wasn't able to crawl out of the mud like I could if I were alone, and had to let my feet sink in up to my thighs, when they would finally meet a rock, and I could stand on the rock to take another step. It was the most dignity available to me in the moment. 

I did think perhaps I would skim over the rocks in my shoes, but that was quickly ruled out by the shoes themselves. 

Whenever I'm on vacation I always think, I could live here. I don't know why but this breezeway really spoke to me so I have preserved it here for memory's sake. 

Redwoods Roadtrip

 

One wonderful thing about the Kinetic Grand Championship in Humboldt is the drive through the redwoods to get there. This is cathedral level awe inspiring nature.

However this year it just seemed regular. Like a regional park versus a national park. Trying to figure out the reason I think it’s because we had the wettest spring in ten years at home. So, instead of the first outdoor moisture of my life being a balm to my soal…

It was just regular nice. I will also mention anywhere wet is so exotic to me, Wales, Tacoma, all of it. And dry places like we have at home kind of stress me out the whole time. Where is the water? 

Driving my hardest to get through wine country. 

2023 Kinetic Grand Championship

 

Awards night at Ferndale County Fairgrounds. 

I’m constitutionally not competitive so my team winning is not better than another team winning, and is a little worse because we just won last year. At key moments I proposed my idea of not competing to win, but was entirely overruled. However, it does mean we are on the splash page for the website which makes us easy to find and show off. 

The perpetual trophy which we carted up 200 miles from my family’s house, got awarded it, and carted it back. 

Adult Ice Skating Levels (or not)

I think I found out that jumps are coming up in just a second. Like after I get the hang of everything we've worked on, get them clean and consistent, the next batch of things involves little jumps. This conflicts with my plan to never do a jump for any reason. I read that you get a pin for completing a level. I am pretty sure we all are not getting pins in real life. Otherwise I would be seeing them on skate bags, on skaters, on the ground. But I did think, what pin am I theoretically working on? Because, I love goals. 

If I were earning a pin I would earn the Beta pin. That's the highest level where everything is coming along nicely. I just got my back crossovers although I haven't had empty enough ice to work on consecutive ones. 

However, Adult Intermediate has had us work on almost every skill from Pre Alpha to Delta. And we still have two more weeks together. So it seems like not very many more sessions before those are all under control. Actually they did make us do one little jump called the Bunny Hop. It seems like a misnomer for an Adult skill. I guess if 190 pounds of bunny hit the ice it would look like the Bunny Hop feels. Which is: dread, nausea, adrenaline. I read that adrenaline is to get you out of the situation that gave you adrenaline. And the funny thing about that is a wave of renewed vigor and energy comes over me, and I am kind of mad, and I still literally do not know how to do the skill.

I suppose these new tricky things might take longer than the old tricky things. I see my ice skates were delivered 2 months ago almost to the day. 

The best hike in Oakland

 

Woodminster Cascade is really a jewel. It's a set of stone stairs winding up both sides of a series of pools. The pools are not running. I'm sure there's tons of meetings about getting them fixed. The volunteers who work on the gardening do an incredible job. On a wet day this feels like Wales. But it's right here at home. 

Bear and I start at the top of the cascade. Instead of the summit, the highest pool is our starting point. We do this by parking at the top at the small dog park and walking over. We started doing this so I could minimize the stairs he goes down. He is one foot tall so he takes them like a rocking horse. With the current out of control foxtail season, I like that I can stop our Cascade hike before we reach the open, grassy areas. 

The trail is part of City of Oakland parks but maintained at least in part by volunteers. City of Oakland parks have a more tranquil, courtyard like feel. That said, it is not unusual to spot people's living space, food stores, or what I think are ritual items. I have never had a confrontation and my policy is that I don't pick up the things like I normally would. The things might not even be unattended-they often look freshly set down-but just the person is out of sight to avoid me. 

I won't say everything you can see and find to leave some discovery up to the reader.