I took this on New Year’s Eve on a walk with my kids and old friends in Maryland. We fooled around in a park. I like the low fog hanging in the trees, always further away when we walked to it.
Seesaw, Margery Daw, Jackie shall have a new master
He shall have but a penny a day, because he can’t work any faster.
That is the version of an old nursery rhyme that I learned from my mother. There is more about it here.
I am going through and starting to delete old blog posts and photographs to make room for the new ones. Not one of my stronger talents!
Rake, huh? I thought, well, I am not sure if I have a picture of a rake.
But look! There it is! Along with the kids shooting corn bazookas at plywood farm figures. They must rake up the husks at night, ready for the next day of Studt’s Pumpkin Farm and Corn Maze, joyful, seasonal mayhem.
I went to the post office Monday. I am in a rental house, and get packages every so often for the previous renter. This time I realized at the post office that one was misdelivered and was to the house next door. Ooops. But the post office said they would redeliver it.
I love snail mail letters. I have colored pens and stickers and stamps. The whole thing makes my inner child very happy. Once I got a letter from my mother-in-law saying that my letters are national treasures! I kept that letter.
I haven’t written myself a letter, but maybe I should. What would I write?
I sent the envelope above out, but it came back. I will be driving home soon and wrote to a friend on the way, but I must have the wrong address. I bought the stamps here. The stamp pads were expensive, though, so I only got two!
Warm belly fur. I am not sure she is going to like going home. When we first drove up the Olympic Penisula, my daughter was two. It was three pm on New Year’s Eve, getting dark, and we were on 101 with the very tall trees blocking most of the light. “Where sun, mom? Me no can see sun.” Sol Duc will probably ask the same thing: Where did the sun go?
I went to the store last weekend to get things like soap and a travel iron. I looked for pens too. I love colored ink pens for my journal. The pens and back to school things are right by the kids’ section. I bought an inexpensive kit. It is a sun print kit. It contains treated paper and plastic silhouette cutouts. I choose the cutouts and put them on the paper, put plastic on top to hold it, and expose it to the sun for 10-15 minutes. Rinse, dry, and voila!
The lower creature is from cutouts. The other I found cleaning the house: I thought it was a deceased large cricket, but no, it’s a praying mantis. I think praying mantis are wonderful creatures. I do not know if Sol Duc brought it in or it wandered in to the house on it’s own. At any rate, I am honoring it’s memory with this silhouette. I am also eyeing other small household objects and thinking about what would expose well. My grandmother’s ring, with a moss agate, that might let light through on to the paper. Paperclips, earrings, flowers, grasses. This paper is quite fun. I will use it as stationary and get to share it!
I call a friend yesterday and sing, “Happy Day Before Your Birthday to You”. It sounds silly. She has just gotten Covid and this cheers her up.
She is telling me about her summer and about a class at a camp. Some for adults and some for children, but one where people really dropped their masks and just got to be themselves.
What identity is your deepest self? She is talking about her nine year old self. I think mine is more like four and rebellious and skeptical of adults, adulthood and all of their rules. I don’t think I am ever out of touch with this identity, though I don’t let it talk out loud in clinic. Mostly. A rebellious four year old informed by medical school and years of experience is a pretty frightening thought, isn’t it? Or the basis for a great cartoon.
That part of me is very observant and quite smart. It does not care what we are supposed to see or the cues people give. Growing up in an alcohol household, it looks for what people do not say. This can be terribly helpful in clinic and also a bit weird. It is body language and tone of voice and what questions a person shies away from answering and the puzzle pieces that do not fit.
Last week I see a small child with her parents for vomiting and coughing and fever. I am interviewing the child and asking if things hurt. “Do your ears hurt?” I ask. She shakes her head no. I point to my throat next and she nods. Yes, that part hurts. Her toes do not. I include toes or something silly to find out if the child is saying yes to all of it. I tell the parents that we will do a strep test, that mostly people don’t cough with strep except when they do. The strep is positive. My medical assistant grumbles, “They didn’t tell me that,” but I think the parents were more worried about the vomiting and she may not have complained about her throat.
Are the masks we wear always bad? I don’t think so. I think it is frustrating if we believe our mask or never ever get to drop it. There is some formality to my role in clinic and I tend to get more formal when I am worried about someone. That has been interpreted as anger or brusqueness, but it isn’t. I am wearing a real mask with all patients because we are seeing at least one person with Covid every week. The literal mask does not help me connect with people, but sometimes I can anyhow. I have to take it off for the 90 year olds because most of them are hard of hearing and lip reading helps.
The first camera I had was a hand me down from my grandfather. I don’t have it any more. The viewfinder would open and you looked down into it to frame the photograph. The pictures were square. It became difficult to find film for it quite quickly and small cheap 110 cameras were becoming plentiful.
I had a 110 cheap camera and did not like it much. My parents got a Minolta 110 in the mid 1970s with a built in zoom. I was hooked! It was much more fun to be able to frame my shot and I took many of the family photographs. That hooked my father in turn and I inherited electronic cameras with built in zooms from him: a Panasonic, a Canon and a Nikon. I think he was trying to find one with an image steadier that could stand up to him, but he had a bad resting tremor. He moved to a tripod and that worked much better.
I took the photograph at my son and daughter-in-law’s wedding in 2022. K is in his teens and we were both playing with cameras. This was the day before the wedding at a brewpub and before the rehearsal. I love that the photograph is off center and the circle behind him mimics the camera lens. I have permission to post!
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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