In part one, we learned that I am not feeling well and have embarked on an ambitiously restrictive elimination diet to find the cause. 

On Monday, July 11th, Suzanne headed off with Bear for a fun ten-day adventure to RollerCon in Las Vegas, a roller-skating convention, leaving me in charge at the Mighty Small Farm.

Now compared to a regular farm, the Mighty Small Farm is not a lot of work. Let the ladies out in the morning and put them away at night, feeding them, giving them fresh water, and collecting their eggs along the way. Wash the eggs as needed, put them in cartons. Let the baby ladies out, give them fresh water and food, put them away at night. (They are not obliging about the latter, so I’m sometimes calling them the young hooligans now. They are party animals, they want to stay out late!)

Pick produce as warranted — strawberries and blueberries and raspberries right now. Not a chore, but a delight.

Feed two dogs, walk them, clean up after them in the back yard as needed. In the case of Sophie, the energizer bunny of dogs, if I’m not up to taking long walks, play at least a couple hours of ball, either in the driveway or a nearby field, or take those walks AND play ball (her preference, definitely.)

Feed and put fresh water out for two easy cats and clean out one easy litter box.

And then there’s Gina, #notmycat. She is the only cat I’ve ever truly loved and I do love her, but she’s not well, and she’s basically an equivalent amount of work to everyone else put together.

Minor digression: we were with her at the vet today, and I was returning to the car from walking a dog while the vet tech was interviewing Suzanne.

The vet tech, clipboard in hand, said, “Any vomiting?”

Suzanne replied, “No.”

I said, “WHAT?!? That is a total lie!”

The vet tech, of course, had no idea who this stranger was who had just accosted Suzanne to accuse her of lying and looked a bit perplexed — who to trust, the cat’s owner or the random passerby? But the ensuing several moments of conversation clarified that yes, part of caring for Gina is cleaning up regular vomit, maybe not everyday and certainly not any worse now than it has been for months, but regular. As well as cleaning up all the other consequences of the insane amounts of food she eats — five or six cans a day — which flows right through her system. My routine for her was basically put three bowls of cat food down at 6AM, then another at 10:30, another at 12:30 or so, another at 4 or so, another three bowls at 8. If I was awake at 10, another can then. Five or six feedings a day. The extra bowls were technically for the other cats, but Gina usually eats them, too.

So, Gina: Feed a LOT. Clean up piles and puddles and vomit, quite often (she considers the litter box optional) and also a litter box two times a day.

Still, nothing compared to a real farm, of course. Not that anyone in their right mind would leave me in charge of a real farm, but my point is that it’s not like a full-time job or anything. Some time in the morning, some time in the evening, and five minutes here or there during the day. Plenty of time to get other things done.

So back to the story of why Christina’s presents are late: Suzanne has headed off, I am in charge at the Mighty Small Farm, and I am starting the AIP diet, which means a lot of time preparing food. It is Monday morning (the 11th) and I think to myself, “I’m not going to be hard on myself this week. I’m not going to worry about writing, I’m just going to take care of the animals and feed myself. Oh, and get Christina’s presents in the mail. Yep, that’s all I’m going to do this week. Wow, I wish I could have some coffee.”

During the ensuing several days, the latter thought was my foremost thought again and again and again. Holy cow, it is hard to go through caffeine withdrawal if you are a regular drinker of coffee. I’ve done it before, but back then I was a tea drinker. Ironically, I only started drinking coffee after I did AIP the first time, because I didn’t like plant milks in my tea, and couldn’t drink regular dairy anymore. And I wouldn’t have said I drank a lot of coffee — I have a small coffee pot and I drank one pot a day.

But I spent that entire week feeling awful. Headache, yes, and fatigue, to be expected, but also nausea, shakiness, and a general sense of physical misery. As well as the joint pain and lack of energy I was already struggling with. By Wednesday, I was seriously considering going back to the doctor again, but every time a new symptom appeared — ie, why are my hands shaking? — I’d check and it would be on the list of potential symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. It turns out that my recent consumption of caffeine was probably about four times what I was consuming the last time I quit caffeine. My cold turkey quit was brutal.

And every morning I woke up and thought, ‘I really need to get to the post office today.’ And every evening when I tried to fall asleep, I thought, ‘I will get to the post office tomorrow. It will be my one goal. I will make it happen.’ So passed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday… on Sunday night, I was starting to feel better and absolutely determined. I had one day left: Christina’s presents were wrapped, in a box, with bubble wrap even, and I would get to the post office on Monday and I would overnight her presents and they would get there on her birthday. I was determined. It would happen!

Spoiler alert: it did not happen.

But that story has to be told in Part 3.

Sophie Sunshine, the energizer bunny of dogs.

My friend Christina is awesome. She is smart and fun and funny, opinionated as anything, decisive and honest, loyal and incredibly generous. She loves books and food and dogs and geek culture and cool music. She’s a librarian to the core of her soul, and a fantastic cook. She’s also the kind of friend who, if something is wrong, says, “What can I do? How can I help?” and then does it. If I ever needed to bury a body, she’d be high on my list to call, although I suspect (like me), she’d suggest finding a good lawyer instead. But if we needed to bury the body, she’d bring a shovel.

Her birthday is on the 19th of July. We exchange presents on our birthdays these days — not big things, but fun things. My favorite refrigerator magnets are from her, ditto my favorite socks. She told me in a recent phone call that the bath salts I sent her for Christmas were great. That kind of thing. And I was ready for her birthday. I’d had one of her presents sitting on my shelf since February!

Look, presents! Wrapped and everything.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve not been feeling well. I came back from Florida at the end of May, promptly got sick, and then just… never quite got better. Achy, exhausted, and with joint pain in all my joints, not just the usual suspects. (I have a couple of joints that always hurt, so I ignore them — that’s just status quo.) Not sick-sick, no fever, no dramatic cough, nothing that would take me to urgent care, but waking up at night because of the pain, hobbling my way out of bed in the morning, and flagging on my walks with Sophie before I’d even made it a mile. My hands hurt when I typed, my knees and ankles and hips hurt when I walked, just… yeah, not fun.

But also amorphous. I truly hate going to the doctor when the details of my complaint are “well, yesterday the base of my right-hand ring finger was throbbing, but today it’s a burning sensation on the back of my left-hand and a stabbing in the bottom of my foot. Also my elbow hurts, my hip hurts, my wrist hurts, and I’m really tired.” In my experience, doctors do not do well with that kind of “something’s wrong, but I really don’t know what” symptoms.

The good news (if I can really call it that) is that this is not the first time in my life I’ve had an extended period of not-wellness. I can remember one summer, back when R was maybe four, spending about an hour on the phone with a Kaiser nurse who really, really wanted to convince me that I should go to the ER, while I really, really wanted to convince her that I was too sick to go to the ER. I was a single mom with a toddler and the thought of the ER was overwhelming; I just wanted an appointment with a doctor for the next day, so I could show up, find out why I had a fever of 103, get some good drugs, and then go home and resume lying on the couch watching my kid watch Zaboomafoo. (TIVO was my friend – probably the only time I was ever an early adopter of technology.) About a month after that, I remember telling my mom that my great accomplishment was that I’d done our laundry with only one break to sit on the stairs and cry from exhaustion. That was a really hard summer.

Fast forward a few years and we were living in Santa Cruz. I was traveling a lot for work, and every time I came home, I got sick. Sinus infections, colds, the flu, just one thing after another. The only breaks came when I left. Finally I came down with shingles. Shingles! (So unpleasant, I can’t even. Just awful. If you can get the vaccine, totally do, because you do NOT want shingles.) My doctor said at the time, “This is not normal. Healthy 30-somethings do not get shingles.” I concluded that it was the mold in the house we were living in.

Maybe it was. Probably it was. I definitely did improve after we got out of that house. No more shingles, thank heaven. But I remained a person who got sick a lot, who had to ration her energy and strategize her days. I had plenty of tests, none of which ever showed anything interesting except “osteoarthritis, highly advanced for age.” Bleck. And then a friend convinced me to try cutting gluten out of my life. Whoa! Three days without gluten and I was asking Christina to watch me for signs of a manic phase. I felt so good! But I still had a lot of joint pain, congestion,  gastrointestinal issues, etc, and so the same friend convinced me to try the auto-immune protocol diet.

I’ve discussed it before, so I won’t reiterate all the details, but it’s a very comprehensive elimination diet. And it is so hard. Not just because of the willpower it takes to live with such strict restrictions, but there are no convenience foods on AIP. No quick snacks, no cereal, nothing fast and easy. Every meal requires preparation and planning. It’s a lot of work, a lot of time spent focused on cooking, and cleaning up from cooking, and planning more cooking.

It was incredibly effective for me; I’m not going to bore you more by listing off the host of food reactions I discovered, but there were plenty. (The short list of things I shouldn’t eat if I want to feel my best: gluten, dairy, soy, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, peanuts, almonds, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and sugar. Maybe a few others that I don’t remember because they weren’t that important to me.)

So with this go-round of not-wellness, the first and most obvious suspect for me was a food reaction. I actually did think when I first got sick that I was having a gluten reaction, but then it just went on and on with no gluten in my life, so that couldn’t be it. But maybe my body had found a new gluten? I went to the doctor and had some bloodwork done to rule out other suspects (negative on Lyme disease), and resigned myself to starting AIP again.

And so I did, on Sunday the 10th of July. Nine days before her birthday, so loads of time to get Christina her presents, right?

Spoiler alert: No.

But this has gotten long, so I will have to continue this story in Part 2.

Here at the Mighty Small Farm, the chickens are known as “the ladies,” as in “Have the ladies been generous today?” Because chickens do not tend to have very long life spans (even chickens as spoiled as those at the Mighty Small Farm), every year Suzanne gets a few new chicks to add to the coop, aka the baby ladies.

In an ideal world, a broody hen takes the chicks under her wing and raises them. In the not-ideal world that we actually live in, the broody hens take one look at the new chicks and say, “Nope, not them.” Then the baby ladies get to live in a caged baby coop inside the big coop, with a heat lamp and plenty of good chick food and clean water.

Also in the less than ideal world that we live in, not all of the baby ladies are likely to make it to adulthood. It’s not good to get too attached, which is why you haven’t seen a steady stream of chick photos. Having learned my lesson about loving chickens, I’ve mostly been pretending that they don’t exist.

This year’s baby loss was a true horror show. A rat (probably) burrowed under the ground and into the coop and attempted to drag one of the baby ladies away. Suzanne heard the screaming and came running. She crawled into the baby coop and for some interminable length of time (okay, probably less than a minute), she and the rat played tug-of-war over the baby while I stabbed a shovel into the dirt on the outside of the baby coop trying to collapse the tunnel. The rat escaped, but the baby didn’t survive the trauma. For the next couple days, the baby ladies got to stay in their heat lamp box until Suzanne could add some wire mesh to the base of the baby coop.

We are finally, however, reaching the stage where the remaining baby ladies seem likely to survive. They’re venturing forth from their heat-lamp box to explore their coop. They still hide from the scary things, aka a person holding a phone camera up at the door to the coop, but they’re spending time outside, eating their food, chirruping a fair amount, and looking cute as anything.

The fluffiest of the baby ladies hiding behind the bravest of the baby ladies.

Suzanne got two different kinds of chicks this year and I should probably remember the breed names but I don’t. However, one kind is super fluffy — those are the two hiding in the back in the above photo. The other kind has really great plumage on their heads.

A better view of the plumage.

Eventually, probably sometime next month, they’ll get released from the baby coop and get to be with the big ladies in the big coop, and I’ll stop pretending they don’t exist and chat with them like I chat with the others. It’ll be fun to see what kind of eggs they lay once they start laying.

Last night, Suzanne and I went out to dinner on the funds earned from selling the ladies’ eggs. I’m waiting on some test results before I get serious about starting AIP, so it was a chance for one last restaurant meal before three months or so of diet annoyance. We spent most of the meal talking about future travel plans — fun imaginings of the future. When I got home, I spent hours browsing walking tours of the world. So many cool places to go, so many amazing things to see. When I finally pulled myself away, I felt quite wistful for a moment, and then I laughed at myself. Yep, the world is filled with beautiful places, and fortunately for me, I live in one of them.

Sophie at the edge of the Smith River in the Six Rivers National Forest on yesterday’s mini-adventure outing.

Last night, I sat down to my dinner, feeling slightly smug about how well I was eating and how great I was doing with my elimination diet. Oh, sure, I’d tossed a little cheddar cheese on my homemade, refried-bean tacos, but otherwise… homemade! Healthy! Vegetarian! Delicious!

Then I remembered that corn isn’t allowed on the auto-immune protocol diet and my grilled corn was against the rules. Oh, and so were the freshly-made corn tortillas, of course. For that matter, legumes aren’t allowed on AIP, so I wasn’t supposed to be eating refried beans either. Also not allowed, damn it, were the adobo chili peppers that I’d added to the beans to spice them up.

In fact, the one and only part of my dinner that actually complied with the AIP diet was the avocado.

Sigh.

It was still a good dinner, but I stopped feeling smug about my AIP success. Elimination diet fail!

This morning’s breakfast was sautéed kale and white sweet potatoes with a single egg to add some protein, (eggs not allowed) while lunch was salad greens with cucumber, radish, and pea pods, with store-bought Caesar dressing made with soybean oil (legumes not allowed, soy not allowed), so I’m continuing my not-quite-there attempts. At least I’m getting plenty of vegetables.

Apart from writing (er, trying to write) and eating healthy, I’ve also been trying to restart the art learning that I began during the early days of the pandemic. I’m not sure how something that I wanted to do fell so soundly by the wayside, but it did. Fortunately, one can always begin again, so I’ve gone back to the Udemy course I was taking and am starting over with it.

It’s made me think a lot about time travel, because in a funny way, it is time travel. It sends me straight back to June of 2020, which is not actually a place I want to live. Sure, the pandemic, not so great, but also I was still reeling from R’s behavior. I cried every day that month. Actually, I cried every day for so much of 2020. Not because of the pandemic, in which I was largely incredibly lucky — all of my loved ones were fine — but because of the estrangement. It reminds me of January 6, too, which, sure, was a terrible moment in American history, but for me is always going to be about Zelda’s dying. A terrible day for the world, but for me, also such a deep personal grief. I’m assuming, though, that as I practice my digital painting, it will become solidly part of my life in 2022 and the memories will fade. fingers crossed

One random further thought on time travel — somehow I suspect that the timeline where Al Gore won Florida in 2000 would be a vastly preferable place in which to live. Vastly. And with that, I will leave politics and grief and move on to writing about my other big activity, which is organizing books.

I think I mentioned back at the beginning of 2022 that I was trying to read books from my Kindle. I’m still doing that, but back in May, I decided that my solution to the organization problem — a spreadsheet with sheets for authors by letter of the alphabet — was not sufficient and so I downloaded an app, Reading List, and started entering books into it.

I’m still entering books into it.

It is so absolutely what the Kindle app should be. When you click on a book, it opens the book record, and you can see details about the book, including the book description, whether it’s To Read, In Process, or Finished, including dates that you started and finished, and there’s a field for you to leave your own notes about the book. You can also create lists and organize by lists. Why, why, why does the Kindle app not do this exact thing?

I paid $15 to have the app on all my devices and am slowly — very slowly — working through all the books on my Kindle, adding them to Reading List, and adding my notes, both from that spreadsheet I made and from my previous system, which was leaving a comment on the title page of the book. Not infrequently I have to stop so I can read for a while.

Also sometimes I have to stop so I can look at books for a while. Probably my least favorite part of the app is that it uses something other than straightforward Google or better yet, Amazon, to search for books online. Maybe it’s Google Books? So you’re trying to add a book and you search for it. Ex (slightly unfair, because it’s always been in KU, so not available on Google Books): A Gift of Luck, by Sarah Wynde.

You search on A Gift of Luck. You get approximately 20 results with Luck in their names, but not that one. Next you search on Sarah Wynde. The first entry is A Gift of Thought, okay, but the next few are registers of St. Paul’s Cathedral, of Gloucestershire parish. Another 17 titles seem completely random. Every different way of phrasing your search will get you different results and none of them will be as straightforward as a quick google search on the same terms. Also, in the case of Luck, none of them will find the book. You will have to enter it by hand.

But even though that feature is seriously annoying, among those random titles are probably at least a couple that look interesting enough that I want to learn more. It’s like browsing in a bookstore except with an immense pool of books. Very distracting! Eventually, of course, I get back to adding the record I was working on to the app, but sometimes not for a while. In fact, this paragraph took me an hour to write because I had to go wander the depths of Amazon for a while, ha. Fortunately, I managed to escape without adding anything to my TBR pile, but I think I should probably get back to working on Serena’s story before I run out of day.

Serena’s story, my other main occupation, is still going slowly. I’m being too critical, I know. Editing should come after drafting! I’m less than 10,000 words into it, far behind where I was hoping to be by now, and I haven’t even gotten the story off the ground. But the characters are chatting, and it’ll get there. Someday. Someday!

Sophie, resting under a hedge instead of returning with the ball. Good thing she’s so cute!

My dad said yesterday that I was being very quiet on my blog. Yep. This time it’s because I’m being very quiet in my life. I’ve been struggling with sleep, allergies, joint pain, and illness that might or might not have been gluten reaction, and so doing very little. The big events of my days have been dragging myself out of bed to play ball with Sophie, then putting myself straight back into bed. But I started feeling better on Friday — three whole days ago! — so maybe I’ve broken out of the cycle of immune system over-reaction. Fingers crossed.

I’ve been reluctantly debating returning to the strict Auto-Immune Protocol diet. Extremely reluctantly. I know it works, but oh, it is so hard. On the other hand, it’s hard to feel sick all the time, too, so… trade-offs, right? The things that I know I should give up are soy, dairy, nightshades and all traces of sugar. But if I go strict AIP, I also have to give up rice & eggs. Ugh.

Obviously, I’ve done it before, so I know it can be done, but it’s not fun. And I would so miss my regular sushi. Or, I should say, my regular onigiri, because I’ve moved on from sushi to onigiri, which for me is basically just the same ingredients folded up in nori (seaweed) instead of rolled in nori. This weekend’s best onigiri: goat cheese, strawberry, basil, and a sprinkle of black pepper. I bet it sounds weird, but it was delicious.

Other delicious food of this weekend:

Kale sautéed in bacon, topped with two eggs, sunny side up, and a sprinkling of basil. On AIP, I wouldn’t be able to have the eggs.

Chicken stir fry with kale, carrots, green onion, and pea pods. On strict AIP, I wouldn’t have been able to add pepper.

Zucchini apple pancakes, topped with Yellowbird Serrano Sauce. The binding ingredients are an egg and a little bit of flour, neither of which I could use on strict AIP, nor could I add the serrano sauce, because peppers are a nightshade. Oh, also there was some goat cheese in there, and I wouldn’t be able to use that either.

As you can perhaps tell, I am extremely reluctant to return to the strict AIP diet. On the other hand, I’m also extremely reluctant to continue feeling as sick and low-energy as I’ve been feeling, so… For the moment, I’m just going to cut back on white rice — it’s a high glycemic index food, so I think it’s the “sugar” that’s causing the joint pain that’s making it hard for me to sleep, and try to up my probiotic intake. More kombucha, maybe even some sauerkraut or other fermented foods. Still, it is, of course, the best time of year to do strict AIP, because there are so many good vegetables available. All of the above — the kale, zucchini, pea pods, carrots, green onion, and basil — came from Saturday’s farmer’s market. Yay for the farmer’s market! And probably better sooner on AIP than later. If I’m going to do it, the sooner I start, the sooner I get it over with. (It’s an elimination diet, so 30 days strict before starting to add foods in again.)

In other news… nope, I’ve got nothing. Sophie Sunshine continues to be a very good girl, albeit highly unsympathetic to me not wanting to get out of bed; Arcata continues to be beautiful; and I continue to love my tiny house. For the first time in my entire life, though, I’m ready for the solstice to come and go, because the days are LONG right now. It’s light well before 6AM and well after 9PM. I guess in 2020 I was too distracted to notice, and in 2021, I was on the road headed east. I love my skylight and windows, and the sunlight they let in, but I’ll be okay when that sunlight starts showing up closer to 7AM.

And I guess since I’m feeling better, I should probably get back to work. I’ve got an audiobook waiting for me to listen to it and words to write. I’ve been stuck for days on a question that I can’t believe I never answered before: how exactly did Lucas (Dillon’s dad) start working for law enforcement? Well, I’ve mostly been stuck because I haven’t felt well, but that’s the place where my stuck-ness landed. Perhaps I will figure out the answer today.

I had weird dreams last night, the kind you wake up from saying, “Whew, glad I’m not living in that reality.” And then wake up a little more and realize, “And thank goodness that reality is completely impossible.” My actual reality is pretty nice; it’s raining right now so I’m listening to the pleasant music on my skylight, with Sophie curled up at the foot of the bed.

May was a quiet month for me on the blog, largely because it wasn’t a quiet month at all in reality. Suzanne flew off to the UK at the beginning of the month, leaving me with all the animals. The weather was abysmal — cold and wet, even hail one morning. Sharing a tiny house with three muddy dogs is chaos, even after I resigned myself to all things being dirty, all the time. They are a great tight-knit little pack now, though. Every once in a while Riley would shoot me a helpless look, usually when both puppies were trying to kiss his face at once, but mostly they all behaved really well together. Fortunate, since kicking them outside into the rain was no one’s idea of fun.

I’d been watching plane fares to Florida every day however, and while Suzanne was still away, a single reasonable flight appeared. I say “reasonable” and what I really mean is “two times what I would have wanted to pay last summer.” But “two times” is a lot better than “five times” and I’d seen that, too, recently. (I saw a fare for $2000, was horrified, then thought, “Oh, that must be Business class.” Nope. Economy flight from Arcata to Orlando. OUCH!) Anyway, one round-trip flight, $700, leaving in five days. I grabbed my ticket, then started texting people in Florida to make sure they’d be around.

Suzanne got home, we had a weekend to catch up, and then I jaunted off to Florida. I had such a nice trip. I didn’t bring my computer with me, and I treated it as a real, true, actual vacation. One could argue — somewhat fairly — that I treat a lot of my life as a vacation and that’s… sort of true. But I usually feel guilty about my failures to be a good self-publisher and a dedicated writer. I’m usually trying to squeeze in emails around the corners of my adventures, schedule writing in my mornings, check on the things that I feel like I ought to be checking on. This time, not so much.

I visited my dad and stepmom, had lunch with my niece, went to Epcot for the Flower and Garden Festival, had dinner with a few friends from my old writer’s group, visited Megacon for the first time, spent a night on Merritt Island talking writing and publishing with Lynda Haviland, went swimming several times, and ate a ton of incredible food.

A TON of incredible food. Some nice restaurant meals, including an African buffet at Boma at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, but the highlight in a ten-day blitz of highlights was Christina’s Brazilian cheese bread pizza. I ate seven slices. Not all at once, I spread it out over an evening, but… yeah. Seven! I think Christina would agree that the line in the recipe that claims “fast and easy” is a bald-faced lie, but if you know a person who isn’t GF by choice and who likes pizza, this is the one to try. So, so good.

Before I left I was feeling super-stressed about all I had to do. I’ve been doing some reading and experimenting with BookBub ads, creating the graphics using BookBrush; and I’d decided the Tassamara books needed their covers slightly simplified. That’s seven ebook covers, five print covers, four audiobook covers, and a box set cover. It’s not a trivial job. But I took a step back from my stress and reminded myself that no one on the planet actually cares about any of that except for me and it wasn’t like I had a deadline.

Oops.

I did have a deadline. I’d scheduled some of my books for free days on Amazon, using my Kindle Unlimited promo opportunities. I was trying to get the covers finalized first, and then run some ads during. Alas, I’d completely forgotten that that was my goal. I only remembered about it when I got an email yesterday from ebook daily, informing me that they’d included Practicing Happiness in their email to subscribers and asking me to share the link on my social media. I didn’t bother to tell them that I’m truly terrible at social media, but I did say I’d share the link on my blog, so! Ebookdaily.com, nice enough to feature Practicing Happiness. A Gift of Grace is also free today, and will be until Sunday. I sort of think I set one of the other books to be free this weekend, too, because my free days expire next week whether or not I’ve used them, but I am not sure and have too much to do to look through each book’s KU information to find out. I’m sure I’ll discover it if I did.

What is the too much to do, you ask? Well, finalizing those covers, updating files, continuing some BookBub experiments, reading some books on marketing, working on the project now tentatively titled A Gift of Touch, doing some editing for a friend, and hanging out with the delightful Sophie Sunshine and her equally delightful friends, the Bearable Care Bear, and Riley D. I don’t have a solid picture of the three of them together, but this is the current background photo on my devices:

Today’s adventure will be taking Sophie to a nearby park for a playdate with her sister, Sage. I hope I remember to take photos because I bet they’re going to be adorable together! I also hope it doesn’t rain. Fingers crossed.

Sophie Sunshine turned one on Sunday. In honor of the day (and also because why not? all spring Sundays should be spent so delightfully), we went on a little adventure. We drove up into the mountains to Etna, about two hours away, and took a gorgeous (albeit short) walk along the Steinacher Trail, followed by a picnic at a nearby campground.

The puppies were terrific. They were mostly off-leash and they’ve really figured out the “run wild through the woods, then return to check in on your person,” technique. The radius of how far they’re willing to go is probably a little bigger than I’d like it to be — I’d prefer it if Sophie never went out of sight, but she sometimes does — but the time she’s willing to be out of sight is just about right, maybe a minute but not much more than that. Amusingly to me, both puppies do well on a recall command of “Puppies! Far enough!” (Amusing because somewhat accidental — my “no barking” command in the backyard is actually, “Puppies! Enough!” which they’ve apparently learned means, “Rush back to the yelling person.”)

The puppies romping through the grass

On the way back to the car, I fell pretty far behind S, because I was playing a little mindfulness game with myself about appreciation: noticing the sounds of the birds and the rushing water and the wind in the trees; looking for small beauty and big beauty (what’s the tiniest beautiful thing I see, what’s the biggest beautiful thing I see); trying to distinguish and label the smells in the air; and stopping to simply take deep, long, mindful breaths. It was an excellent game — both in the moment and for memory purposes, because my memories just sparkle, it was such a beautiful day and beautiful place — but it was also excellent for enhancing the amount of exercise the dogs got. Sophie spent the entire time running back-and-forth between Suzanne and me. She was perfectly happy to do so, but she really wanted to be sure she knew where both of us were at all times.

While we were driving home, Suzanne spotted a bald eagle by the side of the road. I missed it at first, but then it flew across the road right in front of us. So big! I resolved to pay more attention, conveniently just in time to spot a small white thing moving in the ditch and say, “Hey, that’s a PUPPY!”

We were on a rural highway, so moving pretty fast, but Suzanne pulled over, did a U-turn, and drove back. I was right: it was a puppy. I got out of the car and approached it and instead of running away, the puppy said, “Oh, thank goodness, I’m having a really weird day, would you mind helping me out?” Tail-wagging, eager approach, clearly not afraid of people. Not a dog that had been living in the wild for long. But young, way too small to be away from his mama.

I scooped him up and looked around. Any other puppies? A mama anywhere? Any sign or indication that this puppy ought to be where he was? Answers: nope, to all of the above. So I got back into the car with the puppy and we brought him back to Arcata with us. (Side note: I would like there to be an explanation other than “people suck” for his presence in the ditch, but he must have been dumped. There’s really no other explanation that makes sense. Although I guess the corollary to that is that sometimes dumped puppies get found and rescued, so not all people suck.)

We named him Ishi Pishi, after the bridge we’d driven by just before we found him. (From that link, “Ishi Pishi Falls is a set of Class VI rapids along the Klamath River and can only be considered a waterfall by the absolutely most liberal of standards.” Ha.)

Sophie’s opinion: Worst Birthday Present Ever. She kept giving me Looks. The kind that said, “Get this thing out of here,” and “What have you done?!?” and “Take it away!”

Sophie saying “Oh, hell, no”

I did my best. We called Mara, the next door neighbor who runs a dog rescue, and she found a foster for him, so Ishi only spent a single night with us. A single, very long night — I had already forgotten how much work small puppies are, and Ishi was honestly too small to be away from his mama, in my opinion.

Ishi sleeping on Suzanne’s foot.

But now I’m going to get all woo-woo about the universe working in mysterious ways.  As long-time readers will recall, my dog Zelda owned my heart. I’ve had other dogs, I’ve loved other dogs, but Zelda was special. She was my girl. She died on January 9, 2021, and at the moment of her death, a voice in my head — my subconscious, if you like — said, “I’m coming back. Look for me.”

I did. And Suzanne did, too. And when Suzanne met Sophie, she said, “This one.” I was in Pennsylvania at the time, so I didn’t get to meet Sophie until a month later. On the day I met her, Sophie said — in so many ways! — YES. In the following days & weeks & months, though, I was less sure. It’s pretty easy to believe that Sophie has an older dog soul than, for example, Bear does. (She seems to have a more instinctive grasp of the difference between People Right and People Wrong.) But still, that doesn’t make her Zelda. She is her own puppy self, her own personality.

Except… her personality is very similar to Zelda’s. Dramatically similar. I wondered sometimes — especially as she developed an obsession with playing fetch – whether it was just me. Maybe the person creates the dog? Zelda was the only dog I raised from a puppy before Sophie, so maybe when you raise a puppy, the puppy just becomes the dog of your expectations?

Because Sophie has Zelda’s sweetness. She has Zelda’s gentle curiosity. She has Zelda’s persistence and inquisitiveness and attentiveness. She watches me the way Zelda used to: aware of my every move and alert to the possibility that it might be interesting to her. Per her DNA, she is more herding dog than terrier, but per her behavior, she could easily be 100% terrier. She likes to dig holes and chase balls, and in a choice between herding chickens and retrieving a ball, the ball wins. She is not Zelda, she is Sophie, 100% herself, but… well…

Enter Ishi. And the universe working in mysterious ways.

Because on a day when I was thinking about Zelda and Sophie and wondering about dog reincarnation, we randomly stumbled across a white puppy. (Zelda was white.) Said white puppy is clearly a terrier mix of some sort — he has a blotch of brown on his side, and a brown spot on his ear, and if you told me he is pure Jack Russell, I would not doubt you. (Zelda was a Jack Russell.) He has eyes like Z had when she was a puppy, with no color around the rims, and splotches on his nose like Z had when she was a puppy. He has physical similarities to Z.

But his energy is so completely totally different from Zelda’s, it would be impossible to ever believe that he is Zelda reincarnated. At maybe five weeks old, Ishi is clearly already a boss dog. No one is ever going to comment on his gentle curiosity or his sweetness. Boldness and determination, sure. I believe that Redwood Pals Rescue will find an excellent home for him and that he’ll grow up to be a great dog, but physical similarities aside, he in no way resembles Zelda.

But Sophie… well, at one year old, she is sunshine. I am so grateful to have her in my life, so lucky and so blessed. Of course, I need to remember this when she’s trying to convince me to throw the ball for four hours a day and when she comes in covered in mud and immediately leaps onto the bed and tries to snuggle down on my pillows. Mostly, though, it’s pretty easy to remember. Because she’s my girl.

Speaks for itself, alas.

You know those vacation t-shirts that say, “My Grandparents went to (exotic location of your choice) and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”? That’s how I feel about Suzanne’s last trip. She got the fun adventure, lots of social time and seeing old friends — plus, alas, COVID — but all I got was the virus. So unfair!

I’m so grateful for the vaccination and booster, though, because it’s honestly pretty unpleasant. I suspect my immune system would be going crazy if it hadn’t already had those exposures. Right now it’s the equivalent of a bad, reasonably long-lasting cold. I tested for the first time last Thursday, because I felt like I was starting to get sick, and I was negative. By Friday I was clearly sick, and yesterday I took the test to confirm that it was the virus, mostly so I could notify my healthcare provider who then notifies the county. (The only way for people to realistically assess their own risk is if sick people share their info and I want the county numbers to represent reality.)

Anyway, yesterday’s test was the fourth time I’d seen a rapid test in action and I had to laugh: after you do the test, you’re supposed to wait fifteen minutes for the positive line (the T in the image above) to appear. I barely had time to say “Alexa, set a timer for fifteen minutes” before the positive line appeared. So, so, so positive.

Even before I got sick I was having many unproductive days, largely because the puppies have turned into escape artists. I blame Bear, mostly, although Sophie is an eager participant. But not only do they move the concrete block to escape out the front yard, someone — and in a choice between the small dog and the big dog, it’s hard to believe that the small dog is responsible — managed to pull down a board from the backyard fence, creating a gap that both dogs could easily go through. And did! They had much fun visiting the neighbor dogs. Fortunately, the neighbor dogs didn’t seem to mind the territorial invasions.

But the puppies aren’t the only escape artists. Bear — and it was definitely Bear because I caught her in the act — also tried to pull a board off the chicken coop. I stopped her, but she loosened the wire fencing enough that the chickens are now capable of letting themselves out of the coop. Chickens, incidentally, are stupid. When the big predator opens a hole in your enclosure, the right response is NOT to go visit the big predator. Or even the small predator.

The chickens have escaped three times now, much to Sophie’s delight. She is SOO excited to chase them. The chickens are not so excited to be chased. The first time was the worst, because it was just me and both dogs, and the dogs did not understand why I was not happy about the new game. I had to get the dogs shut into the tiny house before I could work on getting the chickens back into their coop. Fortunately, chickens — although apparently stupid about big predators — are not stupid about food. A person carrying cheese is like the Pied Piper as far as the ladies are concerned.

My point, though, was that the puppies are requiring enough supervision when outside that I wasn’t getting much done even before I got sick. Once I got sick, I just stopped even trying. I will get back to writing, obviously, but it wasn’t going to be last week. It’s not the worst of fates, though, to need to spend my time supervising puppies in the backyard supervising puppies. Sophie is eleven+ months old, Bear is ten+ months old, and they are growing up fast. I feel really lucky that I get to spend so much good time with them.

Me, make trouble? Never! (jk)

I do have a lot I want to do, though. First priority should definitely be writing some thank you notes, (thank you, Dad & Charleene! thank you, Marcia & Bill! thank you, Christina & Greg!) but I also have an audio short story (The Spirits of Christmas) that I’ve been meaning to post for a couple weeks and… hmm. Well, I know my to-do list was a lot longer than that, but apparently I have just hit my energy wall. I think I need to go back to bed. Still, I got out of bed today and I wrote a blog post; perhaps I can call that sufficient accomplishment for the day.

Last Friday morning, I was lying in a hospital bed, thinking about the nature of reality and its relationship to memory. I was waiting to have a colonoscopy and the doctor had already been by to introduce himself and discuss the procedure. He let me know that he preferred his patients to be conscious, but that I’d be somewhere between Cloud 5 and Cloud 9, wouldn’t feel anything, and would probably not remember the experience. I was less than enthusiastic about that, but if I wasn’t going to remember it anyway, did it really matter? Wouldn’t it basically be like it had never happened?

Answer: No. Even if your mind doesn’t remember, your body does.

Also, though, he was wrong about everything: I was not on any clouds, I did feel it, I do remember it, and it sucked. Apparently my colon is “loopy,” so it was a struggle to get the probe through and the tech had to try to rearrange my insides from the outside. I assume that was effective, since they did manage to get all the views they wanted, but it was super uncomfortable — I was complaining while on the operating table, which surprised them at least twice — and I’ve been sore for a couple of days now. Even if I didn’t remember (but I do), my body would be letting me know that it was an unpleasant experience. I’ve even got a painful bruise on my wrist from the IV.

(That said, my colon is now stamped approved for the next seven to ten years, which is nice, and maybe a decade from now, technology will have improved so much that no one will be doing colonoscopies anymore. I’m going to choose to believe that, anyway. And, of course, my day of unpleasantness is a whole lot better than treatment for colon cancer would be, so worth it in the end.)

I think my philosophical question, though, was really whether forgetting could be the same thing as healing. If you can fully forget a painful experience, could it be the same as the experience never having happened? I’m pretty sure the answer is still no, still that the body remembers.

Speaking of remembering — although this time in the context of sharing a story I expect I’ll probably remember myself — on Saturday, I was at the farmer’s market with our next-door neighbors when a vaguely familiar face said hello, and then added, somewhat tentatively, “Do you have a black dog and a small black-and-white dog? Because they’re playing on Dan Hauser’s lawn right now.”

EEP!

I hope I said thank you, but I’m not sure I did. I rushed home, not quite running but moving as fast as a not-quite-run would take me, not seeing any sign of them in the neighbor’s yard as I got close. I’m reminding myself that they’re both micro-chipped; that they’re together so noticeable; that they’re reasonably street smart these days, at least to the extent of understanding that the people are worried when they go out into the road… but there are no dogs, no dogs, no dogs.

I’m making a plan — I will dump my purchases inside the tiny house and grab the bag that usually holds treats and then start searching. Sophie, most likely, will have followed our usual walk and gone up the street to the park… But then there they are, lying by the neighbor’s garage door, on the side of his house. And they see me and say, “OH! Our person! We’ve been waiting for you!!” and both of them come running.

A couple, just ahead of me on the sidewalk, was rather taken aback by this. I think they were already speculating on whether those dogs were loose and now both dogs were tearing toward them at full speed, one of the two being rather large. (One might even say exceedingly large. Bear is a BIG girl.)

But both puppies followed me very happily through our gate and into the yard and were super-excited and pleased with themselves. Oh, such a good adventure, they were saying. Much tail wagging and pleasure.

The explanation for the escape was pretty easy to discover: we have a concrete block sitting in front of a hole in the gate between the back and front yards. It blocks enough of the hole that the dogs can’t go through, but the cat can still go in and out. Someone — and Suzanne is blaming Riley — someone shoved that concrete block out of the way, letting the puppies into the front yard, which has a short fence that both of them can leap over effortlessly. I think we will be boarding up that hole before the dogs get left in the backyard alone again.

And I can’t believe I don’t have a recent picture of the two puppies together, but I don’t. I’d go take one, except Suzanne is away for an overnight with both of her dogs, so I can’t. Size-wise, though, Sophie is turning out to be smaller than I expected: I thought she’d be a medium-size dog and she’s only medium-size if she’s standing next to a chihuahua. Here in Arcata, where chihuahuas are few and far between and pit bulls are plentiful, she’s definitely small.

And Bear — well, Bear is ten months old this week, so she still has a few months of growing to do, and she’s the size where people say things like, “Wow, that’s a big dog.” Or, as I said this week when I saw her trying to sleep on the dog bed — head and feet both hanging over the edges — “Holy cow, she is immense.” She’s easily twice Sophie’s size now.

Back in September, the puppies were almost the same size although it was obvious that Bear would be bigger.

Today, not so much. Not sure this picture really captures Bear’s size, but it’s as close as I can get right now.

Suzanne is away again this week. It’s her sixth (or maybe tenth or eleventh, depending on if one counts overnights) trip since I came back in August, I think. When she returned from her last trip, Olivia Murderpaws — who is supposed to be an inside cat — was on the roof of the chicken coop, refusing to come down. I was also worried about one of their royal majesties, the chickens who joined the Mighty Small Farm in the summer of 2020, and rightfully so: she passed away that night and Suzanne had to bury her the next morning. Pet sitter fail.

Not that I actually blame myself for either of those things — I didn’t let Olivia out, and chickens, sadly, do sometimes die. She wasn’t even the first chicken to pass away on my pet-sitting watch. I didn’t write about it at the time, but one of the very old ladies died while Suzanne was away last year, probably on her Oregon trip. It would have made a good post, actually, because I thought she was dead so I dug a hole in which to bury her. But when I picked up the dead body, she opened her eyes and wiggled. Ack! I nearly dropped her, which I would have felt terrible about. Poor dying chicken, dropped from two feet up. Instead, I set her down gently and when I came back a couple hours later, it was easy to see that she was dead, because one of her comrades had started testing to see if she was meat. Chickens are such dinosaurs. I buried her quickly, before the rest of them could get in on the action.

Back to pet-sitting. Back in January, when Suzanne first retired, we were making grand plans for this spring. We were going to head off on a long road trip adventure: wildflowers in Texas, family in Florida, opal mining in Idaho. But Gina, #notmycat, is very frail these days. She eats a ton, but the food rushes right through her, and she’s so skinny she looks emaciated. Her fur’s coming out in clumps, too, and she’s very cranky. Suzanne was pretty sure she wouldn’t last until spring, but sometime around mid-February, she said, “Not sure I can leave Gina with a pet-sitter,” to which I replied, “Oh, absolutely not. Of course not.” That would be horrible, to leave Gina to potentially die with a stranger. (As it happens, gas prices might have killed this trip anyway. Long road trips and $6/gallon gas do not coincide in my mind.)

Except… I really don’t want to be the pet-sitter on duty for her death, either. Every time Suzanne leaves, there’s a little repetitive prayer running through the back of my head, “Please, please, please don’t let Gina die.” Suzanne is gone tonight, then back for a couple days, then gone for five days, then back for a few weeks, then gone for another week. Pet-sitting would be a lot easier without Gina — she’s really the only pet that feels like much of a responsibility, because she needs to eat five or more times a day and produces waste commensurately — but I really, really hope that she lasts through spring and into summer.

And maybe come summer, I’ll get to take a trip of my own. It’s feeling like time!

I’m baking granola this morning and my cozy tiny house smells of cinnamon. I don’t have particularly high expectations for how this granola is going to turn out, because the Best By date on my oats was sometime in 2020, I didn’t have any vanilla, and I’m experimenting with the temperatures on my air fryer, but even if it is inedible in the end, it sure smells nice now.

Plus, it’s a Monday morning, not yet 9:30, and I’ve already started with the experimental cooking, so go, me. Shine on, self. It’s always satisfying to start off a new week feeling productive. Although I guess if my granola is truly inedible, my accomplishment won’t feel like much.

That said, nothing is inedible for chickens. If I decide I can’t eat my granola, I will feed it to their royal majesties and the other ladies of the chicken coop and they will be thrilled. Then I will get to have eggs, which is win-win.

Of course, I actually get to have eggs whether or not I feed my granola to the ladies. Egg season is definitely in full swing right now. The chickens pretty much stop laying in December and then in February they start up again. If I’m the person to collect the eggs, I generally bring them into Suzanne’s kitchen where they get washed, put into egg cartons, and stashed on top of the refrigerator until a neighbor or some random passerby knocks on the door and says, “Hey, I see your sign says Eggs.” (Actually, the neighbors say something more like, “Any eggs today?”)

Last week, when Suzanne was away, I had three pleasant egg-related interactions. One was a college-age kid, so young, who was really pleased to get cheap eggs. $4 a dozen is a bargain in Arcata right now. He told me that at the farmer’s market they were $10/dozen. Ouch.

The second was from a nice woman who wanted to know if they were organic. Um, nope, not in the least. They eat our table scraps and we don’t eat exclusively organic, so they don’t either. Also, I’m going to guess that if the chickens started getting sick, and a vet said it was bacterial and antibiotics would help them feel better and save their lives, Suzanne would vote for saving their lives. They are happy chickens, however — they’ve got lots of space, friendly relationships, and regular treats. The woman didn’t wind up buying any eggs, but it was still a pleasant conversation.

The third was from a regular, delighted that eggs were back in season. He told me  we had the best eggs in town. I used to be of the belief that an egg was an egg, although I bought expensive eggs because I hoped my extra dollar would mean a better life for the chickens laying them. But now I’m pretty convinced that the ladies of the chicken coop do, in fact, lay really superior eggs, more delicious than your average egg.

Also, they lay very pretty eggs. I have many more than usual in the tiny house today, because Suzanne’s kitchen is in the process of being as disrupted as mine was last week, and I looked at them this morning and thought of Easter. Their royal majesties lay the ones with the greenish tint, while last summer’s new hens must be laying the speckled brown ones. But I wouldn’t even have to dye them to have a nice Easter collection.

My oven timer just beeped, so I think I’ll go check on my granola. And then move on to other things, specifically, writing my next book. I didn’t think this blog post was going to be about eggs and chickens — I thought it was going to be about self-publishing — but you know, eggs and chickens will probably be just as interesting to Future Me. Maybe even more interesting.

Goals for today: 1000 words on A Gift of Sight (possibly to be called A Gift of Touch); a walk with my writing buddy and Sophie; and a delicious meal that might include eggs. May all your Mondays be equally satisfying!