i'm not a cat person, i swear.

It's that weird limbo in between christmas and the other holiday of sheer expectation that i usually try to avoid... new years eve.
I usually try to avoid the resolutions and the countdown. I never feel any different from one second to the other. I just end up with champagne up my nose and that sinking feeling that I have no idea where to go from here.

I'm officially laid off. Me and about 9 percent of ohio. So I guess I'm in good company. But then again, at the same time, I'm out there with my fellow ohioans standing in line to all apply to the new strip mall tool emporium that will probably end up filing for bankruptcy because even their employees can't afford to buy anything there.

And usually I'm not a cat person, but this black and white cat has found me and I like her. I can't tell is she's staring at me to comfort me or to lull me back to sleep. Either way, getting out of bed is getting harder every day.

cold wake up

So I moved my computer over to my house and if I sit just right on the corner of my bed, I can catch the interweb from the neighbors on the hill. And we're tearing up the upstairs to put it back together only make it a little bit warmer as previously, using air as insulation wasn't really very insulating. (I always thought the bitter draft was just the windows, but nope, turns out it was actually the entire ceiling / walls.)
I'm waking up nice a slowly with a mattress heater and one nostril filled entirely with snot. Last night Jason took me on a shopping date. I got some slippers for me, boots for my sister, and sparkles for the deer skulls we're adorning our christmas tree this year with. And then I laughed as Jason filled out an incredibly long job application for borders... but then thought about it and started filling one out myself.

Well, my bladder is full from the cold and morning writing is terrible compared to at night, so I think I'm going to just start my day.

voicemails meant to be deleted

Tonight, after a long bath and an even longer self assessment session, I listened to all my skipped voicemails.-student loans -lawrence twp police calling about a goat they found to see if it's mine - my mother - the band is at my house and they don't know where i am - bill collectors again - some lady asking if i have any turkeys - an unintentioned call (ass dial) from jason - my mother again - and a job rejection.


I'm trying not to be too apocalyptic, but I'm sitting here with half of my bedroom ceiling falling in on me in what appears to be the set of a horror movie. The dog training job that I was pretty fucking excited about slipped through my hands and fell into the lap of someone "more experienced" yet again and I'm left with a dwindling paycheck and threadbare self-respect, wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do now.
And I keep playing over and over the interview in my mind, thinking of all the moments, the dogs, the mistakes, the weeks worth of post-interview daydreaming about training service dogs and taking them on educational trips and whatnot.
I guess that I've been turned down for jobs before. Hell, even the Akron Children's Hospital is too good for me to even sweep their floors. I keep rolling over and over what I would like to do vs. where I'm at now.
I realize that I have so many daydreams about the way that things could be. If I'm applying to be a bar maid, I picture opening up my own bar and what it would be like, or for this most recent service dog trainer / office manager position, I imagined expanding to have therapy bunnies and elderly companion pomeranians and saving all of the good dogs who end up in the pound on their way to the needle. (or is it just a 22?)


It all is really starting to roll around faster - goats - mom - student loans - band - mom - - - - (repeat) It's like I never have time to stop it, but I always have time for staying in it.


I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about any more. ugh..... brain frozen.

salted tongue

So I think that officially I have my first cold of this cold season. It knocked my ass back on the couch and slowed me down for bit. I've been eating cough drops like candy and going to bed at least an hour earlier than my already pretty pathetic early bedtime.

And I'm starting to come up with a surplus of time; not that I have the money or the motivation to do anything with it, but I have it now. I have that feeling like when you've been in a car so long, like hours and hours, usually when you're the passenger and the world has been moving by your car window for so long, trees and signs and everything flying by your periphery and disappearing somewhere behind you... that when you stop, you feel dizzy. Like everything is still moving, or should be moving but is now slowly sliding backwards.
I guess it's the slow dizziness of getting off a ride at the fair or spinning in circles. Nothing is moving now. It's all just suddenly stopped and my eyes are tricking my brain into things that aren't happening anymore.

It's the changing of the seasons that often leads me to think that I need to change something with myself. Like who I was in spring and summer is not who I will be this fall and winter. Right before the change, I dream of running away or of waking up somewhere else as someone else... which invariably alarms Jason, with whom I swear everything is going great, which it is. It's just that feeling that with my hours being cut, time being ample and budgets being stretched that I start suspicions of a life a bit more wasted in busying myself with things so fleeting.

I just am starting to see the worry lines etching across my face. The cold is ripping through my unfinished house with leaky windows that are looming over my head. But, like an idiot, I lived paycheck to paycheck even when the paychecks were good, and so now that they are not, I'm stretching a bit more thin.

I'm starting to apply to all those jobs that six months ago i swore I would never go back to, but now a desk and a corner that I can call my own for around 30 hours a week sounds lovely.


And I hate having so much time to sit at a computer now. I've procrastinated on billing. My desk is a mess so i don't even sit at it. My website has lapsed and is now no longer in service. I don't mind much though. There are moments where I can't wait to plan for next year, but tonight... I just feel like sinking down into a pile of blanket, doing shots of cough syrup and wishing that my piano would just fucking play itself.
My music is driving me mad as of late. My musical partners in crime are not to blame, though I might rationalize myself into thinking that my lack of persistance might somehow be their fault. It's not. It's me.
When I was little, my mother would set a bell. For a half an hour a day I was chained to the piano chair, plunking out whatever new songbook I talked my mom into buying me. Most of my time I spent checking the bell to see if a half a minute had passed or not, sometime stopping mid stanza to see how much closer that bell was to ringing. My mom got wise and added on an extra minute every time I got up. I thought it was cruelty. Now i wish I could only have that type of peristance.

I promise myself to become a better story teller.

I promise myself to not watch the bell, but just play until it rings.

I promise myself to not watch the wrinkles stretch... but rather put on some sunblock and go outside to play.

first thawing of the fingers and toes

I'm not sure when I blinked and missed it, but summer is gone now. the nights are bitterly cold blowing through my terribly insulated bedroom. the days are beautifully mild with white puffy clouds slowly rolling by. Work is terribly boring, trying to stare at the few remaining plants we have to make them pretty enough to try to sell. My hours are cut to almost nothing, which is tough because the less time I'm at work, the more money I spend with all my free time.

In good news, the house project just got catapulted into actually commencing again thanks to the impending wedding and a million people staying at my place. Ironically though, once we started working on it again, dad decided to get a new paint job on the truck so.. yeah, don't have any way of getting supplies over 8 feet.
I ran over my puppy today. Pretty weird. Just in a golf cart though and I kinda feel like it was a bit of my fault. While she's amazing and a fast learner and being such a good dog, she has this tendency to stop in front of you when you're walking, but then again, walking doesn't hurt as much as a motorized vehicle. She did the same thing with the golf cart, ran around it and then stopped in front. I yelled "no" at her, which made her look at me and in that moment, she went under the tires, all paws and fur tumbling under the weight. Lucky for me, the ground was soft with recent rain and her puppy body is pretty resiliant... and it wasn't a freaking car. So she's sleeping it off on the couch now. I can see her heart pumping through her ear that is starting to stand up. She's going to puppy school and has been a good student so far, learning the trade of hearding while occasionally getting a mouth full of wool when the trainer isn't looking.

Things have calmed down after the CSA harvest fest. I am constantly sleepy and probably getting sick. Jason has to occasionally remind me to stay calm, which I always appreciate. We're battling coon and weasels on the chicken hosue front and our flock is dwindling. Our last CSA straggler is picking up today and then all the veggies that come out of the garden from now until frost will be all ours. With night time temps dropping into the thirties by the end of the week, I'm not sure how long everything will last.

it's like i can't get nothing right.

I'm having one of those terribly frustrating days that never seems to start. It's the kind of day that makes you want to kick your dog, throw your cell phone out the window, get in your car and just drive and cry about nothing and everything.
It's this weird twisting frustration winding around inside me, wrapping up everything that is going on, sewing together little pieces of the minor daily tragedies to make a quilt of all the things I've done wrong. I fear my temper in the end might get the best of me, and recently this super emotional wave has engulfed pretty much all of my friends and washed away all sense of my self worth.

I'm at this point right now where everything is ending and I can't get my footing right for the next step. I've been angry and frustrated with everything; Jason, the band, my fam, the looming wedding, the ending job, the end of the growing season.

I keep having these fantasies, mostly about fleeing everything; working as a migrant laborer in South America or the vineyards in Europe... or having dreams about getting pregnant and then just jumping in my car and driving until I ran out of gas and money in some town where no one knows me and I could start clean with my new kid.

I don't know. I think I just need to slow down and breath. I have the sweetest little puppy that I really shouldn't feel like kicking. My big to do list for the week only has one thing crossed off. The rest involve more than one step...

Ok, just typing that made me call the butcher and set the pigs date. That was easy. Two things off the list now.

sweet september rain

It's september already and I feel like I've totally dropped the ball on writing this season. It's been my first year doing the bountiful harvest csa and so much has been happening so fast, it's hard to keep up with it all.
Each week, we've been pulling everything out of the gardens and putting it in pretty baskets for members to coo over. It started out pretty rough as I didn't know what I was thinking but I said the season would start the first week in June. Um. Nothing is growing the first week in June. It was like three weeks of lettuce. What a pain in the ass. We had watercress too. And some broccoli eventually. I'm actually not sure exactly how we managed to put 30 baskets together of just lettuce and greens and radishes for a group who hates radishes. I write a little "cooking in season" thing each week with a recipe and what's going on in the garden. The first weeks were my woes of groundhogs mowing down my beans and peas and everything else. Then I wrote about my woes with squash bugs. Then we started supplimenting our baskets with other locally grown veggies.


Ok, so I know I'm going to forget this feeling that I have now, so i'm just going to write down regrets and what I would change... in no order. and i'm sure this is going to be pretty boring for most people reading this, but I have a terrible memory and if I don't tuck this away on the internet, I won't remember it at all.

- label all vegetables and seed starts.
-row covers for cukes and squash
-more potatoes
-reinforce back electric fence
-nothing outside the fence in front garden
-more of front garden... it's the only one we tend to
-more beans... and in rotation this time.
-more time in the garden in general. we really stopped trying around July, kinda disappointing and you can tell as productivity just dropped off.
-hot pepper spray on the plants.
-spinosad worked but washed off quickly, excellent for the beans. try it on the jap beetles on raspberries next year
-more mulch! less weeds!
-things that worked in intensive bedding squares: kale, lettuce, beets, chard, carrots (wet towel over them was wonderful!!!)
-things that would work better in rows: beans, toms-need staked in rows and off the ground!
-squash would have been better if we would have dedicated a whole section of garden for them to roam... as is, they took over and then got squash bugs and all died. more black plastic, spraying and row covers. don't need to till so much for them if we mulch heavy. Maybe put them towards the swamp part of the garden, planted as far away from the walnut as possible and train them to walk on mulch towards the walnut. need to be inside the fence!!! vermin eat one bite and then move on to the next
-toms: need staked badly. heirlooms produced well as long as bone meal was fed to them. more basil interplanting next year, almost equal parts of toms and basil would do well. loved the germans, didn't like great white taste or red zebra. orange toms always a big hit
-corn: takes up too much room for what it gives-takes lots of space in between rows too. maybe plant inside the fence with pole beans, which can justify the space taken
-peas: need to be planted very early in march, and kept up with successive plantings. everyone loves sugar snap and while they may be a pain in the ass, they were delicious fresh.
-garlic: harvest before seed heads form, before head splits open. plant early in spring. very early. does not do well in just sand, maybe mix for one section of the garden to be garlic and onions. does well in intensive plantings

(more notes to come)



The season is winding down now and all I can say is I'm glad. It's super stressful and each week I think I'm going to break, but I think that we've worked a lot of the kinks out and will be ready for next year, though it is painful to think that we would put ourselves through all this work and stress again next year.

The good thing about it is that demand is so high and all our people have been very nice and supportive. Jason and I both admitted a twinge of defeat when upon delivering our July baskets, so proud of the three cucumbers and small cups of beans, a total cost to the recipient of about $20, we would pass by farm stands on the side of the road selling three cukes for $1. Ouch.

Oh well, with mom's disease progressing, everything seems to be getting a bit harder around here. And right now, I'm in OU following up Pj's bout of bad luck, but I'm getting some pretty good food while here along with a ton of books and cd's to fuel the lack of culture coming out of akron. eek.
mmm... off to casa

siesta fiesta

I feel like so many days are slipping by without proper documentation of their events. It seems that I'm too busy going on adventures to sit down and write about them. This is terrible because I have one of the worst memories ever. I forget things that happened just a few weeks ago, how I felt at a certain moment, how I'm "never going to do ____ again!" and end up making the same mistakes over and over again.

So I'll work backwards from today in hopes to nestle my experiences onto this corner of the internet, and maybe by writing it again, I might retain a bit in my brain as well.





Today my brother is home. He just got back from Spain... and the cuture shock is pretty tough to take for him. He's taking a siesta on the couch right now, which sounds really good. We just ate Chinese buffet after thrifting. He's going to be around for 3 whole weeks. Wow. That's more than he hung out with us this past winter at Christmas. He went with me up to trade a turkey for a goat this morning and we took my possibly pregnant cat over to get fixed. He's a lot nicer now and not soooo engrossed in philosophy that he can't see his own hand in front of his face.


My eyes are burning and I want to take a nap now.... oh well. i'll try writing more later.

Terrified

So yesterday was the first day of deliveries for the CSA for this year. It was disappointing to say the least. I just had that sinking suspicion all night of my inadequacies; not enough lettuce, not sure where I'm going, the watercress was wilting... etc. With little sleep from the previous two nights of camping and seeing a show until midnight the night before, I went out with my little snippers in hand to harvest some watercress and pull up the lettuce. Jason was going to dig the radishes later and that was pretty much all we had. The strawberries were not ripe. The asparagus was eaten by beetles. The rhubarb wasn't bad, but few people know how to eat it.
We threw together the baskets in grandma's basement, putting a bag of lettuce, some loose watercress and a few radishes in each. I probably wouldn't have paid more than 2 dollars for it at any store. I was a bit frustrated and not exactly in the best mood for the deliveries.
I printed out the directions in a hurry the night before and I had made it so that we were going from one side of town to the other and then back again, crossing paths and back tracking everywhere. They took soooooo long and were really drawn out. The watercress immediately wilted. The radishes looked sad and I was snapping at Jason.

I'm a fucking idiot for starting it the first week in June. I think that I just forgot how everything takes so long in the spring to wake up. We also got the peas in the ground way too late and didn't even start any beets. I do have quite a few cabbages, but I have no idea when those will head up. Our cukes have yet to sprout. Our chard is barely up. We're looking at lettuce baskets for the next three weeks.
I'm trying so hard not to be pessimistic, but I feel this unending pressure right now of fulfilling so many expectations with so many different factors that I cannot control.

So I guess that I'm going down to the store and picking up supplimental supplies for the 18 people who are coming out to pick up their baskets and I've got to smile and show off the gardens, which are looking so tiny and underplanted right now. I went to the greenhouse and bought a bunch more plants, hoping that it won't look like we're terribly unprepared. But I think we are. And there is little if anything I can do right now to stop the boulder that is pummelling down my way right now. Nothing that I plant today will be ready by tomorrow. And I've fitted myself all too well in the organic lifestyle that scourns using chemicals to speed up harvest.

Everything in it's own time... but it's never fast enough or good enough for now.

spring cleaning is back breaking

Today was gorgeous. It was one of those spring days before it's really spring, where you're teased into thinking that the weather is going to be beautiful and your winter coat can start hiding in the back of your closet. It's also one of those days where while checking my bank account, I really wish that it said something else. I guess it's optimism that kills me. Or maybe it was that overdraft protection up to three thousand dollars that only has $14.82 to go. I've never maxed out a credit card... but I guess there's a first for everything.

Anyway, it was my day off and I spent almost every second of it outside... well, after I got out of bed. This morning was beautiful, with a thunderstorm rolling overhead, I just curled up with a purring cat and a jealous dog and slept until I couldn't sleep any more.

I've been on a huge ebay kick lately. Not just buying, but trying to sell things as well. I'm not as successful as I would like. I've only sold one wreath and one light thing, oh, and a gift certificate that I'd never use. I've bought waaaay more than that including a few cranberry bushes, some mushroom grow kits, quail eggs... again, some blue spruce trees, a rose bush, a fig tree and so on and so on. Jason got the ebay bug and when i got outbid on some emu eggs, he picked up the torch and ran with it... and won. They are in my dining room right now in a beer cooler turned incubator.


and i've lost my motivation for yet another post. it's someone in between my parents yelling at eachother and me wondering if it's time to go to sleep yet or not....

pacing in time

so i'm finally by myself for the first time in weeks. it's strange. there is a rattling around in my brain and the dog on my lap is barking at some phantom standing in the dark and cold just outside the window. i'm pacing back and forth between the kitchen, the piano and the computer. i'm stuck in a rut.
i drink some tea. just ate some soup. my feet are frozen. i finished billing for my dad. i'm looking forward to getting my shit together in 2008. i'm not one for new years resolution, but the fiscal year and all that has got me tracking expenses and saving receipts.
i tried to help my dad this morning with sending out invoices and estimates for his new company... which had zero revenue in 2007. it's funny. i'm cleaning out his desk, trying to organize and he's picking things out of the trash that he had meant to fix a year or two ago but never got to it. broken remote controls are shoved in with chocolate bars and football rookie cards with business cards and sticky notes to remember this or that.

but for most of the day, i was in the best mood after waking up with 8 full hours of beautiful sleep. and then in my warm bed (or should i say, my bed warmed by my new, amazing mattress warmer) i didn't want to move, so i grabbed a book and read for an hour with a purring kitten nestled beside me, hiding from the morning.

it's bitter cold here and i swear that the snow forming is just air molecules that huddled together to keep warm and instead turned into tiny pieces of ice. i feel like i'm shivering all the time now, just in little bursts here or there.
i'm looking for writing jobs online. but i only check once and awhile so i always seem to be too early or too late for whatever i'm looking for. i think that i should just bite the bullet and do what i've been planning on doing since i was 15... write that damn book.
but then again, i don't know how people do it. how can they focus with so many distractions? and even if you can focus, how can you both have time and energy and enough money to keep your head above water.

i guess it's ok. i'm back on multivitamins and checking how many hours i waste away in sleep. i'm happy that i don't have a television. i feel like there are too many other things that are soaking up time that i don't need a thief to steal my time away as well.

and the more time that goes on, the more it's a battle to drag myself out of my room these days. i know that i should go out and i know that once i'm out, i'm ok... but i'd much rather just stay in my slippers, pacing about from the piano to the computer to the kitchen then go somewhere that i have to spend money or i can't just fall asleep whenever i get sleepy.

and my addiction to sweets and run on sentences with fragmented thoughts grows by the day. perhaps that is why i shiver and shake, just the insulin in my body dancing with the sugar and working its way through my veins.


in any case, it's cold and quiet and i can't stop writing the same song over and over again. it's like my fingers keep hitting the notes as though i'm typing the same word over and over and over again and i can't change or stop. so i sit down and try to trick myself into striking different chords, but no matter how hard i try, it never sounds right.
and i'm sad there has been no band practice since our last show and the hope for band practice in the future keeps dwindling. norm might move out of state, which is fine. i just wish that he would tell me so that i don't keep wasting my time.



ok, i'm going to finish this emotional word vomit and kick my ass out into the streets for a night of sparks and hanging out with jason's ex. wohoo!