Fuel

I drive over breathtaking Afton mountain every week to a grand institution of learning, whose founder turned 250 yesterday. It's my day to go to the city, use the buses or walk, be small and yet part of vitality, conversations, and notice faces from other continents. It's my day to explore what I dream of and soak in the minds and lives of others and ponder...which is one of my favorite activities.

I arrive in time for business and leave the fresh morning streets for finger-grunge-work on a laptop pad, indoors, floor three. I've been hired by a team of professors to assist in the work of a funded grant that facilitates the higher education goals of nurses in distant areas. I feel like the mouse who had the luck of chewing a hole through the right wall, conspicuously getting the insider's view, and gobbling scraps of expensive fair. These professors eat food that I like: public health leadership, rural health, community health.

By afternoon, I close the computer and join the ranks of graduate students piling in for an intro-course on research. We're much like all students, plus work/life experience and families. Nurses are a scrappy lot- quick to fight for what they think is right, generally eager to learn, and quick to criticize even their own. This research class is all women.

Back at the satelite parking by bus or foot, rush-hour finally squirts onto the interstate, rising over the mountain. I re-enter home-world with a brainful buzzing, fresh light on my own life, grateful for my husband, stirring some novel idea in realms where I may or may never go.

These school-days are stimulation and connection, and I'm growing on the fuel.


P.S. For an example of my latest inspiration: In historical research, we learned that FDR invested money in photographers during the Great Depression and that is why we have the records today of that period. During this health system crisis in this country, if we could deploy photographers, using the networks already within the healthcare system, we would literally look at what we're doing from a third-person yet intimate perspective. I think this could be a powerful tool for evaluating what's happening, and envisioning new ways. Of course the answer I got to this was: "You should really do your doctorate on this." But that's always the answer in academia. I'm more interested in putting solutions into motion.

Snaps from the home ship

Run up the sails!

View from the deck. Sugar snaps in the floating tire life-boats.

The captains' study. The birds distract me from school work.

Evening sun, the last night of daylight savings. 

Doors flung wide!

Voyage motto: Make [lemonade] while the sun shines!

Garden again

Hello spring!

Our new garden plot. I want to be able to stand in the grass and reach all the plants.

Previous residents laid these tire-beds and, being one to make use of what's around...

and since it's one spot that the soil isn't clay, I planted sugar snap peas and hope to help them climb the side of our house. Later on: squash and pole beans.

Cress, from last fall, came sproinging up before I could stammer the word "thaw". Feisty little greens!

And the mighty broccoli is crowning! They huddled all winter under a lame but leaf-insulated cold frame. I'm right proud of them.

Yesterday digging, I found I was smiling and wanting to jig. I wanted to show off my garden, as if there was something to see. Colors, blooms, and flourishing plants grew in my mind from the muddy clay, newly overturned. Even a worm wiggled to say he was present and on the team. This morning I had the urge to go out and talk to the peas and see if they were growing. Nothing yet, ...above the surface that is.

Saturday

Here are a few snapshots from an open Saturday, at home. It's a day of sorting.

M and his Dad and two uncles tackle the basement where generations of inventors and engineers have worked and played.

Sorting, organizing, salvaging, pitching...

Their type of toy. 

I've done my own sort of sorting, sort of. 

 Old college papers, and random references. This one about a dulcimer I'll keep. That's an instrument I'd love to play someday...

 I've also contributed to the on-line discussion for my Health Policy class and fielded calls and enjoyed distractions outside.

Glad for a day like today.

Trowel-making date

I've been hankering for a trowel ever since I dug back into gardening this Fall. Hand-smithed tools cost around 30 or 40 buckeroos and M suggested that we "make our own" (his most oft stated phrase).

He has access to 'shops' of his family/friends where there are machines, tools, and welders at hand. So under his relaxed tutelage, I cut out the spade from scrap steel with an oxyacetylene torch, and then, after practicing, laid a bead of weld to attach the handle. M did the heating and bending of the spade part. Then we ground off the rough edges and voila!

Welding is quite scary because there is so much electricity and the face shield allows you only to see the light from the arc and the molten metal, once you begin.  I had to face into fear and frustration to keep going until I got the arc to start, but in the end, it was really fun. Now we have one of the sturdiest trowels ever made, and so ugly that no one would ever think to steal it. And it digs like no body's business!

White white white!

In short order yesterday afternoon, our deck became a play ground. First came dense fog and then fell a layer of sleet ice and then chunky, piles of snow to the tune of 9 inches in 5 hours.

Birds are better than cartoons! They have us laughing out loud and glued to their antics. The white mound in the picture is a wood stack covered by plastic and the birds were sledding down, if you can see their track.

This morning I moved our Christmas decorations out onto the porch, to have more greenery to attract the birds. I felt like I was setting up our home entertainment center.

I'm pleased as punch that winter is finally here.

By Word of Beak

After she handed it to me, I admitted to Mom that I'd been hoping for a bird magnet of some kind this winter. The cake of suet actually reminded me of some stuff M's made for us once, for hiking fuel.

Sure enough, several days after hanging the little cage of food on our back deck, a flutter of tufted-tit-mouse birds had found it and were having a ball.

As good ideas often do, the success of luring birds to my window only made me want more and soon there was a bag of black oil sunflower seeds in my kitchen. I spurned all the plastic feeder options, figuring someone in some far-away country did not need to make something for my birds to eat from. I figured I would just spread the seed on some old bucket lid.

Then as I was convalescing last weekend and M had some time to 'putter', this is what happened:

Okay, so I can be very easily tickled. But I think this feeder made entirely of old junk is the coolest thing, easy to fill, and well, makes use of junk!

The birdies like it too. In a day or two, news that free seeds were hanging on our deck had spread by word of beak and a steady flit and flitter brought cardinals and Tit-mice (so far) to our window. 

Between the mesmerizing fire, a back-deck bird show, and a piano and a djembe, I'd say we have all kinds of winter entertainment!