The Shared Illusion

February Lady Sweater

2012-02-01T00:14:00.001-06:00

february lady sweater, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Finished this evening, just in time. :)

Just reflection

2012-01-21T11:37:00.002-06:00

It's been kind of a chaotic week for us. No classes/school/work on Monday, but still the week felt interminable, probably because we were waiting to get paid on Thursday. Classes started Tuesday, and it was immediate chaos because my mom freaks out about stuff and she managed to inconveniently take two morning (9-12) classes, so that allows her to bully the kids into a bad mood trying to get them up and out the door to school before we leave in the mornings. Sheridan has a morning class every day, so she's got to be out the door by 8:30, but if we leave before 8;30 she has to stand around and wait for the class to start/building to open. So that was Tuesday. I didn't have any classes to teach on Tuesday, so I stayed home in the morning with Jilly so she wouldn't be home alone.

Wednesday I teach three classes, 9-10:30; 10:30-12; and 7-10PM, which effectively makes my day last way longer than I like. My morning classes went really well. So did the evening class, but we had to end class halfway through because the temperature had dropped alarmingly and all the bus drivers were ready to take the students home by 8 PM (I guess all the other evening classes let out early and I was the hold out).
I stayed home Weds. afternoon with Jilly because Alan and Sheridan have classes all day, so nobody would have been home with her. Thursday, again, stayed home all morning because nobody home with Jilly.

Thursday afternoon I went grocery shopping by myself (which has not happened in about a year or more. I usually have to take the whole crowd with me). Friday I figured out that I had locked my office keys in my office and nobody was there who had a key, so I stayed home again. I'll be surprised if my boss doesn't freak out on Monday. Plus, no way to get in to do any lesson plans for Monday. I'm going to have to wing it.

In knitting, I'm working on my February Lady Sweater. I love the yarn I'm using. It's called Berocco Ultra and it's in a yummy shade of wine red, or maybe it's crimson. All I know is it is soft, soft, soft and it knits beautifully and the body of the sweater is nearly done. Then it's just sleeves and finding buttons and weaving in ends. I am a lover of the color red. You wouldn't know it from what I knit. Usually I knit blues and greens and pinks and purples, but this yarn I bought a few years ago and I've been working on knitting it up about that long, too. I started kind of a free-form sweater with the yarn after I bought it, but I ended up frogging that because lack of a pattern and lack of knitting sweater experience kind of doomed that sweater.

Anyway, it's nearly done. Not done well. I get distracted while I'm knitting and forget which row of the lace I'm on and I'm sure I displaced two rows of the lace section so it's off a bit, but I'm not going to rip back because it's kind of a bitch to get garter stitch back on the needles and I've been working on this sweater since, like, September 2011. (Not continuously, of course, there were several other projects in between). After I finish this sweater I'm working on the Brownstone I started in September also.

In reading, I've kind of become obsessed with reading princess novels and fairy tales. I don't know why. It's a departure for me. I was on a long science fiction kick, then into some fantasy novels, then some crime novels, and then a long period of dystopian lit. But now it's retold fairy tales, specifically stories with strong, modern princesses who are placed in fakey, historically-inaccurate medieval-Regency periods. Go figure.

What I've read/am reading:
Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George
Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George
Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George
A Posse of Princesses by Sherwood Smith
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

I've read another Shannon Hale book and remembered it only after I'd bought Princess Academy. I wasn't impressed with Austinland (the Hale book I read previously), so I'm not holding out great hope for Princess Academy,which was why I bought Posse of Princesses to read before I do the Hale book.

The Jessica Day George books are okay, but she seems to get to a point where she stops storytelling and starts rushing to the end. Or maybe I just don't like action in my fairy tales, but it seems too rushed and before you know it the book is over and the lovely "once upon a time" feeling is gone.

Anyway, these books go fast, they were all written for Grade 5-8 level, so I've read them all in the past week. I'm thinking of going back and re-reading the Karen Marie Moning books about fairies invading Dublin (Dreamfevre series?) after I finish the Princess books. I know, my mind is taking me to strange places. Maybe it's because of the weird weather.

More death and knitting

2012-01-11T12:44:00.002-06:00

So, it seems like this blog has been full of death and divorce and sadness and well, knitting, for several years now. Again, our family is experiencing the death of someone dear to us. My Aunt Steph's mother in law, Grandma Berta, passed away yesterday. I grew up with Grandma Berta as a kind of peripheral relative, my cousins' grandma. It's sad, though, because I don't remember life when Grandma Berta wasn't part of my family, and because my cousins have had to deal with so much death this year, both their grandmas and my aunt and their dad, Uncle Slim, who died about six and a half years ago. You never really get over the death of your father, though, there are always those unhealed wounds, the complete love you have for that person whether they were a good dad or not. My Uncle Slim was a good dad. He loved his children, he did all he could for them, and we all miss him.

When my uncle Slim died it was the most significant death in our family in years. I went through a kind of depression that lasted more than a year after he died, which was kind of what prompted my foray into Second Life and then into WoW and led to me meeting my husband. Yeah, my life took a whole new direction after that, some of it not good. I can trace that path so clearly now: death, depression, move into a new (virtual world), and meet my future husband (plus countless friends I couldn't imagine being without, even if I've not met all of them in person). At the time it felt like chaos though.

When my house burned down in 2006 it was kind of like a catharsis, where everything in my old life, the thing that was weighing me down, was gone. And we had a few clear years, though health issues have also brought their weight to bear. And now a year of deaths, from my young cousin in March last year to my aunt in April, my grandma, after a summer of constant health issues, passed in late August, and now another grandma is gone. In between all of that are the family making its adjustments, everyone grieving in their own ways, not all of them positive. Like, I haven't talked to some of my close cousins in, well, four or five months, and I don't see us healing from any of the things that have happened very soon either. I don't want to forgive them, I don't want to be forgiven by them, I just want to ignore all of that until it goes away, which isn't really a good way to deal with anything, but the hurt and disgust they've caused is hard to bear, and I'm so angry at them. I want to heal up a bit before I ever have to deal with that again.

My point, I guess, is that it seems like when death strikes we have different ways of coping, and somehow in times of tragedy, in the aftermath of the grief, new paths open up. We escape the sad literal present and try to move in new directions, try to find ways to heal and sometimes it causes us to learn to live differently, to find whole new ways of being. I don't know what will come in the next few months or year, but I suspect it will be great change again. New ways of being. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know. I guess we wait and see.

I'm making a lace scarf. It's this one, Chinook Scarf, by Ali Green. I'm using my own handspun Shetland wool for it. It's nice knitting, though the yarn for it feels rough to me and it's full of vm (which is Spinner-speak for "vegetable matter", meaning bits of straw and things). It's my learner yarn though, only the second or third thing I've spun on my spinning wheel, and I have to say it's very springy.

What I'm reading:

Knitting Workshop by Elizabeth Zimmermann

The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley

Wool, Wool 2 and Wool 3 by Hugh Howey

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

I have to pause between the Howey books, which are really short stories, because my mind gets blown and I have to think for a few days or week. I also read The Plagiarist by Howey, which was another really great, blow your mind story.

We will have a weekend of wake and funeral and then go on through what has been a really mild winter so far. Today it is icy and windy and cold and snowy, but up to today it's been cruising between the mid-40s to up to 74 degrees the other day. The old ones used to say when you have a black Christmas (meaning now snow) you will have a lot of deaths in the coming year. I hope that's not true.

Latest knitting

2012-01-09T14:33:00.001-06:00

2012-01-09 14.21.57, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I'm working on a pair of plain ribbed socks (top-down knitting in the round), knit on Size 3.75 mm needles with Knit Picks Stroll fingering weight in a color called "Cupcake Multi". I started these last Tuesday at Registration and worked on them off and on all week. I could have them finished by tomorrow (just doing heel flap for second sock now), if I work on them a bit this evening.

I'm feeling really tired. Maybe it has to do with a large lunch (cheeseburger/fries) or with not being able to sleep a full night through lately. I seem to wake up after I've been sleeping a bit every night, so I think I'm not getting a full sleep-cycle. This day just needs more chocolate.

A week

2012-01-07T00:20:00.001-06:00

It's been kind of a busy week. I've been working on registering and testing new students, completely in denial that Christmas vacation is over, but I finally have to admit I'm tired of cookies and the Christmas lights are not as cheery as they seemed at the beginning of December. The tree needs to come down, the frivolous books put away and I need to work on writing my syllabi for another semester. Dreary January is here (though the temp. climbed up to 74F day before yesterday). I've been having trouble sleeping at night, probably because I got used to staying up playing World of Warcraft till 3 AM all through Christmas break and had my days and nights turned around. But, classes will start in a week and a half, and I have two days with 9 AM classes scheduled, and another day with a 7-10 class. It's been a few years since I taught a night class. I remember how everyone seems to kind of fade out around 8:30. I suspect there will be lots of writing-in-the-lab time on Wednesday evenings. I'm going to try a few new things this semester, too.

I haven't taken any photos this week, but I did upload a photo of the socks I made for my friend Joanne for Christmas. I love the yarn I used for these. It's MadelineTosh Sock in a color called "Waterlily". The picture doesn't really do the yarn justice, nor can you see how soft this yarn is, but she loves the socks and that was my intention.

Stuff I love

2012-01-02T23:58:00.001-06:00

Stuff I love, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Did I mention I got yarn for Christmas? It's the best present to get, really. The Lorna's Laces yarn in the middle of the photo is the gift yarn. The rest of the stuff: spindles, a sock I'm starting using Knit Picks Stroll, and some yarn I spun myself (the aqua colored two-ply) all spread out on the quilt my mom made from friendship squares her online quilt group sent to her for her birthday a few years ago. This is stuff I love. Handmade stuff, stuff I can use to make more stuff, and colors. :)

New Year

2012-01-01T18:05:00.002-06:00

We made it through a year of deaths and sickness and some hard financial times. I sometimes felt like giving up, especially when the drama with my cousins and my sister started happening. I admit, I feel like I'm in convalescence, and I've felt that way for a long time. The good thing is, we have new babies on the way in our family this year, and we've got less people in this house. Now if I can just get the kids to get to school on time...

I've spent my day doing kitchen stuff: cleaning, dishes, cooking, etc. and playing WoW and knitting and watching movies. I'll post a photo later of the hat I'm making. I'm also making pot roast for dinner and my mother is making homemade bread. It is very peaceful right now because all the kids are asleep. They had too much "partying" last night (playing Just Dance on the Wii and having as many snacks as they wanted or could eat). We stayed home, watched movies, played some WoW, and had a couple margaritas to mark the new year. I barely checked out Facebook because it's boring to me. It seems like everyone says the same things all the time. At least in WoW I can choose my adventure and go do it and have fun. I checked in on SL earlier, but it remains as buggy as always for me. I considered cleaning my inventory, but I'm not ready to commit to deleting 100k things today.

Only two more days until I'm back to work. Not looking forward to it. I could stand another week at home, reading, knitting, watching movies,cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and playing WoW. This seems to be the life I've chosen for the moment (though I should get going on graduate school applications). I'm satisfied. I'm thankful for my blessings, and I do feel blessed with my life and my family and friends. There could be more to it, but for now, I'm satisfied.

It's later, and here's the hat, which I finished this evening (Jan. 2). I still have to knit a lining for it, but it turned out too big for me. Luckily my husband has a big head. :)

We made it

2011-12-26T13:00:00.001-06:00

We really didn't have great hope for Christmas this year. We thought we'd make the gesture though, and we shopped and cleaned and baked and wrapped and decorated and cooked...and we made it though. Not without some tears and some weirdness, but it wasn't a bad Christmas, just lonely and a little sad. My tactic this year was to buy the kids something really outrageously good so at least their joy could be real and they'd remember this Christmas as a good one. Jilly got a laptop and Sher and Grey got smart phones and Cassie got a wacom tablet. I got Alan an official WoW shirt (Garrosh Wants You!) and Mom an angel (I always buy mom an angel for Christmas because she collects them. This year's was from an artist in Israel who makes felted dolls). And I waited for Santa to come. I can pick out any number of moments that would qualify as my Christmas moment this year, but I can't find that one special moment that usually hits me every year, my Christmas Spirit visit that remains in my memory for years to come. Maybe I'm still waiting, or maybe it's not going to happen?

Trapped at home

2011-12-17T00:32:00.002-06:00

There's this huge basketball tournament going on in Rapid City called the Lakota Nation Invitational. It sounds racist, maybe it is I dunno, but basically all the schools that have Lakota students gather together and host four days of basketball, wrestling, Lakota Language Bowl, Lakota Knowledge Bowl, etc. for the kids in those schools. It's a huge deal to win anything there. So, because all their parents want to go and watch their kids, the schools also host workshops. Other tribal organizations also host workshops, and everyone on the reservations in SD decamp to Rapid City for those four or five days. Basically, ten thousand Indians descend on Rapid City the last weekend before Christmas each year, and this is the 35th anniversary of Lakota Nation Invitational.

So, this year my mom had to go (she goes every year, always protesting that she hates it but she really couldn't stand to miss it.) I've been there once for a meeting and I really did hate it. My kids are not joiners of anything but band and Anime Club (which they founded), so they have never participated in LNI. Well, the problem with my mom going is that we are down to one car since my brother in law managed to ruin our old van and my mother's car last winter, and my mom had to take our newer van to Rapid for the meetings. So, anyway, stuck at home for three days no vehicle. I've played about forty hours of WoW (I got the new pets for Winter Veil), knit a pair of socks, scrubbed the fridge and threw away old food, baked, made truffles, finished the laundry, cleaned the kitchen and mopped the floor (this is rare because I usually make my sister do the mopping). There's more I am going to do in the next two days: I am hand-piecing a quilt for someone since my sewing machine broke down, making more cookies, preparing for P2 to come home from the hospital tomorrow, watching Christmas movies, etc. I am just enjoying my three or four days "trapped" at home with the kids.

My view

2011-12-13T10:41:00.001-06:00

My view, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

This is what I see when I go out for a smoke break. It's too cold to smoke more than half a cigarette, but it's a nice view while doing it.

Facebook banned at work

2011-12-12T11:58:00.001-06:00

So, last week our Vice President of Public Relations decided to ban Facebook on our campus. I work at a tribal university. We have about 1200 students, 250 staff and faculty and maybe 50 part-time employees. Most of the staff and faculty have a computer in their office that they use on a daily basis. Students have access to about sixty computers via computer labs and the library. Additionally, free wifi throughout our two main campuses.

So, apparently one employee got drunk and posted a threat to another employee via Facebook a couple weeks ago. He wasn't even at work when he posted the threat. It wasn't even working hours! The answer to this problem, according to our VP of PR, was to ban Facebook altogether. Trying to log into Facebook via phone or my Kindle Fire or my office computer will get a "no network access" message or a "SonicWall Blocked" message.

I use Facebook to keep in touch with my students. Often students don't have a computer at home because they can't afford one and they can't afford to pay for broadband. Very often my students live in areas too rural to be served by broadband, though there are cell towers throughout pretty much the whole reservation. This is something you've probably never heard of, but many people on the reservation get free cell phones. It's part of President Clinton's access to the digital divide initiative from way back, and what resulted is that our tribal council negotiated with AllTell (now AT&T) to provide (nearly) free cell phones and service to tribal members on our reservation (which has spawned the term "commod phone" because Indians who are extremely poor also receive government commodities).

With the advent of free cell phone service, many people don't have regular phones through the local phone company. They just use their cell phones.So, anyway, my students who can get a free cell phone can then agree to pay something like $5 a month for a data plan and long distance service on their cell phones, which gives them access to Facebook. Hence, why so many Indians on our reservation are into FB in a big way. It's addictive, it's nearly free, etc. I'd guess that about 50% of our local tribal members use Facebook, which is a huge percentage considering 50% of our population is under the age of 18.

So, anyway, I and many of my colleagues who teach here use Facebook to keep in touch with our students. Students who have free phones generally pay for calling minutes, but they only pay the $5 for a data plan for the month. So, rather than call them they would rather we contact them on Facebook because it doesn't use up their calling minutes. Make sense? Anyway, now the VP of PR has banned Facebook use on our campus and across our wifi networks. So, no way to contact students without using up their calling minutes.

I don't use Facebook a lot. I don't like Facebook that much, seriously. I check it maybe once or twice a day. I might post a status update once a week, if that, but due to some fighting between some of my family members I tend to stay off FB as much as possible and have any messages forwarded to my email. However, due to the completely retarded reaction the VP had to one employee issuing a threat to another employee via Facebook, I'm suddenly finding myself tilting at windmills here. When the email went out last Thursday that FB was blocked on our campus, I questioned why via email (that went out to our entire email list). Then I got a reply in private from the VP that someone had threatened someone but she made it sound like many people were posting threats. I found out later it was just one person, and he was drunk). So, then a few others chimed in saying they use Facebook to DO THEIR JOBS. Then I replied again that it was paternalistic and wrong to take away Facebook and that our students used it as a forum, they finally had a public voice, etc. Then I got a very forceful reply that Facebook is Banned, end of discussion! (Like I was a fucking child for persisting).

A lot of other employees and faculty are upset about this also, but only a few have spoken up about it because they are afraid for their jobs. I should be more afraid for my job, but I'm so angry about this that I can barely think straight.

It's not even the issue of being able to contact students, that's really just one of the functions of Facebook. The issue is the banning of a useful tool for our whole campus. The issue beyond that is that one person who doesn't understand or use technology much at all (she's seriously a luddite) can just make this blanket decision to prohibit the freedoms of our people (and yes, I consider it a race issue as the person making this decision is white and most of the population of our campus is Native American). It's paternalistic and wrong. i don't care if students were using Facebook or not. I care that this person has basically passed the Patriot Act on our campus because one "terrorist" was drunk posting threats on FB when they weren't even clocked in at work!

Mismatched too

2011-12-05T10:45:00.001-06:00

Mismatched too, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

So, yeah, I didn't have enough yarn to do two mittens out of the birthday yarn. That's because I made a cover for my Kindle Fire (favorite birthday present!) with the birthday yarn first. See how gorgeous that turned out? I couldn't believe how wonderful the birthday yarn is (considering I spun the wool for it and it was my first time doing triple ply on the spinning wheel).

I started with this Polwarth roving, which reminded me of the colors of South Dakota in the summertime:

I love how the golden brown graduates to the aqua and green so subtly. I knit the Kindle Cover all in one piece, knit in the round, and grafted the bottom before adding the crochet tie.

Then I decided to do mittens with the leftover yarn, which was not enough yarn. It was okay, though, because I had some Brooklyn Tweed Shelter in a color called "Button Jar" that was almost the same weight as the birthday yarn. What I love about these mittens is that there are subtle color changes in the yarn, so they are not just solid green and solid aqua, but full of lighter and darker greens, yellows, golds, blues, even a little bit of tan. Not sure it comes across in the photo, but they're lovely (and warm!). Just in time, too, because this is my smoking area at work:

It's not the first snow of the season, but it's the first snow that's stuck. And it's 9 below today. I'm wearing a hand knit cardigan, the new mittens over my fingerless gloves (smoker trick), and a scarf I made from some more of the hand spun done over the summer. Oh, and hand knit socks. Always hand knit socks. I feel so damn prepared for winter!

Mittens, English, Foo Fighters and Coffee

2011-12-01T11:38:00.001-06:00

Mittens, English, Foo Fighters and Coffee, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I woke up this morning to Foo Fighters on my alarm clock, which resulted in my listening to the Foo Fighters pretty much all morning, through my two morning classes, while knitting a mitten and drinking coffee. I'm still not over it. I suspect it's going to be a All Foo Fighters, All Day kind of day.

And it's cold here, light snow on the ground, very windy, hence the craving for wool mittens on the needles. The yarn is yarn I made (my birthday yarn from a couple weeks ago). There's not enough of it to complete two mittens, only the one (hopefully), but it doesn't matter. At this point I'm used to wearing mismatched knits and looking like a bag lady who just visited the Goodwill Store dumpster. Layers. It's all about layers.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T05:01:00.001-06:00

Possibly my expectations were too high for Thanksgiving this year. Possibly I wanted it to be the most special, significant event of the year (barring Christmas), because it's my favorite holiday and it's about food and family and cooking, three of my favorite things. Possibly I counted too much on my cooking abilities or my ability to get along with my mother, but whatever the possibility inherent in my hopes for the holiday this year, suffice to say, things didn't work out as I wanted.

A month to two weeks before Thanksgiving: Start planning by browsing recipe sites, watching Food Network almost constantly, and buying no less than five Thanksgiving-themed magazines (Oprah, Martha Stewart, Food Network, Pillsbury, etc.)

One week before: begin downloading recipes for the meal and planning a menu.

Two days before: Tell each family member they will be responsible for cooking/preparing one or more dishes for Thanksgiving.

One day before:
Watch Miracle on 34th Street, old and new versions, on Kindle Fire (birthday present that arrived late)

Thanksgiving Eve:
2:30 PM--go to Valentine to do our Thanksgiving Shopping, with a list that includes the detailed quantities of ingredients we need to make this amazing meal, with the favorite dishes of each family member and some signs of good planning (food storage containers, for example, in preparation for leftovers).
3:30 PM--mother screws up careful planning by deciding she's buying certain things on the list and she takes "her list" and a separate shopping cart and begins throwing in things, disregarding all stated quantities, brands and prices. Gah!
4:30 PM--emerge from grocery shopping nightmare wherein no less than 150 people are pushing carts through the store with a crazed look in their eyes, vying for the last stocked can of chicken broth and refusing to move their cart so you can get to the produce. Have overspent budget for the meal by a significant amount.
4:45 PM--still in parking lot at supermarket, waiting for mother to emerge with her shopping. Have already filled the backseat and storage area of the van with own shopping, trying to figure out how to fit her shopping in among four other people in the car.
5:00 PM--decide to skip cooking dinner in favor of drive through food for family, which entails calling each family member not present to ask them what they want from McDonald's or Subway.
5:30 PM--arrive home, get kids to haul in the groceries, start unpacking groceries.
6:30 PM--still unpacking and putting away groceries.
7 PM--finally finished. Considering a lie down.
7:30 PM--organize cooking list with names of each person, the dish they are making and the approximate time they should make it. Worked on list with sister, who insisted on volunteering to make things. List posted on refrigerator, each person having agreed to their cooking duties. (Own duties are: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, scalloped potatoes, pumpkin spice cake, cheesecake, cranberry sauce)
9 PM--finally finished procrastinating and realize that pies and other desserts won't cook themselves. Have organized mother into making pies this evening to save time and oven space on Thanksgiving morning.
11:30 PM--finally finished making Turtle Cheesecake and Pumpkin Cake, still waiting for mother to make pies.
12:00 PM--finally finished making pies mother was supposed to make, a process that involved mother coming and telling me I was doing it wrong and adding a bunch of crap to the pies that weren't in the recipe and mother spilling pie filling all over bottom of oven causing burnt pumpkin smell and smoke to fill house, overtaking the previously yummy smells of baking pumpkin and cheesecake. Yum!
12:45 PM--finally finished with the dishes. Bed.

Thanksgiving Morning:
9 AM--wake up to the sounds of my mother trying to cook something. Recognize the sounds by the slamming of pots and pans falling out of cupboard. Oy. Get up, get coffee, observe mother.
9:15 AM--phone call from dialysis clinic. Husband sent to ER because he threw up, blood pressure high, rapid breathing, suspect heart attack. Drive to hospital.
10:30 AM--husband released from ER for indigestion. Crap.
11 AM--arrive home to find mother has decided to cook turkeys three hours before planned time. One turkey completely done. One turkey still frozen but in oven. Crap crap crap! Also, baked beans are done, five hours before scheduled dinner. Also, brief argument over who threw away the knife sharpener and the lack of sharp knives. Mother makes colossal mistake in giving brother money to buy a knife sharpener at teh store before it closes at 3 PM. Brother leaves and promises to be back by 4 PM.
12 AM--discover the oven was turned off at some point. Mother denies all knowledge. So does sister. Frozen turkey still frozen in oven. Have completely missed most of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Thanksgiving afternoon:
12:30 PM--cake frosted, walnuts toasted. Kitchen crowded with mother, self and sister vying for counter and oven space.
1:00 PM--Meal items finished: cranberries, cake, pies, cheesecake, jello, beans, one turkey. Helping various daughters complete their menu items--sweet potatoes in orange cups, fruit salad, relish tray, cranberry cocktails (cranberry juice, sprite, OJ, ice, maraschino cherry and orange slice).
1:30 PM--realize it's a losing battle and mashed potatoes won't be required for at least four more hours while second turkey thaws and cooks. Zone out on Martha Stewart on tv, watching Eureka on Kindle Fire, reading, knitting, embroidering.
2:30 PM--Check on turkey. Still not done. Mother has finally decided to make the bread. Open the wine, drink a fortifying glass, begin making stuffing and mashed potatoes.
3:00 PM-- Mother fell asleep while playing Farmville.
3:30 PM--stuffing in oven, potatoes boiling. Ham cannot be cooked because turkey still not done. Decide there's no use having scalloped potatoes if there's no ham. Take out mother's stuffing.
4:00 PM--Menu items ready: one turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, corn, stuffing #1, stuffing number 2, baked beans, three kinds of cranberries (gelled, whole berries, relish), jello, fruit salad, sweet potato cups, relish tray, various pies, cakes.
4:30 PM--turkey still not fucking done! Bread burnt on bottom. Concede it's my fault for putting bread on lowest oven rack.
5:00 PM--rouse mother to make the gravy. Get killing looks for burning her bread.
5:30 PM--finally call everyone to dinner.

Thanksgiving Night:
6:00 PM--Turkey #2 finally done. Brother shows up sans knife sharpener or money given to him for knife sharpener. Doesn't matter, as turkey was cut with dull knife.
7:00 PM--have a cup of coffee and slice of turtle cheesecake. Best damn cheesecake ever. Referee kids' fights over who has computer, who has tv and who should do dishes. Slightly boggled at complete lack of Christmas/Thanksgiving movies, shows and specials on tv. WTF?
8:00 PM--fall asleep dreading thought of having to find space in refrigerator for leftovers sitting out all over counters in kitchen.
4 AM--wake up, still dreading thought of leftovers left out on counter (probably spoiled by now anyway). Thank sister for putting away leftovers. She staggers off to bed, having spent the entire day and evening worrying about her husband (more on that drahma later).

The only redeeming thing about his holiday was that we didn't decide to leave for Black Friday shopping right after we ate this year like we did last year. Screw shopping for Christmas. I want to spend Christmas in a monastery or something, away from the family drahma and cooking competition.

And final thing: we all tried to avoid it, we didn't say a word about it at all yesterday, but we were all really missing my grandma and my aunt who both passed away this past year. Last year we went to their house for dessert on Thanksgiving day, and if we'd known it was their last we would have spent more time with them, enjoying them. Maybe it's a lesson we haven't yet taken completely to heart, because we were all rubbing each other raw all day (except the kids). It was a heartbreaking Thanksgiving for us, a family who enjoyed this holiday for so many years with jokes from my aunt that she'd shot and cooked Big Bird and my grandmother always cooking a 40 lb. turkey her sister, my Aunt June, had raised. Aunt June is gone, too, and the two little 14 lb birds we cooked were bitter, dry reminders of the joy we have always had at Thanksgiving with Aunt Diana and Grandma Betty.

My birthday yarn

2011-11-16T19:57:00.001-06:00

My birthday yarn, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

My birthday yarn

Wovember

2011-11-13T11:03:00.001-06:00

This is completely awesome.

And this is my current state of knitting. Sweater, half done, taking up two bags. Just a sleeve and collar left to knit on it. 100% wool (Northampton from Valley Yarns in Ocean Heather color).

Veteran's Day

2011-11-11T13:33:00.001-06:00

My family has always had men who defended our country, from far back during the Minnesota Uprising when my great-great grandfather, George Duwanna Red Owl, was accused of helping massacre settlers in Minnesota who had decided to settle on Indian land, to my little brother, Richard, who served as a U.S. Marine from the beginning of the Gulf War until he was discharged in 1995. My great grandfather, Moses, served in World War I, before he was even a U.S. citizen. My grandfather William and my grandfather Adam both served in World War II. My step-father, Cleve, served in Korea. My father, Alvin C.P. Bordeaux, served in Germany during Vietnam. My son Grey is only 13, but he talks about going to the Marines when he's out of high school.

In these hundred and some years of military service in our family we have not felt the loss of a soldier in battle or while defending our country, and so Veteran's Day is a time to honor the service they gave while being relieved there was no "ultimate sacrifice" for our family.

As a Native American it is a time of being thankful our land still exists and that the men in our family have defended it for so many years.

I have friends and students who have also served this country and defended the flag of the United States, despite that they cannot find jobs, they struggle with depression and anger and substance abuse. I am thankful for their service and hopeful they can find the help they need, that they can find pride in what they have done for this land, and that they find peace in the coming year. Pilaunya pe ksto. Thank you from all of us.

Fall

2011-11-08T15:46:00.001-06:00

fall, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I'm a little late, as we've already had the first snow of the season, but I love this photo. The yarn is Dream in Color's October exclusive yarn. I'm making a lace shawl from it. The leaves are just from outside my office door. I just wanted to save a little piece of what I love about Fall, the colors. The yarn reminds me more of November, though, so I guess it's appropriate that I'm posting it as my November picture. More photos of the shawl once it's started and completed.

NaNoWriMo

2011-11-01T19:05:00.001-05:00

Yeah, biting the bullet this year and attempting a novel in a month. Total number of words written on the first day (so far): 0

Anyway, after Glee and after Parenthood, I'll get on it.

We all know how I am with goals. Remember Tour de Fleece this past summer? I reached my goal, even if hardly any of the resulting yarn was useable . We'll see how this goes. By my birthday I may have given up, or I may be rocking it.

Jillian

2011-10-22T11:03:00.001-05:00

Today is my baby's 12th birthday. Jillian was born on an extremely nice (weather-wise) Friday, and she was two weeks past her due date so I was induced. After a very long day (6 AM to 9 PM) she was finally born, and my mother likes to say she emerged "pissed off and with her fists wrapped tight around her umbilical cord, and she's been pissed off ever since!" The whole day was a blur to me because my pain strategy involves mentally retreating to where I would rather be than laying in a hospital bed in pain, so I was out of it for most of the day, though there were no pain medications involved, just whatever drug induces labor. She's been a challenge and a joy ever since.

While my other two daughters are fairly reasonable, sane angels, Jillian was born sans bullshit-o-meter. She questions everything, and her favorite weapon is sarcasm. I suspect she learned this from one of her older sisters, but she has perfected it on her own. She also has a quick temper, often jumps to completely wrong conclusions and is really, really social. The rest of us in this family tend to hang back and scope things out with the eye of suspicion before we jump in with even something so innocuous as an opinion or even a "hello," Jillian is right there with quick, amazing social skills and friendly patter. As you might know with really social people, drama follows her and sets up camp around her like an aura. She's really, really compelling and determined and sweet and quickly angry. Maybe because her father is one of those dynamic people you envy because even though most of what they say is bullshit, they say it in a way that is compelling and believable even when it's not true. I know that sentence doesn't make sense, but think of the average Tea Partier and add in a dose of AIM and a reservation education...while I'm working on teaching Jillybean some critical thinking skills, she still has the makings of a future politician, and I mean that in the most motherly way possible. She's going to be scary incredible when she grows up fully. Also, she's really, really beautiful.

Jillian, 12 years old.

All three of my daughters: Sheridan, Cassidy, Jillian.

Let us not forget the boy, my Greyson.

Deadwood

2011-10-09T13:50:00.001-05:00

I took my students to Deadwood yesterday for the SD Festival of Books (well, 33 were supposed to go, four showed up because Pell Grants were released Friday and everyone decided to do something else, I guess). It pissed down rain all day, and Deadwood is a historic town, so the streets are really narrow, some of them brick-paved, and everywhere you turn there's a slot machine or bar, however NO DAMN PARKING! Since it's historic and nearly every building is a historical landmark, they're not required to be handicapped accessible, so P2 couldn't even go in most places because his wheelchair wouldn't fit through the door, nor were there access ramps. So, we couldn't go to any workshops because they were held in "charming" historic buildings (the Masonic Temple, for example) without access. (Normally I would love this, but being married to P2 had forced me to reevaluate many things, chiefly, how people don't consider mobility challenged other people when they do stuff like build doorways, plan parking, or host big events).

We did go to the book fair, though, and picked up some good books, and P2 had a good time visiting with various authors. My students had fun riding the trolley up and down the streets of Deadwood, though they couldn't find any of the workshops either. We drove around town for an hour looking for good coffee because apparently most people in Deadwood only drink beer. We found a Starbucks, tucked away in a casino at the end of the historic section of town, and we drove around for another twenty minutes trying to park before we had to finally give up, park illegally in a hotel-owned lot, and send in a SWAT team to grab coffees for us.

It was a beautiful day, if you love rain and the Black Hills and Fall. Gorgeous watercolor views of trees, old buildings, misty fog in the hills from the rain. I could have hung out all day just looking at the views, as long as I had my Grande Americano and a pack of cigs. The good thing about Deadwood is nobody really cares if you smoke outside because most of the tourists there are wandering around drunk off their asses anyway, so who's going to get after you for smoking when there's a couple slow dancing in the middle of the street?

The day culminated with a free dinner and keynote address by Lakota author, Joseph Marshall, III, whose book everyone in SD read this year for One Book South Dakota (it's where the SD Humanities Council chooses one book for the whole state to read and discuss, then honors the author with a dinner and keynote address at the end of the year). I've been having my students read the 2011 One Book selection, The Journey of Crazy Horse, and then the opportunity to go meet the author arose, hence our trip to Deadwood. Anyway, I think the students who went had fun, and my kids and P2 and I had fun. Then we drove home. In the rain. At 1:30 AM in the morning. On deer-infested roads. Got home at 4:30 AM.

Man...

2011-10-02T22:51:00.000-05:00

It was a nice, peaceful weekend here, but only because my sister spent the weekend in Rapid City with my daughter and niece. With the three of them gone, all the high-drama people were out of the house and the rest of us rested up and ate well and went about our lives without any blood-pressure-raising events. I managed to finish all the laundry, knit, read, listen to audio books, cook beautiful dinners, do some baking, watch some television, and enjoy my weekend.

Today my sister returned. She picked a fight with her husband on Friday so that she could go out of town without him, and when she returned, he was here. She then proceeded to kick him out, upon which he apparently threatened suicide to his sister on the phone, then the police called here asking where he was. A search of the house turned up nothing, and apparently he had taken off walking down the road. We informed the police officer who came here what he looked like, but we didn't go looking for him (because what would we do if we found him?)

A couple hours go by. My sister is posting on Facebook about how all of her immediate family are against her. (I think this is guilty conscience on her part because none of us said anything to her about any of this drama going on, afaik). Then my brother in law's mother called me begging me to let him stay here until she can manage to find a car to come pick him up (she lives eight hours away). Of course, it's not my house, and I have no idea what to say about all of this. How far is family loyalty supposed to go, especially when faced with the possible suicide of another human being AND YOU COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO PREVENT IT? I don't know, either, but it sucks, it truly, truly sucks, to be in this position. Besides the obvious shame I feel about my sister's behavior, I also feel manipulated by my brother in law (did I mention said brother in law stole $60 bucks from me and my mother on Friday?). I also don't know where my brother in law is, or how to get hold of him since the cell phone he also stole from my mother is not working. Nevertheless, his mother's obvious distress about what's going on down here is what I'm connecting with here. I'm a human being, and I appreciate that my bro in law is a human being, and my sister is a highly immature human being, and this series of unfortunate events has me wanting to scream at my sister: didn't anyone ever teach you to cowgirl up and just do the right fucking thing!!!???

It's my grandmother's birthday today. She has been gone from us for one month and two days. I miss her. I miss that I would have gone to her house tonight and had dinner with her and cake after, and she would have told me all about what was going on in Parmelee and I would have told her what was going on at work and with my kids, and I probably would have presented her with handknit socks and flowers. Had I been in possession of my vehicle today, I would have taken the flowers to her grave, but again, selfish sister, drama, etc.

Spinning

2011-09-30T11:21:00.001-05:00

spinning, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Lately I've kind of been adrift without a specific project to work on. I'm kind of working on a lot of different things--two quilts, a spinning project on the wheel, a spinning project on the spindles, a sweater, some socks. I just don't have anything specific that I need to get done by a certain time, so it feels like without a deadline I'm just not able to focus on one project. Then, I don't want to set a specific goal or deadline because that would stress me out and my fiber arts stuff is supposed to be just for fun. Though, I do need to finish a quilt for two, I just haven't been having good mojo in that area. I start stitching diamonds together and then the machine acts up. Hand piecing them, while peaceful and portable, will take forever. Not sure what to do.

September socks

2011-09-25T22:59:00.001-05:00

september socks, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Yes, there are June, July and August socks. These are socks made from one of my favorite yarns, Handjive Knits Nature's Palette Fingering (100% merino). I had some socks made of this yarn a couple years ago. Felted them, then lost one side. This yarn is amazing, as long as you don't wash it in warm and run it through the drier (which unfortunately seems to be the fate of most of the socks I've made. I suck at Woolens Care). I actually started these in July, but then I did the insanely hard pink cabled socks from July 15-August 15, so those are my July socks. My August socks aren't actually done yet. One side is, but I got sidetracked by the sweater from hell (Camp Loopy #3 project). Anyway, these precious socks are just to look at. I'll probably never wear them because the yarn is, yes, ungettable. They don't even make it anymore. I still have one and a half skeins of it left (and i had to search all over the internet to find those skeins). It's Yarn that is Too Good To Knit.. It's Trophy Yarn. When I die, bury it with me.

Also, tried something new on these socks, which is the two color thing. I made some two color anklets a couple years ago (from this same yarn, btw), but this is the first time I've done the stripey thing in socks. Who says I'm resistant to change?

Monday

2011-09-12T11:02:00.002-05:00

Six A.M.: I don't think I went to sleep before 3 AM last night, and here it is, 6 AM and I'm trying to get up so I can get the kids moving towards being ready for school

Eight-twenty AM: And two hours later, I'm driving two of them to school while the other two and my mother finish getting ready. Pondering the idea of opening my own coffee/latte place because facing 6 AM or 7 AM or 10 AM without good coffee is just not working for me. I miss Noella's Coffee, a deep, dark, rich Americano in a portable cup that I could recycle later and put my own coffee into. Sometimes you don't even have to do that because often a really big Americano can last all day long.

Eight fifty-nine. Driving my oldest to her college drawing class and my youngest to middle school and then my mother to work. Probably my mother will co-opt the car all day because, well, she does that. Her car broke down nine months ago and she still hasn't repaired it. We gave her our van which we bought and paid for last year, but her son-in-law broke that down too. I don't mind that my mother depends on me for a ride, but her sulking when I need my vehicle to do my own stuff drives me rather nuts. I had the money earlier this summer to get the other van fixed, but I didn't do it because I knew it was a case of spending good money just to have my brother-in-law break it down again. He's a person who doesn't respect other people's property. The sense of entitlement is astounding. My sister is going on her fifth phone in two years, all because when they fight he breaks or sells everything they own. He's also managed to break the phone we gave my mother for Christmas, and the tv they bought last spring, and my sister's flip camera, and who knows what else. I do know he's sold half our DVDs and the radio from the old van.

Nine fifteen: finally at work.

Ten-thirty: heard from husband. He's got a head cold. Tell him where the Dayquil is. Preparing for class this afternoon because I want to be all ready and I want to watch another episode of Eureka while I knit on the sweater I've been working on for the past month. It's "due" to be finished on Wednesday so I can block and get it photographed by Thursday.

Eleven o'clock: Finally finished with class prep. Ready to watch Eureka Episode five from Season 3. Only four more days until the new Eureka season starts. That means four more days to finish episodes 3 and 4 so I'm all caught up for the fifth and final season, which features (yay!) Wil Wheaton, whom I've discovered a new fascination with this summer, and Felicia Day, who I love from The Guild.

More later...

Sunday: And the reason why I sometimes detail my whole day is because I won't remember that day later, like, only six days later. I do know my 1 o'clock class on Monday went well. And I made corn dogs and tater tots for dinner because Mondays are too stressful for real food. I probably watched The Daily Show before bed. I probably fell asleep during John's monologue because I was really tired that day. Other than that? *shrug*

Taking a step back

2011-09-07T16:01:00.001-05:00

A few months ago a friend suggested to me that I might be dealing with my grief by being hyper active. Where others in my family dealt their grief by being extra-dramatic or feeling sorry for themselves or by being angry and aggressive, or avoiding it or ignoring it, maybe I've been dealing with it by not dealing with it because I'm too busy. As long as I'm awake I have some project going at all times. I'm never just idle. In this past summer I have accomplished three pairs of knit socks, a star quilt, a knitted shawl, a sweater, a partial sweater, a pair of knitted lace cuffs, ten skeins of spun wool, cutting out enough diamonds for five more quilts, level 85 on my Shaman in WoW, reading fifteen to twenty books, and cooking/cleaning/laundry for a family of 10. All this along with doing my full-time job of teaching. This is not to mention that I am keeping up with several television shows as well as starting to watch several new-to-me tv series (by watching their past seasons on Netflix). So, I started watching Drop Dead Diva and Eureka and Doll House, and I've watched the entire Firefly series and Serenity movie at least three times this summer. Oh, and did I mention I'm pretty active in an online forum (Second Citizen) and on Facebook and on the knitter's forums at Ravelry. And I've got a reading list of 50 or more books on my current reading theme of Dystopian Fiction?

What I'm currently reading:
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
A Life in Stitches by Rachael Herron
The Journey of Crazy Horse by Joseph Marshall III (for class)
Brave New World by Aldoux Huxley
Hunter by Wil Wheaton
The Android's Dream by john Scalzi (Audible for when I am busy knitting/doing dishes)
Alison Wonderland by Helen Smith
The Iron Heel by Jack London
The Republic by Plato (background reading for dystopian fiction)
Utopia by Sir Thomas More (background reading)

Finished books for past month:
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
1984 by George Orwell
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Ready Player One by Ernie Cline
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Nerd Girls by Alan Sitomer
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So I'm thinking I need to schedule at least one hour a day when I don't think, read, knit, spin, write, watch tv, read or respond to forums, or listen to books. I just need to chill for at least one hour a day. Going to start trying today.

Granda Betty's quilt

2011-09-04T16:00:00.002-05:00

gma's quilt, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I started this quilt in June, made the whole quilt top in one day and basted the layers to quilt it and then didn't work on it much all summer. I chose that particular shade of blue in the border because that color always makes me think of my grandma.

Grandma Betty died on Wednesday and I still had the four corners and the borders to quilt. I worked on it Weds. night, all day Thursday and half of Friday. Finished it about 3:45 PM Friday, right after they brought her to the hall for her wake. We hung it so people could see it rather than drape it on her coffin.

The words "Compassion" "Love" "Generosity" "Hard Work" "Service" "Faith" and "Family" are quilted into the borders. Those are virtues I believe my grandma embodied. We buried the quilt with her yesterday.

Betty I. Red Owl

October 2, 1929-August 31, 2011

Camp Loopy #3 Project-Cardigan

2011-08-16T01:32:00.001-05:00

First day of working on cardi, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

This is after my first day of working on the third project for Camp Loopy. I stayed up too late last night working on this. Then didn't work on it all day today, picked it up again this evening while watching Dollhouse reruns on Netflix and got another 4 inches on it. Love this project. Need to order another skein of yarn for it on payday, though.

Sansarya's Camp Loopy #2 BFF Socks

2011-08-16T01:30:00.001-05:00

Sansarya's Camp Loopy #2 BFF Socks, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

This is the second project for Camp Loopy, finally finished on Saturday morning. I had trouble with all the little cables so I had to rip back about four inches on the heel to redistribute the stitches. I had a bit of second sock syndrome after I finished the first one, too.

Working at a Tribal College: chapter 6

2011-08-11T15:20:00.001-05:00

How come nobody ever asks the tough questions?

I was recently involved in a discussion of The Help, a bestseller book that's been made into a movie about the African American women who served as the hired help of white women in 1950's Mississippi. The book, written by a former southern white woman whose parents had a hired African American woman, is told from the perspective of a white woman and three African American women. The controversy arises from the point of view and the fact that a white person wrote the book which shows the perspective of African Americans fifty years ago. Specifically, African Americans are questioning the authenticity of the voices of the African Americans depicted in the book. And rather than focusing on the story, the controversy arises from the perspective, the point of view, the authenticity.

So I started to apply that to something about where I work: the teacher education department. Here's a direct quote from the catalog description of this department:

Based in part on the research by Martin Brooks and Jacqueline Gennon Brooks and the wisdom of the elders, the conceptual model and mission statement provide a strong foundation for the education of future teachers.
By placing the student in the center of the framework, one must realize that the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that students bring to the program must be honored. By building on the students’ prior knowledge and experiences, future teachers are provided a culturally-relevant model that will allow them to pass this honoring on to the students that they will teach.
Culture is the second component of the framework. Through an understanding of one’s own culture, other cultures can be respected. Modeling culturally-relevant pedagogy in the Education Department’s courses is a key factor to the satisfaction and success of Sinte Gleska University graduates.
When the idea for a conceptual framework was being considered, it was understood that there had to be a specific process that reflected the Lakota culture and values in the development of the program, the teaching of the courses, and the field experiences and internships that students would be required to complete. The content was expected to be culturally-relevant and based upon the traditions of the past, their connections to the present, and the implications for the future, as is stated in the department’s mission statement. This meant that cultural values and teachings had to be incorporated in traditionally western European thought taught in textbooks.
By looking at a process in which students would be held responsible for their own learning, for modeling the Lakota values, and for the realization that learning is a life-long journey, the constructivist model became the fourth, and outer circle, of the framework. This conceptual framework and mission statement provide a strong foundation upon which the program is structured.

Now let's put that into context. Of the current twenty-one classes listed in the Education Department's Fall Schedule of Classes , only three are taught by Native American (specifically Lakota) instructors. Of course, students in the education program must complete a selection of core courses. Of the core courses that education students must complete (47 total hours max), only 24 of those credit hours are taught by Native American people, and that's if they try really hard to get into a class taught by a Native outside of the Lakota Studies department (and let's face it, two of the instructors in the Lakota Studies department are white, too). So, in total, 125-132 credit hours are required for a student to receive a Bachelor's degree in elementary education (the single largest program in our University). Of those 125 hours, only a maximum of 24 credit hours will be taught by a Native American person.

Why do you brag about having such a culturally-relevant center and focus if your students are mostly going to be taught from the perspective of white people? Why do you wax on so eloquently about how many of your graduates go on to teach in local schools where we have 99% Native American students when they've only had contact with Native American instructors twenty percent of their entire college years? How can you certify these are culturally-relevant practices and education when you are not a Native person, don't teach from a Native perspective, don't hire Native instructors, and don't require your students to take more courses from Native instructors?

Yeah, it is about perspective. About point of view. About authenticity. You really should lose your accreditation and your certification and your job. You suck.

"If human equality is to be forever averted--if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently--then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity." George Orwell, 1984

I've been reading a lot of dystopian fiction lately and thinking how it's research for this story that wants to come forward. The only problem is that the dystopia I live in interferes with the natural flow of other stories' ability to emerge.

Whining

2011-08-11T14:48:00.000-05:00

So, in order to keep my job/be considered for better jobs/be fully qualified, I need to get into a master's program. I don't know what kind of master's. Probably English or an MFA in Creative Writing. I'm just feeling really unmotivated about the whole thing now. I'm not sure I want to be a creative writer (like, as a career), and I'm not sure I want to be an English teacher, seriously. I'm good at what I do, yes I could be better, but I don't want the expense and to spend the extra time trying to jump through hoops to satisfy some accreditation agency or the higher-up mucky mucks where I work in order to get this degree that is just as useless as a bachelor's degree and that won't garner anyone more respect (or even much more money) where I work. Really, the main reason I can see for getting a master's degree is for my children. They're the best reason, but in order to get a master's degree I'll have to spend money, significant money, and that would take away from the kids' college educations.
I looked at the salaries for people with master's degrees where I work. I didn't mean to, but they printed out on the printer in my computer lab (we can't tell where things are being printed from, but all the printers on campus are networked so sometimes something someone prints in another building will come chugging out of our printer in the lab). So, the newest employee hired here with a master's degree makes $31,300. That's five thousand per year more than I make. Is it because she has a master's degree? Sure. But making the same amount is a person who has worked here for fifteen years and who only has a bachelor's degree. Granted, this other person always feel paranoid that she's going to lose her job, but she still makes THE SAME AMOUNT as an entry level employee with a master's degree. Not only that, but another person in my department just got her master's degree. They are paying her 78 cents more per hour than they were before, or roughly a $1688 raise.
And I look at these MFA programs and the cost of tuition--$10,000 a year. I don't have $10k a year. If I had $10k a year extra I'd have to use it to send my children to college and/or pay for other expenses. Like, consider the fact that we've been homeless for four years, we're supporting ten people, my husband is constantly in and out of the hospital for medical care related to his dialysis, and the fact that the price of everything is going up while a recession bears down on us...even with the supplement from faculty development I might be able to get from our university, I'd still have to pay more than $3k of my own money or more per year to get this degree.
I know, these all sound like excuses and my reasoning on them isn't even that good. It would be great to make more money, even as little as $1600 more per year. It would be great to make $31,300 a year like that other person who they hired instead of me because she has a master's degree. It would be awesome to not be paranoid I'm going to lose my job. I'm just feeling kind of overwhelmed by the complicated process of getting into graduate school, trying to find the money to pay for it, and all the extra work that would be required once I did get into graduate school. Bleh.

It's our four year anniversary. We can't afford to go anywhere or do anything. I'll probably have a glass of wine later and whine about how broke we are. I have to admit, I'm kind of surprised we made it this far, especially after that rocky first year (first few weeks, really). And that rocky second year where Alan spent six weeks in the hospital And the rocky third year where I had a job I hated making less than minimum wage...and year four, all the deaths and illnesses in our family. Maybe year five will be much, much better. We can hope, right?

Chapter 5: Being Indian at a Tribal College

2011-08-06T11:01:00.001-05:00

One of the things that continually frustrates me about where I work is that the Indian people are complicit in the oppression. For example, I've heard one of the reasons I didn't get the job I applied for last December had to do with someone (a secretary) saying I never come to work. I believe I know where that comes from. My assumption is rather complicated.

When I was attending a National Writing Project meeting a few years ago as a co-director of our local writing project, we had a whole group of teachers with us participating in a special initiative called Project Outreach Network. We had to come up with a plan for how we were going to conduct inquiry at our site. There were five of us there, four Indians, one non-Indian. Somehow during the week-long meeting we got into a fight, and one of the Indian teachers who was older than me said something to the effect that I should not be one of the co-directors. And for the first time I came up against a race issue among my own people in which, basically, once someone of your own race casts you in a role, they don't like it when you leave that role. They don't like you to leave the little box where they've sorted you. Garbage men cannot become city councilors. Poor, single mothers cannot become directors of significant grants, and, for the purposes of my writing here, support staff at tribal colleges cannot become faculty. When you look at our tribal college you'll notice that a majority of the Indian staff are support staff, while a majority of the white staff are faculty. The few Indian faculty we have are held to a different standard, a rather low standard, of professionalism. We are labeled as flighty, never there, lazy, uneducated, unprofessional. Even at our own institutions we don't get a fair deal.

The assumption that I was "never at work" didn't have any basis in fact. I was there for all my classes and taught them for the full three hours, and I was there for all of my scheduled office hours. I just wasn't there for the full 80 hour week that support staff (like secretaries) are supposed to be there, hence the hyperbolic comment that I was "never there." I was there, far more than many faculty. I was working, doing research on future and current classes. I was there providing support to students who weren't even my own students in the computer lab that serves as my office (because I'm Indian and I apparently don't deserve the respect of having my own office, I have to share a computer lab with students and provide writing and tutoring support to them, unlike my colleagues in the same building and across the whole campus). I wouldn't mind providing the tutoring, computer assistance and paper writing support I provide if other faculty in my department were held to the same standard. They are not. Other faculty send students to me and tell them I'll help them without offering to help their own students.

Despite nearly forty years of providing education on the Rosebud Reservation, little has changed in education on the Rosebud Reservation. People still expect the whites to be the experts and the assumption remains that educated Indians must have scammed someone to attain their jobs. I don't know how that can be changed. It's agonizing to try educating my students about how great their future will be when they have an education when I know it not to be true. When you get an education, you are still going to be Indian and nothing is going to change regarding fairness. Especially among your own people. Especially among your own people. Nothing is going to change among your own people.

Tour de fleece yarn

2011-08-03T13:57:00.001-05:00

Tour de fleece yarn, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I never did keep up with updated my Tour de Fleece posts because it got to be a bother spinning for a couple hours every day and then spending another hour photographing and blogging and forum posting about it all. So, here they are, my results from 20 days of spinning during the 2011 Tour de Fleece. Left to right: Shetland, Falkland, Falkland, Corriedale, Blue Faced Leicester, and Blue Faced Leicester. I can't remember the yardage of each individual batch, but it's something like 1600 yards total or about 2 miles of spun plied yarn. Since this yarn is all double plied, it's about 4 miles of spun singles.

Notes from the Computer Lab

2011-07-25T15:23:00.000-05:00

There's this girl who comes to the lab every day and spends hours playing around on the internet. She's about 25-26 years old, medium height, short black hair she wears in a stick-uppy ponytail on top of her head, always dressed casually in old shorts, t-shirt and sandals. She looks at YouTube videos and shopping websites online.

Recently she showed me some photos of babies that she printed on our lab printer. Well, I thought they were babies until she explained they are realistic baby dolls. They're supposed to be so real you can't tell the real babies from the fake. And she tells me her grandma is going to buy one for her. She's got several pictures and shows me the ones she's ordered.

Several days go by. Some days her family comes to pick her up at the lab--her mother (or grandmother?), brother and some younger kids which aren't hers--other days she leaves on her own. She's constantly talking about these dolls, or on some days she's completely silent.

Today she showed up looking quite tired and worn out, and she was pushing a stroller. Inside? Yes, two fake babies. They aren't as realistic as they look in the photos and are in fact quite a bit larger than a newborn baby would be, but they are dolls. And she's driving them around in a stroller with a blanket over the front to shield them from the sun. I didn't even comment.

Relay for Life in Second Life

2011-07-16T14:57:00.001-05:00

Relay for Life in Second Life, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Doing the RFL again this weekend in SL. This will be my seventh RFL, because I did a couple laps my first year in SL, which was just a few months after I started SL, and have done it every year thereafter. This year I'm lapping in memory of Madame Maracas (Julia Hernandez), a dear friend who died last year of cancer. Also, Bear, another friend (and wonderful musician) from SL who died of cancer last year. Adding those two to the list of relatives who've died from cancer and those who have survived.

spinning

2011-07-09T21:53:00.001-05:00

spinning, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

This is all the yarn I've spun over the past few months, most of it done the past week and a half.

TdF Day 8

2011-07-09T21:18:00.001-05:00

TdF Day 8, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

338 yards Falkland in Americana colorway. Spun and plied over 3 days on my Matchless spinning wheel.

TdF July 7 and 8

2011-07-09T12:06:00.002-05:00

TdF July 7 and 8, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I didn't want to take pictures on the 7th and 8th, though I did spin both days, for about an hour each day. I've got 4.0 oz. of Falkland all spun up. You can see the amount on the bobbins is uneven (less on one than the other), so plying these together presents a problem: I'm going to run out of yarn on one bobbin before I run out on the other bobbin, and I won't be able to continuously ply all of this unless I figure out how to get more yarn on the bobbin with the smaller amount...or if I learn a new plying technique. There is a technique called Navajo plying, where you just ply your singles back on themselves and end up with a 3-ply yarn. People use this method to preserve color separations better, like if you have a rainbow striped yarn, you can make sure the reds stay with red and greens with green, etc. rather than all mixed up and end up with a muddy-colored skein of yarn. I wanted to do this yarn 2-ply because I am excited to see how the colors look together when they're mixed up. But, that's not going to be possible, I guess. Lesson learned: plan ahead. :)

Tour de Fleece Day five

2011-07-07T00:17:00.001-05:00

Tour de Fleece Day five, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Not much accomplished today, but it's more than was on this bobbin yesterday. Did some plying, too, on the spindle, but no pics of that for now.

Postcard from Second Life.

2011-07-06T23:06:00.001-05:00

Postcard from Second Life., a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I used to spend a lot of time buying houses and decorating and retexturing things in SL. I haven't done that in a long time. Now we've got pieces of furniture from old decorating schemes and some new stuff I don't even remember buying rezzed on our land in a house Barnesworth gave to us for our wedding. Trying to figure out when SL stopped being fun.

Day 4 TdF

2011-07-05T23:25:00.001-05:00

Day 4 TdF, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Partial bobbin of red, white and blue Polwarth wool (there's some yellow and orange and purple in there, even some green. The color is called "Americana"). Might be half an ounce here. I didn't spin very long tonight. Was tired from work.

DAY 2 TDF

2011-07-04T21:37:00.001-05:00

DAY 2 TDF, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Eight oz. Falkland. I actually spun most of the right hand bobbin on the first day of TdF, then filled it up and did the whole left hand side bobbin on Day 2 (I spent HOURS at the wheel). I really am enjoying my spinning daily, though. I've not knitted anything in days...

DAY 3 TdF

2011-07-04T21:32:00.001-05:00

DAY 3 TdF, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

338 yards two-plied BFL plied on my KCL spindle. This stuff is soft. Need to find something cuddly to make with it later.

TdF Day 1 spindle spun

2011-07-03T10:42:00.001-05:00

TdF Day 1 spindle spun, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I guess I'll post on the blog once for the wheel spinning and once for the spindle spinning each day for TdF. That's going to be a lot of posts, fair warning. :)

Day 1 TdF Wheel spun

2011-07-03T10:06:00.002-05:00

Day 1 TdF, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

One or two ounces. I'm not really sure how to measure that once it's on the bobbin. I love my Matchless.

Joining in the Tour de Fleece

2011-07-02T01:17:00.002-05:00

tdf, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

...which is a sort of commitment to spin on a spindle or spinning wheel every day during the Tour de France, which goes July 2-24, 2011. It's a yarn/fiber thing. I'll post pictures of my spinning from every day of the TdF (hopefully. I kinda suck at commitments, as you probably know from my New Year's Resolution posts every year.)

Camp Loopy #1 Shawl completed

2011-06-25T22:19:00.002-05:00

Camp Loopy #1 Shawl completed, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Gave the shawl to my 11 yr. old since she has a dress that exactly matches the colors, right down to the stripes, and it's more of a scarf than a shawl. She <3s it almost as much as I do. :)

So, Camp Loopy is this sort of knitting camp for people on Ravelry. We don't actually go anywhere, we just stay home and knit using yarn from The Loopy Ewe, a seriously great yarn store. You order the yarn with a discount, you make a project with a few parameters, you finish the project and upload photos, and then you get a further credit on future yarn. If you finish three Camp Loopy projects this summer, you get a special prize of Wollmeise, which is German yarn that is completely ungettable. You CANNOT buy this yarn unless you are extremely very lucky, and then you pay the equivalent of your children's college funds to get it. (okay, I'm exaggerating). But anyway, I finished the first project, which was really hard for me because I have up to now kind of sucked at lace knitting.

Second Life

2011-06-22T09:20:00.001-05:00

Second Life, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Every time I log in to SL outside of my standing Thursday night party at my friend Scrimmy's, it seems like SL is glitchy. Today I logged in and managed to change clothes, hair and skins, then teleported down from my sky platform to my house. Then I tried out the semi-new furniture and then got the notice of a region restart in 5 minutes. Last time I logged in the same happened, except with no notice. Just was trying out chairs and then CRASH! It was almost exactly the same experience last week as this week. It's like Groundhog Day in SL. Anyway, I made the attempt so feel like my monthly subscription fee was not quite as wasteful as if I hadn't even tried to stay in SL longer than fifteen minutes. Now tier fees...

More yarn finished

2011-06-21T00:22:00.001-05:00

0620112155.jpg, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Spun on my Spindler's Cottage spindle, which I love way more than is reasonable considering it's just some walnut wood and a metal hook :) The photo makes it look like the yarn is green, but it's actually ivory-colored. Just bad lighting and the reflected green of my duvet. I had done all the spinning on this wool two weeks ago, but I finally figured out how to spin the wool off onto my ball winder and then plied it back on the same spindle, which went really well. The wool is super soft. Not sure what to make with it, though, since it's only 146 yards of yarn. Still need to finish (wash and whack and dry) the yarn. I just needed to empty some spindles so I could continue spinning other stuff.

Grandma Betty

2011-06-15T11:42:00.000-05:00

Last Weds. my grandma came home from Rapid City hospital, but they kept her in Rosebud hospital because she had e.coli and had to be in IV antibiotics for a few more days. Then on Friday the doctor called all of us in and told us that there's nothing at all wrong with grandma other than not being able to get up and walk and her nausea, and he had no explanation for why she was in the hospital. That day she was disoriented, would have moments of catatonia-like behavior, didn't recognize some of her grandchildren, etc. I thought it looked like she had taken a bit too many drugs (they were alternating tramadol and morphine with tylenol for pain, plus lanacaine patches on her back), or she was having mini-strokes. But the doctor told us she's dying of a broken heart and there's nothing they can do for that.

So I went home and started the blue and yellow quilt because to me, a relative dying without a quilt is like nobody loved them. Grandma has plenty of quilts, but I've never made one for her (because she already had plenty), and she actually gave away all her quilts at my Aunt's funeral in April. This is a burial quilt.

On Saturday grandma rallied and was sitting up and talking. She couldn't eat because they were afraid it would go into her lungs. On Sunday and Monday she ate, and she ate a lot of stuff (hot fudge sundae, applesauce, a Subway sub...). It was CRAZY how much better she was (but this is concerning because in my experience people on the edge of death will rally and have a surprisingly good day or two and then die).

So then on Monday night the doctors called my mom and aunts back to the hospital and told them her respiration is wrong and they couldn't figure out how to bring it back up, so they sent her to Sioux Falls hospital after putting in a breathing tube. At Sioux Falls hospital they said Grandma has pneumonia (again) and a UTI and they put her on a ventilator. (I think Rosebud hospital should be sued and her doctor's license to practice should be taken away, but that's another story.)

So, anyway, I'm slowly quilting this quilt and it's absolutely gorgeous and soft (used wool batting because it's incredibly pleasurable to hand quilt wool batts). I think being prepared is going to help me this time if/when grandma goes. She's been sick and in and out of the hospital since last October. My aunt who died struggled to take care of her, but my aunt had epilepsy and three total shits for kids, and when my aunt died it was like my grandma gave up altogether.

Maybe I'm still numb from my aunt's death, because it's like I can't feel the grief I should be feeling knowing my grandma is this close to dying. Everyone else in the family fell apart on Friday when the doctor told them she's dying, but I just stayed calm and sat and held her hand all day and she would have little moments of lucidness (like telling my aunt she looked like she was ready to give the last rites because she was standing there holding her rosary all day). So I'm doing the last thing I can do for her, which is making this quilt in her favorite colors, and if she actually does get better, she'll just have a new quilt to put on her bed.

Current quilt

2011-06-13T08:15:00.001-05:00

0612111950.jpg, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Gorgeous French blue and buttery yellow. This is for my grandmother. Hopefully it will mend her broken heart. Started this Friday, finished the top Saturday, started quilting Sat. evening, continued on through Sunday, but only part of the star is completed. I am not up to my usual speed with this, but maybe I'm savoring the quilting on such a lovely quilt or maybe it's the urge to spin that is distracting me?

Grief is like this

2011-06-09T04:19:00.001-05:00

You spend days, weeks or a month even with that thought in the back of your mind, but it's not fully there, it's something you set aside to think about later. Yes, exactly like Scarlett O'Hara. Then one night you lie down to sleep and you drift off and dream. You dream you are sitting with your family in the living room and all your children and cousins and aunts and grandma are around you. That thought is still there, but you are waiting to think about it later, tomorrow. And you and your aunt are sitting next to each other, rocking in the big armchairs, while everyone is discussing something important. Maybe it's an event you all will be hosting together, a dinner or a holiday, and the whole family will be there. And you catch yourself talking about something you had forgotten you weren't supposed to talk about. Maybe it's Easter. But you catch it only after it slips out of your mouth. And then everyone pauses a second and goes on. Someone taps on a box full of cookies. The cookies are sugar cookies painted beautifully with royal icing. The cookies are shaped like animals, and they are suspended on lollipop sticks and held up by putting each stick into a styrofoam base. But they are old cookies. They were meant for some other occasion, and even though they are delicate and beautiful, they are old, too. They won't hold up for the party you're planning. And then you turn around to look at your aunt sitting in her rocking chair beside you. And you suddenly realize in your dream that she's gone. She's been gone for awhile. She's gone forever. But she's sitting right there, her spirit still suspended around her, around you, with all of you. But she's gone, you know, and blackness descends just as you sink into the grief again. And you wake up crying. I can't catch my breath, because it's like it happened all over again, just now. I can't even believe she's gone.

June socks

2011-06-07T00:17:00.001-05:00

June socks, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

Knit Picks Felici yarn in Botany colorway. Super soft! Using my new Signature needles, which are awesome.

My newest spindle

2011-06-04T23:37:00.001-05:00

0604112308.jpg, a photo by Sansarya Caligari on Flickr.

I just got this in the mail yesterday. The guy who I ordered from convo'd me to tell me he grew up around where we live. I love little miracles like that. He's in his 80s now and makes a damn fine spindle! It's walnut, all handcrafted from the same piece of wood, shaft and wheel both. It weighs about 1.89 oz. I spun the wool he included with the spindle.
It was a loverly day. I did some laundry and hung it on the line. The weather was absolutely perfect today.

Most recent spindle spun

2011-06-01T18:54:00.002-05:00

Most recent spindle spun, originally uploaded by Sansarya Caligari.

Spinning this now on my Avi Wasserman pearwood spindle. I'm managing to spin for about an hour every evening, usually longer. Really liking this spindle, but I think I need something a bit heavier to handle heavier loads. I finished this much in a couple days and it's already too heavy for the spindle.

Can you tell I've just learned how to blog from my Flickr account? I also learned how to email camera phone pics to Flickr and then blog from those. Constantly amazed :)

Nat's quilt

2011-06-01T18:30:00.001-05:00

Nat's quilt, originally uploaded by Sansarya Caligari.

Quilt I made for my daughter's favorite teacher, Natalie, because she tied Sheridan's eagle feather on for graduation a couple weeks ago. Again, another quilt I made start to finish in one week.

Sheridan's graduation quilt

2011-06-01T18:26:00.001-05:00

the quilt, originally uploaded by Sansarya Caligari.

I finished it the night before her graduation. It only took me one week to cut, sew and quilt this full sized quilt for her. She chose the colors, and I really love the background color because it's the exact same shade of the lilacs that are in full bloom in our yard right now.

Socks for Jody

2011-06-01T18:24:00.001-05:00

Sans socks, originally uploaded by Sansarya Caligari.

These are Hermione socks designed by Erica Lueder based on the Harry Potter character. She's designed socks for about every Harry Potter character and I've got lots of sock yarn piling up, so I'm working my way through the books with socks. :D

Constantly Amazed

2011-05-27T11:01:00.000-05:00

It's been a rough month or two for us here. In between deaths and storms and illnesses and grief, I was working on completely losing it when someone amazed me. It's like that, though. Sometimes you get ten days of grey, soggy days and then the lilacs bloom.

Work, life, etc.

2011-05-04T15:46:00.000-05:00

Kind of a depressing, meh week so far. In addition to grieving, it's the last week of classes here and I'm down to seven students (from an original 36). I'm giving tests and course evaluations, but it doesn't seem like it's worth even bothering, seriously.

Grey's birthday was yesterday. Pizza, soda, spicy chicken wings, chocolate cake and ice cream. He's thirteen, and I can hardly believe my little boy is a teenager now. Besides hogging all the chicken wings to himself and inhaling two Mt. Dews, his first act was to spend four hours playing DragonAge 2 and then to make his Facebook page. We promised him he could add one curse word to his vocabulary when he was 13 (meaning he can say this word without fear of punishment from me, unless he says it when it's inappropriate). It was a pretty quiet evening. I wish I'd thought to buy salad stuff because at 3 AM I was hungry and regretting that I'd only eaten a couple slices of pizza for dinner.

I started new socks because my sock yarn came in today. The sock yarn color is called "Diving Board". The yarn is Knit Picks Stroll Multi.

I ordered from Knit Picks last week, and I was highly surprised the yarn arrived so fast. I'm making socks named after Hermione from Harry Potter, one of my favorite fictional characters. I know I already have a couple pairs of socks cast on, but I needed the pick me up today, I couldn't wait to try out the new yarn, and I'm getting to the end of my Sienna cardigan and it's starting to wear on me. The yarn is my Mother's Day gift from Alan and the kids (yeah, I picked it out and ordered it myself. This is the only way to assure oneself that one gets what one wants).

I also played some WoW last night. I don't know if I'm back like I was before (when WoW was my only real past time), but at least I leveled to 84 last night finally and finished up some achievements, and it felt good. I'm such a total carebear, though, that all the new quests and areas and activities are overwhelming for me especially because I'm on a PVP server. I don't want to switch servers because I love my guildies too much, but the PVP was really hindering my enjoyment of the whole thing, even to the point where I didn't want to alt-up and play on another server to get a break from the gankage. I just needed a break from the whole thing, maybe because I was a little pissy that WoW has gotten so big and there's so much to do and it's hard to decide whether to quest or work on reputation or grind mats for leveling professions or .... I'm still kind of shocked that there are people who make WoW their whole lives and know every little thing about the game. I'll never be one of those people, even though I love WoW like its one of my own children.

Other stuff: Have to take Alan to Rapid City again on Friday to get his dialysis port worked on, cleaned out, replaced or whatever. This will be the second week in a row, and we really can't afford the cost of gas and food to go there and back. It's a 3 hr. drive and our van is not good on gas. I wonder if the doctors and dialysis clinic realize that a trip to Rapid City for this stuff costs us the equivalent of a week's meals for our family? It can't be avoided, though, because without dialysis he'd, well, die.

Not really into the Second Life thing much either. I think we need to drop some land and tier down to a small holding again because we are hardly there anymore, and the money we saved could be used for other things (like trips to Rapid to get ports cleaned).

Watching Game of Thrones on HBO every week, and I'm reading the series again, for the fifth or sixth time, not sure. We're also watching the ending episodes of Stargate Universe. I still cannot believe SyFy has cancelled the show.

Reading:
A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin
Free-range Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
The Book of Awakening: Having the life you want by being present in the life you have by Mark Nepo (I'm reading this because it's an Oprah recommendation, but a lot of it is too new agey for me, lot of hooey and it feels needy to even read it, but oh well. It's daily meditations, and I've been wanting to get into meditation, esp. now since my aunt had her heart attack and we know heart attacks run in the family) (does this sound like the kind of book Bridget Jones would read?)

I'm kind of kicking myself because I have two big projects due a month and a half ago, and I'm still working on them. I should have finished them in February (one of them was finished in Feb. but they came back with a ton of changes in mid-March and I basically have to redo the whole damn thing for the third time, and I haven't gotten to it yet). They've already paid me for both projects, and I need to sit down and grind it out, I just can't seem to get into it. I am soooo ready for the break I have coming up between when Spring semester ends and my vacation starts. I'll be off from work from mid-May to July 1. So, so ready for this break.

Easter

2011-05-03T11:08:00.001-05:00

A week ago, on Easter morning, my grandmother called and told my mom that my Aunt Diana had had a seizure and passed out and had no pulse. She'd called the ambulance and wanted us to meet her at the hospital. We raced around getting ready to go.

We'd just put our Easter hams and baked beans in the oven and were discussing what else we were having for dinner. I was nursing a bad cold, Alan had bronchitis and had just been to the hospital the day before for antibiotics. My kids are teens (or nearly) and not really into the whole Easter basket thing anymore, other than the voracious love for chocolate bunnies and Reese's peanut butter eggs. But, we got ready and my Aunt Barb and her daughter Carrie came to pick us up. Before we got out of the driveway they called again and wanted me to pick up Bobbie and Randee and Randee's kids, Dyl and Pacie, because they were stuck at home with no gas. So, I got in my van, drove to town and went to Randee's house. I met Bobbie on the way and she told me they had borrowed money for gas and would meet us at the hospital. So, I took off for the hospital, stopping to get some gas myself.

Before I reached the turn for the hospital, my Aunt Steph called and told me they were going to Parmelee because the ambulance hadn't gotten to the hospital yet, they were still working on Aunt Diana at home. She told me they hadn't revived her yet. It had already been forty minutes since my grandma first called. I knew what my Aunt Steph was saying right then, and I started crying. I called Bobbie and Randee and told them to go to Parmelee because they hadn't revived their mom yet. I drove 75 mph to Parm, smoking the whole way, crying. My Aunts and mom and Carrie were right ahead of me, barely half a mile.

When I got there and saw the ambulances still parked in the driveway, I knew. I knew before that, but it confirmed it for me. I parked my van in their vast driveway, already filled with cars, and ran inside through the front door because all the people were at the back door. I could already hear my Aunt Barb screaming, "NO! No! Diana! No!" and sobbing and my mom and Aunt Steph crying and screaming. I got inside and saw her, lying on the floor, a tube sticking out of her neck, and the EMTs were packing up their bags. She was gone.

I don't really remember the next few hours. We waited for the coroner. We tried to get Randee to come to the house and she wouldn't open the door to my cousin Bob, who was pounding on her door to drive her to Parmelee. Bobbie arrived and my mind still hadn't fully accepted what was going on and her shock and grief were more than I could bear. Jordan, Diana's only son, broke down and sobbed, trying to move her off the floor. My grandma wouldn't leave her bed, she just stayed in her room, crying, "My baby, oh, my baby!"

The EMT told us she hadn't died of a seizure (Aunt Diana had had epilepsy since she was ten), but what was probably a massive heart attack. We waited and waited for the coroner to arrive, and when she did she pronounced her dead of natural causes (heart attack). Then the ambulance took her to the hospital to wait for the mortuary. And we all drove there and waited.

Aunts, cousins, Uncle Bob, other relatives. We kept trying to call my sister Mary, who was in Sioux Falls for Easter with her husband's family. My brother Rich was already on his way home from Rapid City. We waited from 2:30 to 6 PM for the mortuary to arrive and take her body. I finally got hold of my sister and she left immediately to come home. Randee, Bobbie and Jordan, Diana's children, were with us, and none of us knew how to console them because everyone had lost a sister, aunt, cousin, daughter, and for me, one of my other mothers.

My Aunt Diana was barely 16 years older than me, but she helped raise me. She was always there, a part of my life since I was born. We all lived with my grandma until she got a job in Lower Brule and moved away. Then my mom, brother and I lived with my Aunt Diana in grandma's house until Diana married my Uncle Joe when I was eight. When I was nine, ten and eleven I lived with Joe and Diana because my mom was going to school. My brother and I were her kids before she had kids, and when I was a teenager she let me come and work in her country store as a cashier. She taught me to drive. After I'd had kids I went to their house every Sunday for dinner, and every week she'd let me use their laundry mat to wash clothes. Before the store burned down, there were several holidays when she would slip me $50 or $100 to help pay for Christmas presents or Easter baskets or fireworks. She was one of the few family members who was nice to my husband and liked to visit with him. There was never a time when my Aunt Diana wasn't a close part of my life, until now.

My sister Mary and I sort of took charge of the wake and funeral. My cousins were too numb and grief stricken to do much, so we took care of the kids and cooked, stayed with grandma, cooked more, planned the food, bought groceries, arranged for flowers and balloons, etc. I wrote her eulogy and obituary and finished a quilt for the coffin because I refused to allow my aunt to be buried without something from me, and every last stitch I put in that quilt I regretted that I'd never given her a quilt while she was alive. When I finally finished the quilt on Wednesday afternoon I broke down and sobbed as I put it over the coffin. You never really imagine you're making something beautiful, taking careful tiny stitches, and this last thing is the last thing you will ever be able to do for your mother, your aunt, your uncle or cousin or friend.

The funeral was last Thursday, and it was a beautiful day. I can't even express how sad the preceding days were, except that we were so busy getting ready for the wake and funeral that it didn't hit me really hard until Saturday when I didn't have anything else to do for anybody. I cried all day Saturday.

When my kids were little I made their Halloween costumes every year. One year Sheridan, 5, was an angel and Cassidy, 3, was a butterfly. Except, it was windy that Halloween and cold, and Cassidy, walking along trying to trick or treat said, "If I take off my wings, Mom, I could be a worm." She had a set of antennae with her costume, and after trick or treating we went to my Aunt Diana's house and we left the antennae there. The next week when we were there for Sunday dinner, Aunt Diana was wearing the antenna and tried to convince Sher and Cass that she could contact my cousin Bobbie with the antenna. Every Sunday the same thing, she'd put on the antenna and say, "Let me call Bobbie, now, so she can come for dinner," and Bobbie would walk in the door minutes later. She also used to tell the kids on Thanksgiving that she'd killed Big Bird and she'd produce a huge turkey to show them. On Easter she'd say she'd shot at the Easter Bunny and told him to get off her lawn (she called him E.B.) "I saw that big bastard in my yard and I shot at that sucker!" she'd say, and my kids would laugh.

My Aunt Diana was a wonderful cook. We went to her house for every holiday when my kids were growing up, and there would be turkeys, hams, roast beef, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and homemade bread. She taught me to make homemade egg noodles and tuna noodle casserole and attempted to teach me to make her bread. For her wake I made the bean soup that my Uncle Joe taught me to make for when she was too sick to cook, and I made bread twice last week, using her recipe.

She was a joker, too, and her teasing has been with us all week as we hear her voice in the house, wake up believing she's there, shaking us, and I know she'll always be there, probably laughing at us. I know she wasn't ready to go. She still had grandchildren to raise, grandma to take care of, her yard to fix up, her garden. My heart is broken for her, for her kids and grandkids and her mother and for me, because I lost my mother. There will never be a day that I don't miss her.

Diana Rae Red Owl-Young

September 23, 1951-April 24, 2011

Food sovereignty, or, my ramblings on home gardening

2011-04-17T11:37:00.003-05:00

Our tribe, descendants of the people who declared they would never be farmers, is working with a Hutterite community near our rez to begin a food sovereignty movement. I would say the movement has already started with individual families on our reservation if the gardening craze is anything to go by, as we've seen the number of families who keep a vegetable garden grow significantly in the past ten years. Hopefully this works out because even though we can grow a small amount individually to supplement our diets, it's impossible to grow anything substantial because everyone has only small amounts of land available. Ten year plan is to turn what farmland there is here into large community gardens and to turn grazing land into bison-only ranching (meaning cattle ranchers would have to run bison instead of cattle and look at new markets for selling, basically changing the way ranching has been done in this area since reservations began.) What we can't produce ourselves, we would trade for with the Hutterites.

The problem, of course, is the short amount of time our leaders spend in office before everyone gets disgusted with them and votes them out (so legislation like declaring food sovereignty and agreements with anyone gets trampled and eventually thrown out). The other problem, of course, is our ancestors who said they'd never be farmers deliberately chose reservation land that was completely unsuitable for farming. Then the work starts all over again, with the citizens who want to use tribal government to improve our way of life and those who want to use tribal government for their own gain.

In any case, in my family we're going to turn our 2.5 acres into mostly garden this year. It won't be a good garden, yet, but in a couple years it could produce enough to substantially impact our grocery bill.
So looking at the problem with starting a "eat locally" movement on our reservation I'm going to first look at an "eat locally" movement in our own family.

I currently live with my four children and husband and my mother, sister and her husband and usually my nephew and niece are here. That's eleven people we feed on a daily basis, and our grocery bill is substantial. That's also eleven people who are available to help till our 2.5 acres, plant and take care of our garden. I'm going to add in my brother, who is living in Rapid City, but who has a master gardener certificate and who is working as a landscaper. He can help with a lot of this, even if he only visits once a month.

Additionally, we want to get a chest freezer, buy a bison and have it butchered and use that meat to replace our consumption of beef. Eventually we want to get chickens and maybe a goat or two (everyone is against my goat idea, and I admit, the mohair part of goat is the most interesting to me at the moment). Our diet as Native people prior to the reservation period was limited to deer and bison meat, fat and organs, what wild growing plants that could be harvested (wild onion, sage, turnips, ground potatoes, and possibly some kinds of greens, though not sure what), prairie fowl, fish, and what could be traded for (corn, for sure, and probably squash, since we used gourds for rattles). There were also "magic beans" (mice harvested them, and when we found a mouse cache of beans we'd take the beans and leave corn). My Lakota oral history professor, Ron Goodman, once told me that if I ever found a cache of mouse beans, he would give me $50k for a handful of them.

I've been keeping a garden for the past two years now, but only a small plot, about 3 feet by 10 feet. I've managed to grow a few cucumbers, some lettuce, green beans, zucchini and last year a bumper crop of roma tomatoes. Oh, and the lone pumpkin vine that took off and strangled half the garden before I figured out what it was doing and cut it back. We got about 6 pumpkins off that thing, but I learned to never plant pumpkins near other vegetables because they are killer beasts of the garden with sneaky little tendrils of vine that murder the other crops!

I've also grown a small herb garden in the house (cilantro, oregano, parsley, chives and basil) and in a pot on the porch (mint and basil). My cilantro and basil took over those crops and did really well, so they'll get their own pots this summer. My mint grew well, but the wind in July killed them, so I should have moved them to a safer place as soon as the wind started up. (Still learning here) I never managed to grow lavender, and I couldn't find a rosemary plant anywhere, so I'm still working on growing those.

This year we want to till the entire back yard and plant mostly corn, pumpkins and tomatoes and peppers. I've learned a lot about our soil here just experimenting with different plots, plus about pests. Last year everyone who had a garden that we knew said the grasshoppers and deer killed them off. I didn't have that problem, though we had grasshoppers and I did catch a few deer in my little garden in early days of autumn. What I did differently is fail to weed. I did this out of ignorance, mainly, because I didn't know what was weeds and what was plants at first. Since it took me so long to figure it out, the grasshoppers ate the weeds and left the plants alone. So, weeding isn't always a good solution and I had some weeds growing in my garden that grasshoppers like best.

As for the deer, my little garden plot is in front of the house, between the kitchen wall and the handicap ramp. I've no idea why a deer came that close to the house, except they were after the apples. We have two heavily producing apple trees (Jonathans, I believe), and the deer loved to come graze on what had fallen on the ground last year. My garden, about 10 yards from the fallen apples, was probably just a random choice by those deer.

The plan this year has involved more of the family than when I started two years ago when I did mostly all the work. Last year I had the boys dig up my little garden plot with me. The little girls helped me plant. I did most of the watering, and my sister and the little girls helped with harvesting. My mom attempted her own little garden last year, but the wind took it, and she didn't pay much attention to it after she planted. It was a waste of about $50 in plants. I watered it, but the location was unfortunate because there was no wind shelter. The wind is hell on gardens unless you water deep, I've learned. Also, watering during a windy day is bad for the plants. They get sunburned and windburned at the same time, and the water helps them "open up" so the wind damage goes deeper (I think, this is my theory). I'd always heard you can't water when it's windy, but I had to try it myself to learn that lesson.

This year I have buy-in on more of the gardening duties. My sister is highly motivated to do a garden (I don't know why. It's like asking why the wind blows. She could change her mind mid-summer and I'll be left with a giant mess of garden to take care of myself). My mother claims to be motivated, but if her garden from last year is any indication, she'll start out good and lose interest fast, so I should take that into consideration as well. For the boys (they are 12 and 13 yrs old), I have the best motivation: no computers until the chores are done and since it's summer there are more chores because there's no school. Since they intend to spend their summer on the PS3, XBox and playing WoW, they'll do what I say. For the little girls (both 11), they pretty much do what I tell them to do, as long as one doesn't slack off. Well, if they're competing then the one slacking off just makes the other one look good, so they'll try to keep up the "good deeds" until they mutually agree to go do something else. Their motivation is trickier (girls are always tricky), and will involve a mix of bribes, coercion and shaming. Yes, I am planning the manipulation of my work force. Sue me. As for the older two, I'm hoping they'll both get jobs this summer, and if not, their entire motivation is they want to help take my burden so I'm not too worried about their help.

Anyway, we're planning to have my brother come and we'll take turns tilling. I already know the tomatoes grow well here, as do cucumbers and zucchini and green beans. And pumpkins, if you control their meandering. In the past two years I've learned a lot more about zucchini from watching Food Network shows, so I know to harvest them when they're tiny and to even use some of the flowers for food. Only two of us like zucchini, though, so I'll probably only plant one and baby it along as I can.

We haven't grown corn here in years, though my mother says her husband's corn did really well when they kept the crows off it. "One for the gopher, one for the crow, one for the worms and one to grow," is a refrain going through my mind. Our problem will more likely be mice and deer in our garden, and grasshoppers and wind. A big garden will mean big swarms of grasshoppers, and my intention is to never use any insecticides or bad chemicals. Do I weed, or not? Plus, do the kinds of weeds grasshoppers like (the kind that grew in my garden last year) grow where we plan to plant our garden? I guess we'll find out.

Last year, even though I had so many tomatoes, I didn't can anything. My mother canned some apple butter, but I should have done better myself. I even went to a canning workshop and was given a complete canning set (pot, jar lifter, Blue Book, measuring cup, funnel, jars, lids, etc.) I just couldn't get motivated to do it, even though I specifically learned how to can tomatoes! So this year I have to do much better. My cucumbers didn't produce a lot (maybe 10 cukes all year), but what it did produce was really delicious. I got huge cukes, though, and I should probably try to plant pickle cucumbers this year. My middle daughter loves pickles. I also want to do a salsa garden. The romas would be excellent for that, provided I can grow them bigger. I've not tried onion, so that's a goal, as is garlic and peppers. We did have a few jalepenos last year, but they were buried under the huge pumpkin leaves and I missed them before they were killed off by the vines. There was one tiny, lone jalepeno left.

Maybe what I should do is plant smaller gardens and that will help me figure out what grows well when it's not contaminated by other plants? Or maybe figure out what plants grow well together, like how my cukes and tomatoes did well together last year? So, I could have one garden plot with just cukes and tomatoes and another with peppers and onion. One with corn only. One with pumpkin only. I'd like to try potatoes, also, and put the zucchini by itself.

This first year of turning new ground for the garden I expect to be another learning experience and to get less than expected from what they call a "sod garden". Next year should be a little better, and the year after that should be excellent, barring extreme weather and pests. I'm going to keep recording what I learn about each thing until I know as much as possible about keeping a good garden in our yard. Hopefully this first year, which I expect to be disappointing, won't turn my sister and my troops off gardening altogether. The best motivation, of course, is that I plan to start a savings account and spend less on food to fund it. Hunger is the best motivation, and if they won't help with the garden, they'll have to eat beans.

Tuesdays

2011-04-12T09:59:00.001-05:00

Tuesdays are supposed to be my morning to stay home and write. It's the only weekday morning when Alan is at dialysis, my kids are at school, mom is at work, and I'm not teaching a class. Thursday mornings when Alan is at dialysis I have to teach a morning class. Saturday mornings when he's at dialysis my kids are home and Grey is somehow an early riser on Saturdays and a reluctant riser every other morning of the week. I think it's because he knows Alan is at dialysis on Saturday mornings and there is a free computer he could use in those short hours while Al is gone.
And there are good reasons why I can't write when Alan is home. Alan sleeps in most mornings except dialysis days, so you'd think I'd be able to write in the early mornings while he's sleeping, but I can't do it. He's a snorer. And there's the farting. And the rolling around moaning. Sometimes there's talking, like when I'm supposed to be doing something and he knows it (like getting the kids up for school), so he interrupts me every couple minutes to remind me I need to be doing something else besides writing.So, he's not really sleeping in so much as refusing to get up while being totally annoying.
Or, like on Sundays when I could sit down to write and he's sleeping in and I have no major responsibilities, he gets up because it seems like he thinks every time I'm online is when he should also be online...reading over my shoulder. Maybe he hears my fingers going faster and with more force on the keyboard and thinks, "something is up!" and he'll interrupt to ask me what I'm doing, and I might say "Writing," and he'll get up to see what I've written. Honestly, I could sit next to him and blog and if he knows it he'll go read it as soon as I hit publish.
My typical situation when I sit down at the computer is this: Alan is sitting next to me because his computer is right next to mine on the desk in our room. The monitors touch and we fight for elbow room, that's how close they are. And he likes to show me things or read things out loud to me, even knowing I have no powers of concentration on more than one thing when I'm online. I'm highly focused on other things, so I don't pay attention when he reads me something, and he gets mad, we have a little fight. Lots of little fights build up to a Big Sulk...you get the picture?
So, when I attempt to write sitting next to him, he's reading over my shoulder, and when I tell him this bothers me it leads to Big Sulk. Nobody could write that way. And predictably, when he reads this (and he will) he'll have a Big Sulk and then "allow me writing time," but the whole time I'm having writing time he'll be sitting with bated breath, waiting for my writing time to be over so he can read what I've written, and I'll know it so I'll self-edit (unlike what I'm doing here, btw) so that I don't have the face the unpleasantness of his reading what I've just written that I'm still unsure about and that he'll want to critique. That sounds really egotistical, but from experience that's what will happen. And if I don't want to share, another Big Sulk.
Basically, I don't have privacy, and this is the worst thing about being married, to me. The lack of fucking privacy. This is not to say I don't like being married, but the adjustment from being a very private person to suddenly feeling like I have to share every fucking thing about me and my inner being is just not working. And, this is not a good writing environment.
Also, if my kids see me sitting at my computer they think it's Bug Mom Time. I really can't get over how they can ignore me sitting in the kitchen for hours, knitting, reading, quilting, cooking, doing dishes, cleaning, but as soon as I sit down at the computer there they are, insisting on "Us-Time". Ignore them and it's Big Sulk again.
So this semester I scheduled my Tuesday mornings so I didn't have office hours. Tuesdays are it. Really, they are the only day of the week when everyone is supposed to be gone taking care of their responsibilities. (Well, Jill sleeps till past noon and so do Paul and Mary). It was the perfect plan. I could have four uninterrupted hours of writing one day a week and maybe get some work done, like on the newsletter I have due a month ago and on the essay I need to write to apply to MFA programs (also due a month ago) or just on the things I want to write, like the short stories I've been working on the plots for in my mind over the past few years, or the poems that I have half-written in my journals. Or half a dozen other things.
But nooooooo, my mom decided since I'm staying home on Tuesday mornings, she is too. So, instead of getting up, getting ready for work and agreeing to drive the kids to school for me (which would save me about 25 minutes of drive time and add 25 minutes of writing time to my few precious hours a week), she sits around in her nightgown playing FarmVille and reminding me how late they are for school. She could be helpful, but she wants a morning off a week too, knowing that Tuesdays are my morning off. Also, since she knows Alan is at dialysis she thinks it is okay to come in my room and bug me while I'm writing. So she'll come in and visit for half an hour or nag me about something. Basically, it's like having another kid or husband around.
I know it. I sound so ruthless and mean here, but this is the honest truth: people really annoy the hell out of me when I'm writing. Writing is a process, yes, but it's also a situation where you have to be in The Zone. You have to be comfortable and you have to have your environment exactly right. I have a whole week long writing exercise I do with my students where they identify their writing rituals and their best writing environment. Like, I know for sure that I can't write without my cigarette dangling out of my mouth or in the ashtray next to me. I don't know why this is, but it's the sad truth. I need a cigarette to write. Hence why writing at home alone is a big deal. Not just because I need the cigarette and home is the last place on earth we're allowed to smoke, but because I need the privacy and the uninterrupted time and mornings are a good time for me to write because my brain isn't thinking about dinner and who's doing the dishes and how badly the kids are doing in school and who I need to call to take care of things like my daughter's graduation or my son's being bullied or my other daughter flunking English 10 because her teacher was a douche...
So I said, "Fuck it," and I came to work this morning. And nobody is here in my little writing lab on the prairie and it is totally quiet and peaceful. Peaceful writing environment in a no smoking zone. Fucking irony, we haz it.

First Yarn

2011-04-11T10:50:00.001-05:00

I went home Friday after a visit to the hardware store for pvc and connectors and I made a niddy noddy. What is a niddy noddy? It's a thing to wind skeins of yarn onto after you've spun and plied your yarn. I have only three spindles, and one of them was loaded with blue laceweight yarn (and not finished spinning it.) One was loaded with singles, which wasn't finished either. The third looked like this:

So, I couldn't spin anymore yarn of this fiber until I'd got the plied yarn off the spindle, which necessitated a niddy noddy. I found instructions for the thing online and seeing how simple (and cheap) it was to make one, I visited the hardware store and bought the supplies, went home and made Alan cut up the pvc for me, and snapped it all together. Then I wound off my plied yarn, washed and whacked it and ended up with this:

My first skein of real yarn. It's only about 52 yards (most skeins of yarn you buy are at least 85 yards). I don't think I whacked it quite enough either, or I should have let it dry with a weight dragging it down (because the plies look like they could come apart pretty easily), but whatever. It's yarn! And I made it! And now I'm on to the next spindle full of more yarn.

This spinning thing is addictive.

I'll be damned

2011-04-06T15:02:00.002-05:00

I finally got Ravenclaw.

Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?

Wednesday--The Box of Words

2011-04-06T11:19:00.000-05:00

I'm at work and it's quiet and spring-timey outside. I wore my new sweater today (picture later). It's the first adult-sized sweater I've ever made, and it took only a month or so to make it (even though it's huge. As a rule, all first sweaters are far too large for their makers. It's like the Law of Knitting, or something. "All first sweaters will be four sizes too large to teach the art of correctly sizing and conserving yarn."). I made three baby sweaters a long time ago, two crocheted and one knit. Since then I've started and never finished making an adult-sized sweater. So, this is officially my "First Sweater", which I made from the book Charmed Knits by Alison Hansel. (it's a book of knits for Harry Potter fans. I made myself a Weasley Sweater).

So, anyway, I'm wearing my new sweater. It's a heather-y ocean blue color (because this is South Dakota and like all New Yorkers wear only black, all South Dakotans only wear blue). I'm sipping an Americano from Noella's and eating a glazed donut from Turtle Creek Crossing and watching Eat.Pray.Love. on Netflix. I love my life some days. Not every day, but today I love my life.

There's this scene in Eat.Pray.Love where Julia Roberts is at a party and she goes to help her friend change a diaper and she asks the friend when she knew she wanted a baby. The friend gets this guilty look on her face and confesses she didn't know but she's had "the box" since before she even met her husband. "The box" is filled with baby clothes, gorgeous little dresses and hand knits and soft, soft flannel gowns. Julia says she has a box just like it, but it's filled with National Geographic magazines. This made me wonder what's in my box?

I could say quilting notions (I do have a box filled with threads and needles and quilting thimbles and marking pencils and pins). I could say yarn (I have several boxes filled with wools and wool-silk blends and acrylic). I could say fabric, because yes, there are several boxes of fabric I've bought over the past three our four years (When my house burned down I lost more than a dozen fabric and quilt-filled boxes). I could say books. I have boxes and boxes of books, books stacked in my DVD cupboard and in my closet and on my bedside table and let's just agree to think of the Kindle as its own "box of books", only more compact. (I <3 my Kindle).

But the one consistent thing I've had since before I ever married and before I thought for sure what I was going to do with my life, before children, is writing. I have been a writer since the first grade. I've always had this box with journals and notebooks and tiny journals in my purse with ideas jotted down, poems that popped out while I was driving, words filling the white spaces of old envelopes and grocery store receipts and napkins and occasionally even on toilet paper. And sometimes it was a box that caused guilt because I'd write things about people that I could never say to them, things I didn't want anyone else to know, things I thought were so boring and tedious and still needed to be written and set free from my brain. I write things down and lose them, and I like to think of my words out there floating around in teh air like that plastic bag dancing in the breeze in the movie American Beauty. Or maybe those words are resting in landfills, some of them already biodegraded into the earth. It doesn't matter. I sent those words out there and they are part of the universe, no longer locked inside me.

I may never ever be published again, and maybe I'll never be published with my creative writing (poems, prose, stories, etc.), but I have got these words released and out of me. Maybe you think I'm thinking of the words like an infection or like pus stuck inside a blister, but really what I mean is: there are these words that form in my brain and I have to put them somewhere because they are like persistent things that swirl around and confuse my functioning until they are out of me, on a piece of paper or on this screen, stored away or just falling out of me so I can go on with things. I can't say these things all the time. I can only write them down and let them go. Sometimes I want to save the order the words are in, but mostly it's just a relief to get them out.

This blog has been my box for a few years now, ever since I stopped trusting that the words would be there in meatspace because my house and my box of words burned down four years ago, and I can't trust that method anymore. Some things in this blog I wouldn't want people to see, not people I know anyway, so I put my words here and I don't show those blogs to everyone. But they are here, preserved, waiting for me to revisit and figure out who I was five or six years ago, what I was thinking, look at how I've changed (or not), and try to make sense of myself.

What I'm reading:
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown (still)
A Song of Ice and Fire (rereading my favorite bits)
The Union Quilters by Jennifer Chiaverini
A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca (reading w/ my students)
Indigenizing the Academy by Devon Abbott Mihesuah
Dropped Dead Stitch by Maggie Sefton

We were watching the Camelot tv series on Showtime the other night and it made me want to re-read The Mists of Avalon, too, so I downloaded it from Amazon and I have it waiting.

What I'm knitting:
I have half a dozen pairs of socks started and unfinished. I pick up a sock project in the evening and work on it for awhile. Then I switch to spinning on my spindle

for a bit to stay in practice. Then I switch to the sweater (but this sweater is done so I've started another sweater, Brownstone, but I can't finish it until I get more yarn).

I'm also working on a kerchief, which I thought would be a quick project, but it's going on three weeks now and I'm still not finished. I keep losing my place in the pattern, and then the repeats don't work so I unravel. I'm making the kerchief in a yarn color called "Whipple blue". My grandmother's maiden name is "Whipple" and her favorite color is blue. I'll probably give it to her for Mother's Day.
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And I'm working on some lacy mitts, made with Shibui Knits yarn in this lovely dusty pastels colors. Picture doesn't do it justice. It's really a sweet yarn, and soft.

In memory of the four winds

2011-03-28T13:49:00.000-05:00

You were a short swirl, a dance, barely stirring the tall grass
a reminder of the west and north and east and south
you were the slight brush, a kiss of air across a cheek
a butterfly lifting up and swirling around the bushes, making the leaves cackle
you would run across the strands of our hair and tangle it
creep under doorways and chill us
you would blow the roofs off homes, send flying all not tied down
you were fury and rage
you were the soft breeze at midnight coming to cool the dark and allowing sleep
you were the broom that swept snow across the road and iced it
you were all manner of movement, the opposite of inertia, which is change

and now you are gone all is still
we hold our own breath, waiting for that cool touch
for the intense deep color of your coming
we wait and hold and wait and hold
but you will not dance for us

we will remember how your spirits moved our world
how you transported seeds for food and rain to feed the seeds
and wipe our tears off our faces and dry them
how you would blast through our lives and make us curse
or make us laugh and we would spill our blood on the earth
waiting for you to appear to relieve us
while the sun progressed through summer
praying
praying
praying
little cousin
for your soft, sweet return.

In memory of my cepansi, Tatewin

Fridays at a tribal college

2011-03-18T09:31:00.000-05:00

Chapter 3: Fridays

Fridays at our college are phenomenally dull. We don’t hold classes so that instructors can have “planning time,” except we’ve done it so many years like this that most instructors don’t even show up for work on Friday, so it’s an empty campus. The transportation vans that are usually busily bringing students to and fro are parked. The parking lots are empty. Only us Indians sitting here, putting in the hours until it’s time for someone to call out, “Quittin’ time!” (I say “only us Indians” because Indians make up the bulk of the support staff, who DO have to report to work on Fridays).

I’ve started a thing where all the students who I’m supposed to have dropped/failed/withdrawn from my classes for their frequent absences can come in on Fridays and make up the class, thus garnering enough contact hours to pass the class. I have planned to show a movie on these Friday make up classes, with a writing/blogging assignment and some discussion. This is the first Friday and nobody showed up. I had one vague promise for an 11 o’clock visit from a student, but by then it’s too late for her to see the movie and write a small paper on it. Fail before it’s even begun.

I’m going to have to fail my entire group of students this semester because they’ve all missed enough classes to be dropped for attendance. They’re going to lose out on financial aid next semester. They’re going to be discouraged, even though their attendance is, yes, their own responsibility. I’m just heartbroken that I’ve managed to lose the entire class this semester.

It’s not just me, though. It’s every instructor and every class in our department and quite a few in other departments. We’ve all failed to keep students coming to class.

Spring semesters are always bad here. It’s a combination of multiple snow days and more holidays. We didn’t have classes on Monday for the entire first month of this semester because of holidays and call offs for weather. My students for my Monday-Wednesday class had grown used to meeting only once a week for half an hour by the time we started Monday classes again. By that time only two students were still coming to class. After Pell Grants were issued two weeks ago, nobody came to class for nearly two weeks. I sat there during each class period, knitting and watching movies I had planned to show in preparation for our Narrative Essay unit, all alone and rather humiliated. I’ve called students, emailed them, texted them, run into them in the store and urged them to come to class. Short of going to their homes and dragging them in, I don’t think there’s much more I can do.

What I'm reading:

O Pioneers by Willa Cather

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

Chapter Two: Tribal College

2011-03-16T11:24:00.000-05:00

Chapter Two: This chapter is called “Tribal College”

I mentioned I work at a tribal college. Tribal colleges were founded in the late 1960s-early 1970s to provide education that was culturally relevant to Native American people on their own reservations and/or homelands. At the time tribal colleges were founded, Native students who attended college dropped out something like 90% of the time. The reasons had to do with an epidemic of lack: lack of resources, lack of welcoming college campuses, lack of support systems, lack of Native studies programs, lack of other Indians…Whatever kept them from completing a college degree. At the same time tribal people were having a resurge of cultural pride after the civil rights era. We’re talking about the American Indian Movement, Alcatraz, the BIA building in Washington, DC, and Wounded Knee II here. Native people had been subjected to a hundred years of western education at that point, and they wanted to teach their own cultures, history and languages to their own people. So they formed tribal colleges.

The first tribal college started at Tsaile, New Mexico, called Navajo Tribal College. It was founded in 1968 to provide a two-year degree to Navajo tribal students. They later changed the name to Dine Tribal College. The second and third tribal colleges were founded at Rosebud, South Dakota, and Pine Ridge, South Dakota. They were founded within days of each other, and each claims to have been the second tribal college founded in the nation. I work at S**** G****** U*********, at Rosebud, and though I’m not sure whether we were the second or third founded, I do know that my entire life has centered around this particular tribal college. My mother was the first employee of this college back in 1972. I was two years old. My grandfather on my father’s side was among the exploratory committee members who went to Tsaile in 1968 to visit and decide if it was worth it to build a tribal college here at Rosebud. My mother was pregnant with me when Grandpa Adam took the trip. My mother worked for this college from 1971 till 1980, when she finally graduated from Black Hills State College and started teaching for the local public school. In 1991 I was hired to work here as a library cataloger. In the past twenty years I went from cataloger to library manager to publications coordinator to director of a grant program to adjunct faculty member and finally to faculty member.

S***** G***** U********* is one of the leading tribal colleges. We were the first tribal college to attain accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. We were first again to attain accreditation at the baccalaureate level and then at the master’s level. We were the first to establish an endowment to provide scholarships to students. We were the first in a lot of things. We are possibly dead last, however, in staff and faculty salaries. We lie on our IPEDS report about our staff and faculty salaries. We lie in our grant reports about salaries. We lie to our donors about salaries and lots of other things. We lie to our partners and our associates and even to ourselves about salaries. SGU doesn’t pay a living wage except to a few people.

We also lie about the number of white people who work here. We hire white people more often than we do Indians and we pay them more money, provide them more benefits and yeah, we even graduate more white students in higher level degrees than we do Indians.

You know how in old western towns they would build a one story shack and then put a false front on it to deceive observers about the height and grandeur of the building? That’s this tribal college.

I have seen more than fifteen English teachers come and go from the Arts & Sciences Department here in the past twenty years. I was an English teacher in the A&S department in 2006-2007. I left to get married and moved to Arkansas. Since we moved back (four months after we moved there), I have been trying to get my teaching position in Arts & Sciences back. It hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know that it ever will. Recently there was an opening and I applied for it. I was the only tribal member who had applied for it. I was the most experienced applicant. I was the most qualified. The chair of the department had specifically requested they hire me for the position, had even requested a transfer rather than going through an interview process (he was overruled, probably because he's Native American and "not qualified" to make that decision--even though he has a Ph.D.)I wasn’t hired for it. They hired a Teach For America drop out who had had a breakdown in front of her high school English students. This says to me: “You’re so bad a teacher, we’re going to hire someone who is mentally unstable (and white) before we hire you.” Or maybe it just says they only like to hire white people?

So, currently I’m a faculty member, though in the weakest department on campus. I teach Basic English in the Study Skills department. WE used to have a TRIO grant to provide remedial college courses to incoming freshmen who weren’t ready for college-level work. We lost that grant last year and remain uncertain about whether or not we’ll have a job come August. I had applied for this job once before and wasn’t hired. They hired an alcoholic who came to class drunk just once too often, and after he left they hired a new mother who didn’t show up at all. So, then they consented to have me fill in as an adjunct and finally hired me after I’d been here for a whole semester. I make $1,500 less than the other English instructor and $1800 less than I made when I was an English instructor in Arts & Sciences. This is my life.

I get to work late, because the kids won’t budge. I plan what we’re doing in class that day based on where the students are at, how they progressed in the last class and where I want to take them next. I spend time online reading other English teachers’ thoughts about teaching. I look at Facebook and my forums and read my email. I might knit or read or write. I will take conference with students at any time, help solve computer/printer dilemmas, tutor students from other departments, whatever needs doing.

It doesn’t bother me that I’m the only faculty member in our department without a private office. My “office” is the student computer lab for our department, a long room with fourteen computers and a desk with my own computer and a networked printer. It doesn’t bother me that everyone in our department got new furniture last year when they were trying to spend all the grant money before reports were due. I have an old mishmash of furniture that includes and old, stained secretaries chair, a computer work station and a roll top desk filled with old papers from long-gone English teachers. It kind of bothers me that the whole building only has one 27” tv/vcr/dvd combo to use and has to share it with the Arts & Sciences Department, but at least we have that (though for the cost of one desk we could have had the four that we need, one for each classroom). It doesn’t bother me, even, that all the other instructors close their office doors so students won’t seek them out.

What bothers me is that nobody seems to be trying. It’s like they’ve all sunk into this bottomless pit of apathy and students are floundering around trying to learn how to be good students and our faculty in this department can’t even be friendly or helpful. They teach the same thing every semester with no altering of their syllabi. They lose most of their students by midterm (we all do), but they don’t try to call their students or find out why or maybe think about making the class more interesting or find better ways to help the students. They don’t bend. I’m the kind of person who bends over backwards to help students, coming in on weekends, scheduling make up classes, altering my syllabus to ensure each student masters the skills they need rather than try to get through everything and leaving students with a foggy idea about the skills. And what bothers me the most is that I feel myself sinking into this apathy. I wanted that other job so badly because the department I’m in was really put here to weed out the wheat from the chaff. At least 75% of new freshmen taking remedial courses in this department drop out. I get the feeling we’re here to make sure they do drop out.

Beyond the frustrations with my job, salary and department, there is the underlying problem that we are run by white people. On the surface it appears that we are not, but if you look at the top twenty jobs here and who is filling those positions, they’re mostly white people. If you look at the base of decision making (even who gets hired), it’s white people. If you look at who graduates with which degrees, you’ll see clearly it’s mostly white people. And even looking at something as simple as our class schedule each fall and spring or at our catalog, you’ll see that we are a white institution with a Native American façade. Do I sound racist? My husband is white. I’m half white. It just seems like severe injustice that a tribal college is filled with white decision makers who ensure that white people get the best jobs, salaries and respect while Native people who founded and built this college are basically shafted, both as employees and as students.

Example: We split our programs into specific subject areas and students sign up for classes like Freshmen English and algebra and methods of teaching social studies. Native people don’t think that way or learn that way. We learn best with integrated studies, doing hands on authentic work. If I were running this college I’d shut it down for two years and change the entire way things are done. I’d hire more Native people and fire many white people. I’d have an integrated, project-based education model where students would be split into cohort groups when they signed up for college. They would remain with their cohort through all four years of school, and we'd teach for mastery rather than basing everything on grades. We’d have quarterly project-based semesters (with most of January and February off for break due to weather) and faculty would work in teams to support each cohort group, providing writing instruction alongside algebra and science and social studies and psychology and Lakota language and history and culture, all integrated into a curriculum designed to teach students how to think on their feet, how to plan and implement programs that are useful to our tribal nation. And students would receive a salary for being students, with the salary increasing every year until the final year, when they would receive a business loan to fully implement their program or they’d receive further funds to complete master’s and Ph.D. level coursework. At the end of their four years they would have done enough research, planning, writing, reading, math, science, social studies, cultural learning and had enough support from their fellow cohorts that they would have worked themselves into not just a degree, but a career and a business. Then at the end of four years we would graduate useful, sovereign, employed tribal members rather than just giving a diploma to someone who will probably remain unemployed unless they move away. That's how I see tribal colleges being of the most use. Unfortunately, hardly anyone else sees me as useful or hire-able.

Our problem at this tribal college is not white people, though. It’s ego.

Thursdays

2011-03-03T21:41:00.000-06:00

Usually my Thursdays are teach class, office hours, home, cook dinner. Today I'm sick, and have been for the past week. But, my Thursdays usually involve going to my friend Scrimmy's land in Second Life and listening to whatever he's queued up on his radio show, and we dance and have good off the wall conversations.

Pics of tonight's gathering:

Scrimmy (Scrim Pinion in SL)

Issy (Isadaft Trollop)

Jen (Schechinah)

Hex (Blackthorn)

Margaret and Wills

Lexxi looking kittenish

P2 looking Brad-ish ;)

Me, looking darker than usual

(We thought P2 and I looked like Brad and Janet among the Transylvanians when we first arrived, so we changed clothes.)

And this is the whole gang (plus or minus some because people drop in, dance a few, visit and leave).

So anyway, most Thursdays you'll find me in Second Life, dancing and trying to look less Janet and more...Magenta. :)

Red Velvet Cupcakes

2011-02-09T22:54:00.001-06:00

I had one this past weekend at Starbucks in Rapid City--the Target Starbucks, not the mall Starbucks. It was almost the best thing I ate all weekend (steak wins the award for Best Thing I Ate All Weekend). Anyway, going to make some over the weekend for the family for V-Day.

Recipe from Food Network (Paula Deen, 2007):

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
2 large eggs, room temperature
2 tablespoons red food coloring
1 teaspoon white distilled vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the Cream Cheese Frosting:

1 pound cream cheese, softened
2 sticks butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
Chopped pecans and fresh raspberries or strawberries, for garnish

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 (12-cup) muffin pans with cupcake papers.

In a medium mixing bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder. In a large bowl gently beat together the oil, buttermilk, eggs, food coloring, vinegar, and vanilla with a handheld electric mixer. Add the sifted dry ingredients to the wet and mix until smooth and thoroughly combined.

Divide the batter evenly among the cupcake tins about 2/3 filled. Bake in oven for about 20 to 22 minutes, turning the pans once, half way through. Test the cupcakes with a toothpick for doneness. Remove from oven and cool completely before frosting.

For the Cream Cheese Frosting:

In a large mixing bowl, beat the cream cheese, butter and vanilla together until smooth. Add the sugar and on low speed, beat until incorporated. Increase the speed to high and mix until very light and fluffy.

Garnish with chopped pecans and a fresh raspberry or strawberry.

Cook's Note: Frost the cupcakes with a butter knife or pipe it on with a big star tip.

I think I'm going to add a little bit of coffee to mine, though, which I think made the difference with the Starbucks version.

My days

2011-02-09T12:19:00.000-06:00

I get up anywhere between 6 AM and 7:45 AM. If it's after 8:00 AM I'm late and not in a good mood. I go to wake up the kids. This will take anywhere from an hour to two and a half hours, depending on the time they went to bed, what day of the week it is, and whether or not I'm motivated. Coffee makes everything about this process easier. So does the Today Show. If my mother is involved in waking the kids up, then usually there is screaming and stress involved. I try to keep my mother out of this morning wake up routine. Her heart isn't up to it, and she stresses herself out too much, as well as stressing out me and the kids. I hate drama in the morning, and my mother is sure to deliver it if she's in the mood or in a hurry.

After kids are sort of up and taking turns in the bathroom I turn my attention to my own morning rituals. Sometimes I save the shower for morning, but usually I shower before bed, so it's mostly a decision about clothing. The decision comes down to two things: weather and comfort. Fashion, while important and something I really appreciate and love, doesn't go down well here. I'm teaching people who possibly haven't eaten in a few days. I'm not going to wear Leboutin to teach them in. I'm usually in loose pants, t-shirt and my teacher sweater with hand knit socks (that hardly ever match) and my usual brown leather Born Mary Janes (which are going on four years old now). After dressing, washing face, brushing teeth, braiding hair, I rush around finding my stuff. I also find stuff for the kids, usually shoes, socks, bags, books, pens, money, etc.

We're out the door, hopefully by 8:30, but actually around 9:00 AM. Drop kids off at school, stop for the mail, stop for my usual large Americano at Noella's Coffee, and then to work (one last cig on the way there).

Get to work, spend time deciding what to do in class that day, get my handouts copied or my lesson plans solidified. Then I spend time messing around online and/or knitting. "Messing around online" can take the form of actually doing research for other classes or it can mean I'm harvesting my farm in FarmVille.

At some point in the day I will teach a class. English 091 or English 092. These are basic remedial English classes for students who have proved on a standardized test that they need some help getting prepared to deal with college level writing and reading. I don't happen to believe the test is accurate or helpful, but my entire job is based on some students flunking that test, so what am I supposed to do? I don't believe students' writing aptitude can be measured by a multiple choice test. Basically, I teach the class with the goal that every student who shows up and passes will have mastered the ability to write one good paper. When they can write one good paper, they are prepared as they'll ever be for Freshman English.

After my class I'm working on my record-keeping. I'll note down who showed up, who didn't, make notes to call students, I will call students, and I'll make note of who turned in what work. I may do some reading and grading of papers. I'll also start preparing for my next day's class.

At four or five I start thinking about going home. I have more decisions to make now. What's for dinner and do I have enough money to go buy food or am I making something from what we have at home. What do we have at home? I may call home to find out. I leave work, armed with a list for the grocery store or slightly depressed that I have to make another meal featuring hamburger and nothing else.

Home: usually the dishes from the night before and/or that day have not been done. I will either delegate this chore to my daughters or I will do them myself. Usually I walk in the door at 5:15 and am confronted with a pile of dishes that have sat in the sink overnight and all day, and I have to wash them before I can even start dinner. Keep in mind that there are five other adults in the house. My daughter, one of the adults, usually helps me with this chore, but rarely takes it on by herself. My husband is home most of the day (except dialysis days and the three days a week he has classes) and lets them sit there for me to deal with. My sister has classes two days a week, both evening classes, and she lets them sit there (and adds to them!) through the day. Her husband, who has classes three days a week, will only do dishes once in a month. My mother never does the dishes. Obviously, the fact that nobody will do the dishes bugs the fuck out of me. I am the only one in the house who goes to work regularly. I'm the only one who does the cooking. I'm the one who does laundry for six people plus all the towels for eleven people. I'm the one who shops for and pays for the food. And I'm the one who usually gets stuck with the dishes. Yeah, I have four kids. yeah, they help with the dishes, but who the fuck decided that me and my kids get to be the house elves for the rest of you lazy fucks?

By 6:30 I usually have dinner planned out and cooking. Our menus range from tacos, lasagna, spaghetti, and pizza to chef's salad, sandwiches, soup and stir fry. I never know one day to the next what we'll be eating. Breakfast for dinner is a popular (though work-intensive) meal. We usually have dinner between 7:00 to 8:30 PM, depending on what I've had to cook and whether or not the dishes were done. During the time I'm cooking dinner, I may also be doing laundry, visiting the kids about their days, urging them to do homework, or knitting. Dinner often isn't finished until 9 PM.

We do not do the dishes after dinner because not everybody eats at the same time. They will drift in for some food, drift out again. So, even though I have to plan, cook and deliver a dinner by 8:30 PM, they will not all eat it at 8:30 PM. Sometimes at 10:30 PM, my sister and her husband are cooking themselves a second dinner. They either claim I didn't cook enough, or they couldn't eat what I cooked because of the presence of onions, tomatoes, cheese, or whatever. It's not that I deliberately cook things they don't like, it's that they change their minds on a daily basis what they like, so I've stopped making the effort of trying to please them so I'm cooking to the middle--what the kids will eat and the adults will tolerate. There are often eleven or twelve of us to cook for, so it's not a very balanced ground to be cooking on. I'm trying to teach everyone that when there's food, you eat it. You don't bitch about it. You don't say "I'll eat later," and then cook yourself something else. You just eat it and be fucking grateful someone bought and cooked food and your only contribution is eating it. I feel like I'm losing this battle, though. Our grocery bill can range between $800 to $1200 a month because of this cooking and eating outside of regularly planned meals.

At around 9 PM I start urging the kids to get their clothes out for the next day, do their laundry, give me their laundry to do, or get in the shower. While the kids are preparing for bed, a task that apparently takes two hours or longer, I'm getting myself ready for bed. This means I'm folding laundry or cleaning my bedroom or showering. Whatever I'm doing, it's usually 12:30-1:30 before I'm in bed ready to sleep. The best thing about my bedtime though: I can fall asleep in like, under two minutes. And I sleep deeply.

Now I ask you: do you really think I have a lot of time to read four forums thoroughly and keep up with all the drama that's going on? Call me clueless, call me self-interested, say I have selective memory, whatever. In reality, I pop in to the one forum I read semi-regularly (Second Citizen MkII), I read one or two threads. I might comment, I might not. I won't remember what I said or when I said it later because I'm busy, I have lots of crap going on in real life, and I'm just not that involved in what's going on in every person on the internet's lives right now. Get over yourself.

Dream-housing

2011-01-24T11:21:00.005-06:00

My great grandma Carrie had this kind of sink in her house "out in the country" as we used to say. I think both her kitchen and bathroom sinks were like this, only they were made of steel, not porcelain. Or maybe the kitchen one was porcelain and the bathroom was steel. Anyway, what I am nostalgic about is the single basin design, and the little curtain underneath the sink to hide the hardware.

So, on this snowy, blowy Monday morning from work I'm researching porcelain single basin farmhouse sinks (which are about the most expensive sinks in the world, apparently). The one above is made in France by Herbeau Creations. I'm moving on to clawfoot tubs (which I know I'll never be able to have in my dream house since Alan can't get into and out of one...but it's nice to dream a little.) Will post more later.

And we have a winner in the clawfoot tub department!

Again with Herbeau Creations *boggles* That was completely random, too, but I really like the design of the feet on this one, which are randomly different from every other cast iron clawfoot tub going. So anyway, I could pay about $8k for this tub...or I could use that for my daughter's first semester of tuition. Decisions, decisions (of course I'm kidding. I don't have $8k, and if I did it would definitely go toward frivolous things like a savings account and food and getting the van fixed, followed by tuition).

On to bathroom sinks. I found Grandma Carrie's bathroom sink (or one close to it):

However, after looking at it some more and reminiscing, I would have to go with the one below for my dream house. No cabinet space, nothing in the way of the hardware. It's clean and spare and I love it. Obviously, perfect for log home living, as well.

So, before I found the one above, I found the one below:

Have to say, those kind of sink cabinets annoy me. They're mass produced, not an antique you bought or inherited from your grandma. They're just dressed up to look like an antique you inherited from your grandma. And believe me, if I inherited an antique cabinet from my grandma, she would stand up from the grave and whup my ass if I turned it into a bathroom sink!

Moving on, keeping with the French-farmhouse thing I got going on.

(I was going to post a toilet and a bidet, but I couldn't find one I liked).\

And then there's this beauty!

I just want one for fun, but I want a regular gas range in the kitchen for regular cooking. I just think, I live in South Dakota, the electricity goes out often or you run out of propane, and you're kind of screwed in the cooking department. A wood burning cook stove makes sense, so I could at least have a warm kitchen and coffee when the lights go.

This one below is the winner in the cook stove category:

Challenges

2011-01-18T15:55:00.000-06:00

It's not been a very good start to the new year. My car became really undependable after January 1, starting one day and not starting at all the next day. I'm pretty sure the electrical system is all messed up, caused by some very unwise twiddling with the dashboard innards by my brother in law, but I'm not allowed to say that out loud because my sister goes into Oscar-worthy dramatics every time it comes up. My mother's car is completely dead. All the antifreeze leaked out, and the car completely froze up and won't start at all (this is also related to said brother-in-law and my sister, but again, The Best Actress Award has been awarded several times already in the past few weeks). It's going to cost significant amounts of money to fix the car, which I don't have as yet, so we have to suffer with a sick vehicle. So, I'm having trouble getting around, and work is full of pressure with my boss likely ready to let me go (I applied for a transfer to another department before Christmas and didn't get the job, and my boss was on the interview committee. That's more stuff I don't really care to go into, except to say: tribal colleges really don't care to hire their own graduates, in my experience.), so it's very, very important that I don't give him good reasons to let me go, like frequent absences and tardies.
So, anyway, not a very good start to the new year. Beyond the fact that the cars won't run and we're having to beg rides sometimes, the furnace is out at home (still!), we're having issues obtaining food, and the kids have been sick since New Year's Eve (different kids at different times, but at all times since Jan. 1 someone in the house has been sick).
I'm hoping and praying for better days, but I really feel like giving it all up and just staying home in bed, forever, or until forced to move to the asylum. I'm usually good with challenges, but sometimes life just throws more at you than you can handle, and this run of bad luck feels like that.

Other things I'm worried about: I have two big projects due, like, pretty much at the end of this week. Classes started this week, so I'm having to be in my office more and can't work on those projects. Last week and the week before were complete chaos due to the vehicle problems and because it was registration, which I had to be on call for at work because that's part of my job. So, there just hasn't been time, and when there is time I feel more like curling up in bed, like a lump. Bleh.
I'm angry that nobody at home will help me with the house work and cooking. I get home from work. Nobody has done the dishes or cleaned up the kitchen or even run a load of laundry. I clean up, do the dishes, cook dinner, and they all run in and eat and then go back to, basically, being lumps of lazy flesh gathered around various screens in the house (tv, computer, video games, iPods, cell phones, etc.) I'm drowning in work and drowning in house work and drowning in car troubles, and nobody sees me sinking out here, and I see them sinking but there's nothing I can do to fix it. We're just a sunken crew. Maybe tonight after or during dinner I will just shut down everything--tv's, computers, etc. and make them listen to me. I don't know if it's the point where I feel like drastic measures are needed, but I'm close to that point. Is it better to wait, considering three of the four kids are sick and my sister is a complete Drama Queen and I would rather avoid the confrontation than do the work myself? It's hard to know with these things.

On the plus side: I'm churning out the knitting like you wouldn't believe. I finished two pairs of socks, a pair of mitts, and a scarf and mittens since Thanksgiving. I'm working on another scarf, three more pairs of socks and a cowl-thing. I generally want to spend all my time cuddled up on my bed, knitting, watching tv, and reading.

What I've read lately:
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Beech Street Knitting Society by Gil McNeil

Currently reading:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Holiday Grind by Cleo Coyle
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

I tend to read more than one book at a time, and I'm trying to read or re-read the classics, so I'm on a Dickens kick right now. The Harper Lee is for the EN092 I'm teaching on Tuesdays.

Really, if I could cuddle up in bed with a good cup of coffee (got a Keurig for Christmas!!) and a book and my knitting and just stay there for a few months, I'd be perfectly happy. Until then (which probably won't happen until I'm in my 70s or 80s, I'm kind of stuck trying to make it through each day and feeling like crap most of the time. I know I said I am mostly content, but this car problems/work problems/family problems is finally starting to wear me down.

T'was The Night Before Christmas-NDN Style

2010-12-24T08:00:00.001-06:00

T’was the night before Christmas and all thru the teepee

not an eyelid was shut because nobody was sleepy.

The Wal-Mart bags were hung by the fire so neat,

hoping Chief Nick would fill them up with smoked meat.

The children were nestled all snug in their bed

while visions of fry bread men danced in their heads.

With ina in her kerchief and my hair braided tight

we turned up the scanner to entertain us tonight.

Then all of a sudden a crash we did hear,

the rez dogs started barking but that’s the norm around here.

The moon on the breast of the new falling snow

gave the luster of mid day to my rez car below.

When what do my ndn eyes should appear

but an ndn sleigh with eight tiny reindeer!

With a little rez driver so stoic but quick

I knew in a moment it must be Chief Nick.

More rapid then Rez Ballers the reindeer they came

and he pointed with his lips then called them by name.

On Fancy Dancer, on Smoked Meat, on Thomas and Victor,

on Back Strap, on Philbert, on Black Cloud and Trixster;

sshhh land beside the teepee, quiet for good reason

we have to be careful it’s deer hunting season.

The stickers on his sleigh read I love baloney

another one said my other ride is a pony.

The one in the middle said NDN Power

there was duct tape and bailing wire holding it together.

When the teepee flap opened I just hung my head,

for I just finished off his stew and fry bread.

He was dressed in full regalia from his head to his mocs,

his outfit fully beaded right down to his socks!

His chokecherry eyes twinkled, his braids were like WOW!

You have to see it for yourself, he was just…somehow!

The stump of his peace pipe held tight in his teeth

and the smoke signals encircled his head like a wreath.

His face was kind of greasy and he was ndn size,

he had a commod bod only a skin could recognize.

He spoke not a word just flashed his Tribal ID.

He left a block of cheese and new tape recorder under the tree.

He left hand drums and blankets and round dance CDs,

huckleberry pies and the new Northern Cree!

Then he pointed with his lips, gave a big hearty AYYE!

And he danced out the door and jumped in his sleigh.

I heard him exclaim as he flew out of sight

Merry Christmas to all let’s round dance tonight! HO! HO! HO!

Source: Unknown

Christmas

2010-12-20T23:07:00.001-06:00

All weekend I've been hearing the mournful whining of everyone in the house saying, "I can't get into the Christmas spirit." I baked like a maniac yesterday, making chocolate christmas tree lollipops, fleur de sel caramels, double chocolate sandwich cookies, and gingerbread dough.

Today we had a snow day, meaning it was snowing and icy up until 10 AM when work was finally called off. Then the sun came out and melted it all.

We made a gingerbread house, using this great dough recipe I found in a random Christmas cookie magazine (100 Best Cookies from Better Homes & Gardens). The dough chilled overnight, and today we made templates for the house and cut out the dough and baked it. I think we should have waited a day until the dough had time to "age". Anyway, we started decorating this evening. My sister has been collecting candy for this house all week. The royal icing actually turned out well, which was a surprise to me because last time I attempted it I got lumps of inedible sugary stuff from the whole effort. Even my brother-in-law got into the act, making a base for the house which we were going to attempt moving the house onto after it was finished ala Cake Challenge on Food Network.

Yeah, there are gaps where the roof should meet the eaves of the house. The weight of the roof piece and the icing on that piece caused some caving because the gingerbread had baked but hadn't had time to really harden (read: go stale). We made the effort of stained glass windows, with plans to slide some Christmas lights inside to illuminate the windows from the inside. There are a number of things that went wrong, from the icing being too wet and heavy to the not-quite-fitting cookie pieces because the dough puffed up and rounded on the edges (like a good gingerbread cookie, but not good for a house). Also, I was sipping margaritas all evening because we have to use up the tequila or somehow get rid of it before my brother comes home Friday (he's on probation and can't be around alcohol). So, I wasn't exactly lucid through this process. About a minute and a half after I snapped the picture, the roof caved in. Not fell off. Not slid off. It caved because it was too wet and soft from the icing.

We're going to attempt again tomorrow. For tonight, this is some delicious gingerbread. And everyone agreed, "It finally feels like Christmas."

Unfortunately, my real task is still ahead of me, and I wasted a whole day doing Christmas for everyone instead of doing this present I promised to make for my friend Julie's grandson.

It's only about halfway quilted, and only about two more days to work on it. I'm sunk.

Today is the day...

2010-12-15T15:46:00.000-06:00

I start to panic about not having any Christmas shopping done. I have some stuff, but not the main stuff, and this worries me. There will be no money for shopping for another whole week!

I don't feel good about my job security. I applied for another job in another department on the same campus. There was some major drama about this transfer, even though the other department had urged me to transfer. I don't know why there always has to be drama around my prospective employment with this employer. Let's just say, I must have enemies. Anyway, possibly looking at a New Year with no job, or at least some job-related trauma.

I feel bad that I didn't take my kids Christmas shopping. They're old enough now that they want to buy things for their friends, and it didn't even occur to me this might be the case. It will be too late next week to take them Christmas shopping for some of their friends. Feel sad about this.

I'm also panicking about not getting stuff done, like the full-size quilt my friend Julie ordered from me almost two months ago. It's partially quilted, and I'm hoping to have it done next Wednesday, but it's starting to scare me how big the task is, and I don't feel like quilting this week. I feel like sleeping.

I have to finish three and a half socks before next Thursday. I am pretty sure I could get this done if I didn't have a monumental quilting task ahead of me.

I remind myself that I've completed an entire full-size quilt in less than 30 hours before. When my favorite uncle died, I started making a quilt for his funeral on the morning following his death. I finished that quilt, including cutting diamonds, sewing the star and background, layering, quilting and binding by the following afternoon. It can be done.

I am a little sad that my students did not all get their portfolios to me in time for the grading deadline. I have to go home and read the portfolios that were turned in and award grades, and some of those grades aren't going to be good.

I'm also sad that this is the day my grandpa Bill died, 18 years ago. My oldest daughter was only two months old on the day he died. Now she is 18, an adult. I keep hearing his voice around me today, thinking of things he would say or the way he would hold his hands when he talked or how he'd gesture or how he sat at the kitchen table. I'm going to buy a lottery ticket in memory of him on my way home this evening, and put gas in my car. Those are two things he was always telling me to do.

Today is the kind of day I just want to curl up with a soft warm blanket and a cup of coffee and space out with a book or tv and spend time alone. I feel like I've failed at something so major but I can't think of what it is.

Snowing in South Dakota

2010-11-22T11:44:00.000-06:00

Not the first snow of the season, but definitely the first snow that looks like it might stick. Today is a good day for soup. And homemade bread. And brownies and knitting (or quilting) and getting the damn furnace fixed.

View outside my office:

Another year where I don't live in a log cabin with a wood stove. Sad.

Dear Santa

2010-11-07T00:14:00.002-05:00

I always get asked what I want for Christmas and I'll forget the things I really want, so I'll just say, "Oh, bath stuff is good enough." and I'll end up with four baskets of shower gel and lotion. So I'm writing it down where I can remember to look for it:

2010 Birthday/Christmas Wish List

--pie pans

--more ramekins

--a Dutch oven (I know the Le Creuset one is outrageously priced, but the Paula Deen one is reasonable)

--tart pan

--KitchenAid Stand Mixer (ok, this is a Santa wish, I know that it's not really possible)

--KitchenAid immersion blender (my dream of homemade roasted tomato soup will hopefully become reality)

--Amazon gift card

--yarn (good yarn, not Red Heart, pls)

--gift cards for good yarn stores :)

--knitting needles (I prefer wooden needles)

--Amarige

--Harry Potter movies (preferred background noise)

--Bath stuff (Okay, so I really do like bath stuff, the girlier the better)

--Clinique (yeah, 'spensive taste in skin care products)

--Bialetti (I want this one a lot)

--Keurig Mini Brewer (for work)

--spices from Dean & DeLuca

--My favorite candy (Russell Stover French Chocolate Mints)

I should probably stop here, or I'll spoil myself imagining I'll get any of this for Christmas or birthday. Just thought I'd make a list. :)

Funny side note: I'm going to be 42 in a few weeks. All year I've been telling everyone I'm 42. I cheated myself out of my 41st year because I have a really bad memory. No wonder my mother regularly forgets my birthday. I can't even remember how old I am.

In knitting news

2010-11-03T04:46:00.000-05:00

There really isn't much to say. I've been trying to finish a pair of socks all month, but I caught Startitis and I've made three sides of three pairs of socks, but not finished a second side for any of them (does that count as reaching my October goal of one pair of socks?) I also made half of a pair of fingerless gloves and re-started my February Lady Sweater in a new yarn. Oh, finished a scarf for my daughter's birthday, though it was all knitted before I "started it." I actually just recycled a shawl I've been making for over a year, frogged it and stopped unraveling when it was wide enough for scarf status, then bound it off and gave it away. I think she likes it.

I've been wearing all of my knitted socks, which kind of puts a damper on my plans to give them away as Christmas presents. I don't think anyone in the family would have wanted them in the colors I made them in anyway, but I've vowed that when I finish the second sides of the three pairs I'm making now (and it's actually more than three pairs on the needles, because there are at least three other pairs on the needles I started last year and never finished) I'm saving them for Christmas presents. I also bought more yarn for Christmas socks.

I have finished a hat. No pics yet since it's a Christmas present (ha! as if anyone I give presents to reads this!). I've got another hat on the needles also, which is supposed to accompany matching mittens. I'll be lucky to finish the hat, and maybe make up the mittens over Christmas break.

I haven't been reading much, either. We got Dish Network in our bedroom, so I spend all my time offline, comatose in front of the tv. Who knew that I needed a television tuned to cable tv to solve my insomnia problem? Seriously, as soon as dinner is over I turn on the tv and fall asleep. It's so weird. Also, probably why I'm blogging at, um, 4:45 AM. I totally missed all the election results on CNN because I was snoring away in front of the election results on CNN.

Bleh, disappointing election

2010-11-03T04:34:00.000-05:00

I know it's just mid-terms, but the voter turnout around here sucked balls and the result was about what people deserve for not taking the time to go fill out a ballot yesterday. I felt bleh about this election, too, but it was too important to not vote. Anyway, here's hoping the Repubs make such a bad show of it in the next two years at the Dems and Obama prevail next time.

Happy Halloween, Single Reader

2010-10-30T01:37:00.000-05:00

Suicide and bullying

2010-09-29T09:38:00.000-05:00

Response to this story that came across the forum I read regularly: http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/education/bullied-8th-grader-commits-suicide

I come from an Indian reservation that has the highest suicide rate in the world, especially among 15-24 yr old males. It's a whole society here that has been bullied, not just by the surrounding white community, but by the United States government. People want to blame poor parenting, poverty, substance abuse, but those things are just symptoms of the larger disease, which is bullying. We tried fighting back, but you can't fight numbers and better technology and legislation that removes your property and your rights to "serve the greater good."

When you grow up in that kind of society, all you know is hopelessness, apathy. You're powerless, and people who are powerless take power where they can: in bullying, oppressing others because they are oppressed. When people feel hopeless and oppressed they do what they can. They escape or they break, often both.

Researchers, anthropologists, & sociologists who study reservations often say that they are microcosms of the world and that the things that happen on the reservations will eventually happen to greater society. Want to talk about a poor economy? We've had 70-80% unemployment here for the past 20 years. 9/11 was something that shocked so many people worldwide, but Native Americans and other marginalized people already knew that horror, grew up with it, still feel it because we've all been victims of genocide.

American is the biggest bully there is. Of course your children are bullies. Even unintentional bullies because very often you don't take the time to understand that marginalized people will have different ways of interacting with people that don't involve the methods Americans use, and you ensure that the methods Americans use are the only methods used to get ahead and be successful. You ban gays in the military, gay marriage, going after the weak to ensure the "strong" survive. You make laws to ensure it and you back up those laws with the strongest military in the world (bullies with guns).

There is so much wrong with America and American "values" and yet you are shocked when your children are bullies and that other children who are bullied get sick of it and kill themselves and others. I guess that's hopeful, that you are shocked. At least there's some human being in there somewhere.

Monday blahs

2010-09-27T12:34:00.001-05:00

I'm back at work this week. Managed to kick the bug over the weekend, though I'm still coughing and stuffy headed. I feel uninspired today, too, but it's Monday blahs. I just want to go back to bed. Feeling regretful that we didn't get to go to Sioux Falls for the book festival over the weekend.

I feel like I lost a whole week by being sick. I didn't do much during the week other than FarmVille and reading and sleeping. I didn't even read any good fiction, other than Little Women. It seems like Little Women is a different book every time I read it. The first time I read it I was like, nine or something, and I'm pretty sure it was an abridged version of the book. Then I read it again in high school several times and it doesn't seem like it was a full version I read then, either. I've read it once a year as an adult, and I bought a copy of the book that possibly was unedited when I was in Concord, Maine, because it seemed a lot more preachy and less interesting than the one I just read again (the other version I bought in Concord burned up in my house a few years ago). So, anyway, this means Little Women continues to deliver each time I read it.

Usually I get really creative in the fall and want to make things and write more. I am not feeling fall-ish this year. Maybe it's lack of money or time, but whatever it is, I just feel like cuddling up and sleeping all the time. Depression? Feeling old?

Oh, and for the past year I've been telling everyone I'm 42. I won't actually be 42 for another 7 weeks. I don't know wtf that aging myself up thing was, but as a consequence of that I feel like I lost a year of my forties, also. Strange days.

A plague upon both our houses...

2010-09-22T14:30:00.000-05:00

Okay, so we only really have one house, but it DOES contain a plague-like virus that's taking down one family member after another. Started with my niece, coughing and hacking a couple weeks ago.Sure enough, the coughing/stuffiness/hacking/body aches, etc. passed on to my 2nd oldest last week. Then my oldest came down with it, then I got it, then my sister, and now my youngest daughter. My mom has a little version of it, as does my husband and my brother in law. So far (fingers crossed) my son and nephew are okay (because we all know how men are when they get a little bit sick). Seems to strike the women faster and harder than the men. My grandmother (80 yrs old) is in the hospital with pneumonia, and my niece's mom finally took her to the doctor and confirmed bronchitis (which I suspected from the stabbing pain in my chest).

So, we are all sick, we've had soup for the tenth night in a row (I'm exaggerating), and all I want to do is lie down with a clear head and get some restful sleep (not the stuffy-headed, coughing, hacking, hocking up green stuff, waking up every two hours "rest" I've been getting). My students today told me I look like warmed up death, backing away from me when I told them death was contagious.

Bleh.

but I finished one side of two different pairs of socks. See?

Lace Anklets pattern by Whit's Knits @ Purl Soho, knit in Plymouth Yarn's Sockotta stripe.

and

Ribbed Socks (made up the pattern myself) knit in Knit Picks Gloss sock yarn in Burgundy.

I guess I'll work on the second half of the pairs in between sleeping and blowing my nose.

Baby Star Quilt

Oh, finished a baby quilt last weekend, too. The picture isn't that great (took it on my phone at night. Come to think of it, all my pictures are taken on my phone, usually at night.)

Forumz

2010-09-16T12:03:00.000-05:00

Heya, Single Reader, how goes it?

So about a month ago I quit reading (haunting) the forum I was calling home on the internet, Second Citizen Mk II. I wrote about this forum last April and a little about it in August. Now it's September, and I've pretty much stayed away from the forum for a month because I objected to images that were being spammed by a trollish member. When I objected to the images even being there and my inability to block them, I kind of got the shit beat out of me, verbally, and I felt like I lost some friends over that deal. It doesn't sound like a huge deal, both the images and my leaving the forum, but it was to me. It was a huge deal.

First, the forum has been my "home on the net" for over a year. Before that we had a previous version of that same forum called Second Citizen, and I've written about that forum, too, several times in this blog. Well, Second Citizen kind of imploded three years ago, and we didn't have anything like it since. Then our friend Leck started SCmkII last year, and we all hoped it was Second Citizen returned. But it wasn't. It was sorta like it, but in a kind of disappointing way, like when Grease II came out and everyone thought it would be as special and wonderful as Grease, but it wasn't. Now, some may say Grease II is a special something all on it's own, and I agree, I fricking love that movie, but it's no Grease, that's certain. And, like the Grease and Grease II phenomenon, SCmkII is no Second Citizen. It's a whole other animal/movie/vegetable/mineral. It is its own thing.

All my Second Life friends (not all, but many) belong to SCmkII. I met people there who have now been friends for almost five years. At one time those same friends raised money for me to be able to be with my husband at the hospital when he had kidney failure and nearly died, and they've been there all through our relationship and life together. So, they are really, really good friends.

But very very few of them supported or believed me when I said seeing images like were shown on the forum a month ago were an assault on my senses and my spirit. I don't like to explain my culture to people because understanding what I mean involves a belief system that is different from what people are used to. Let me give an example. In my culture it's considered wrong to step over a person laying on the ground or floor. It damages them, and you, if you step over them. The same is true for even benign objects, like tipi poles. This is a belief system where you understand that all things possess a spirit. And the spirit can be damaged by seemingly harmless things like seeing something violent. Not everyone shares the belief that everything is spirit. And I'm barely able to understand it myself, I'm still learning, always learning about this. Why do I believe in it if I don't know it fully? Does anyone know God or Jesus fully? They claim they do, but do they really know? Well, it's because of faith. Because I've seen it work. I've seen mysterious things. I've felt the presence of spirits and seen them. I've seen the spirit in people and things. Even typing this makes me afraid, btw, because people who see and experience spirits and spiritual things in this country are considered whack-a-doodle nutso freaks, no matter what their belief system. And it seems like any time I try to be true to my belief system as it relates to forums and forum arguments and my reasons for doing things, it backlashes. For example, I once had an argument about Custer and the battle of little big horn. and when I made some assertions from the Lakota side of things, the person came back at me with "provable" facts, while I had only oral history, stories from elders and my belief system as my "facts". Maybe it has to do with the way the academic community expects only that which can be proved is true (can God be proved?), or it has to do with the general opinion among intelligent people that there is no god or that any religion is wrong, but whatever it is, I can't get into the theology of why I believe this way or why it prevents me from making a coherent Western-style argument in the method that you choose to argue a point, but I do have a point and a reason, and if you are a respectful person you will listen to my point and reason and accept that. And if you can't do that, I tried and you did not, and we have a parting of opinion. And if you continue to disrespect my right to my opinion or reason for doing something, then I have to not be around you or the places where I might encounter you.

So, I feel damaged by what I saw at the forum those couple days, and I said so and people said "you're a whackadoodle nutso freak who wants to suppress and oppress other people, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, WE HATE FASCISTS, GTFO!" So I did. And I haven't been back to read except to comment a little on the death of a friend, and then I've closed the window again and left it alone. And every time I think about going back or open the window and peek in, I see the same thing: The whole place feels negative and black. Maybe it's because I feel left out or because people were cruel or because I had my feelings hurt, or whatever, but whatever it is I'm feeling about that place, I just can't go back. I think the whole place has this black spirit (and some people there would be proud of this), and I don't belong there. I think a lot of it has to do with one or two people, but even if those people were to leave forever, I'd still not feel wholly comfortable at that forum. I already have lost friends, in fact, because forumz is serious bizness, and I'm finding it hard to keep in touch with people without that forum. Regardless, I can't go back. And what's worse is that I've lost respect for some of my friends there, and so I don't want to be around them much either. Maybe they've also lost respect for me, because I haven't noticed any emails saying "Hey! I miss you!" except from one person, the one who yelled the hardest when I said I couldn't be there.

And so, I'm sad.

A good "Sunday"

2010-09-06T18:33:00.002-05:00

Okay, so it's really Monday, and Labor Day, but it felt like Sunday. I did FarmVille all morning, then moved on to cleaning, laundry, knitting and reading. I finished another pair of socks today, my second finished pair this week (though, technically, I only made one pair this week since the first sides of the two pairs were already finished a few weeks ago). I started new socks, too, as soon as the last pair was finished. :)

Then I made homemade chicken noodle soup (recipe below):

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup (my recipe)
Whole chicken (cut up or not)
about 8 cups of water
Allow chicken to boil in the water, then add:
1 large bay leaf
small handful of parsley (1/4 cup?)
medium sized onion, diced
Salt, to taste
Chicken soup base--about 4 tablespoons (you could use real chicken broth and reduce the water in this, I just didn't have any)
Allow to boil until the chicken is cooked through. When the chicken is done, remove it from the pot of soup and cut it into bite-sized pieces, removing the bones and skin and "bits". :) (You could remove the bay leaf now. Mine usually comes out with the chicken).

Homemade egg noodles (Great-Grandma Carrie Whipple's recipe)
9 large eggs, chilled
small handful of salt (1/3 cup for the anal folks)
8 cups of flour (or thereabouts)
Beat the eggs and salt together
Add the flour by the cupful until the dough is sticky and holding together
Halve the dough and knead it on a floured surface, adding more flour to reduce stickiness
When the dough is still cold to the touch but pliable, roll it out, using flour liberally as needed to keep from sticking to surface and to rolling pin. You want to roll it out to about 1/8 inch thickness. When it's rolled out, lightly flour the surface again and begin to roll the dough into a tube (like with cinnamon rolls). When it's rolled, used a sharp knife to cut 1/4 inch thick slices off it (like with cinnamon rolls, only much thinner). Once it's cut, carefully unroll each slice and put it in a bowl with a small handful of flour. Keep unrolling and placing these in the bowl, adding flour to cover once you have a layer of noodles. When they're all unrolled, toss the noodles with the flour to coat them, then drop by handfuls into the boiling soup, stirring them in every now and again to circulate the water around the noodles. They should cook fast, not clump together. (If they clump, they'll still taste good, they just won't be as pretty. They may also get doughy, so you may have to cut them a bit and let them cook a bit longer. I haven't had bad noodle-clumping issues, though, so maybe ask an expert as you ARE working with eggs in this recipe).
Repeat this step with the other half of the dough.

When the noodles are holding their shape and not clumped (hopefully), throw in a couple handfuls of flour (the flour you just used for noodles is fine to use for this, it's just thickening the soup). Return the cut up chicken to the pot, discarding the bones (or feeding the dogs, whichever works for you). Simmer the soup for a few more minutes. Remove the bay leaf (or allow one of the kids to find it in the soup and award them a prize, such as the title "O Finder of the Bay Leaf, Esquire".)

Enjoy :)

Sometimes I add celery to this soup, but today I wasn't in the mood to chop. Knitting socks is way more fun than making soup.

Oh, reading: I finished Pillars of the Earth on my Kindle today. I always feel like I've cheated if I've seen the movie of a book and not read the book, so usually I go back and read the book after having seen the movie. Great book, epic, and I really loved the little details that Ken Follett included in the book, such as what was needed to get the priory productive again or how Jack was going to add buttresses to the cathedral. The ending was a shock though, so I'm glad I read the book, or I would have missed all of that part, as it wasn't included in the tv series. Moving on to World Without End next. Oh, and Black Elk Speaks, for the class I'm taking. Ooh, I've just noticed there's a Kindle edition of the Black Elk. That could be handy, saving me from having to share Alan's book. :)

My first self-designed knitting pattern--Merino Ribbed Fingerless Gloves

2010-08-29T01:10:00.002-05:00

Making this with some Koigu Merino I bought oh, a year or so ago. I only bought one skein because I intended to use it for granny squares. So, I'm not exactly sure I'll have enough to do the other side. This is my own design though, and I do have another skein of the Koigu in a powder pink. I don't really mind wearing two different colored gloves, anymore than I mind wearing two different colored socks. So, anyway, welcome to the debut of my first official knitting pattern (which I probably learned how to make by combining the patterns of many different glove/mittens patterns I've used in the past) (typing this from memory because I didn't write it down as I was making it.)

Sam's Almost-Painless Easy Fingerless Ribbed Gloves
(is that a long enough title for one's first knitting pattern?)

Materials:
Size 2 double points (set of five)
2 skeins Koigu Premium Merino
tapestry needle
stitch holder
stitch marker

Pattern: Knit 3, purl 1.

Cast on 48 stitches and distribute stitches on 3 needles (16 stitches on each needle. Keep track of these: Needle 1, Needle 2, Needle 3). Join without twisting stitches.

Wrist section: Knit in pattern until your tube measures about 2.75 inches.
Thumb gusset: Work stitches on first and second needle in pattern. Work stitches on third needle in pattern until last four stitches. Place marker, knit 1, make 1 right, knit 2, make one left, knit 1.
Next row: knit in pattern around.
Continue in this manner, increasing two stitches between marker and end of needle 3 stitches, then knitting one full round in pattern, until you have 18 stitches between marker and end of needle 3. Knit around to marker. Remove marker.
Place thumb gusset stitches on waste yarn or stitch holder. From end of Needle 3, backwards loop cast on 8 stitches. Join these to the tube by knitting the first stitch on Needle 1. Knit around in pattern. When you come to the cast on 8 stitches, knit in pattern (Knit 3, purl 1). Distribute your stitches so you have 16 stitches on Needle 1 and Needle 2 and 20 stitches on Needle 3.
Palm: continue working in pattern another 5 inches or until desired length is reached.
Cast off all stitches around. Cut yarn leaving about a 6 inch tail. Use tapestry needle to weave in end of yarn.
Thumb: Pick up 12 stitches along the backwards loop cast on edge of thumb (Needle 4). Slip the held stitches onto three needles (should have 6 stitches per needle and 12 on the picked up edge--These are Needles 1, 2, and 3). Starting at end of picked up stitches (Needle 1), knit one round.
Second round: Needle 1-Knit 1, ssk, knit 3 (5 stitches)-. Needle 2-Knit 1, ssk, knit 3 (5 stitches). Needle 3-Knit 1, ssk, knit 3 (5 stitches). Needle 4-Knit 1, ssk, knit 6, k2tog, knit 1 (10 stitches)
Third round: Knit around all stitches on all four needles. (25 stitches)
Fourth round: Needle 1-knit 3, k2tog (4 stitches) . Needle 2-Knit 3, k2tog (4 stitches). Needle 3-Knit 3, k2tog (4 stitches). Needle 4-Knit 1, ssk, knit 4, k2tog, knit 1 (8 stitches). (20 stiches)
Fifth round: Knit around all stitches on all four needles (20 stiches)
Sixth round: Needle 1-Knit 2, k2tog (3 stitches). Needle 2-Knit 2, k2tog (3 stitches). Needle 3-Knit 2, k2tog (3 stitches). Needle 4-Knit 1, ssk, knit 2, k2tog, knit 1 (6 stitches) . (15 stitches)
Seventh round: Knit around all stitches on all four needles.
Eighth round: Cast off all stitches. Cut yarn leaving 6 inch tail. Weave in tail with tapestry needle.
Weave in all ends (don't forget the one inside the thumb).

Make another.
Wear with pride.

:)

(If any of these terms are confusing, I suggest you go here to learn how to knit).

I write like...

2010-08-23T10:11:00.000-05:00

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

A week without SC

2010-08-19T10:16:00.000-05:00

So about a week ago I quit logging in to Second Citizen forum because of some pictures there I didn't want to see. I have to admit, staying off SC makes me want to be online a lot less. There used to be three things I did as soon as I logged in: check my iGoogle page, read my email, log into SC.

So what have I been doing? I've been spending more time on Facebook than before, though not posting there any more than usual (once a week?). I've sort of given up WoW for the time being also, because being an orc shammy is fail at this point in the game. I know there are orc shammys out there who totally rock the class and I give kudos to them. I'm not one of them. So, giving up WoW means I also spend a lot less time reading WoW Insider than I did before (I used to read the RSS feed and read there at least once or twice a day).

P2 and I just finished watching Stargate Universe: Season 1 on Netflix, and we've still got a month before that starts up again on SyFy channel. We also watched the entire series of Firefly (now cancelled, unfortunately). We haven't found another tv series to interest us, though we have watched a few movies.

I've been working on a newsletter this week, a freelance project I do for extra money. That's kept me sorta busy, but my online time is usually late at night, so I can't always work on it then because a) too tired and b) too late to contact people for interviews/stories, etc.

I've logged into SL a couple times this week. It feels like what it is: empty.

I've restarted Plurking to keep in touch with some SC people who wanted me to post there.

I've visited with my friend Lucifer from Scotland on Yahoo. I hardly EVER log into Yahoo. This is how I'll probably keep in touch with Luc now, though, so I'll probably be on there more.

I do FarmVille, but to be honest, during the week I'm too busy with work to do that much and during the weekends I'm usually fighting with the kids to use my computer.

So, this week I made a hat (see previous post) and I made socks. This is not a very good picture of the August socks, but I made these socks in two days.

One isn't done yet, but it will be done within a couple hours.

The leaving of SC may be a good thing in terms of knitting time. It's not a good thing in terms of "keeping up with friends". Also, in the "losing friends" category I'm a success! (not good--sarcasm, we haz it.) While I don't want August to be over, I know that August is always hell on forums. I'm sorry I apparently created some drahma on my favorite forum where I'm now an ex-member. Wasn't my intention.

The Hat They Call Jayne

2010-08-14T00:17:00.002-05:00

I just finished one and a half pairs of socks this week (July and part of August socks), pics later.

What I'm really excited about is the Jayne Cobb hat I'm making for Alan/P2. Jayne Cobb is a character in an old tv show called Firefly. At one point in the series, Jayne's mom sends him a handknit hat. So, we watched the series a few weeks ago, and Alan fell in love with the hat. There are even several Facebook groups of people who love Jayne's hat, and links to all kinds of Jayne hats you can buy on Google, plus Ravelry (the knitting/social networking sight I belong to) also has tons of Jayne hats, patterns for Jayne hats, etsy stores for Jayne hats...

So last week we had a little extra money on the credit card and I ordered the yarn to make Jayne's hat. Yarn arrived today.

Hat is 2/3 finished already!

~~I'll post another pic when it's done. :)~~

The Hat They Call Jayne is done. I finished it around 2:30 today. ~~I didn't take a picture yet because~~ was busy all day cleaning house preparing for out of town guests coming tomorrow. Alan loves it, though. :) Moving on to the August socks (will post a pic of that tomorrow, too).

New Quilt Finished

2010-08-04T12:02:00.000-05:00

I just finished this quilt on Sunday. I've been working on it off and on for about five years. I bought the fabric in 2005 at my favorite quilt store, The Gallery in Valentine, Nebraska, which has since closed. I think I made most of the diamonds for it the same week I bought it, but there were a few unfinished. I then apparently GAVE the diamonds and fabric to my mother to use for a giveaway* when her husband died, but anyway, somehow these diamonds and leftover fabric survived my house fire in 2006, I dunno how
So, about 18 months ago I found the quilt top pieces (in my mother's quilt fabric stash) and ordered more fabric for the background and finished the top. Some of the quilt is hand pieced, some machine pieced. After I finished the top, I started hand-quilting it. I didn't quilt it for the whole year. I put it away and worked on other stuff, but every now and again I pulled it out and put some stitches in. Finally in July this year I hauled it out again and finished it.
I think this is the first quilt I've ever made for myself in 18 years of quilting, and it reminds me of Mary Mulligan, the owner of the quilt store where I bought the fabrics for it. Mary was a good friend and kind of mentor when I first started quilting. She taught me how to do double-fold French binding and quilt-as-you-go log cabin blocks and oh, many, many other things about quilting. She died of cancer a year or so ago, and I really miss her.

*a "giveaway" is a ceremony practiced pretty much throughout most Indian tribes where a family will give away a bunch of stuff, mostly handmade stuff like quilts and beadwork and regalia or even horses, etc. to honor someone for special occasions, such as name givings, death, memorials, graduations, winning a basketball tournament, going to the military, etc.

Did I mention I'm learning to spin yarn? (updated 9/8/10)

2010-08-03T13:28:00.001-05:00

I'm not very good at it, yet, but it's definitely something I want to do more of. I've made one horribly puffy skein of undyed wool, which I turned into a rather nice, rustic coffee cup cozy (pic below).

And I've spun some dyed roving into slightly neater single ply yarn (first pic above), which I hope to ply at some point when I get time alone without a four-year-old thinking it's a fun game to stop the spindle from twirling. Also, I need to check out more videos and possibly a book on how to ply. I've watched a few, but the camera is too far away for me to see what's going on. Anyway, I'm happy with this new thing. One step closer to my goal of spinning buffalo wool into yarn. :)

It's the 5th anniversary of this blog!

2010-07-20T00:00:00.001-05:00

And to sum it all up:

Fridays and teaching at a tribal college

2010-07-16T12:12:00.000-05:00

Fridays at work are pretty easy going. I don't know why so many people skip out. Maybe the week has been long (and this HAS seemed like a long week), maybe there's been stress (I only had two students show up this week!), and maybe it's summer and there are more interesting and important things going on out in the world, but I actually prefer to be at work on Fridays (another maybe: perhaps this has to do with the 11 other people living with me?) Where I work, on Fridays nobody comes in. We don't have classes. The buses don't run. The bosses don't even always show up (my boss is in his office playing FarmVille). My office is in a computer lab. There are always a few students who show up and need help logging in or with writing a paper. I can play my music on my computer. We don't do casual Fridays. We do casual every day. :) Also, it's been very hot all week, ranging from high eighties to low 100's. Office is air conditioned, home is not.

So today I managed to get my book orders in for Fall semester. I've looked at my syllabus and decided what to concentrate on for next week's classes (provided anyone still shows up). Only two more weeks of this "semester" and then they're taking a test, so next week is all about "Teaching to the test". They also have to write two more papers next week, then two the final week.

Tribal college teaching is a different beast. I don't know about other teachers, but I read what they say on the ECNing and in other forums, and working at a tribal college has all kinds of differences. My friend Kim and I talked about how tribal colleges (and schools on reservations) have a lot more in common with inner city schools and rural schools, and that hasn't really changed in the five or six years since we discussed that.

Tribal college classrooms:
Classrooms contain nothing but chairs and tables (mostly broken chairs and tables)
Windows in classrooms often don't open. If they open, often you won't be able to shut them again.
The temperature in the classroom is always the opposite of what you want. In January the classroom is cold enough to prevent the removal of coats, hats and gloves. In July the classroom is actually hot enough to both interfere with and hinder learning and breathing comfortably.
There are no SmartBoards, laptops, projectors, televisions, DVD players, VCRs, or anything even slightly technological.
Classrooms typically get cleaned once a month. Once. a. month.
You provide your own markers for the dry-erase board.
The computer lab/classroom has ten computers. Six of them work. They are all emachines, with very little memory, purchased to allow business office staff to access the business software/network, not to save anything. These computers are second hand, and they might link to the internet, they might not. They are all running on Windows XP and MsWord 2003.
The monitors for these computers were all purchased pre-2002.
The mouse for each computer may or may not have a scroll wheel.
I use clorox wipes before I even touch a mouse or keyboard in the computer lab.

Tribal college students
Students don't always show up
Students have more than one bag. The bag they bring to class is not the one they need. Same applies to notebooks. They often bring the wrong notebook. They also leave the books at home unless you are specific and say "bring your books!" Sometimes they leave their books at home because they don't want to have to use the book in class. No matter how many times you say "bring your book, we're reading this part tomorrow" they will leave their books at home. More than once I've had a student tell me, "The police took my car this weekend (when I got arrested for DUI) and my book bag was in it." I bring a couple extra books with me for these situations.
Students think that showing up once a week for a twice-weekly class is enough to get a B grade.
Students think that showing up every OTHER week for a once-weekly class is enough to get a B grade.
Students won't read unless you force it in the classroom
Students won't discuss unless you ask direct questions.
Students won't think about what they read unless you assign them a paper on what they just read, and then they'll spend half an hour thinking of reasons why they don't want to comment on what they just read. Often that reason is "I have an emergency at home."
Students write constantly--with their fingers on tiny keyboards on their cell phones and in chat programs on the computer. (If I could ensure each student had a cell phone w/ texting, I'd give assignments using the text as a writing tool).
Students prefer to learn on the computer.
If they can't use the computer in class, students want to you to give them a worksheet to fill out that they turn in. They don't want to read, write, think or discuss. They want the fucking worksheet so they can get this done and move on to the next worksheet-centered class.
Students have really, really interesting things to say when you can finally get them to write, read and discuss.
Students here have incredible writing talents. Not skills, many of my students don't have the grammar conventions to communicate clearly. The content of their writing, though, is incredible.
Most of the above, the part about students, is for students under age 30.

TC Students above age 30:
Want to discuss everything about their lives: their kids, their house, their boyfriends/girlfriends, their cars, their jobs, their parents, sundance, other teachers, their lack of computer skills, their high school memories, their garden, their travels. I just have them write about all these things or class could not go on while they discuss everything EXCEPT the assigned reading/writing.
Don't always have the computer skills they need to successfully complete the class assignments.
Students over 30 will bring good perspective to the class if they take the time to do the assigned reading and writing. Often one student over 30 in a class of under 30s will lead the class on a journey nobody suspected they wanted or needed to take.
I am always grateful to have students over 30 in my classes.

TC Instructors and teachers:
Tribal college teachers often have bad attitudes.
TC teachers want to get to class, give the assignment, have the students do the assignment and be done.
TC teachers often don't assign writing because they don't want to read the results.
TC teachers want to know how to get and keep students going to class, but often they don't teach in interesting ways.
TC teachers are often boring.
Some TC teachers speak to the students as if they are five year olds.
Some TC teachers think only the white students will pass their class. When they think this, it becomes true.
Some TC teachers think writing some things on a board while talking is enough to transmit learning to their students.
Some TC teachers never learn the names of all their students.
Some TC teachers have highly engaging classes where their students look forward to coming each week and always do the assignments (which are always fun). These teachers are in the minority. I think there are two of these TC teachers here, and I'm not one of them.
Some TC teachers would be certified insane if they worked at another college anywhere else in the country.
The certified insane TC teachers? They're often the most popular teachers, but often it's because they give an A automatically, whether they know your name or not.
Some TC teachers give students a grade that is based on who they are, who their family is, and how it will benefit them. These are usually not the Indian teachers.
Some TC teachers agonize over their students' attendance, work, writing, reading, discussing, and life problems.
Some TC teachers recognize the problems and feel helpless to do anything about them.
Some TC teachers are apathetic as a survival mechanism.
Some TC teachers are selectively apathetic, depending on the race, class, and family of the student in question.
Some TC teachers are just getting through the days to retirement.
Some TC teachers are total control freaks.
Some TC teachers want to be controlled. Some don't. Some don't realize they're being controlled.
(there's more that can be said about TC teachers. I run out of space, though).

I had 11 students signed up for my summer English class. Five total showed up the first week and two the next week. Three of my students had issues with child care (lack of). Two had issues with transportation. The other one? No idea.

Work work

2010-07-06T01:31:00.000-05:00

Back to work tomorrow, and I'm feeling a bit depressed about it all. I know I was upbeat about it last week, but I tried this experiment tonight and things did not go well at home while I was gone. I tried taking off for a couple hours at dinner time (I went to my office to make copies of my syllabus for tomorrow). While I was gone I expected someone to make dinner. I got home two hours later. Nothing. They just left it all for me to do. This is a household with four other adults and one nearly-adult, and guess who is doing most of the work? Yeah.

So, anyway, no matter how things go at home, I'm back to work tomorrow (which is really TODAY as I write this).

Things annoying me:
1) People who sulk.
2) People who rarely shower.
3) People who pretend not to notice their work is piling up
4) People who pretend not to notice someone else doing their work while they ignore the piling up of their work.
5) People who are so fucking insensitive they don't see that they get a free ride while others shoulder the burden of their food, gas, ride, laundry, bed making, cleaning, cooking, budgeting, etc.
6) People who feel entitled to 100% of everything, simply because they have a (fixable) problem.
7) People who ignore obvious signs someone is upset with them, as if pretending not to notice makes the problem go away, then when the problem confronts them they act surprised.
8) People who expect others to shoulder their responsibilities, then get dramatic and sulky if the other people refuse or confront them
9) People who give birth but refuse to accept responsibility for their spawn
10) People who volunteer to take care of said spawn, then fail to do so.
11) My sister.

Back to work

2010-06-28T16:23:00.000-05:00

Okay, who doesn't love a job where you can take six weeks off and not get fired? Well, being a teacher means an automatic 12 weeks off during summer, usually, but college teachers means less, though still time off! I got bored of being at home in a hot house today, though, so I'm back a week at work a week early. I need to get my syllabus done for next week's class, anyway, and it's too chaotic at home to get any writing done. It hardly seems economically-sound to pay a teacher my salary to teach 12 students one four hour class for one month, but I guess this is how things are done here.

I've spent my vacation gardening, reading, quilting, knitting, reading, playing FarmVille, playing WoW, reading, getting back into Second Life, spending time with my children, reading, budgeting, cooking, cleaning, reading, doing laundry, setting kids a chores schedule (so I could do LESS laundry, heh), and just relaxing and READING. I'm still not done with the Ice & Fire series, and I refuse to read anything else until that is done. Luckily I love this series, long though it is.

Good things: I don't always sleep late. I'm eating regular meals, though not doing the exercise I had planned. I've got over my addiction to sunflower seeds. I'm getting enough rest. I'm less stressed. I guess it was a good vacation, though I wish we could have afforded an actual trip somewhere. Doesn't matter. At least there was time to do things I like with people I love. We're planning a 4th of July picnic in the park with the rest of my huge family. Cookout, swimming in the river, followed by fireworks at the Casino. Hopefully there's no drama around these arrangements. It could very easily be downsized to just my own immediate family.

In SL, P2 and I have bought a little bit of mainland in Clearwing, taking it off the hands of our friend, Lucifer, who is helping to pay for a plane ticket for his ladylove Io to join him in Scotland. We're glad to give what little help we can, and it's nice to be back on Mainland. Some of our other friends have joined to buy the rest of Luc's land and we've got a little community going, with a Darkmere Social Club for nightly DJ parties and chat. It's all very casual, but it's good to get the feeling of the Second Citizen Community back again.

SL is feeling lonely

2010-06-06T00:07:00.000-05:00

Well, what's really going on in the picture is that my draw distance is set very small so you can "see" the sim, but not what's really there because things get edited out if your draw distance is low.

An old, old friend (from 2005) IMd me tonight and hadn't been online in months and was surprised at how empty her Friends List was looking. I had noticed that many times, but sometimes it's seasonal absence and sometimes it's the way the SL viewer (or third party viewers) cause constant crashing. Recently my best friend's SL boyfriend died in real life, so she hasn't felt like logging in. Another good friend has a stalker (also from 2005), so she doesn't log in either. My husband is wrapped up in WoW, so he doesn't log in. Basically, I've got 8 people on my own Friends List right now. I should say, I hardly log in myself, except to clear messages and check out sales at my favorite stores once a week or so, so it's not surprising that very few from my friends list feels like logging into SL because...well, it's just really not the same SL it was when many of us joined. It's bigger, more confusing, still buggy, harder to socialize, and like my friend Memory said, "The more things change..." Or, maybe we as people have changed and SL has stayed too much the same. We no longer need SL for whatever it was we needed it for two, three, four, or five years ago. We've moved on, but not out. That being said, I've not gone a whole week without logging in except for Feb. 2010, when I was banned for some inexplicable reason and reinstated a week later after many useless attempts to use the Ticket System. Thanks to an old Linden friend, my avatar and her stuff was reinstated, but it's the longest I've gone without SL, and I barely noticed.

Today's Plan

2010-05-25T10:11:00.001-05:00

7:30-9:30 Two hours to get the kids up and out the door to school. Thankfully it's the last week of school. Only three more days of this hell! (Got a load of laundry in. The neverending chore.)

9:30-10:30 Online time. I'm limiting myself today. Just doing FarmVille and checking SLU for anything interesting.

10:30-12:30 Baking bread for dinner tonight. I am going to attempt something resembling French bread or baguettes. Spaghetti for dinner. Homemade sauce. (Also, kitchen time and waiting for things to rise/bake is good knitting time. Working on a sweater. Details later.)

12:30-1:30 Alan gets home from dialysis. Lunch, etc. Probably going to try to get some things in the garden this afternoon, depending on how things warm up (it's chilly this morning). I do have more lettuce to harvest there, though, which means salad for lunch!

1:30-3:30 Attempting to quilt. This is dependent on a few things: finding all my quilting tools and fabrics, having a plan in mind, and motivation. I've got three quilts in various stages of being quilted already. I want to start something new, and as we know, Startitis can be frustrating both in the short-term and long-term.

3:30-4:30 Kids get home. Should probably make cookies or some kind of snacks. Was considering cupcakes and having Jill and Whit help decorate them. We'll see how it goes.

4:30-6:30 Making dinner. More knitting time.

6:30-7:30 Dinner, dishes, more laundry. Trying to get Kid #4 into the bath. This could be hours.

7:30-10:30 Either online time, watching Parenthood, or more quilting/knitting/laundry. Probably all of the above.

10:30-11:30 Trying to get kids to get to bed. Luckily getting them to bed is easier than getting them up in the morning.

11:30ish Final online time for the day. Probably will have stuff to harvest in FarmVille. Maybe some WoW.

12:30ish Bed. Re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire series on my Kindle. Just finished The Devil Wears Prada, which was a huge letdown. First time I've ever had the experience where the movie was better than the book!

Second Life: The age of the hacker

2010-05-15T08:17:00.004-05:00

I've been reading with great interest these several threads at SLUniverse Forums: Onyx source code has been leaked; Important! Oh Snap!; Woot! Farewell Woodbury!; Copybot ban link system in clear and multiple violation of TOS; and Onyx Bots Everywhere. Makes for a lot of late nights reading forums (and all this while watching the past five seasons of LOST!).

Basically, the threads are about the security, or lack thereof, of the Second Life grid, its data, and its residents. What I'm seeing going on is a kind of hacker's war over the open source code of Linden Lab and of its main product, Second Life. It's really complex, with tangents running off in all directions as forum drama (and real wars) tend to do. It's being carried out by people half my age who are, for lack of a better explanation, brilliant young people who are disenfranchised with the plodding day-to-day of what Linden Lab employees do, and who really have set themselves on the cutting edge of virtual worlds and proved they can control something that isn't really theirs to control. Why do they do it? Because they can. Why do I care? Because it's a slice of history being carried out in front of my eyes via the forums.

It occurs to me that the "solutions" Linden Lab has put in place to report and repair bugs in its software aren't working. There's the JIRA, which really sucks balls. It's complicated, it's hard to report bugs, and then you have to get enough votes to get the bugs looked at and fixed...really it's a non-solution. A suggestion box that it seems is rarely read with any serious intent of fixing anything, but serves to appease those who actually make an effort to use it. I've rarely seen any serious bugs fixed via the JIRA method of reporting. I've seen bugs come back again and again in viewer after viewer.

The other method of getting things fixed at Linden Lab seems to be open sourcing the client code and allowing anyone with the skills to build their own client, fix the bugs, and offer it (for free) to the residents of SL. Apparently this process is closely watched by Linden Lab, but this "solution" also enables the construction of several illegal versions of the client, ones which allow copying of other people's products in Second Life, or data mining to gather real life information about SL residents, or any number of other things that threaten the security of SL and its residents and business owners.

While the security of SL is threatened by hackers, it's interesting that Linden Lab has not shut down the ability of non-employees to create and distribute viewers. They've put into place a Third Party Viewer Policy, and they have banned at least two resident-created viewers (as far as I know). They've also come out with a new viewer, the SL 2.0.x (after eight years of building and maintaining SL they've finally gone from v. 1.x to a v.2.0). What they haven't done is shut down the brilliant young coders who are making these third party viewers, and I think its because they've always used residents to build Second Life. Why not use residents to search out and fix the bugs that the Lab doesn't have the staff or stamina or skills to find and fix itself?

If it weren't for the creators in Second Life, there would be no Second Life. It would just be an empty place without any spirit or soul (and yes, I'm arguing that a virtual world can have a spirit and soul and even yes, culture, and that this spirit/soul/culture is built and embodied in its residents). The hair makers, clothing designers, skin artists, sim builders, experience makers, photographers, machinimists, shoe designers, airplane builders, script writers, educators, corporate business men and women, investment brokers, land barons and yes, even hackers, have built this virtual world, aided by the initial work of Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, and made it what it is. And what it is has never been defined fully.

It's all a delicate balance. There would be no fashion designers without fashionistas to buy their stuff. There would be no land barons without residents to rent their land. There would be no airplane makers without people who want to experience piloting an airplane. There would be no corporate businesses without the proper tools and stability to conduct real life business in SL (and here's where the security of the grid comes in, along with the hackers who identify the security holes and fix them--or not). They're saying the education people are leaving SL and the corporations have already left. Many are putting this down to the lack of stability and security of the grid. I'm thinking that if hackers had been a part of the grid back in 2002, the grid would not only be stable and somewhat secure, we'd all be visiting corporate websites as avatars and websites would look like graphically-better versions of Second Life.