Get Crackin'

     It's been a frustrating morning.  I'm happy to say that I've been more inclined to laugh than anything, though, and I feel really good about that, because there was a time when little things could upset me way too much.  I'm a bigger person now, I guess.  I hope.
     The front gate wouldn't open.  It was comical, to think we were trapped on our property and might not get Kaela to school on time in this, her first whole week of "real" school.  Because she's been homeschooled since kindergarten, she's been in high anxiety since the first day of eighth grade last Thursday.  Then, this morning, in a rare moment of almost relaxation, having two full days of school under her belt, she said we should wait until 8:05 to leave the house, instead of leaving at 8 sharp; she didn't want to get to school too early and have to stand around waiting.  Then, voila, the gate refused to open.  There we sat, poised at the edge of our property, separated from the road by mere inches, and the remote wasn't functioning.  We were going to wish we had those five minutes back, as I had no idea how to get it opened mechanically, and was afraid I might break it if I tried to do so.  I carefully backed my little Prius up a portion of our curving, narrow driveway to a spot where the sides were not so steep and I could actually turn the car around without taking a nosedive into the rock-hard clay with the fragile front end.  I drove back to the house and went inside to try the master gate opener, and nothin' doin'.  It didn't budge.  I was out of ideas, so I called Dan, who walked me through the process of opening the gate mechanically:  find the correct set of keys in a certain dresser drawer, unlock and remove the padlock from the pin on the gate arm, remove the pin, disable the actuator (arm), pull the gate open.  Once I could drive out, I then had to get out of the car to close the gate again before I could get back in the car and continue (finally) on our way.
     By this time it was 8:16.  Kaela was texting her friend, Kara, fingers moving with lightning speed, working herself into a perfect frenzy.
     "She says they start at 8:25!  I'm going to get a tardy slip!" she fretted.
     "No, they start at 8:30, you'll be fine, we'll be there by 8:25," I said, trying to use my best soothing voice.  Then I lapsed from better judgement and mused aloud, "It might be a good idea to leave by 8 or earlier in the morning, just to avoid such unexpected delays.  I mean, we could hit construction, or an accident . . ."
     This observation set off a new texting frenzy.
     "Oh, we'll be fine," I repeated, mentally kicking myself.   "Try to drink some of your smoothie."
     Smoothies are one of Kaela's favorite foods, but lately she'd been nauseous and having difficulty eating, probably from stress.  She took a tiny sip now, just to shut me up.  She hadn't eaten breakfast.  I kept urging her to drink more, all the way to school.  We pulled up at exactly 8:25, and the kids were just lining up as I approached the loading curb.
     "Wait until I stop the car,"  I cautioned, since Kaela had unbuckled as soon as we entered the drive, had her backpack already on and was poised to leap, hand on the doorknob.  The smoothie was only half gone.
     With a sigh of relief I headed back home.  I was happy to have the smoothie, although I would have preferred she have some food in her stomach, because it meant that I could get right to work when I got home.  I've vowed to write every day while Kaela's in school, and I'm excited about doing it.  I didn't get started last week, on her first two days (Thursday and Friday), because Megan was still home from college then and we had things to do, small things, but important because I treasure time with her especially now that she's moved away and making a life of her own.  But today I was returning to a quiet house, except for the dogs, and they're easy to ignore.  They're just doing their job when they bark, warning off intruders (be they coyotes or hummingbirds), and they require nothing from me in doing it.
     I'd given some thought to where I would write, and I like it here in my dining room.  It's the center of the house, and there are huge windows all around me and plenty of light.  Look to my right, there's my butterfly garden, the road and the (non-functioning) gate.  Look to my left, there's the back yard and beyond, the arena and horse stalls.  There are plenty of chores waiting there, but they can do just that:  wait.  And there is no one and nothing here to dictate otherwise, a glorious feeling.
     So I begin to write, and a small glitch occurs.  Look back at that second paragraph--the rather long one.  See the French word "voila"--only it doesn't look right, because it isn't.  There should be a small accent mark above the "a".  On most keyboards, you have the option to use your number keypad and alt key together to make properly accented letters for languages that use them.  Some keyboards have two sets of numbers, one of which is a permanent number keypad, and other keyboards have a "numlok" key that will allow you to turn numbers into a number keypad, to use as a calculator in most cases, and also for this special foreign language accent feature.
     My notebook, it turns out, has neither option.  This is serious for me, because I use French and Spanish quite a bit.  It took me awhile to find out this limitation; at first, I just wasn't willing to accept it, and I kept trying to find a way to access a number keypad feature.  I first tried different function key combinations, and when nothing worked I decided I should consult the manual.  I searched the house, and no manual.  This is sometimes the case with electronics lately; I believe they expect you to access more and more information on the web.  So I went to the internet, and, sure enough, there was the manual for HP notebooks, in pdf, all 130 pages.  I searched, but nothing shed light on my particular needs.  I then did a general web search on accessing accent mark features on notebooks, all to no avail.
     I was finally at my last resort, calling tech support.  I spent the next 1/2 hour with a really, really nice young man who did his best to a) understand what it was exactly I wanted to do, and b) figure out how to get my particular notebook to do it.  We even went so far as to explore the very setup of my machine, went deep into its inner workings and programming, where we could ask it to change everything to French or Spanish, but nowhere did we discover the ability to simply insert an accented foreign word or letter here or there, as I so often need to do.  Then he informed me that what I evidently need is a separate USB numeric pad, but not one with only 10 or 11 keys, make sure to get the one with 19 keys!  And they sell it at Best Buy for only $22.  Thank you, Very Nice Anonymous Tech Support Guy, you made my day.
     And so frustration becomes learning and on I go.  Or, as one horse trainer I know likes to put it, "You gotta ride the ride."  But I have writing projects waiting, and that's a whole 'nother blog.

Walmart

     I took Kaela shopping tonight, and we ended up at Walmart.  She was looking for a new purse.  We'd gone somewhere else first, and she'd scored the last of their stock of the new Nancy Drew video game, which made it a VERY GOOD NIGHT.  But that first store didn't have any purses she liked, so we decided to try Walmart.
     It had been a very good day, too.  By definition, that means we didn't have anything planned, and we didn't have to hurry up and get anything done by a deadline, and we didn't have to be anywhere special at any certain time.  I did a lot of catching up on little odds and ends--"puttering," my husband calls it--and even managed to watch MOST of a baseball game!  Think of that!
     The last couple of weeks have been REALLY hectic, with rodeo and all, and I felt bad that, a couple of times, I'd told Kaela no, she couldn't do something she wanted to do.  There is only so much I can fit into a schedule and maintain my sanity.  And, kids being kids, enough is never enough.  There is always the next thing to do, or that desire to stretch the current time with a friend into more hours, or another day or two.  So I was glad to feel somewhat rested and restored, enough to take Kaela out shopping for her game and a new purse.  It was her money; all I did was drive.
     So, we were at Walmart.  We always find Walmart--interesting.  Kaela seems even more highly tuned to some of the more interesting features than I am.  Tonight as we headed down the aisle towards the accessories department, she commented, under her breath, "If you've had a baby-child, you should put some CLOTHES on."
     I was clueless.  I hadn't noticed anything other than a group of people wandering by.  I may have halfway registered a few tatooes.
     "Skimpy clothes?"  I asked.
     "Belly shirt--NO, up to HERE!" she declared, holding her hand across her upper rib section.
     "Hmmmm."  A thought occurred to me.  "It's not only Walmart, it's Friday night," I noted.
     She slapped her forehead.  "Oh, right."
     Then it got really weird, even for Walmart.  Everywhere we went, people were running into their friends.  It's like they all knew each other.  Each time we witnessed another such exchange--"Hey, Bubba!"  "You headed over to Earl's, too?"--we exchanged a quick glance, just to make sure we were both seeing the same thing and weren't either one of us imagining some huge Walmart Culture Takeover Of The Population At Large.
     Even at the checkout line, two hefty, shaved-head men in camos were calling out to each other from lines at registers 19 and 21.  "You goin' to Luke's wedding?"  "Unfortunately, yeah."  (I am not making up this dialogue.)
     I had a scary thought.  "Do you see anyone we know?"  I asked Kaela, glancing around nervously.
     "No," she said quickly, staring ahead and not even checking, like she was terrified of what she might see.
     Then, there came a ray of hope and clarity.  Our checker demonstrated intelligence and wit above and beyond the call of duty when she asked us if we wanted a bag for the purse Kaela was buying, or not.  And, when Kaela declined, she commented, "No, you have no idea how many people want a BAG for the BAG they're buying.  Like, really?"
     And we were restored to balance and harmony, and headed for the door, almost free of Walmartland, when there came a voice, and I saw--a--face--I--KNEW.
     It was my cousin's fiance.  And then next to her, I saw my cousin.
     "Oh my god, there are people we know here," said Kaela, and she was laughing a little hysterically.
     Well, there you have it.  We, too, must be Walmart people!  I don't ever, ever wear a belly shirt, but I do have a tattoo. 

Lucky

     I lost one of my chickens today, and I'm very sad about that.  Lucky wasn't just any chicken; she was--well, Lucky.  And she was lucky.  She'd lived through some pretty feather-raising experiences.
     Lucky was an Old English bantam, and a perfectly beautiful specimen of the breed, with her golden speckled feathers.  She was a tiny little thing, and she laid the smallest white eggs I've ever seen come from a chicken.  I acquired Lucky from a friend about 5 years ago, when I first moved to Redding.  Lorene had mail-ordered and hatched some eggs in an incubator, so her kids could see baby chicks come into the world.  Then she needed to find them a home, and I was happy to have them.  My husband, Dan, built them a nice pen out of some old dog kennel fencing, and he bought them a lovely wooden hen house.
     The pen stood just outside our fenced back yard, where our 3 large dogs spent a lot of their time.  There were six or eight chickens, and I went out and got some guinea hens to add to the flock.  They were all chicks together and got along well.  Occasionally we'd let them out to spread their wings, and I taught them to come when called by offering dove and quail seed and calling out, "Guinea, guinea, guinea!"  (I'd heard of teaching guinea hens to come when called and didn't realize the chickens would learn, too.)  Once or twice a chicken got into the back yard and the dogs killed them.  One day Lucky got in and lost all her tail feathers in the mouth of our Lab, but managed to escape.  That's when we named her Lucky.
     We'd had the chickens for almost two years when we had a terrible storm one winter night; I heard later that winds had been clocked at the airport near our home at upwards of 80 miles an hour.  In the middle of the night, the wind sounded like a freight train going by outside my bedroom window, and through the din I heard a loud crash.  I ran outside to see what made the noise, fearing the worse for my horses, chickens and goats, but as I rounded the house the wind lifted me bodily and threw me against the chain link fence, knocking my own wind right out of me.  I went back inside and decided I'd just have to wait for daylight.
     The next morning I found my chicken pen and henhouse had been lifted and thrown right over the 5-foot back yard fence, and broken into pieces.  Although there were no dead chickens in the yard, there were several missing when we finally found the survivors pecking around in the front yard bushes a little later, acting as if nothing had ever happened.  Lucky, once again, was one of the survivors.  Days went by before we could erect a new pen, and in that time we lost every single chicken and guinea hen except for--you guessed it--Lucky.  She spent every day right next to the house, outside the kitchen window, and roosted there at night, ten feet up in the branches of a pine tree.
     That was three years ago.  In the meantime, we've increased our flock to twenty-one hens.  Since everyone but Lucky is a full-sized chicken, not a bantam, she unfortunately was at the tail-end of the infamous pecking order, and was constantly and viciously chased away from food a good deal of the time.  She alone, however, would eat out of my hand, so at least once a day I would go down to where the new chicken pen stands near the horse barn and hand-feed her.  Sometimes the other hens, although they were too chicken to actually eat from my hand, would crowd in close and intimidate her into running off.  I got into the habit of quietly trying to draw her away when they weren't looking.  I could literally peek around the side of the barn and whisper, "Guinea, guinea, guinea," and she alone would hear me and come waddling around the corner to eat from my hand.
     Dan had just sat down to a dinner of warmed-over ham and noodle casserole tonight, and I was in the laundry room folding a load of clean clothes, when I heard a chicken squawk, not even sounding hurt so much as surprised.
     "The dogs have a chicken!"  I screeched, running for the back door.
     Dan beat me there, and I watched through the sliding glass doors as he called off the dogs and scooped the little mass of feathers into his hands.
     "It's Lucky," I moaned.
     He took one quick look, and when he lifted his eyes I saw what he didn't want to have to tell me.
     I decided to bury her out at the back of the property, where we had to bury two of our little goats, Jar-Jar and Binks, last year.  Digging graves is no easy feat in Redding soil, but "Lucky"-ly it was only a chicken grave and we've had record rainfall for the last month, so the ground is relatively soft, as in a great big pick can make a decent dent if you're very persistent.  (I've never buried a chicken before, and I doubt I ever will again, but Lucky wasn't just any chicken.)  My granddaughter, Kaela, came down to help me out (she really is grand).  The funeral was well-attended by several friendly cows, who stood just outside the fence and mooed forlornly to excellent effect, as the sun sank sadly into the west.  We piled lucky thirteen very large stones on top of the grave, and placed white stones all around the edges.
     Lucky had a very good life, and a pretty long one, for a chicken.  I tell myself she went quickly and didn't suffer, because the last sound I heard her make was more surprised than anything.  If my mom is in Heaven watching, as I'm sure she is, she's probably already taken Lucky under her wing and is up there feeding her from her hand while Jar-Jar and Binks frolic nearby.

Cultural Acclimation

            My granddaughter, Kaela, wants to be a marine biologist.  She’s been hounding me for months to obtain from Netflix and watch a film called The Cove.  It’s about how the Japanese harvest dolphins.  I won’t pretend to have a lot of knowledge about the practice of killing and eating dolphins world-wide, since this film is the only information I’ve absorbed on the subject thus far.  Viewing it did raise some interesting questions in my mind, however, and I’m eager to do further research.  But that’s a whole ‘nother blog.

             The Japanese manner of herding and corralling the dolphins reminds me very much of how we deal with cattle.  They line up fishing boats near a pod of dolphins and create a “wall of noise” by banging on metal pipes that hang down into the water.  At the end of the pipe, under the water line, is a foot that sends the vibration out into the water.  The dolphins dislike the noise, in fact are frightened by it, and move away.  The fishermen thus herd the dolphins into a cove, then quickly spread a wall of net across the mouth of the cove, barring the dolphins’ way back out to sea.  Once the dolphins are corralled, some are marketed to research centers and amusement/education centers, such as Marine World or Sea World.  The rest are harvested, killed and processed for human consumption.

            Dolphin meat used to be featured in school lunches throughout Japan, but due to political pressure this practice has reportedly been discontinued, although the film alleges that dolphin meat still finds its way into the marketplace at large, disguised as one type of fish or another.  Dolphin fishermen, again yielding to outside pressure, also claim to have made their killing methods quicker and more humane.   These two facts, again, remind me of the beef industry in America.  In recent decades, we’ve been urged to avoid too much red meat, and animal activists have protested and tried to bring about change in the way we treat and harvest cattle.  Ironically, it’s the Japanese who have some of the most humane cattle practices, producing the famous Kobe beef, which is supposedly dramatically more tender and of better quality because the cows are treated kindly before they are swiftly and humanely dispatched, thus keeping harmful enzymes and chemicals released during stress from adversely affecting their muscle tissue.

            Raising cattle for food is a long-standing part of our culture here in America, as in many parts of the world.  Many of us think nothing of raising these animals expressly for consumption; they have no other function in our world.  Japan is a small country, surrounded by ocean, and relies on fish for the mainstay of its diet.  Raising red meat is too costly for a country with so little land to use; raising cattle takes a lot of acres.  Dolphin herding and harvesting is probably a part of their culture from antiquity.  In India, Hindus are appalled at our practice of eating cows; to them, cattle are sacred.  In Korea and the Philippines, past, and in some cases present, practices include eating dogs.  In parts of the Middle East, Africa, Mexico and South America, meat goats are common.

             I tried to eat goat meat last year.  I’ve grown up eating beef and chicken, but I’ve never raised a beef for slaughter and I’ve never killed my own chickens.  I do own dairy goats, and friends who own meat goats urged me to try eating goat meat, so I did.  It was difficult, and I have to say I just don’t want to do it—to me, the cooked meat tasted and smelled just like my little goats smell, and I couldn’t get past that.  Maybe if I’d grown up with it as part of my culture I would be less bothered by it.  I already know I never want to try to eat dog (even typing this is horrifying to me)—my dogs feel like my adopted children. 

            I think that’s a lot of Western civilization’s problem with dolphin harvesting—what dolphins are, to us.  We see dolphins as these cute, amazing, mysterious ocean-dwelling mammals, not food.  The film makes a point of stressing that they are MAMMALS, not fish, but so are cows, goats and dogs.  Of course, there are those who shun eating any living animal, and perhaps eating any mammal is as repugnant an idea to them as eating goat or dog is to me.  It’s culture, and individual choice and conviction.  There are lots of good arguments for not eating meat, environmentally and for humane reasons, but that, too, is a whole ‘nother blog.  I ate vegetarian, for the most part, for several years,but finally started eating meat again when I was diagnosed with anemia.  I still eat very little meat, and prefer eating vegetarian a lot of the time.  Food, like religion and politics, is something that people can get very emotional about.

            I do know for sure that I never want to eat a dolphin.  Like eating dog, it seems horrifying to even think of it.  To me, dolphins are highly intelligent, almost mythical and mystical creatures.  I’ve been telling my family for a long time that, when I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes poured out over the Pacific Ocean; I have this idea that what’s left of my cells will merge with the ocean and, ultimately, even become a part of a dolphin somewhere.  So I get how some people are upset about what the dolphin fishermen are doing, and how some people won’t eat meat of any kind.  Most of all, I appreciate the people who made The Cove for inspiring Kaela to want to learn more about marine biology.

A Little Brown Box

     I got a little brown box in the mail today, and it immediately made me feel a wonderful sense of renewal and anticipation and happiness.  As they say, good things come in small packages.  Evidently, they also come in unassuming and unexpected ones.
     It's been a very stormy couple of months.  After a mild and relatively rain-free winter, now that the schedule of horse activities is in full swing for the 2012 year, the weather has decided to make up for lost time.  We've had unprecedented rainfall, and my ranchito is largely underwater.  This morning, when I slogged out to the lake of a pasture to feed my goats, high winds nearly ripped the barn doors off and scattered the hay to kingdom come.  The horses stand in stalls, heads down, blanketed, bored and itchy, their saturated hooves breeding fungus.  Their soaking wet stalls are difficult to clean, and we have to gear up for protection against the elements with hooded slickers and tall rubber boots.  The chicken eggs when we collect them are muddy and are even harder to clean than the stalls.  The dogs track mud in, and we clean it up so they can ask to go out awhile later and start the process all over again.
     And then, like the sun breaking through the clouds, came the little brown box.  What could it contain, you wonder, that could be so thrilling?
     The little brown box is just full--of--insect larvae.  Bugs.  Fly predators, to be exact.
     This is the kind of stuff I get excited about.
     You have to understand:  flies are a REAL PROBLEM when you have horses.  They accumulate and multiply at an alarming rate, and are very annoying and harmful to humans and equines alike.  They bite!  And it hurts!  They carry germs and disease from feces to animals and cause wound and eye infections.  Flies are not fun to have around.
     Enter the tiny but very important, helpful fly predators.  They arrive in my mailbox as larvae, and as soon as they begin to hatch, I hang their box out by the horse stalls, where they can do their job.  They quickly and efficiently locate any fly eggs or larvae and lay their own eggs on them; when the young fly predators hatch out, they do just what their name suggests and prey on the developing flies, killing them and stopping the fly reproduction cycle in its tracks.  These little guys work hard, and having them around works!  Visitors to my barn comment gratefully on the relative absence of flies.
     I appreciate bugs.  They have a role to play in the balance of nature.  Much to my children's chagrin, I don't kill spiders; I capture and remove them from the house.  My daughter complains that they'll just come back in, while I remind her that there's nothing for them to eat inside and they're much more likely to remain out where they can hunt all the other bugs.
     My tolerance for bugs has led to some . . . incidences.  Once, while visiting my husband's aunt Lorie and her boyfriend, Bob, I glanced over to the side of the couch on which I was sitting and commented, "Oh, there's a scorpion."  Bob leapt to his feet like he was on fire and grabbed a large catalogue, and I quickly said, "Wait, do you have a jar?  If you hit it, it might escape, but I can catch it."  He looked at me like I was from Mars and swung at the offender, who promptly escaped.  You can't squash a scorpion on a soft surface.  Eventually he did fetch a jar and I caught it.  (I'm pretty good at catching things in jars.)  The minute I had it contained, Bob grabbed the jar and headed for the door.
     "Wait!" I said once again, "I'll let the kids look at it close up before we let it go."
     And again he stared at me incredulously.  "Are you nuts?  I'm killing it before it bites somebody!"
     It was his home.
     A couple of hours later, we all went down to the local restaurant for some dinner.  While we were eating outdoors on the lovely summer evening, a large beetle landed on my head.  (And I mean LARGE, this was in Florida.)  All eyes became glued to me as a couple of the girls screeched, evidently frightening the beetle, who stumbled onto my mashed potatoes and lay there on his back, waving his legs frantically.
     "Silly thing," I scolded and, hoping to make light of the whole incident and move on quickly, scooped up the beetle and tossed him into a nearby azaelea bush.
     Returning to my seat, I caught an expression of pure horror on Bob's round red face.  "What is it with you, lady?" he hissed, like I was a witch or something.
     Ah, the perils of being an environmentalist in this world.
     Then there was the time I allowed my children to keep a black widow and her egg sac to observe until the hatching.  I'd trapped her in a jar and left her there, securely lidded and safely contained, overnight, during which time she miraculously spun and laid her ball of eggs.  This was a rare opportunity, but I misjudged the size of the hatchlings.  One morning, as we all sat reading, baby black widows, which happen to be white and nearly microscopic, poured out of the screen atop the jar and out into my living room.  I shooed the children into another room, grabbed the vacuum and cleaned feverishly, reassuring myself that chances of more than one surviving were minimal, anyway, since they are voracious and cannibalistic.  I'm happy to say, no one but black widows were harmed in the unfolding or aftermath of this story.
     So, back to the little brown box of bugs.  It's arrival was indeed exactly like the sun breaking through the clouds, because fly predators begin to arrive in my mailbox in the spring and continue to arrive monthly all throughout the warm summer months.  Collecting that box from my mailbox brought up a whole array of feelings, the way smelling pine trees makes you feel Christmassy, or smelling coffee in the morning makes it easier to get out of bed.  Just holding that box in my hands let me start feeling those long summer days of warmth, sunshine and horseback riding.
     And now, magically, as I've been writing this, the clouds outside the window have begun to blow away, and the sun is shining.  But what's most amazing, all the bare black trees on my oak-wooded property have decided to burst into bloom and are sparkling, wet and green, like emeralds.
     Thanks, little brown box.

Bringing up Bebe

     The title of this blog is also the title of a book I have most recently fallen in love with, so much so that I went out and bought a copy for my daughter, Jaime.  When I asked the clerk at my local Barnes and Noble to check if they had a copy of it, he repeated the title but pronounced it "baby".  "No, bebe," I corrected, smiling, "it's French."  (He must have thought I was an idiot.)  The subtitle is:  One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.
     It's by Pamela Druckerman, who wrote it while living and raising her 3 children in Paris.  I enjoyed the book so much because I discovered that I am more a French parent than an American one, and I'm relieved to realize why I often feel out of step with my American friends.  I guess it's in my genes, therefore I'm not to blame.  Being a parent, especially in America evidently, is a tricky business and very challenging, and I'll take validation wherever I can get it.
     Besides being full of interesting, thought-provoking cultural comparisons, the book is funny, and I laughed out loud quite a bit as I was reading.  It's great to learn and be simultaneously entertained.  (See, I can multitask.)  I'm sad now that I've finished reading it; I want to hear more.  Maybe she'll write a sequel.
     In some ways, I am very much not a French parent.  Children in France go to day care from a very young age, although the author of Bringing up Bebe is careful to define the differences between French and American day care.  Maybe if day care in America were more like that in France, I would feel differently about it.  I'm sure there are good, very good, and not-so-good facilities in both countries.  Like Druckerman, I've had strong feelings of wanting to raise my own children, especially when they're young, myself.  Beyond saying that, I won't ruin the book for you.
    However, I have decided that, according to this book, all French parents, in spite of sending their children to school-like institutions from a very young age, are actually home-schoolers.  The reason for this is that their central philosophy is that a child must be gently guided to awaken to the world.  Her autonomy and unique personality must be respected and allowed to blossom.  This is not anarchy, however; there are boundaries, but lots of room within them for individuality.  It's a good balance, as described by Druckerman.  This is one thing I like to think I have in common with French parents.
     The other one is, not surprisingly, their approach to food.  French children learn to eat almost everything, and behave in restaurants.  Our family's passion for food is not normal.  Time and time again, my children's friends have discovered heretofore unknown foods in our home, and even learned to like them.  Eating out for us is not just about nourishment, it is an adventure, and as close to church as we get (attending theatrical presentations runs a close second).  My kids have grown up knowing all the firm rules of restaurant behavior, and how eating and conversing together is an important part of every day.  An integral part of our daily homeschool curriculum is a course we call Nutrition 101, whose reoccurring lecture involves a reminder of the importance of eating a "wide variety of foods in as close to their natural state as possible," i.e., fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains.  This is so we can not feel guilty when we eat chocolate like it's a food group all its own, which, coincidentally, is a French practice.
     When my kids were babies, I enjoyed speaking another language besides English with them a lot of the time.  I thought it was good for them to stretch their vocal and language abilities, starting from the time they first began to use language.  With my daughter, Megan, I spoke French, and as she began to speak she knew several words and phrases only in French.  Pas pour manger meant she wasn't to put something in her mouth, and she said it "Pa-pa-pa."  Each day when her dad left for work she told him "aurevoir" and waved.  If she dropped something, she would say "tomber" (pronounced tom-bay).  Reading Bringing Up Bebe has been a deeper look into a culture I already love and in which I now feel even more at home.  It connects me with a whole lot of other people on the other side of the world, and that's exciting.  I love how books can do that.

Where I Come From

     This blog title is also the name of a popular country song.  I've recently rediscovered country music, but that's a whole 'nother blog.  Anyway, the song title fits, so I'm using it.
     A friend of mine noted on Facebook today that she's reading a book about Sonoma, California, and it calls up all the feelings she has experienced in growing up and living there for many years of her life.  It reminded me how I feel about where I grew up, in Southern California.  Several other people also commented to that effect--one woman was reminded of Maine.  I think we all have a deep, deep attachment to the places we're from.
     After I moved to Northern California, I would periodically return to So Cal for visits to remaining family there--my dad, my son and grandkids.  Each time, I would cry as we left to come back north.  This lasted for a couple of years.  There was such a strong feeling of that being home, where I belonged.  There was so much grief over our family dispersing far and wide and no longer having the center it had once had.
     Growing up, my entire family lived in one little area of Southern California.  We got together at least once a week on the weekends, but often during the week as well.  Time passed, children grew up, things changed.  I was the first to move out of town, though not too far, an hour or so away.  Then my grandparents died, within 6 months of one another.  A few years later, my mom died.  My sisters and brother moved, two of them out of state.  What we'd had no longer existed.  Or did it?
     Twenty years ago, I ended up in Northern California, in the area my Facebook friend was talking about, near Sonoma.  I spent a lot of time in the wine country, in San Francisco, on the Northern California coast in places like Muir Woods and Drake's Beach.  Those places began to feel like home.  I made friends there, raised my kids there, created memories.  Now I've moved even farther north, and the San Francisco Bay area feels like a second home to me.  I still return to So Cal to see my dad and my son, but everything has changed, and I no longer cry when I leave.
     It's odd, but I traveled in France, years ago, to the south, to a tiny town where my ex-husband's grandparents came from.  Driving through the countryside of Southern France, I felt like I was home.  It reminded me strongly of Southern California--the light, the terrain, the vegetation.  We were not in a touristy area, and almost no one spoke English, but they were very patient with my clumsy French, and they were very "neighborly".  Really, that's the best word I can think of to describe their immediate friendliness, and it made me feel right at home.
     Last year, I took my daughter, Megan, to Paris.  There were so many Starbucks, and McDonalds, and everyone spoke English.  It was hard to speak French, unless you spoke it well, because they didn't have the patience.  And so, at times I felt like I was back in San Francisco.  It was a big city, with museums and restaurants and landmarks, etc.  Of course, it was Paris, and San Francisco does not have an Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, or River Seine.  But outstanding landmarks aside, it was a modern big city like so many others.  Once again, I felt at home.  A nice bonus was that, in spite of not practicing much in recent years, somehow my French has improved to the point that I was able to actually use it to get beneath the tourist veneer.  I talked to real people--a server at my hotel, a man making crepes on the street, the woman who owned the little boulangerie around the corner from my hotel, where I went for coffee every morning--and felt "at home".
     By bits and pieces a large part of my family, and most of the ones I started out with in So Cal, have gradually migrated to Northern California, to the town of Redding.  And here we all are, and now this feels like home.  Five years ago, my husband and I bought a ranch in the countryside just outside town, and as our children came to visit they discovered that it immediately reminded them of one particular house they'd lived in as small children in Southern California, and so coming here, now, feels to them like coming home.  I like that.  I know this house and surroundings physically remind them of that earlier home in lots of ways, but maybe a lot of the feeling comes from us all being together, wherever we are.
     Last year, our family hosted a French exchange student, Marianne.  She's from Bordeaux, in the south of France, but not the part I visited.  I hope to visit Bordeaux someday; Marianne gave us a book so we could learn all about where she was from.  She had so much fun here last year, she's coming back to visit again; she and my granddaughter, Kaela, who lives with me, have become great friends, and keep in touch by Facebook and Skype.  Kaela is already planning to visit Marianne someday, too.
     I think of all the places I've lived and visited and fallen in love with, places where I've felt at home.  I think of how my family spread out, and came back together.  I watch my own children and grandchildren venture out and away.  Yet, through computers and texting, we're never far apart.  Though separated by hundreds of miles, we talk almost daily.
     It makes me wonder if there won't come a day when someone in our family won't be somewhere far, far out in space, thinking back to where they came from:  the planet Earth.

And--GO!

     It's been a whole week again since I've blogged!  My daughter, Jenny, is visiting for a (very) few days, and we are talking--no, I mean REALLY talking--for the first time in years.  That's important.
     But she and Kaela have gone to get haircuts, so I have a few minutes to myself.  Here's what I tell myself with my blog:  it's like I'm in a writing class, when they sit you down and say, "Write an essay about something, anything.  You have twenty minutes.  And--GO!"
     But there goes the gate chime!  They're home already??  Okay, I did eat lunch right after they left, so that took some time.  Still, those were some fast haircuts!
     Well, Jenny leaves tomorrow . . .

Just Keep On

     Sometimes, there are things I want to write about--feelings, frustrations, thoughts--that I know I will never put in this blog.  Although it would feel good to get them off my chest, that's just not what this is for.  Everyone's life has bumps and potholes.  Sometimes they feel more like the Rockie Mountains or the Grand Canyon, because you're in them.
     Talking to someone who understands or writing in a journal helps me feel better, and then I find I just have to keep on.  Keep on with the good stuff, with whatever makes life feel right, productive, happy.  The troubles are still there when I get done, but a funny thing happens when I get myself into a more positive place:  things seem less of a problem, and sometimes solutions just come to me.  I read today about the top 10 things that assure longevity, and one of them was just not taking life, or yourself, too seriously.  Life's too short as it is to be unhappy, but hey, if I decide to be happy I'll live longer!  How cool is that?
     My biggest problem is standing up to problems.  I don't like making tough decisions, confronting, drawing lines, asserting my position, being the Bad Guy.  I like to ask nicely, and have life go, "Oh, sure, whatever you want."  I have to really think things through, get myself armed and ready, then go forward into battle.  I can't wait until the smoke clears and I can be done, at least for the moment if not for good, and go back to being easy-going, live-and-let-live.  I just want to go back to doing the things that make me happy.
     There are so many things that bring me a really deep sense of happiness.  I'm sure these things are there for everyone, but maybe they're not the SAME things.  I love when I get up in the morning, and nothing hurts too bad, and I'm out of bed and outside to feed goats and horses before the sun rises.  There is nothing like watching the sun appear slowly over the horizon, mist rising from the ground through the oak woods, listening to the birds beginning to stir and call:  a quail, a woodpecker, sometimes an owl with a backwards good-night.  When the weather is cold, it's so satisfying to make fires in the wood stoves at either end of the house, and when they catch nicely, watching my dogs curled up next to them to keep warm.  I feel so good when my barn is all tidied up for the day, everything neat and in its place, ready for a ride.  I feel especially good after a ride, after moving and working and sweating to reach that place where I am the brains and my horse is the legs and we are going places together.  I get satisfaction out of stocking my cupboards, and cooking good meals.  I love talking to my family, and when anyone calls or stops by I usually drop whatever I'm doing and make time to just talk.  It really lifts my spirits to lavish "pets and love" on my dogs, and it makes me very, very happy to have Dottie out at the barn with me while I do chores.  There's just something about watching her busy being a dog, exploring with complete concentration, or going nose-to-nose with the horses, or dropping whatever she's doing to come running when I call, tongue and ears flapping, tail wagging, happiness personified.  That kind of joy is so contagious.
     Those are just a few of the things that make me happy.  I don't need a trip to Disneyland.  I don't even need a trip to Paris, although I would LOVE one and it would make me ECSTATIC to go there again, someday, but my real happiness doesn't depend on that.  My happiness comes from things much simpler and closer to home, and I don't take one of them for granted.  It's nice to know they're all right here, ready to enjoy, especially when those bumps and potholes come along.
     What makes you happy?

Time Flies

     Where did the last week go?  The day after my last blog, I drove to Sacramento to pick up my niece, Sally, for a 10-day visit from Florida.  Sally's had riding lessons at home, and has really been looking forward to doing lots of riding while she was here.  I managed to clear our schedule so we had time for riding every day.
     It has rained the whole week.  We've had an extremely mild winter so far, with very little rain, but Sally has come and the weather is making up for lost time.  I'm not talking about some light showers.  Try winds up to 60 miles per hour, thunder and lightning, and periods of torrential downpour.  The creek out back is raging.  At least Kaela and Sally have had fun taking videos of this unusual presence of water and making boats to float through its rapids.  They even tried riding bikes through it, resulting in a dislocated bike chain, two hot showers and a full wash load of muddy clothes.  Next, they tried out the footing in the arena, hoping to get in some riding in spite of the rain.  I looked up from my desk early this morning and spied them out there, galloping around the barrels and going over jumps on foot, pretending to be horses.  When they returned to the house, however, Kaela's assessment was that the arena was "too slushy" for real horses.  Darn.
     Since outdoor activities have been thwarted, they've been doing lots of--you guessed it--eating (see previous blog).  I returned from a meeting at 9:30 p.m. last night to find them microwaving a pound of bacon.  Odd what boredom will make you do sometimes.
     March has turned out to be a month full of visitors, so blogging will probably continue to be sporadic.  Sally leaves next week but Jenny arrives 3 days later, and the day Jenny leaves, Jaime arrives with my 3 wonderful grandkids.  I know we need the rain, and I really do love it, but I hope it quits soon.

Food

     Our family is into food.  A lot of the pictures we put on Facebook are of the foods we eat.  We spend a large percentage of our time talking about, reading about, shopping for, preparing, and eating food.  We do try to be healthy about it, and we try not to eat too much.  None of us is overweight, although I have a small spare tire that I'd much rather do without, but I think it's as much a result of aging as eating.
     I've loved food a little more than the average person ever since I can remember.  My mom is at least partly to blame; she was an excellent cook, and made sure to always have some yummy home-made snacks on hand:  chocolate chip, oatmeal or peanut butter cookies, chocolate or spice cake, pecan pie she made with the pecans she brought home from my great-grandmother's New Mexico pecan farm.  She taught me everything and then gave me free reign in the kitchen.  When I was eleven or twelve years old I got interested in making bread, and began to learn to make all sorts of home-made breads.  I began studying French in school, and decided I had to learn to make crepes, pot au feu, and cassoulet.  Living in Southern California, we were lucky enough to have access to the best Mexican restaurants, and Mom gathered recipes to try at home.  I remember one year we gathered all our friends and family and organized a tamale assembly line, making dozens of savory pork tamales for everyone to share.
      I've always been thankful I had a mom who was a good cook, who taught me to love food and cooking.  It's made my kitchen a happy place, where I've had a lot of fun through the years, and still do, cooking with my own children.  Even my boys cook, and do a lot of the cooking for their families.  When they visit, they teach me new recipes.  From Justin, I've learned to make the easiest and most delicious baked salmon.  Josh taught me some tricks for a great chicken parmigiana, and Joe demonstrated how to make a mouth-watering pan-seared ahi tuna with beurre-blanc sauce and wasabi drizzle.
     My granddaughter just brought me some home-made, fresh-squeezed lemonade she made.  Even in the time it took me to sit here and begin writing this, someone got into the kitchen and made something.  That's just how it is around here.  A few weeks ago, my daughters and I headed out for the day to attend a gymkhana.  I drove the horse trailer, while they followed in my daughter, Megan's car, and stopped on the way for snacks and drinks.  Mind you, they have a snack bar at the gymkhanas, but the fare is limited to burgers and hot dogs.  That day, my girls were in the mood for something tastier, and showed up with whole-grain crackers, brie, salame and mandarin oranges.  We never made it to the snack bar.
     I'm sitting here typing, and the smell of popcorn is wafting in from the kitchen.  We never eat ours plain.  It's always garnished with extra butter and parmesan cheese.  Plain would be unthinkable.
     About six months ago, Kaela decided she wanted to try to eat vegetarian for a month.  I pulled my "Recipes for a Small Planet" from the 1970's off the shelf and dusted it off, and we had great fun concocting all kinds of vegetarian delicacies, like nut-and-seed tacos, noodle casserole and hot-and-sour soup.  Although she enjoyed the experiment and it made her aware of some things, like how hard it can be to find good vegetarian food in Mexican restaurants, by the end of the month she was ready to eat everything again.
     I know a few people who don't like to cook, and a few others who have trouble boiling water.  When Megan first moved into her college dorm apartment last year, her new roommates were complaining that they couldn't get the stove to work.  Megan looked behind it, and sure enough, it wasn't plugged in.  Awhile later, one of her roomies complained that the water wouldn't boil, and Megan noted that she had the burner on simmer; evidently she was afraid of burning something if she turned the flame too high.  I'm glad there are people who are clueless and unmotivated about food; if I ever want to open a restaurant, those are the people who will make my business a success.
     Until then, I'll keep on my merry amateur way, feeding family and friends for free.  As for now, it's been over an hour since dinner, and I'm getting a definite vibe from the freezer, where there's a carton of butter pecan ice cream I'm making my way through, one scoop at a time.

Visitors

     I'm expecting visitors this month.  Three out of the four weeks, I'll be hosting company.  I enjoy having people visit me.  I'm gratified that they like our home enough to come and spend prolonged periods of time.
     It's family members who are coming this time, and I like that we can spend time together for a change, instead of at least four-hundred-some miles, if not a whole country, apart, keeping tabs perodically via Facebook and email.  There's nothing like being together all day, every day, doing all the little things one normally does on a typical day, getting to know one another all over again.
     Sally will be the first to arrive.  She's my niece, my husband's sister's daughter, and she's 13 years old.  They live in Florida, the other side of the country, and it's been 3 years since we've seen her (can it really be that long?)  The last time she was here, I was recovering from a pelvic fracture and was just starting to ride my horses again.  Sally loves to ride, but I wasn't in much shape to put her on a horse then.  This time, she'll have lots of opportunities, as we're on the horses almost daily and take them to gymkhanas and playdays almost every weekend.   Sally and Kaela are only a year and a half apart, and they have a great time together, for which I am profoundly grateful, because things were not always so.  When they were very small, we took Kaela for a visit to Florida and the two of them fought almost constantly, making the entire visit very stressful, to say the least.  Whatever that was all about, I'm so glad they outgrew it.
     Just a day or two after Sally leaves, Kaela's mom, my daughter, Jenny, arrives.  Kaela's very excited that we're going to the midnight premiere of the new Hunger Games movie the day her mom arrives.  She read all three of the series of books in just two days, and insisted that her mom buy and read them before she came to see the movie with us.  I'm looking forward to Jenny's visit especially because of some recent changes in her life, but that's a whole 'nother blog.  Jenny lives in Portland, along with three of her siblings and their families, and a funny thing about my Oregon kids is that they have to go to In-N-Out Burger whenever they come to Redding, because there are none of that particular restaurant chain in Oregon.  It's a tradition.  Jenny wants us to meet her at In-N-Out as soon as she gets to Redding.  I'm glad she's given us plenty of warning; now I can be sure to not eat for 24 hours prior so I'll be able to hold an entire burger and fries.  I love their fries, but I only eat at In-N-Out when my Oregon kids visit.
      The very day that Jenny plans to return to Portland, my oldest daughter, Jaime, plans to drive down from Troutdale, a suburb of Portland.  That will make 2 weeks in a row I'll get to eat at In-N-Out.  Jaime and Jenny will be passing one another out on Interstate 5.  I wish my daughters could have planned to be here together, and yet I'm glad to see them one-at-a-time, too.  Jaime will bring her three children, my adorable grandchildren, Sage, Colin and Sean.  She has timed her visits more than once to allow her to be here for Sage's birthday, which falls during the kids's summer school break.  Colin has wished that he could have his birthday at Grammy's, too, so this time we'll have a birthday party for Colin, even though his birthday is not in March at all, but the third of May.  We're inviting family who also have boys around Colin's age, but keeping it a small party.  Sometimes small is actually more fun.  We'll have all the crucial elements:  good food, games, cake, ice cream and a pinata.  We'll make some happy memories for Colin and everyone else to treasure for the rest of their lives.  That's what it's all about.
     I like having visitors so much that I sometimes think I'd like to host company for a living, as in opening a guest ranch.  I fantasize about putting up a little guest house and owning a few calm, good horses, so that city families could come spend a weekend at the ranch.  It's only a few steps farther on from what I'm already doing a lot of the time, so it's easy to plan how I'd accomplish such a goal.  Just a little research, and maybe . . .
     It's nice to always have a dream or two in the closet.

Leaves

     Bear with me.  Writing a daily blog, for me, goes something like this:  during every day, roughly a zillion possible subjects occur to me.  Sometimes I jot them down.  Later, I try to write about them, if I can remember why they seemed worth writing about.  Sometimes I can't find my list, or nothing on it strikes a chord, in which case I stare out the window and tell myself, "Just write about anything.  Pick something you see and write about it."
     So today I'm staring out the window and I decide to write about leaves.  There's just something about leaves that I really, really like.  For example, I love that the horse stalls get full of oak leaves when the wind blows on winter days, and when I go to clean out all the manure I can rake up leaves, manure and all, and the leaves help all the little bits of manure stick in the rake and the stalls come so nice and clean.  They make such a nice, crunchy sound, and they absorb some of the smell.  They also absorb the puddles in the stalls, and it almost seems as if some chemical in the leaves cleans and neutrallizes as it mixes with all the excrement and I shovel it away into the wheelbarrow.  Is it just my imagination?
     I love that leaves are green a lot of the time.  Green is my favorite color, and I deeply appreciate all the green leaves everywhere.  Maybe this comes from having lived all my life in this desert state.  Every year, I look forward with great excitement to that moment--and it is AN ACTUAL MOMENT--when all the little green leaf buds burst forth from all the oak trees surrounding my house.  One minute the trees stand, black, stark and bare against the sky, and then suddenly--you notice a sparkle of green in the pale, late-winter sunshine, shining at the very tip of a branch, and then another, and another, and look around--just like that, it's happened.
     One very, very precious memory to me is the story my son tells of the first time he came to visit me after I'd moved here to my oak-meadow ranch.  He'd driven all night from Portland with his two young sons, and in the very early morning as they pulled into my long, winding driveway, and his oldest began to stir and open his eyes, Joe said quietly, "Look, Hayden, we've come to the Shire."  It does have that magical air.  That morning, the trees were bare.  By that afternoon, to Joe's awe and amazement, they had budded.
     Though small, leaves can contain whole worlds.  There's the plant itself, so intricate close-up, with veins and skin and scales.  Underneath, insect eggs, tiny lives that will soon emerge to feed off of the plant, grow, change, and fly away to begin the cycle all over again on other leaves.  On top, a bright pink star, a gall that houses a small developing wasp.
     My goats eat the new small leaves budding low down on the oaks in their pasture like they're candy, doing a nice job of trimming up the trees for us.  I love to see a goat all stretched up on her hind legs, front legs propped on a tree, munching away.  Maybe I'm just easy to entertain.
     Walking my two little chihuahuas on a windy day is great entertainment.  They're convinced the leaves are chasing them and they get quite confrontational about it.  "Hey, cousin, be friendly!" barks Vinnie, while Tazzie declares, "I'll rip your face off, bwaaahhh."
     It's time to feed horses, so I'll have to "leave" off for now.

Excuses

                Of course, the minute I decide to do my blog every day, my life gets crazy busy for a couple of days AND I get sick, which makes me feel like a Big Fat Liar or Loser or both.  I have this idea in my head that, in order to be a writer, I have to actually WRITE every day, and even sell something on occasion.  Or maybe just publish something, whether or not I get paid.  See how easy I’m making this?  There should be no excuses.

                I was accused of making excuses for myself once, a few years ago, by someone who shall remain nameless and is now a good friend.  At the time, we were mere acquaintances.  I don’t even know if she remembers what she said.  She didn’t even say it to my face, but I overheard her remark to another woman, “She has an excuse for everything.”  They were referring to my struggles with my ornery little paint horse.  We were all riding drill team together, and that horse, Slinky, had never ridden drill before.  It takes some getting used to.  You throw a dozen or two horse-and-rider pairs into an arena and run patterns, with maneuvers that have you running head-on at the other horses at times, crossing right on top of another horse and rider at others.  My little horse was having none of it, but I was sure trying to convince him that he wouldn’t die if he’d just do what I was asking, but that I might kill him if he didn’t.  Every time he’d go into emotional overload and start doing what the drillmaster called “throwing his own private rodeo,” I’d wrangle him back into some semblance of control, smile sheepishly, and apologize and try to explain to the rest of the team.  “I’m trying a new bit today,” “I’m wearing spurs,” “There was a full moon last night,” were some of the things I probably said in hopes they would excuse the interruption.

                Along with being a pathological excuse-maker, I guess I’m also pretty stubborn.  I kept at drill team on that horse until the day he bucked higher than a kite, repeatedly, all the way across the arena and sent me flying.  Just his way of saying, once and for all, I am not a drill horse.  My friend Christy said she never saw a rider launched that high, and that I almost made the 8 seconds required by rodeo to have a qualifying ride.  I couldn’t tell you, I seem to have blacked out at some point, or maybe just don’t remember because I did break my helmet and ended up with a concussion.  (I’m glad I was wearing the helmet.   So many of my friends don’t wear them, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog.)

I had a lot of time to think after that, with what was left of my brain cells that hadn’t been smashed or scrambled, as I sat for two months in a wheel chair while multiple pelvic fractures healed.  I figured out that sometimes you just have to do things, and other times you have to not do them and do something else.  Sometimes you try and hit a dead end, but then you try again and it works.  Sometimes it doesn’t, but you change tracks and suddenly you’re in a great place and life is just peachy after all.  The key in all of that is to KEEP DOING SOMETHING.  Making excuses is a waste of time, and evidently can be very annoying to people around you.  I decided that maybe if I hadn’t kept making excuses I would have realized sooner that Slinky just wasn’t a drill horse, and I would have used my energy to find one who was.

So there you have it, my excuse for why I missed a day of blogging, and why I don’t believe in making excuses, all rolled into one.  If you’re thinking that something about all this isn’t adding up, I’m sorry, I don’t have any excuse for that.  I just said I’d write every day.  I didn’t promise it would all make sense.

The Numbers Game

                I know what you’re thinking, but no, I don’t have a gambling problem.  I was referring to the current system of math education in our schools.  I managed to avoid the game completely for the last nearly 20 years of home schooling my youngest daughter, Megan.  Oddly enough, although I’m not the best at math, I managed to raise and educate her right into an early math degree.  Go figure.

                Of course, I can’t take credit.  There was just no stopping Megan when it came to math, from the very beginning.  She could barely talk when she started figuring out how numbers worked, and she couldn’t ask me enough questions.  I’d be flying down the freeway between Sacramento and San Francisco and hear her small voice from her back car seat:  “Mommy, is two times three six? “  I’d respond, and her next observation would be, “Then four times three is twelve, right?”  This level of evaluation was coming from her when she was still in preschool.  Math was play for her.  It was a game, but not like the game to which my title refers, not like the one the schools play.  For Megan, it was a fun game.  For a lot of kids in school , including my granddaughter, Kaela, the math game is not fun.  It’s more like the kind of game Katniss Everdeen is thrown into in the currently wildly popular series of Hunger Games books and movies, an intense and scary fight for life requiring every bit of wits and strength the players can muster, a fight to the death.  (I just read that last part to Kaela, she doesn’t think I’m being overly dramatic.)

                Seriously, they’re asking these kids to learn operations and concepts that the average person will never use, unless she decides to go into science or engineering.  Kaela does want to be a Marine Biologist, so she’s motivated.  She’s also motivated by peer pressure; she doesn’t want the embarrassment of being put into a remedial class, so she fights to stay at “grade level”.  I don’t want to see her burn out, or learn to hate math.  How ironic to think that what kids may be learning is to hate the subject being taught, or even to feel stupid or incompetent.  Whenever Kaela starts to seriously doubt her intelligence and ability, I try my best to let her know she has what it takes, that she’ll get there, she’ll  learn what she needs to know, when she needs to know it.  She doesn’t have to do it all “their way”.  She just has to keep trying, do her best, and play along.  I remind her they’ll keep giving her the same darn lessons all through school and until she gets to college.

                Here’s what the current math system makes me think of:  potty training.  When a tiny baby is born, you know that eventually she will learn to go potty on a toilet, not in her diapers.  Do you start putting her on the potty the day she’s born?  I suppose you could.  I’ve heard of some people who do start putting their babies on the potty at, say, 6 or 8 months of age.  At some point a baby that young may actually void her bowels and bladder while she’s sitting there.  Or, you could just wait until she’s 18 months old or so to introduce the whole idea, give it a few days or weeks, and there you have it.

                I love math, and I love school.  I’m still taking classes and probably will for the rest of my life.  Whether home schooled or in school, it’s important that a child feel confident and happy.  Learning happens better that way, and life’s just too short to be miserable.

Animal Tales

     Our family has, over the years, accumulated an interesting group of animal tales.  This could become a writing project.  We also currently have quite a few animal TAILS, 34 to be exact, if I can count 21 chicken tail feathers.  Year before last, when Megan was still out at Shasta college, before she transferred to Chico State, she did a project in her statistics class where they graphed the number of pets each of the students had.  Those with the least pets were listed on the left of the board, with numbers increasing as you moved to the right.  Megan's name ended up on the far right of the board, all alone, separated from the other city students by several inches of empty board.  Her number at that time was 36, but we lost 2 of our little goats last year.  It was a sad year.  I still miss Jar-Jar and Binks, and get teary every time I ride by their little graves out at the back edge of our 20 acres.  The graves are decorated, both, with a rainbow arch of colored stones, symbolic of the meadow at the edge of the rainbow, where they now are frolicking forever.
     Besides our domestic pets, our property is home to a myriad of creatures, including frogs, birds, coyotes, skunks, mice and various other rodents, snakes, spiders and insects.  The bird group includes everything ranging in size from hummingbirds to turkey vultures and herons.  One blue heron's actual residence is the lake on the adjoining property, but he seems to love our front meadow as a sort of park, where he can preen and parade to his heart's content during the day, upsetting my paint mare to no end.  She is sure he's going to zoom over and eat her.  There's a barn owl who also inhabits one of the neighbor's enormous old oaks, but who is fond of perching in the mulberry next to my front lawn and stalking my chihuahuas.  He fights fair, though, and usually warns us with a soft Whoo-hoo of his presence.  One night, Kaela and I took the little dogs out for their bedtime walk, and he decided to have a little fun, and let go with the most ear-splitting screech, sending us all scurrying for our lives back indoors.  Was he trying to say, "Get those dogs back in the house before I do something you'll regret, I'm extra hungry tonight"?  Who knows.
     I do feel like the intruder here, the visitor.  The animals and oaks and manzanita and their kind have been here for eons.  I want to tread lightly, do no harm.  I celebrate each acorn that sprouts, am mindful that it will be decades before it becomes an actual tree.  I am dismayed by the paths we and our machines have made, razing the delicate vegetation, which struggles in our desert state just to exist, right down to the iron-rich red clay.  I am saddened by the bareness in our pastures, where horses and goats have overgrazed.  I try to compensate in whatever way I can, composting manure and spreading it to enrich the soil, rotating pastures, avoiding the paths so they can regrow.  I am the visitor, not the blue heron or the owl.  Although they make their actual "homes" on adjacent properties, I'm sure they have no concept of fences.  It's all one great northern continent, to them.
     My neighbor's cat likes my property a lot, too.  I have a theory about this.  My neighbor keeps her 10 acres very, very tidy.  At least half of it is actually landscaped!  She sprays her oaks to get rid of those "annoying" web-worms, and uses herbicide on the perimeter to reduce fire danger.  She hires people to come in weekly and collect leaves and other detritus and burn or otherwise dispose of it.  She washes her driveway.  I think I saw pictures of her place in a recent issue of Sunset magazine.
     Then there's my place.
     It's very . . . natural.  I like things a little overgrown.  Okay, so it's A LOT overgrown.  And we have all these animals, thus animal feed, thus--mice.  And ground squirrels.  The cat has a field day over here.  We love her for coming over to help us at least try to control the rodent population.  We don't have a cat of our own, due to our labrador's habit of playing with small things in an overenthusiastic manner until they expire, but that's a whole 'nother blog.  (The lab is actually quite a good hunter, too, but you can't beat a cat for speed.)  The only down side of having the cat around is that my paint mare is--you guessed it--afraid of her.  Lindy is sure that little black cat is a panther, ready to sneak up on her, pounce, and tear her to shreds.
     Today, I'm doubly thankful for my neighbor's cat, because it's her fault I thought of the Animal Tales writing project.  When I spied her wandering across my front meadow yesterday, I thought of a black cat we--uh--lived with, years ago (I almost said "owned," but that would have been grossly inaccurate).  Zelda.  Now that cat had some stories.
     But that's a whole 'nother blog.

I Am Here

     Here I am, at my computer, writing.  This is one of the things I truly love to do.  It's right up there with riding (horses); I love writing and riding (that's easier written than said out loud).  I am a writer, although I haven't sold anything I've written in a long, long time.  I do have a small library of rejection notices.  We used to say "slips," but now we get electronic apologies.  I'm proud to have some from places like the New Yorker.  Silly, huh.
      I take full responsibility for this state of non-production; I have simply chosen to do other things.  Whenever I do something, I go whole-hog (you'll forgive me, my kids bought me a calendar of country sayings for Christmas and our sentences now are full of back-woods boy-howdy).  My father was pointing out my fanaticism to me the other day, when I was describing to him some new interest with which I was toying (I forget exactly what, but my difficulties with short-term memory are a whole 'nother blog).  He said, be careful what you start because, knowing you, you'll dive head-over-heels and get lost in it.  That's pretty much how I roll, and for most of my life I've immersed myself in my Mom Side.  I've poured myself into creating an environment that often feels as much like a library, school, resource center, or science lab as it does a home.  I've been passionate about home schooling, specifically, and education in general, and I've been lucky enough to have the financial wherewithall to not have an outside job a great deal of the time.  Although even my hobbies or passtimes become work--not the dirty four-letter word "work," the word Voltaire was talking about, that thing that gives meaning to life (that was Voltaire, wasn't it?)  Even my love for horses has somehow become giving riding lessons.
     Now my life is shifting, after almost 40 years of home schooling.  My youngest, who just happens to be my granddaughter, has decided to broaden her experience with formal schooling, and so, at precisely 8:10 this morning, I dropped her off at the local school for a trial day.  She hopes to be enrolled full-time by next fall.  She is very excited.
     So am I.
     I have a plan.
     I am about to dive into it.
     Here it is:  I will write for no less than 2 hours every morning as soon as I get Kaela to school.  My launching pad will be this blog.  This is my space for reflection, musing, sharing, venting.  Projects will emerge.  Two hours of writing will be just the beginning; soon there will be additional time required for research and manuscript solicitations.  I will join the writer's group at my local bookstore, and take a writing class either online or through the college, to get all the juices flowing good again.
     I like this plan!  I'm excited about it.  I will carve a writing space into my kid/family/horse/ranch life.  It's time.
     I started this blog almost a year ago, and have made exactly 2 entries in that year, with the last being 10 months ago.  Every day I've thought of blogging and other projects, writing in my head as I'm mucking stalls or trail riding or taking care of my family.  It feels like what I'm about to do is semi-retire.  I'm putting the job I've always done into other hands, or letting it take second place, to finally put my main energy into something in which I've only allowed myself to dabble thus far.
     I like my new plan so much that I'm not even going to wait until Kaela is fully enrolled in school in the fall.  I'm going to start now.  Today.  There's no better time.  I won't be able to spend 2 hours while I'm still homeschooling her, so my current routine--I'll call it my pre-plan goal--will be to write this blog every day.  That way, I can take as much time as I can, but still have plenty of time to work with her on things she really needs me for now:  math and STAR testing prep.  This will be a baby step, but a good beginning.
     And so I sit here this morning at my dining room table, thinking, dreaming, planning and writing, and it's a very, very good place to be.  My two wood stoves are humming with warmth at either end of this big old ranch house.  Three big dogs cluster around one hearth, two chihuahuas curl up together on the other.  Outside the big picture window opposite I see the bare black oak trees silhouetted against a leaden sky, reminding me of last night's terrible wind-storm and all the fallen branches I found lying everywhere when I went out to feed goats and horses shortly after dawn.  I'll need to take the quad and trailer and pick them up, and also clean out that back pasture.  Beyond the trees I see the barn, and my paint mare in her purple plaid blanket; she's enjoying the little bit of sunshine that occasionally breaks through the clouds.  Stalls need cleaned, and last night's wind filled my hay barn with leaves and it needs swept out.  I need to get a couple of black felt cowboy hats in to the Boot Barn for cleaning and shaping; the rodeo kids will be out here on Saturday to have their drill team pictures taken, and they've got to look their best.  I've got the rest of the day to deal with my old job, but this morning my life started in a new (old) direction (again), and that's a wonderful thing.