Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve Hike

On Saturday, a beautiful day in February in San Diego, I went on what ended up being over a 10-mile hike in Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve. We started out at the western entrance near Sorrento Valley. There is a parking lot, but it had rained Thursday and a little bit on Friday, so the lot was closed (although it had opened by the time we returned). This meant having to park in a nearby residential area…by nearby, I mean almost half a mile away…this is coming down the hill to the entrance.

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You can see the start of this end of the trail, plus the trail off to Lopez Canyon, down below from the road. San Diego is full of canyons and open-space areas like this…

I’ve lived here for 25 years and still haven’t been to even half of them. It was a bright and sunny day…

This is the view of the hillsides from the parking lot. The entire preserve is surrounded by office buildings and houses, although they are fairly unobtrusive for most of the hike.

Here is a link to the website for the preserve, which includes trail maps. We hiked from the western entrance to the waterfall and then out towards the eastern entrance, where one of our members continued to her house, and then we looped back on a different trail to the parking lot.

Someone had placed rocks on the fenceposts…

These are typical California rolling hills, very dry at the moment, as we’re in yet another drought…even with last week’s rain, there is not a lot of green popping up.

You can barely see the houses on the ridge to the right.

There was some mud on the trail, but mostly it was dry. We encountered lots and lots of bikers, some in huge groups of 30, and a few runners.

There was actually water in the preserve. Here’s the official group photo, minus the organizer, whom I’m hiked with before.

It was a very fast hike…there weren’t many hills, but the organizer was also a superfast person…you can see the rest of the group way far behind us (yes, we did stop and let them catch up occasionally).

That’s why I’m sore today…speed exertion, not hilly stuff…although there was a little of it on the way to the waterfall.

This is one of the areas where we just had to stand aside to let all the bikes go past…the trail wasn’t wide enough for both of us.

When I lived in Britain for a year, this is the landscape I missed…that brown and olive green color, rolling grassy hillsides, California live oaks, the green showing where the stream lies.

The waterfall is in volcanic rock…

Not rare in San Diego…

The foam in the water was somewhat disturbing…especially when it looked like big blobs of detergent. Gotta love that after-storm effluvium.

Another group photo above the waterfall…most of us are sweaty at this point. It wasn’t hot, high 60s, low 70s, but we weren’t moving slowly. I think I said that already.

The leader took one photo of me talking while walking. Yes. I do actually talk sometimes. I had discussions about blogging, bad job situations, negative people, colleges (I tried to avoid that one), kids, being outside in nature, SEO, website traffic, and books about the Pacific Crest Trail…this group was fairly diverse.

There were shady areas on the hike…this will be a hot hike come summer, but the shady bits might make it doable.

That’s one problem with Southern California, is that there are about 4-5 months of the year when certain activities like hiking aren’t particularly easy or pleasant. I think this is when normal people go to the beach. I’m trying to get in as many hikes as possible before the heat comes…I don’t do heat well.

And there are lots of stretches of dry, hot, treelessness on this hike.

It was fine today though. We did a couple of stream crossings, some more wet than others…

I told you it was a gorgeous day, didn’t I? I took lots of deep, cleansing breaths, banishing demons from the tips of my fingertips out into the brush.

The peacefulness of these groves of sycamores and oaks was wonderful.

And even the vast expanse of trail and sky was soothing…

It’s even better being out front with nothing human messing with the view…

I love the sky…

The trails were a variety of straight, wide, and flat, with some rocky bits, and some narrower rocky trails near the waterfall. Usually we could walk side-by-side, and didn’t have to go single file. You had to keep your ears open for bikes coming up behind, though.

This stretch had very few bikes…

When we finished, we still had to hike the 1/2 mile up the concrete hill to our cars, but it wasn’t too bad.

The actual hike that we did in the preserve was about 9.4 miles, and we added another 0.9 on the hike to and from cars. We did it in just over 3 hours, so pretty fast (and that included a couple of stops). It was a nice day for it. If you go look at the trail maps, you can get a better idea of all the different access points to the preserve and the mileages involved. There were lots of little kids and families out for walks or rides in the space, and many mountain bikes. There’s also a historic adobe on the preserve, although we didn’t see that on this trip. Those living in the Penasquitos area have a great resource nearby in this preserve.

Vacuuming the Brain

Another no-posting night. I was drawing instead…

I’ve done drawings of the bent-over figure before…but she has an umbrella this time. These are people who are weighed down by life, I think. My people are always damaged and cracked these days. Not surprising, I guess. Drawing is a way to move stuff out of my brain…to dust out the corners, vacuum the floors. I really should draw every day (time! not enough of it!).

Once I was done drawing, there was nothing left in my head but sadness, so I took that to bed, tucked it in, and tried to get it to stay asleep for a reasonable amount of time. It likes to wake up around 4 in the morning and torture me. Sure enough, it did. I told it to shut up and rolled over, put the pillow on my head. That got me another hour or so of not-pain. That’s what these weekend mornings are now…painful. Work mornings are such a rush of having to get up for work and all that, so I can’t get bogged down in moody crap. Weekend mornings don’t have the same urgency. I’m tired, I want to sleep in, maybe lie about in bed for a while, but it’s a depressing place, so I don’t do it. Which in itself is depressing. Vicious cycle.

I get to this point in my head where I just say to myself that everything is depressing…move on. If you’re moving, maybe you’ll see something that’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll even FEEL something that’s not so bad. Standing still? Depressing. Don’t do it.

Whatever.

So yesterday I did a long, semi-painful hike (in that I am still feeling it today…it wasn’t hard, just fast), I did a lot of financial aid forms, I wrote three blogposts for groups I’m in (although I’m waiting for info on two of them to be able to finish), and I finally finished cutting out all the fabrics for Ivy’s Memorial quilt…

Wool on the left, which actually needs to be trimmed down, and cotton on the right, which will be appliqued (yes, by hand) down to the wool bits. It took just over 4 hours to pick everything out, longer than normal for me, but I think that was because of limited wool options slowing me down.

I can’t say this piece thrills me…I mean, it’s a memorial to a dead dog that we miss a lot, and maybe in the mood I’m in, memorials to dead things are not a good plan, but it is something I wanted to get to the next stage, so I did. Usually I take a photo of all the fabrics used in the quilt, but this one isn’t really one of my art quilts and I couldn’t be bothered to try to figure out what in this pile (including cat) I had actually used…

So I didn’t (I used a lot of it). And then I took all the wool bits and zipped them into one of those plastic bag things that bedding comes in when you buy it…I love those bags and never use them. I don’t use wool that much in the stuff I do, but I do want to keep it all together. I don’t want to waste a drawer in my office with it, though, and honestly, it was going to be two drawers, and I need those for cottons (which are taking over the space), because I use them so much more…so I think I will store this under my bed with the crazy-ass flesh-colored crazy-quilt fabrics. There is sometimes an issue with storing under the bed, in that you forget they are there, so that’s a problem, but when the kids move out, I am just going to turn this whole house into a scary Hoarders episode of fabric stash, so who cares?

OK. Not really. OR! If I do that, then you know I’ve gone completely off the deep end. Note to kids: good luck cleaning mom’s stuff out when she dies. I’m not making it easy for you.

I finished the second book in the Zita the Spacegirl series, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

These are quick reads for adults, and really are meant for elementary-school-aged kids, maybe middle school. I actually liked this one more than the first one. The story seemed to hold together better.

There’s a robot that pretends to be Zita and the two try to save a planet. There is a third book, but I didn’t get it from the library yet. I probably will, just because now I want to know what happens (and yes, they both end on cliffhangers…if you’re like me, you can’t NOT read the next one).

We do have a 3-day weekend (thank you, Lincoln), so I have an extra day, which is good, because the to-be-graded pile is deadly, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much yet, and I still have a to-do list that is a mile long. It starts this morning with a trip to the gym, which is a good thing…the muscles from yesterday are complaining and the best thing for them is to make them do more. Plus it’s good for the depressed part of the brain…well, people keep saying that exercise helps with depression. Then again, there’s a lot of things that people say about how to fix depression, and sometimes I think it’s just not a fixable thing. It’s there and if you’re lucky, you’ll figure out a way to live with it or persuade it to go away. I can’t take a screwdriver to it or make a list of things that make me happy and have it just disappear.

More drawing tonight I think. Hope. It’s like vacuuming the dust bunnies out of the brain.

Dig Deep

I was going to write this last night, but couldn’t. The tired finally took over. It’s always a clue when I fall asleep in meditation.

This week has been mentally rough. I don’t really know why, but I knew Friday had the potential to be a mental clusterfuck, so I woke up and told myself that it wasn’t going to be that…that I was going to be productive, focused on a goal, and I wasn’t going to let that sad bitch inside me fuck me over. It was a test day, so the kids are super quiet, yet the unprepared ones are more demanding than ever, and it’s often just a difficult day anyway, but it leaves me too much mental space to wallow. I often get in a really bad place on test days, and they’re usually on a Friday, and then that fucks the weekend over.

But I didn’t. I made it through and I wasn’t in a shitty mood. I got lots of things logged in. I had a couple kid issues and I handled them. For once this year, after 12 years of teaching, I felt like I had it, I was in control, I could do it.

I cried in counseling, but not like the world was ending. Just trying to suss out what I’m depressed about exactly so that I can attack that and make it leave. (I typed “make it leaves”…now there’s a drawing popping into mind…I really need to make time to draw this weekend.)

And then I got home. And the toilets are still backing up, so I had called the plumber, and he told me to check something on the septic before he committed to coming out, so I did, and then called him, and he said to call the septic people, and yeah. We think it’s the leach field. Like it’s done. Like it needs replacing. Like thousands of dollars.

And I lost it. I mean, it’s understandable. I have too much on my plate, I’m financially not in a great place, and I’m depressed. It does often feel like the universe is out to get me at the moment, that everything under the sun is conspiring to fuck me over. I know notionally that is not true, that I live in an older house and it needs to be maintained, and I don’t do a great job of that due to time and money, but that sometimes things just stop working or need to be replaced, and those things cost money.

And so I tried to call my parents and they didn’t answer, which is probably a good thing, because I would have lost it. The phrase, “I can’t do this any more,” has been in my head so many times over the last 6 months, and the reality is…I DO do it. (huh huh huh…she said do-do). I do. I get up off the fucking ground and I do it. I researched home equity loans and I have my tax refund coming in (which was going to get me through the summer), and I will just have to make it work somehow.

Then the girlchild came home in tears and bounced back into crazy hyper after I fed her (she’s like a puppy sometimes, because then she falls asleep), and she said something about needing an adult and here she has me, the crazy depressoid (not her words…mine), and I said that I had called my parents and they didn’t even answer (it’s OK…I dealt)…and she sent me this…

That’s it. I need an adultier adult. Like, dammit…I’m the adult. There’s no one else here but me. I’m pretty capable though. I got the septic guy to feel sorry for me (not hard really). The drainage guy (who is the fixer guy) is coming this afternoon to see if he can figure out if it’s just the leach field or if it’s something else. I just dumped all the sand out of my hiking boots from last week’s hike so I can put them on for this week’s hike. The girlchild got herself up and out for the ACT this morning. Boychild has some scholarship stuff to do, especially now that there will be even less money and UCBerkeley sent him an application for a scholarship for low-income students. Fuck. Now I’m low income…which is funny (not really), because compared to a lot of my students, I’m not low income…although they have iPads and I have a mini that was a gift…but the boychild qualifies. He has another interview next week for the college of his choice…so I hope that goes well. Who knows, though? There are no fucking guarantees for anything, as my life has slammed down on me over and over.

Which brings me to the title of the post. Girlchild’s soccer team yells this out as one of their cheers during games…Dig Deep! It’s amusing to me, because I don’t think most of those girls really have to (or choose to) dig deep for anything, even the physical demands of the game. You can see a few giving their absolute all, but most of them don’t. And some of their personal lives may require them to dig deep emotionally…we can’t ever know, but when I got up this morning after a longer than usual night’s sleep, after yesterday’s slump, I heard them yelling in my head…Dig Deep. Yeah. I am. You know I am. Every day.

Watching the Mood

I couldn’t process enough to write last night. It’s interesting (to me at least) that I use the blog to process where my head (and body) went during the day. It helps me have some sort of closure about feelings and actions and progress…in my emotional life, my artistic life, and my work life. I need to see progress, moving forward, or I get more depressed…ironic that…being depressed makes me more depressed. I’m depressed about being depressed. It really is a stupid vicious cycle and the lamest stuff sets me off. I do my best to process my way out of it, but it doesn’t always work.

I don’t even know what it was about yesterday…I worked my ass off running a Jeopardy test review game yesterday. I didn’t have time to think in class, but apparently that fucked with my brain even more. Like I know today will be bad…it’s a test day, so it’s quiet (except for the dipwads who aren’t prepared and want to let everyone know that and disrupt during the test, which is why I give my little personal responsibility speech beforehand), and my brain has PLENTY of time to wander the sand dunes of depressoville. There’s not a whole lot I can do about that except realize it and try to talk myself out of it. But yesterday? Busy days are usually the OK days, the days I didn’t wallow, didn’t ruminate, didn’t do the Eeyore thing, the Marvin the Paranoid Android thing. I’ll be numb and flat, but not down and out.

At the end of school, I got a text from the boychild with this…

who had been hanging out with Calli in the back yard (Calli being the girlchild’s Golden Retriever). Um. I knew we had raccoons…I’ve heard them on the roof and in the tree outside my bedroom window…seen them in that tree too. But lying on the pavement outside the pool fence? In broad daylight? No, it had no rabies symptoms. By the time I got home, it had gone into the pool enclosure and was lying on the deck by the side of the pool (like you do in San Diego in winter), snoring. Loudly. Seriously sleeping and snoring.

This morning, it’s gone. Which I guess is a good thing, because I thought maybe it was sick and I’d get up and find a raccoon corpse in my backyard, a corpse the size of a small Golden Retriever honestly, and then I’d have to do something about it. Raccoons are beautiful creatures, really. I just don’t want it living in the backyard with the dog, I guess. Calli probably thought it was a big fat cat (she’s not very smart). Yes, we have skunks too…hopefully she’s figured out that they’re not cats.

It rained yesterday…so that raccoon was sleeping out there in the rain when I left for the girlchild’s game. There is nothing more miserable (in San Diego…not part of the Winter Vortex at all) than a winter soccer game at night in the rain: cold metal bleachers, wind, rain, everyone huddling under umbrellas and still getting wet…

The girl on the left had just arrived…that’s why she’s still relatively dry. I actually managed to stay quite dry until I had to leave early for my meeting. I had a waterproof blanket, the umbrella stuffed into my bra so I could stitch during the game, and a padded seat under my butt. Two jackets? I did OK. I did leave early though, so I did not suffer the entire game…

We haven’t had too many rainy games this season, so I shouldn’t complain.

This is the progress from Academic League and soccer…

It got too hard to do drizzle stitches in the rain, so I eventually quit on the tail of the bottom bird. Remember my original plan (hope?) of finishing 3 of these every two games? Not happening. At all. Oh well. It’s not that it’s hard; it’s just time consuming. Maybe THAT’S what I should do during the test today, instead of grading and logging in papers (no, not really…I need to get caught up on grading). The birds will get done eventually. It’s not the end of the world.

At my stitching meeting, I continued my incredibly slow progress on the girlchild’s Christmas stocking, started when I was pregnant with her in 1997. Oh yeah.

It’s a good thing she is semi-patient. She’s really not, but… The pattern is irritating in that the symbol for the mauve color is darker than the symbol for the green…but the green in real life is darker, so my visually addled brain keeps confusing the two colors on the pattern, because it thinks the darker symbol is the darker color…which is really weird when you think about it, but then also very logical. I suspect most designers don’t think about things like that: the darkness of the symbol corresponding with the darkness of the color. The mauve is a filled-in black circle and the green is a letter S, very open and light. Even making it a G instead of an S would have helped my brain, I think. So I kept losing my place (no, I don’t use highlighters).

Anyway. Did I do anything art-related? Nope. No energy. Absolutely exhausted on the drive TO stitching…finally went to bed sort of early (for me, anyway), and then was up in the night with an unhappy tummy. There’s seems to be no winning the sleep game at the moment. I really tried to get motivated on two different things, but even cutting stuff out sounded like more effort than I was capable of last night. I’m sure that’s contributing to the low mood. It’s lovely that I know all the things that are affecting me, plus and minus, but I still can’t seem to get far enough ahead of the moods to prevent them from happening. I mean, this is MY brain. I do a pretty damn good job of paying attention to all the stuff it’s saying and trying to treat it right and listen carefully and act accordingly, but it doesn’t seem to matter. When it’s in a mood, it’s in a mood…a 6-month-plus-long mood. And yes, I do often wonder if it’s still a mood or if this is just the new me. Not OK.

Tonight…it will be better…whether that’s artmaking or sleep or just spending time with those cranky-ass beasts I gave birth to…it’s got to be better.

A Small Baby Bird

My mind literally skittered away from meditation tonight; I couldn’t force the light to fill my body. I am supposed to start from a pinpoint of light in my chest and visualize it filling my body with warmth and light. I can’t. I just can’t. There is black tarry sludge in the edges, and it’s pushing back at the light, forcing it to shrink back into the center and sometimes just disappear. It sizzles when it touches the light, lets off a rancid smell, chemical, burns the nostrils.

Wow. That’s not like a good visual of my mood at all, is it? In fact, a drawing pretty much popped into my head fully drawn when I was meditating, which really turned into trying to fight the sludge away and continue to breathe like I’m supposed to. Sometimes it just seems so pointless to even try, but I know I feel worse when I don’t. So I just do. Again and again.

I need to try to go to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour tonight. I can feel the mood worsening this week and I know some of it is hormones, some is stress, but some is sleep. If I’m lucky, I might get an extra 30 minutes tonight. Maybe. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll have all the financial aid stuff done and packed up for mailing some time this weekend, so I won’t have to think about it any more. I’m hoping that will help. Then again, maybe it’s distracting me from the other shit.

I’m thinking about this quilt again…

One Paycheck…because my life is back to that again…looking at the available money and taking deep breaths, trying to figure out survival again. I am so tired of it…so tired of worrying about money and expenses and how to pay for stuff. I had it rephotographed because it’s going to be in a book on quilts and human rights that will be published later this year. I know that once the kids get through school and hopefully get jobs that I will be OK, because I will only have to take care of myself, and I think I can do that. I think I can keep one head above water. Three heads? When two are in college? I’m having a lot harder time visualizing that. Maybe that’s the black tarry sludge…it’s worry and depression and panic and anxiety and grief, all rolled into a burrito of shit. A creeping burrito of coming-to-get-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night. Stephen King hasn’t written the single-mom-paying-for-college book yet…now there’s a scary-ass horror story for you.

Deep breaths. I meditate at school all the time now. I kick one class out into the hallway, close the door, pick up all the science journals, adjust the planner on the screen, stare at the wall and breathe…one two three four…you can make it to the door…five six seven eight…you can do this. You can’t rhyme all of it, but you can do it. You can open the door and let them in and breathe out the crazy and the sad and the dreary depth of grief that overwhelms you sometimes as you walk around the room, trying to persuade kids to work. Feeling this one’s forehead and wondering why he got sent to school with this fever and headache, talking quietly to that one about how to change what’s happening with her stuff right now, praising this other one for doing work you’ve never seen him do, chastising that other one for a giant brain fart day. You understand those days. You have them too, and somehow you get through. You grade. You teach. You email. You do all the right things. You walk through the black tarry sludge, which sucks at your feet and threatens to stop oxygen flow to your cells, but you push through, slog through, put your shoulder to it and move on through it.

But it never ends. Never fucking ends.

I needed to draw tonight, but it got too late. I had to make a test review powerpoint. I thought I had one for this test, but apparently not. And I graded because the girlchild commandeered my computer, so I watched part of Downton Abbey while doing that, and it made me cry. Dammit. I didn’t even get through the first fucking episode of this season without losing it. I’m such an emotional disaster area. Just stay away from me. It’s like nuclear waste. I feel like it just radiates off of me.

It must. You must be able to just look at me and know.

I heard this the other morning and went…NO. Why? What the hell?

Chvrches: Bela Lugosi’s Dead

And then I thought I might actually like it. And now I’ve heard it like 7 times, and I still don’t know. It’s definitely not Bauhaus. But I think I might like it.

You know, there really isn’t a conclusion to today’s post. I keep thinking someday I will get on here and yell, hooray! The depression is gone! The witch is dead! Hallelujah! Thank you all for joining me on this journey out of the hole! Whoop! Now let’s get on with what equates to normal with Kathy. Seriously, when I read old posts, I wonder who that person is? Even when she’s stressed, I don’t fucking recognize her. I don’t even know who she is. And that makes me so incredibly sad. Really sad.

Yeah. Well. I guess that’s what hope looks like, a small baby bird in my hand who is barely raising its head for water. At least it’s still alive.

Buried in Fiber

It’s OK. I did art stuff tonight. I probably should have gone to bed earlier instead, but…I wonder which will prolong my life more? More sleep or more art? I’m voting for the latter. Trying to balance the two, but really? The art is more calming. Sleep isn’t restful. It’s full of bad dreams and nasty sad. I’d rather be playing with fabric. I started cutting out flower parts…

which is complicated by the fact that there are wool parts of flowers and cotton parts of flowers, so I’m cutting all the wool first, and then I’ll find cotton that works with it, since I have a fairly limited stash of wools and a vast stash of cottons. I made it through almost all the flowers…at least the wool parts…and there’s a squirrel and a bunny in there too.

I need to figure out the banners and all the cotton bits. There’s not a lot left…maybe tomorrow night? Except financial aid is still a mess and school stuff needs to get done too.

I stitched at soccer…

I forgot to take pictures of the girlchild playing. He played her tonight, for real. That’s good. She did well. They won. Another game Thursday. It’s kind of a routine now…two games a week, one Academic League match a week. I keep having to remind myself what day it is…do I bring my stitching to school? Do I bring my Uggs and sweatshirt to school? Will I have time to go home first? Too much thinking. My brain isn’t good at thinking any more. It’s obsessive about the bad stuff, runs over and over it, trying to make sense of it, having conversations with myself. But give it a real task? Yikes. It’s done.

I went to the gym. I meditated. I finished two books…The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon…

who is only 22 years old. This is her debut novel, the first of seven in the series. It’s called a supernatural dystopia, and definitely has sci fi overtones, whatever that means. I liked the idea and most of the book, but kept getting lost in vocabulary and this foreign race, the Rephaim, and some other race, the Emim, which sometimes didn’t make sense. Plus the setup of clairvoyant levels is supremely complicated. But it has promise…I would read another one.

The second book I finished was Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

Yes. This is a kids’ graphic novel. A group I’m in has a graphic novel/comics book club, and I have never been to the meetings, but thought I could try to read the books at least, and maybe someday swing one of the meetings. I had a hard time with this book…not because it’s written to a younger audience, but because I got confused by events in the story. Plus I honestly didn’t like Zita much…she’s kind of an annoying squirrel, to use a term I use on some of my students. I don’t know if this book would appeal more to a younger audience, like a late elementary age? Maybe. I do have the second book as well. I did like the giant mouse and the round monster thing, and the spider robots were cool (even though they are evil). It was kind of an eh.

Kind of like my life. Eh. Which means it’s probably time to go to sleep. The later it gets, the sadder I get. I did find another hike for the weekend, I think. I actually found two, signed up for one reluctantly, then found the other one and switched. Seems like with the three-day weekend it would be lame not to go on a long hike…so that’s what I aimed for in my planning.

Ugh. I’m hoping with more regular influxes of art activity the days won’t feel so shitty. We’ll see. I’m tired of the shitty feeling. I keep doing things to improve my mood, trying to think positively about my future. Yeah. Well. The fun thing about depression is that it makes it very hard to think positively about anything, and when past experience is slapping you upside the face, pulling your feet out of the mud long enough to even Stand the Fuck Up and Go Make Art is difficult. I can’t be that depressoid who does nothing but sleep. I can mope and iron fabric at the same time if I have to. There’s some chance of surviving this if I keep my hands buried in fiber.

No One Else Can…

The new meditation visualization is easier than the last. It starts as a pinprick of light in the center of the body that spreads to take up the whole body shape. That’s much easier than a football-shaped oval of light running up and down the center of my body. It kept getting snagged on my liver or my solar plexus, whatever that is…seriously, he keeps using that term, and I finally had to Google it. I knew it was in the middle, but that’s all I knew. Deficient education.

I spent a lot of time cooking tonight. I’m not sure why. I made barbecue sauce from scratch. It was pretty good stuff. I froze the extras for later. I made BBQ burgers with the sauce. They were really good. I made some potato things that were mostly eh. And I made a blueberry cheesecake galette that might kill people with joy. Seriously. It was fucking good. You’re jealous now because there isn’t any for you. Well, honestly, if you came over tomorrow and asked nicely, I’d give you some…I might have to wrest a serving out of the kids’ sweaty palms (I had to delineate ownership of each piece for tomorrow, so boychild wouldn’t eat all of it), but I’d give you some.

I’m not sure why I had a sudden urge to cook good stuff, but I did it. Maybe it was to make up for the largely useless day at school, where very few people listened or changed their behavior based on my directions. I love days like that. Those are the days when teachers wonder what it must be like to work with adults. Having spent the first 13 years of my work life working with adults, I can tell them it’s not a whole lot different…except that you have more control over your own stuff and politicians don’t expect you to work miracles with rocks. Or teenagers. Because sometimes they’re hard to tell apart.

There was definitely some frustration involved. So the cooking helped. And the girlchild cleaned up the kitchen. It almost looks normal. We had a discussion the other day about available hours in the day and why I don’t care as much about cleaning as I do about fabric. I explained to her my theory that in a household, whether you are married, dating, or roommating, that if there is something that really truly bugs you about how things look or are being done, then you should do them yourself…it’s not OK to force your ideas of cleanliness or household importance on other people. It’s about the only good thing I got out of marriage counseling a million years ago…and since I’m the only adult here, that’s how we roll. She’s welcome to mop or sweep any time she likes…and when her friend came over on Sunday, because we were the only household in East County that wasn’t watching the Super Bowl, well then she cleaned what she thought she needed to clean. It was different than what I would have done in some ways, but I was grateful for any help…because honestly, I don’t usually get any help.

Things I’ve learned from the girlchild: how to use fresh garlic and ginger, how to embrace weird-ass ingredient combinations, how to use every dish you own for only one meal. She’s an amazing cook. I don’t know where she gets it from. I am a much better cook now because of her. It’s her fault that blueberry thing got made…and all the calories that were in it? Probably also her fault.

There are only so many hours in the day. I choose to do the things that make me more at peace. If I watch a Hoarders episode, my priorities might change…but only briefly.

I’m not sure where the rest of the evening went. I did have detention and tutorial after school, so I was home late…and I did meditate and exercise and talk to my health coach for the last time and work on more of these crazy financial aid forms and help dry dishes and help pick out boys soccer photos for the school newspaper and butt heads with the boychild about the next college interview (sigh. if you want to go there, and this is your first choice, then stop bitching and set up the interview. or don’t. just don’t give ME shit about it. I did not design this world. I am no happier living in it than you are.). It’s his third college interview…good sign. I hope. But I didn’t do art stuff, and that is starting to wear on me…nothing in two days. Need a fix. Tomorrow is staff meeting, soccer game, and gym. It will be a miracle if anything else happens. No photos even today. Barely even got to read my book. Feel disconnected from my own head at the moment. I can stitch during the game at least. Have to remember to take it all with me. Car full of supplies so I can survive a game. Boots, sweatshirt(s), gloves, stitching, blanket, chair. Tea.

The awesome hike I was going to do on Sunday got canceled…the trail is closed. I picked another hike. I’m not as excited about it, but it will be semi-challenging…although I’ve done it before. I was looking forward to the other one. Sigh. I rarely look forward to anything any more. Sad but true.

OK. I need to do that sleep thing…even though it doesn’t work right. Too much of that stupid sad brain talking back to me. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It mutters in a corner and when I say, “What? What did you say? Repeat that?”, it replies in a surly fashion, “nothing. I said nothing. Shut up. Go away,” like I’m just going to stop paying attention to it. I mad dog it a little, giving it the eye, getting up close and personal with it, and it gets nervous, fidgets, uncomfortable, tosses some now-painful memory out at me, a picture, a scene from the past and I seize up with it, with the view of what the artist-formerly-known-as-happy looked like (this one was from Oregon), and it takes the opportunity to duck out under my arm, slipping past me, and I feel it slide gently past into another space, out of reach. Damn brain. You talk too damn much. Heal thyself. No one else can.

For Ivy…and Me

My SIL really saved me from myself yesterday and last night. I think she called me about 5 times, not for long, but just to tell me one more ironic or stupid thing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I know I was trying NOT to sound mopey and shit, but I was, and I don’t even know if she knew that…but just having her sarcastic loving self checking in with me kept me from sinking deep into the low. By the time she stopped calling (No, Really, she said, This is the last call), I was significantly tired so I managed to do a few more things and then went to bed early for me. And got a decent night’s sleep for probably the first time in a month. I know she doesn’t read my blog (she has three kids under the age of 12…I’m not sure she reads anything but text messages), so she’ll never see this. I’ll tell her thanks at some point.

There’s something about the vast expanse of weekend hours that I spend by myself that get me down. One part of me looks forward to quiet and getting to do something I want to do, and the other part of me wants to interact with people, but not total strangers and not in a difficult way. I don’t want to have to work hard at it, because I already do that every day during the work week. I want relaxing and social. Sort of. In small quantities. Maybe. Plus I’m significantly poor, so no cost. Yeah, I know. It’s not very realistic. Even an occasional movie would be nice…maybe when I get past the next Visa bill from hell.

Really, what I did yesterday was fill out financial aid forms. And I did a little fabric stuff. And I meditated.

I have completed 145 meditation sessions. Ironically, I’m having a hard time with the current series, the Creativity series…there’s something about the format of visualizing energy moving through that I can’t hold on to properly. I have no problems with creativity in itself, except for finding time for it and forcing myself to do OTHER stuff that is NOT creative. I am having a hard time relaxing at the moment in meditation…I can’t get my brain to release. It’s been too tied up in financial aid applications to relax…I’m still doing those, by the way. I finished the worst of it Saturday, the CSS Profile, which was way worse than the FAFSA by like 100 degrees. But some of the colleges have their own forms, so I did one of those tonight…and all of them need copies of my tax return, my paystubs, my W-2s, all need to be signed on each page and probably I need to provide a vial of my blood as well. Boychild interrupted my meditation because he had forgotten to turn in an essay online…and then I was talking to him about getting a job. He wanted to know why. Sigh. Ah. Money, dude. Plus hell…you just need to get a job and start being part of society. Feel free to find a job you’d like: politics, bookstore, I don’t know. Something. I will be doing these damn financial aid forms for another two weeks probably…so it seems fair that he should have to work this summer? I don’t know. I might have to work this summer too…who knows. I don’t know how anything is going to work out. Like him, I don’t know what job I could get just for the summer. Delivering pizza?

I also have completed 33 health coach sessions in the last year and a half. They’re stopping my coaching, which has been free so far…apparently losing all the weight means I no longer qualify for the free stuff. I’m OK with that. I think I got the best out of the sessions a while ago. I think there are one or two more. That’s it. I lost 45.5 pounds in that time period. I dropped one med. I upped two other meds and added new ones. Sigh. I’m healthier now despite the extra meds. I can’t help being anemic.

So I went to my local quilt store that carries wool fabrics and got a few more bright fabrics…well, bright-ish. That’s all that was available…

That crazy fabric underneath them is the backing fabric I got for super-cheap a million years ago, and I used every inch of it up on the back of the Sightlines quilts, which have finally returned home.

And then I started going through my wool stash, trying to find all the leftover pieces from other projects I’ve done…because I don’t need huge pieces for the flowers in the background…these are from a Primitive Gatherings’ block-of-the-month that I finished…well, I finished all the blocks. I haven’t put them together…that’s usually my sticking point.

Then I found the pieces from the two Sue Spargo block-of-the-month leftovers…there were some good bright colors in there, including some orange I used for the fish in the water…

I don’t need big pieces. This is not hoarding. Seriously. This is using up my scraps. I don’t have a good wool stash. It’s OK. I don’t NEED a good wool stash. I’m not planning on this being a regular thing. I just really wanted something to show how much I cared about Ivy and how bad I felt about her dying so early. I realize that current readers may not have a clue who Ivy is.

Ivy came home with us in June 2006 as a puppy (yes, that is the boychild at age 10).

She was a Boxer mix…later we figured out that the mix must have been a whippet, because she was long and skinny and ran like the wind.

She was a good dog, like they all are, although she had issues with my parents’ dog at some point, so Missy couldn’t stay with us after Calli (my daughter’s dog) moved in. But she was sweet, and every time the phone rang at night, she would leap off the couch and go running down the hallway, sometimes barking like the world was ending.

She wasn’t very big, but sounded large. She was a good protector and was very loving. She had skin allergies that started up in 2011 and we tried some food and allergy tests…turns out she was allergic to everything under the sun, so we had her on allergy shots for a while, but she even developed an allergy to those. And then her vet died of a sudden heart attack…at age 44 or something. It was crazy. So it took us a while to get another vet in the practice up to speed on the whole allergy issue, and then she got really really sick really really fast. And then well again. And then sick again. And by the time we found out that she had liver cancer, she had stopped eating and drinking, and I had made the horrible decision to stop her pain and suffering. She was 6. It was May 2012. Yes, that long ago.

I don’t know why her death has been so hard on me…I’ve had multiple animals die, but always of old age…or they were old and the diseases finally got too much for them. Ivy was young, in the prime of her life, perfectly fine and hyper and running around excited one day, and vomiting everything up and barely able to stand the next day. It was about a month from the first serious illness to putting her down, and it was just hard for me. My daughter still talks about it; she’s still carrying around resentment over how she didn’t get to hold Ivy when she died. Long story…she was there when it happened, but…I know if she had said something, she could have held her, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue. One that can’t be changed now.

So I spent most of the summer sad about her death. When my first dog, Russia, died of old age, the kids were young, and it took me a couple of years to get another dog, mostly because of finances, and that was Ivy. We have Calli here half the time; she travels back and forth between me and my ex with the kids…so it’s not like I never have a dog here. And I don’t know that I’m home enough to justify a dog just for me…and there’s the cost.

But the real deal was that I felt I needed to memorialize her life. I did some drawings and one became a sort-of banner to Ivy. That’s what this is. And it’s wool mostly, with cotton accents, and I’m planning to embellish it a la Sue Spargo, because I enjoy doing that kind of work, sort of as a hobby, rather than like an art endeavor…and I want what I make for Ivy to have been enjoyable. Because it still makes me feel like crying to think about that month when she was so sick, to remember that day I couldn’t even get her to eat out of my hand, so I decided that was it. That she was suffering more than it was worth, and she wasn’t coming back. We didn’t get the biopsy results for another three or four days, but I was right. It was liver cancer all over the place.

So I’m making this for her. And for me.

I would be ironing on the ironing board, but Babygirl thinks it’s hers now. I had all the wool sort of spread out on the other side of the board.

When I got to the fleshy bits, I had a run of fabrics that I worked really hard to get back in 2012/2013.

And I currently have about half the quilt ironed down to mostly wool, ready to be cut out.

It’s a much different process than I use for most of my quilts…but I’m glad to have it started. Maybe tomorrow night I can get started on the flowers…I have Ivy, me, and the main landscape (hill, river, fish) all cut out. I just need to do about a million flowers and two banners and then there are bunnies and squirrels, because Ivy liked to chase animals. So expect to see more of this in the coming days. For Ivy. Yeah. And me.

San Elijo Lagoon

This is another one of those…is this really a HIKE or a WALK? I think the latter, although it’s a very nice walk at that. We did about 7 miles…there’s a group picture somewhere, but only my arm is in it (not quite on purpose, but you know how I am about pictures). Here’s the trailhead in Solana Beach (California, by the way…I often forget most people reading have no idea where I live)…

I’ve always wanted to do this walk…driven past the lagoon on the freeway and said to myself that I should go do it, but it never happened…I mean, like for YEARS I’ve been saying this. It is a long drive from my house. That doesn’t help. I can’t just pop up there after work and do a quick walk, although many people are using it for a quick run.

There are many birds in the lagoon, including this Great Blue Heron…who posed…

Yes, I am beautiful. And then flew…

But not very far…just enough so we could get his/her good side.

I do not know how to sex a heron. Sorry. Apparently it’s by size. Well. There we are.

The walk was mostly flat, with only a few minor hilly bits, nothing challenging. There were also some rocky and narrow bits, especially going under the freeway bridge, but most kids and seniors could handle it.

There were about a million ducks.

This is the view towards the freeway and housing areas that surround the lagoon.

This is the view back towards where we started.

And the lovely view under the freeway.

It’s strange to hike with all that freeway noise, but eventually we got out into THAT below, and the noise faded away.

There’s less water in this section, fewer birds as well, and still lots of flat.

That’s the thing…it’s 7 miles, but a flat 7 miles, so we hiked it in less than 2 hours.

And it wasn’t very challenging. Sometimes that’s OK…apparently I felt like I needed a bigger challenge? Who knows. I spent most of my time walking with a Russian yoga instructor who had saved a turtle in Malaysia by massaging it. We talked about the mind-body connection, even in turtles, and lots of other enlightening stuff, from kids, to travel, yoga, Seattle, college, financial aid, self-employment, art, and men. It was entertaining at times, depressing at others. She and I walked fast, ditching the strollers. Again, walk? Or hike? Or run?

There were Torrey Pines about…

And it was definitely a beautiful day for a walk or a hike…

San Diego is great this time of year for such things. There were many flowering plants, even in the “dead of winter”…I sucked at taking photos of most of them (moving too fast), but got this acacia…

And a view of the clouds reflected in the water…

I bet this is a really popular walk during the summer, when East County is unbearable.

We made it back to the trailhead quickly and finally gave up on the rest of them…which was probably a good thing, because they stopped to take a bunch of group photos.

I’d do it again. I might run it though. Put it in the file for summer evening walks…

Making Up a Journal…

Here’s the post I hope the curator never reads. It’s Monday, January 6 (yes, I started this that long ago…welcome to my life at the moment), and I am supposed to have done a journal for the Earth Stories quilt I finished back in August/September. It’s been a rough 6 months and said journal does not exist.

I started back in early January with trying to use Google Docs, because I figured I could load the photos into a document and then write the words around it while I was sitting at a soccer game. I wanted to use the iPad, but wasn’t sure if the app I wanted to use would be able to save locally without wifi; the phone was my backup plan (and yes, I do often at least start and occasionally write an entire post on my phone). However, Google Docs sucks because it won’t take photos of any size out if the camera…they have to be resized. That’s a lot of work. I did originally resize them for the blog, but I usually delete those when I archive photos into files…so now I’m doing double work…not so smart.

Why didn’t I start a journal when I started the quilt? Because that’s not how I work. I do have a sketchbook (or seven). I don’t journal each quilt’s progress there…I do have a typed private art journal that I write in every Friday (or at least once a week) and there’s obviously my blog, which documents everything except when the dog poops (which it would document if I could find a pattern to it), but I don’t really focus on each quilt in a logical way…it’s more, here’s the quilt I’m making and here’s all the other shit that’s going on, which is why when they said they wanted a journal for the Earth Stories quilt back in like February 2013, I was like…I can do that. I’ll just copy pages from my blog. And then life (shit…tsunami wave of shit) happened. And that’s probably more than EVER needs to go into the journal of making that quilt. Besides, it would be 400 pages long and no one would read it while standing in the exhibit and wondering what made Kathy Nida do what she did, or even how she did it, because I’m not sure anyone cares about why either. Or maybe they do. Who knows.

So I ignored the need for the journal for a goddamned good long time. I emailed the curator and made sure I didn’t have to deal with it right away. And then I let it percolate (ahem…actually, I completely ignored it because I couldn’t handle it).

I bought the journal (a portfolio, relatively cheap from Michael’s) around January 2, and I thought I was finally ready to deal with this. Of course, it meant going through old photos, cleaning out photo files to find what I needed, and that was one of the issues before. I can’t even look at some of my old photo files right now. They’re filed by date and I then go through and cut and paste them into their relevant folder, whether it’s pictures of the animals or the kids’ soccer games, or it’s a particular quilt. It’s nice to have all the quilt pictures in one place, but this quilt spans about February or March of this year until September or so, and I don’t know if I can deal with the documentation.

I HAVE to deal with them. Shit. There’s only photos from November in the quilt file. Fuck. That means they’re all uncategorized, only in by date. That means I have to go through 8-9 months’ worth of photo files, during some of the most painful parts of my life. Wow. So. Should I take a Xanax now or later? Or should I just shoot myself? It might be quicker and less painful.

Probably better to do it in small batches (the photos…not the Xanax). I managed to get them all sorted in a few days. Then I resized all of them into one folder, so if I fucked up and deleted everything, they would be easy to find. Then I started with that damn Google Docs. I fussed with that file for about two days and finally said fuck it and imported it into Word. It wouldn’t move photos the way I wanted them to move, it wouldn’t size things easily. I couldn’t get the text to wrap right.

So you’d think years of Word expertise would make this an easy job. You’d be wrong. Something that happened in the code from Google Docs came in and warped the intelligence of anything I could have done in Word. I would move and reformat a photo just to have it completely disappear when I started typing text. The page below moved all those photos all by itself…the file doesn’t look like this, but when it prints out, this is what it does.

I don’t have a great color printer at the moment. It’s about 20 years old, maybe older, and it just sucks. So I took the file to FedEx to print it out there. It’s possible that there was something hinky that happened in that interface that randomly moved photos and words, but I wasn’t about to try to fix something I couldn’t find without carefully reading code (running out of time here), so I resorted to old-school. Yes. I reprinted the pages on my black and white printer here at home, cut out the color pictures from the other copies, and cut out the words from my printouts…

And started scrapbooking. Whatever. It’s all in these little plastic pages. No one will know…or care.

Example above. It worked fine. I didn’t write a lot because I didn’t think people would want to read a lot. I included a cover page of my inspiration for the piece and my resume in the back. I finally mailed it off earlier this week. You can see below the stupid shit that printer was doing…

“I to see”? Whatever. So it’s done. I don’t know if anyone will ever look at it, let alone read it, but there it is. When the exhibit opens, I’ll do some posts here about the quilt too, so don’t feel bad if you don’t make it to the opening.

The next journaling experience? For Celebrating Silver, they want one or two 12×12″ pages of the process or story or hell, I don’t know what. I don’t own 12×12 pages. I will have to make some paper between now and then apparently. I think I have until mid-April on that one, so obviously I should ignore the need for that to get done until…um…about April 14. I’m sure some people’s journals are really interesting and give great insight into the artistic process. I don’t think that’s the case with mine. I don’t know if I want to spend more time writing about the inspiration before I make a quilt, making the drawing, and then making the piece. I do write about it here, but I think a journal with nothing in it but a big fat QR code is probably not what they want.

Anyway. I suck at journaling the way they want. Here’s my journal. Right here. You’re reading it.