It was a very misty day here, which really set the Old Man off nicely.
The “Old Man” is a plum tree that faces our house. We think he is probably almost as old as the house, so likely going on 100.
He is wonderfully gnarled and covered with lichen, and in August he bears lovely little golden plums.
The garden has mostly lapsed into its winter slumber. The final holdout is humble borage, beloved of bees and hummingbirds.
Borage is not flashy. Its flowers are unusual, but you have to look closely to appreciate them. However, they start blooming in April here, and I fully expect a few of these hardy plants to be blooming at the start of December.
Given the importance of persistence in both writing and life in general, I aspire to be not like the lovely lilies or roses, but like the borage.
A little odd, but giving sustenance in lean times, and enduring until the very snows.
It has been a long time since I have managed to do any blogging.
I’m going to experiment with making small frequent posts. We’ll see how it goes!
The landscape fell into shadow, as if night came in from all directions at once. The air grew chill.
The sun still blazed high — and then it was snuffed, a bottomless emptiness where it should have been, ringed with a feathered halo of white fire streaming away into a deep twilight sky.
Around the horizon was a pale band, as if the sun was rising from all directions at once.
This, then, was the end of the world.
For a more complete and less evocative description of the eclipse, please go here.
I was fortunate enough to see the eclipse totality yesterday. If you just want a descriptive sense of what the totality was like, go here.
My parents and I watched it from John Day National Monument in eastern Oregon. The park service had mown a field to accommodate all the visitors.
Fortunately for us, people didn’t hear about the parking area, or presumed it was full — there were a couple hundred cars in a field that could have held twenty times as many.
Without the eclipse glasses, we wouldn’t have been able to tell anything was going on until the sun was 3/4 covered. At that point it got a little dim, as if there were a high haze.
I honestly don’t think that I would have remarked it until the sun was about 90% covered. At that point the whole landscape started to dim into twilight, and there was a little nip to the air.
At 98% it was notably twilight, but you still wouldn’t have been able to directly see what was going on with the sun — without the eclipse glasses.
Though the glasses we watched a fine sickle reduce to a line, then a dot.
Then….
Gone.
This is the sight the has stopped wars and ended reigns.
It is truly amazing.
The whole sky was a deep twilight, but not black.
There was the blackest of black circles where the sun should have been, with a streaming pale halo wisping off in all directions.
All around it was a deep twilight, but there was a band of pale light around the horizon — as if dawn would be coming in another half hour or so.
The otherworldly look lasted about two minutes for us — then the light started beading at the edge.
And the light returned.
Go here for a more evocative description.
There are much better photos of the eclipse itself — but I wanted to note that even the best of the eclipse photos don’t truly capture what I saw.
In even the best eclipse photos, the surrounding sky is too dark (often completely black), and the light is too bright and crisp-looking.
I think the issue is that the corona is too bright relative to the rest of the light.
I hope you get to see a totality in person some day, because as with so many things in life, the photos don’t do it justice.
It has been a week since Trump won the projected electoral vote.
It has been a tough week, although as a white woman living in a quiet corner of a liberal state, it has been tough at some remove.
A week ago, I watched with creeping dread as the early returns looked worse and worse for Hillary. I went to bed before the worst was known — hoping that somehow the world would have reset to the “right” path by morning.
When I woke up, the first thing I did was check the results.
I had a few seconds of profound relief when I saw the vote percentages.
Then I saw the electoral college tallies.
The mixture of disbelief and creeping dread throughout was similar to when Dubya beat Gore, except a few orders of magnitude worse. It was having a nightmare come to life in slow motion — and of course this is just the beginning.
In the last week there has been a swell of hate crimes. Trump has put together a ghastly transition team.
I have heard such terror from so many of my at-risk friends (minorities, people with health problems, people outside of the white “mainstream”). And at the same time, there is a chorus of “this won’t be so bad, we can get through this, we’ll just roll with the punches.”
It is terrifying to think that these conciliating attitudes may exacerbate the harm that Trump could cause.
A snippet from Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been going on. I just hope that it isn’t as prescient as it feels at this moment in time.
There is still the cruel hope that faithless electors can prevent Trump from taking the Whitehouse. I signed the petition, but I know that it is an incredibly long shot. One or two might defect. Maybe ten could defect. But unless Trump does something absolutely insane in the next month (something Republicans see as insane, that is), I don’t see how 38 would possibly defect.
I feel very helpless, but I also know that I can’t just sit here and feel helpless.
I am privileged. I am not at risk in the way that many of my friends are. I need to step up for those at risk.
I have set up recurring donations. I have subscribed to the New York Times and The Seattle Times, in hopes of showing my support for journalistic integrity.
I will try to go troll hunting for my friends.
If I see something in real life, I will do my best to quash my conflict-avoidant conditioning and intervene. As lily white as Port Angeles is, that seems a bit unlikely, but I will put myself in the mindset to be ready.
I desperately hope that all of this will pass without doing too much damage, but I cannot assume that. I desperately hope that history will not be looking with profound image at this period to see how America let a fascist dictator take power.
Much as I would love to assume that everything will be ok, I cannot assume that. I will do what I can to help make sure that doesn’t happen, even if it is a number of small things.
The small things add up.
The other exciting development is the addition of a kitten to the family.
We first met Cringer at the end of July.
At that time he was being fostered by a tech at the Port Townsend animal shelter. He was due to be neutered at the start of August — just in time for Rob’s birthday.
Because of some complications, he actually came home with us three weeks later than expected. It was hard waiting, but in retrospect a 12 week old kitten was much easier than a 9 week old kitten.
Even so, he spent his first day with us in the corner of the closet, facing the wall. That was pretty sad, but he settled in quickly. By the next day he was purring and playing.
Within a few days we let him out of his room and he started terrorizing Dulcie. She had never been around kittens, and so she ran away every time he came into the room. It didn’t help that he recognized her as a cat, and wanted to dash over and make friends.
After a few days she realized he wasn’t actually dangerous, but he persisted in leaping on her at every opportunity for the first few weeks.
He is starting to mellow slightly — he only pounces on her half the time now — and they occasionally look downright cuddly together.
He’s shaping up to be a great lap cat when he’s not acting like a kitten.
The fence is done, and has been for a while.
From getting the corners done to getting the fence completed took about a month. We had to cross-lash the H braces, string the wire, and install a gate.
Once we figured out the process, it took about 15 minutes for each electric wire, and a bit less for each ground wire. I’d rather not compute how much time that required, considering that there were four sides, seven wires per side.
It looks good, and although it isn’t cougar proof, it is a lot better than what we had.
It’s rather comical to look at the old and new next to each other.
Having gotten the fence squared away, we were able to get a new girl. Her name is Teela, and she is another Nigerian Dwarf — probably with a bit of Pygmy in there.
Nob spent a couple weeks bossing her around — he’s bigger — but she has some spunk, and she has horns. Now she ranks him, and 8-Bit ignores her (except when there’s food involved), so she has it pretty good.
She’s a sweet goat, and fits in very well.
Hopefully that will be the end of our cougar woes.
It is a risk still — the fence is cougar resistant, not cougar proof — but the only realistic alternative would be to rehome our goats. That wouldn’t have been hard with Nob, but 8-Bit would have been a job and a half.
Now we just have to wait and hope. It was a year and a half before we lost Bell, so it will be a while before we can be confident in our lovely new fence.
It is now late July, and our remaining 2 goats are intact.
Unfortunately our remaining goats are the 2 boys – one big (a La Mancha) and one little (a Nigerian Dwarf).
From a compatibility standpoint, they’re the worst pair of survivors to have . . . But they seem to have adjusted reasonably well.
The only problem is that the big boy can’t play very well with the little boy, so then he’s overly frisky with us.
Once the fencing is done, we’ll see about getting a girl to keep the boys in line.
The fencing . . . ugh.
Good fencing isn’t easy.
What the game warden recommended was high tensile electric fence.
The power of the fence doesn’t need to be any higher than what we had already, but the goal is for it to be tight and strong — so the cougar can’t just zip through.
High tensile electric fence is made with 12.5 gauge wire (annoyingly heavy-duty) cranked to 250 lbs of force.
The real problem is to support that kind of fence, you need really strong corner posts.
We have spent the last month and a half going through the steps to get H braces in place.
This setup involves bracing the corner post with a partner post a few feet away, with a pole holding them apart towards the top, and a cross wire pulling them together into a stable box.
It is, frankly, a huge pain.
The biggest issue was getting the holes done. Our soil is rocky, and even with an auger it took several hours to do the preliminary holes — and even longer to tidy them up and wrangle a few extra inches to get the full three foot depth.
Then we had to put 8 foot posts in the holes, level them, and fill in with concrete.
Thirteen of them.
It was slow going, but we finally got the top braces in a couple days ago.
The next step will be the wire cross-lashing that will stabilize the box.
Of course, at that point we still won’t have a fence. We’ll have corners.
I am sorry to say that we did nothing.
After all, we had lived in our house for a year and a half without any problems. And the cougar didn’t get a square meal out of Bell, so maybe it would just roam on its way.
A couple weeks later, I went out to give the goats a treat, and Minnie was gone.
Poof.
One big goat – 130+ pounds – missing.
Not without a trace, though. All of the electric fence wires at one end of the pasture were broken, and there was a broad drag trail.
I followed the trail a little ways, but balked when it went into the woods. After all, Minnie was bigger than I was, and the cougar had taken her out just fine!
When Rob got home from work, he managed to find Minnie’s remains . . . Which was amazing, because the cougar had carefully buried her. It was sad, but also really impressive. I don’t think that a human could have done much better hiding a goat with duff and moss.
Can you spot the goat?
We didn’t notice it at the time, but a couple days later we realized that 8-Bit — the big boy — had a bite on his rear leg. The cougar must have gone for him first, failed, and then gone for Minnie.
The less said about giving antibiotics to goats, the better.
The game warden came out the next day. The first step was to put up a game cam and try to see what was what.
I had assumed it must be a big cat. It dragged Minnie a hundred yards, including through the brush.
The game warden told us about a cat that took out a 400 lb. calf. The cat was able to drag the calf to the fence, but then couldn’t get it over or under.
So . . . cats are freakishly strong.
The game cam came up empty the next morning, but the morning after we had some fine pictures of the cougar.
Unfortunately, halibut season had just started, so it was a couple more days before a warden made it out. It was too late for a cage trap, he said — the carcass was starting to rot. He told us that we should keep checking the camera, and let him know when the cougar resurfaced.
In the meantime, see to our fences.
We had taken advantage of the “safe” time after the cougar took Minnie to set up a gate in the shed, so we could lock our two remaining boys in at night. That was fine in the short term, but in the long-term the only answer was a really good fence.
Really good fences are a big pain.