Zooming In…

It’s interesting to wake up the morning after the hike and try to figure out what the hell you did the day before to cause the specific, different muscle pain that you have today. For instance, why does my right quad hurt so much more than the left? Maybe because that’s the leg I used to pull myself up onto rocks when we were scrambling up the canyon toward the waterfalls?

Then there’s Poison Oak Paranoia: every slightly itchy feeling since Saturday, I’m checking for the rash. I’m convinced it will show up (and it can take up to 5 days to show up, which is scary). At some point, I’ll get around to posting about that hike, but I have to resize the photos and I was in two long meetings yesterday, so I ran out of time.

My women’s art group is doing a show with Mexican female artists in September/October about the border, more of a conceptual collaborative piece than everyone contributing a single piece of art, so it requires meetings and brainstorming and working with people who work very differently than I do. I realize my experience of the border by being a teacher of students who regularly cross it is very different than others. I’m not entirely sure what I feel about it except that it seems to break up families and make it more difficult for certain groups of people, especially those who really don’t need more trouble in their lives. I read a book a few years ago about four Hispanic girls and the Dream Act and how this arbitrary line that we draw affected their lives. Anyway, you will probably see more about this project in the future, but know that right now, I am envisioning floating 3D fabric houses in the air above our real-live fence. And how that will go together. I think it’s good to force the art brain to work out of its comfort zone, out of what it’s used to doing.

Girlchild survived her weekend camp and came back invigorated and excited (she is so much more of an extrovert than I am). She had to tell everyone who her role model was as one of their team-building/introduction exercises, and she told me she chose me, and I said, “because you want to be a depressed, crazy old woman in your future?” and she said, no, because she wanted to be strong like me. Sigh. And I don’t feel strong at all most days. It’s like dragging myself along through the mud most days, but I guess she’s right. I just wish I didn’t HAVE to be so strong. It would be OK to have less to deal with and get through and to not have to feel like I’m always surviving things. I’d be OK with that. I guess I should tell her, some day, when it doesn’t make me burst into tears, that a huge part of my strength comes from having her and her brother around, that if they hadn’t been here this year, if they’d been off at college or even if they’d been around but not supportive (which believe it or not, they have been), then I don’t know where I’d be right now…maybe still in bed and under the covers. Maybe worse. Sigh.

I graded a little, but I didn’t let it take over my day. Then I traced some more…

Honestly, this seems to be taking forever and I don’t know why. Complicated pieces? Tired brain? Hard to say. Lots of little skeleton pieces…hey, I must be tracing dirt again! Dirt, then water. Skeletons, then bodies. Then birds, always the birds…and cats. Actually, I think this one has a dog instead of a cat. I don’t remember drawing a cat. The drawing is so big and took so long to do that I don’t remember, and when I’m tracing it, it’s upside down on the light table, so I can’t see all of it. I literally only see the little section that I’m tracing.

Kinda how I’m living life at the moment…just the little section I can handle each day. The night before I usually think about the little section I will handle the following day, but I try not to think further ahead than that unless I have to. It’s too hard. It feels too empty.

Brain. You really need to rewire yourself. Being smart and reflective and all inside-looking and crap? It ain’t helping you at the moment. Look out. See the whole drawing, not just the piece you’re on.

Nope. That’s what gets me in trouble right now. Trying to see the whole picture. I zoom out, the brain freaks out, and I zoom back in, quickly erasing whatever set it off. I don’t know whether that’s the healthiest thing to do or not…it’s just what I’m doing to survive right now.

Diverging from the Fairy Tales

I’m finding that certain parts of my artmaking process are more meditative, more peaceful-making than others. I’m not sure why, but I think it has to do with how much brain power the task takes up…the more, the better. Drawing, tracing Wonder Under, and choosing fabrics use up big chunks of brain real estate, so they work really well to dispel wandering depressive thoughts. Cutting pieces out? Not so much. I’ve spent my artmaking time all week cutting pieces out, and it hasn’t really helped much…a little, but not much. Tonight, though, I started tracing the big drawing on Wonder Under, and there it was…a peaceful (semi-, as much as it ever is) brain. Sigh. Wow. It’s such a better place…because before that, not so much peace.

I did OK this morning and into the middle of the afternoon with an awesome yet physically challenging hike (more on that in another post), but my blood sugar was being cranky today…it was too high after hiking, for no apparent reason, and in trying to control it, I don’t know what happened, but it crashed worse than it has even in the last month or so…and it’s a real mood changer. I know the symptoms, but I often get the symptoms when my blood sugar is normal, so coming back from the grocery store, I was fairly sure it had dropped again…and yes, I had eaten…and yes, it was bloody low by the time I got home, like bad. Not call 911 bad, but certainly minor-freak-out bad.

Dammit. It freaked me out (it always does, especially when I’m on my own, even knowing there’s help a phone call away). I drank my milk and finished unloading groceries (because that’s what you do when your blood sugar is crashing, right? No. That’s what you do when you’re trying to keep your mind off the crash…and no, it’s not really effective because you still feel like shit). And after 15 minutes, it was OK again. But I have no freakin’ idea what is regulating it right now. It’s all over the freakin’ map. It makes no logical sense if you look at what and when I eat and when I exercise. My doctor’s running some tests in a week and a half, and we can look at meds, but her initial answer was to make sure my diet was appropriate, which was more than a little annoying, because I haven’t changed a damn thing about my diet, and the blood sugar is totally off. Now that I’m totally watching everything and counting everything and keeping track multiple times a day, it’s even worse. And it’s inconsistent about it too. So that’s something out of whack.

So it’s probably a good thing I traced some stuff…

I actually didn’t get very far, because these pieces were really complicated to trace, lots of funny complicated shapes. But at least I got a start on it. I was supposed to grade papers today, and I napped instead. And read my book. And meditated.

I cannot bring myself to care about the grading.

My car, she is old. She is 12 years old this year…and she rolled into 190,000+ miles without my noticing at first.

Sigh. And the check engine light went off, but I think that’s because the bulb died. I don’t know how much longer she will keep driving. Problem.

I took this picture at our school assembly on Friday…

We had these BMX bike guys come out and do stunts…

One of the better assemblies we have had…only a little proselytizing about no drugs and staying in school.

It’s not that I disagree with those things for my students; it’s just that I don’t think it works to get them to repeat it back during an assembly like this. They don’t hear it. It doesn’t sink in. But the bike-riders were cool.

I finished reading Wally Lamb’s We Are Water…

I love his writing, and this book was no exception. The only issue was that the story was fairly predictable. I knew where it was going, I just didn’t know how he would get there, and it’s in how he writes and reveals the details that his stories are so great to read. The book is about a woman whose life is full of some fairly dank and nasty secrets, and how they affect her family over time. She also happens to be an artist, which might have made it more interesting to me as well. I wonder how my being an artist has affected the kids and the rest of my life. Is it part of the problem? Who knows. It’s told through multiple perspectives, which mesh very well. It’s interesting that they are only family perspectives…one woman marrying into the family shows up in everyone’s story but has no story of her own.

We have a week of school left until Spring Break. It’s possible I might have to take the boychild to New York to look at a college…or not. Hard to say. Girlchild is still recovering well; in fact, she’s at a camp this weekend for Key Club. So I think she’s doing fine…which is a relief after last week at this time. It’s amazing how fast the young bounce back.

Maybe that is the core problem with my depression…my brain doesn’t have the resilience it used to have. I hate to think of the brain slowing down like the body obviously has…on the one hand, I’m hiking all over and doing crazy things like boulder scrambling and rope climbing, but I also feel it the next day (and the next day), and it’s clear to me when my body is done, is tired. It doesn’t bounce back quickly. But I don’t know about my brain…it is just as creative as ever, if not more so, but it will not drop this depression…it will not move past it and get on with it, even though intellectually I’ve gone through it all and I realize what the deal is, but I just can’t get on. The core part of feeling is so mired in this bad place where I’m not worth anything and I can’t be happy…and that part feels so horrible that I get lost in it. It’s like those swampy horrible monster-filled places in the stories we read, where the heroine has to tromp through to the other side, usually to a dark and nasty castle where something important is hidden or being kept, and the heroine has to rescue it and get it out, away from whatever evil ruler or magic being that is in the castle, and of course, they always succeed, right? Except I’m still in the swamp and I’m lost. So I guess that’s where my story diverges from the fairy tales.

I’m not the princess, not worth saving. I’m not even the scruffy servant who has some secret magical power. Or I’m not a good enough heroine, or whatever’s in the castle isn’t motivating enough? Or I didn’t bring my sidekick or my group of intensely supportive friends or my weapon of magic or whatever. Do fairy tales only work on the young? Hard to say. At least I have over 1600 pieces of Wonder Under to trace in the next few weeks to try to keep that old brain occupied. Maybe it will figure out it’s own fairy-tale ending in that time period.

Corte Madera Mountain

Saturday I hiked Corte Madera Mountain, otherwise known as San Diego’s Half Dome…when we started in the morning, it was foggy, cold, and damp. Here we are at the trailhead (thanks to Keith and Maritie for their group photos)…

The trail starts out on a nice, oak-shaded, fairly wide road. You do need an Adventure Pass to park out on the road for this hike.

From there, the trail opens up into a bushy valley. To the west, we could have seen Los Pinos (if it wasn’t foggy)…we originally had a plan to climb that as well…

The wildflowers were blooming…

The deer (and some other pawed animal) had been on the trail before us…

The sky looked a bit gloomy, but it didn’t rain. This part of the trail, which really looks like a creek bed, was fairly easy to walk…a few small climbs, but not hard…until the last little bit up to the other road (I’m sure it has a name; haven’t got a clue what it is…wait, there’s this thing called the INTERNET…Ah…it’s Los Pinos Road, and yes, it’s actually a road.), which is on the saddle between Corte Madera and Los Pinos. This part was a bit steep at times.

Here we are on the saddle with Corte Madera hidden in the clouds.

There’s a sign there that marks out all the trails, some more officially than others.

This is about the only wildflower picture I took on purpose…

Here we are with Corte Madera in the distance…despite the fog, it’s starting to warm up (or we are starting to warm up because of the hiking)…

From the saddle, we took the road towards Corte Madera…apparently cars/off-road vehicles do drive this, but we didn’t see any of them.

From that road, here’s the path up to Los Pinos (which you can’t actually see, because it’s in a cloud). We did not do that hike, by the way…by the time we got back to the saddle, lots of time (and energy) had passed and there was a unanimous vote NOT to deal with this peak on this trip.

There is then a small, unmarked trail that has this raptor sign at the head…this is the one that goes up to Corte Madera. This time of year, the birds are mating and laying eggs, so there are rules about where to hike and not hike, although it was fairly difficult once we were up there to figure out where that actually was…more about that later…

At this point, the trail got narrow and sometimes climby…

The views were gorgeous though…

Lots of boulders and pine trees and tromping through manzanita that was waist- to shoulder-high. It was still cloudy/foggy at this point.

These two rocks had space between them…I have a later view of them from below.

Many of the rocks were colorful.

As was the manzanita…

Beautiful vistas stretching for miles…

You can see a raptor flying in the blue sky that is now peeking through the clouds…

We stopped around here for a snack break…with a view of Corte Madera in the background.

More raptors…I think this was a turkey vulture, actually.

I took a panorama shot here of the group eating and resting…

This is one of the hills on top of the long stretch towards Corte Madera…

The top was fairly flat, a narrow trail, but you could see forever on both sides…

This is looking back at the group coming down the trail on the other side…this was the only bit where we had to climb on the top at all.

This is to the north…toward Cuyamaca…

I think this is where I took the next panorama shot…

There were lots of stacked-rock cairns marking the trail.

Can you see the face in this rock?

Nose, eye, big chin?

This is at the top of Corte Madera, where the can is. We weren’t sure, due to conflicting maps, whether this was where we shouldn’t be, in order to protect the birds nesting, but we did a silent hike for this whole section, no noise, no talking, just in case. This is the view to the northwest…you can see all the clouds are finally clearing out.

I think this is more to the west, but I’m not positive!

We all sat and admired the view, and took lots of photos. It was very peaceful being up there, even with so many people, because we were all still silent.

There’s something to be said for hiking like that sometimes. This was taken up at the top…

This is Cuyamaca Peak in the distance (hiked it in November)…

And the group shot at the top, looking north…

On the way back, we were waiting for the other group to catch up with us…this is the valley between the two sorta peaks up there. The bushes are about waist high.

These are the two trees we had used as markers to remind us to take another trail down, instead of returning the way we came. So here, instead of going back south, we headed off to the northeast, through bushes that were often head height and very close together…

There’s a view of the Corte Madera valley and pond to the east…

The bushes are closing in! One person found a tick on their body. Many people ended up scratched from this section. We put on long sleeves and long pants for a reason…

On the far end of the long ridge, there were some rocks with iron inclusions…very pretty…

It turned out it was one of the leader’s birthdays next week, so we all brought potluck snacks for lunch and surprised him. Someone brought party favors for a goofy picture at the top. There was even cake (sort of) and candles (that kept blowing out). It was a nice birthday surprise…

Then we set off, way too full, down the back side of the mountain…there’s that pond again.

The path was difficult at times, but also there was a lot of wandering through areas like this, and one oak-covered area that was quite nice and shady.

Here’s those two rocks from below…

Lots of boulders and a wide trail at this point…

And a water barrel…that had holes in it and a bathtub at the front.

Yup. How often can you get in a bathtub with 11 other people? Not often enough apparently…

At this point, we were pretty tired…and then we realized something…we were on the wrong side of this fence…

Yeah. This one.

For the record, we never saw such a sign on the other side of our trail, and we didn’t see any patrols, but we did have to crawl through barbed wire to get out. So maybe that wasn’t the best choice for coming down the mountain.

So this is us curving back around the eastern side of the Corte Madera area, heading back to the saddle between Corte Madera and Los Pinos…because that’s Los Pinos (not in the fog now) in the distance…

And back at the saddle, there’s Corte Madera in the bright sunshine…

And we looked back at everything we’d spent all morning climbing over…

Then went back down into the creek bed, with Los Pinos rising over us to the west…

Back through the shady oaks towards the cars…

This was a gorgeous hike, not super strenuous, didn’t need poles (though many had them). The various GPS devices said this was 8.6 miles (which includes our backwards descent into somewhere we shouldn’t have been) with about 4.5 hours of hiking time (that doesn’t count all our stops for photos and food). It took us longer than we thought it would, but I think that was the fault of the potluck more than anything else, plus a meandering trail at the end that we had never hiked before. What’s interesting is that I think I hiked this back in 2003 when I was hiking regularly…but it was about 90 degrees that day and I got mild heat stroke. Today was wonderful…started out chilly and got a little warm in the end, but the transition from foggy and cloudy to bright-blue sunny skies was definitely a plus.

You can drive up the road to where the raptor sign was and shorten your hike, which might make it very doable for families, although there’s still some scrambling and some issues with the raptor nesting dates, but otherwise, a drop-dead beautiful trail. You can access the trail off of Buckman Springs (off Interstate 8). This website gives fairly clear directions (I obviously don’t write posts to get people TO the hikes…that’s what the internet is for). He also has a bunch of other San Diego hikes at different levels of difficulty with lots of great photography.

Trying to Find Normal

Being home from hospital and going back to work doesn’t equal normal. Work was a little crazy…apparently my guest teacher was ALSO a little crazy. I got desperate hugs from my students. I guess they missed me.

The good news is that, although girlchild doesn’t think she’s getting better (it still hurts a lot), I could see improvement just in the 20-odd hours she was with her dad. She can walk a lot further and she’s a lot more alert. So those are good things. She chose to come to my house (and walk up the stairs!) last night, and she ate a real amount of food for the first time since Monday night. Her med schedule is still fun for ALL of us. I got up at 12:30, 2:30, and 4:30 to medicate her, and then I was up at 5:30 because I’m some sort of crazy and I’m going on a hike today. I NEED to go on a hike today. So I am. So no post last night…too tired. Managed to cook dinner, exercise, meditate. Stared at artmaking supplies. Accomplished nothing. I don’t need to accomplish anything right now. It’s OK. Soon, but not right now.

Boychild is relieved that he got into one of his backup schools. There’s so much negative crap about smart white boys not getting into good schools that I think he was worried (I know I was). So we have started the acceptance/rejection round as of last night (one of each)…in another 10 days, we might know where he’ll spend the next 4 years, but as he said last night, now that he has ONE acceptance under his belt, “I can go to college!” Yay. I think he thought he would be stuck here forever. No worries kid.

More later, assuming I survive.

In Which I…

I’ve read a bunch of books lately with chapter titles that all start with “In Which I…”, as if someone asked what you had been doing and why, and you tried to come up with an explanation for your behavior of the last two days, 15 minutes, 43 years of your life. It made me start to classify the parts of my day, my life, into things I could explain with a phrase starting with “In Which I…”. It’s an interesting exercise…maybe silly also. It’s OK to be silly occasionally, as I remembered during the 2+ hours I was in the car with the girlchild yesterday, and the 2 hours I was with myself in the car today, because everyone else fit in the carpool car but me. Sigh. Because I didn’t yell loud enough fast enough. It’s OK. That’s who I am. The loner. The chick who drives by herself. I can be that person. “In Which I Carpool with Myself…” (cue Billy Idol…)

Oh yes. That was worth it. “In Which I Learn to Sneer like Billy…”.

Anyway, the hike will be posted later, when I can rip off the group photos that someone else took, because I never take those. Strangely, although I made sure to charge my battery the night before, it looked uncharged when I started taking pictures on the hike and died about halfway through. I had the phone with me, though, and took OK photos with that. Me and my birthday money are looking for a new camera, although the one that was recommended to me is way out of my price range. I’ll figure it out, though. Gotta go read some websites. “In Which Kathy Buys Yet Another Camera…”. Seriously. I’m deadly to cameras. They just don’t last.

I managed to keep the blood sugar under control today, unlike yesterday. Ironic in that I could do that while burning a million calories on a long and strenuous hike, but couldn’t manage it while sitting on a soccer field watching the girlchild play. Stupid that. Oh well. I emailed the doctor finally. I had talked myself in and out of sending the email about 10 times, and finally did it so that if more tests were needed, they could be done at the same time as the others that I have to do, and I won’t have to go in for the bloody poke more than once. Hopefully.

Most of the rest of the day was the Have-To’s…”In Which Kathy Does the Shopping…”. Not exciting. Annoying really. I graded a bunch of stuff. I got ready for having three days off of school, the longest I’ve ever been gone in a row. I tried to get the girlchild to calm down enough to go to sleep. She won’t admit to being worried about surgery. I’m worried, not because I think something will go wrong, but because I just worry. I wish I didn’t. “In Which Kathy Worries about Worrying…”.

Then after all that stuff was done and I had meditated, I decided to try to finish cutting and taping the newest drawing, just because I know I have to copy one piece again, so I wanted to see if anything else didn’t match up…

It didn’t. Sigh. Oh well. I’ll do it tomorrow afternoon. I want to get the Wonder Under traced and cut out before Spring Break, so I can iron all the fabrics down in a concentrated chunk of time.

Then I came into the studio to try to deal with that damn bird, get it ironed down. Apparently I hadn’t ironed the lips or the eyeball either. It didn’t take long for me to be done…here’s everything ready to be cut out for the Mammogram quilt…

I should start doing that this week. So that means I finished ironing all the fabrics for that quilt. Someone said something to me about artists being free spirits. Well, yes, but then there’s that other part of my brain that likes to record and document and catalog everything. The part that keeps track of how much time I spend and how many fabrics I use…that’s a bit more of the OCD or at least the controlling logical part. “In Which Kathy Uses Both Sides of Her Brain…”. I won’t say I’m using ALL my brain, because obviously that’s not true.

Only 44 fabrics were used…

Mar 16 14 020 small

And it took 6 hours and 18 minutes to pick them all…that’s kind of long for me. I usually can do about 100 an hour. I think it’s because I did it in small chunks. It takes longer to get my brain into the right place to pick stuff on weekdays too. “In Which Kathy Tries to Make Art and Be a Responsible Teacher…”. Yeah. And add “Mom” into that as well. Consider “Homeowner” (no yardwork done at all this weekend, despite oath taken to self LAST weekend. Yes, I am that lame.).

OK, I need to do that sleep thing again. Make art? Don’t sleep. Don’t sleep? Get depressed. Don’t make art? Sleep. Get depressed because not making art. Damn vicious cycles. “In Which Kathy Does Her Best to Make Herself Insane…”.

The Rabbit Hole of Grief

I posted yet another picture today of my feet on a soccer field…where they often reside. I was grading papers. It’s girlchild’s last tournament before her back surgery, so some thoughts were going through my head. I noticed an old friend had commented on my Instagram account that I should hashtag my feet photos as #kathynidasfeet, since I keep taking these photos…and I was curious if I really HAD taken all that many Instagram photos of my feet…so I went searching through my account…which was a path into the rabbit hole of grief.

It seems that I will never escape this mess, as photos are everywhere that remind me of things that make me inexorably sad, so sad I fall deeper into a hole. I feel like I’ve got a grip on the edge of it at the moment, scrabbling at the muddy and slippery edge, ripping off fingernails as I try to hold on, gripping the sides of the wall with my knees, trying not to fall back down, to roll back into the gunk that fills the bottom edges of my brain. I hear the grief, like black dogs, vicious ones, Dobermans, not kind black labs…scratching at the sides of the hole, leaping up so close to clamp their jaws on the air by my calves that I can feel the rush of hot dog breath on my legs, smell their rotten dog food air. I’m trying to get out. I am.

So seeing photos of a former life, dead dogs, people who might as well be dead, a whole dead life that no longer exists and never will, a life I never asked to be removed from, never expected to lose…it’s difficult. It pushes me down, holds a pillow over my face, tries to suffocate me.

I can’t say that I’m all that successful at fighting it. My counselor says that I have a life. That I have a hold on things. That I have it under control. That I can control my stress reactions. And sometimes I can. Sometimes I take a deep meditative breath and I move on, I push the bad away, I breathe through the scary and come out the other side calm, ready, poised. Well, as poised as I ever am. Yeah. That’s not so much poised as Girl Scout readiness for disaster.

But it still doesn’t feel OK. Very little does. Last night, for an hour, a conversation with the boychild about poetry and literature, authors and types of poems (I have been categorized by my preferences, and I’m OK with that). At the end, he borrows a huge pile of my poetry books, including one volume of lesbian poetry that gets me a funny look. Then again, he’s used to my feminist rants, and this doesn’t fall far from that. I’ve told him that being a woman is different from being a man. We even talk about his childhood, what he remembers. I’m tired, lying on the couch in the dark post-exercise, deciding about sleep. I’ve been tired all week. I have stuff I need to do. Stuff I want to do. But this is more important. He will remember this feeling, if not this particular conversation. It will be part of what he remembers about his mom…much better than remembering her crying for the last 8 months. That can’t be a good memory. Will he describe me as the artist? The crazy sarcastic creature who draws all night? Or as a depressoid? I’m hoping that is just one short chapter (it doesn’t feel short at the moment) of a longer, fuller life. I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter…but as we get to the end of his being the kid at home, with college notifications happening in just two short weeks…I spend a lot of time wondering what my life will be like without these two around all the time. It was so hard when I divorced to lose them at all…it was the worst part of the divorce. I had been their primary caregiver every day for a very long time, and all of a sudden, they would go off with their dad and have a life without me and I would be alone. There’s a lot of that now. There will be more in my future.

A lot of this angst is trying to look into my own future and feel hope or excitement or a chance at happy. I can’t get there. I can deal with one day, sometimes a week. That’s it. Hiking really is only a delaying tactic, a way to psych my brain out from looking at the future. I can’t think about all that crap on a hike…I can just think about the step ahead of me. It’s an immense escape. I guess it’s a healthy one, but who knows.

I keep getting lost in the rabbit hole. I keep getting stuck in some room. I draw those rabbit holes, you know. They’re in my quilts. I just realized it. Are they hiding places? Or are they traps of some sort? Are they somewhere to go when you can’t handle anything? Somewhere to hide what you want no one to find? Or do I fall into them and find myself unable to back my ass out?

No telling.

I was in Temecula all day at the girlchild’s tournament. I have photos, but don’t feel like dealing with them now. Then I came home and got ready for tomorrow’s hike, and went to FedEx to copy that 3-page drawing…I seem to spend many a Saturday night with the other losers in FedEx copying stuff. Tonight it was an older couple copying receipts…he was wearing suspenders and glaring at me (and my naked drawings) from under thick gray caterpillars of eyebrows.

I came home and exercised and meditated (cried through the whole damn thing)…and then started to tape the thing together…

There are two pages that just aren’t fitting together right…I think it’s because I didn’t push the sketchbook down hard on the copier. That seems to help everything line up better. So I’m probably going to have to go back and copy those two pages, or at least one of them.

I got about 2/3 of it put together before I realized I was tired and I have to get up early for a hike tomorrow.

I’ll finish the rest later. It’s not crucial. Nothing is. It’s going to be about 35″ wide x 80″ high. I enlarged it only 200% because otherwise it would be really massive. It’s already big. And complicated.

I have almost dropped out of tomorrow’s hike about 10 times. I’m worried about my blood sugar, so I decided to be much better about packing a variety of food, including sugar, just in case. I had another low blood sugar incident today. I’m trying to figure out what’s causing them so I can prevent them. I didn’t have an issue last weekend on the hike, so I will think positively about tomorrow. Plus it’s a hike I really want to experience…mostly for the location.

As for that damn rabbit hole…there weren’t a lot of foot pictures on Instagram, so I guess now I know she reads my blog probably…that’s where all the foot pictures are. It’s silly that my trying to assess the number of foot pictures caused me to fall backwards, to slip downwards. What a stupid trigger. In reality, I was already slipping, been slipping all week. I’ve been quiet on here, inwardly processing some level of worry and panic about balancing school and the girlchild’s surgery and subsequent needs. Being the mom means you have to hold it together and I seem to suck at that lately. Or do I? I don’t even know. I do often feel like it would just take one more thing, one more task that needed completion, one more responsibility loaded onto my shoulders, and it would all come tumbling down.

Except that’s just life. Life says, “Do this.” “Deal with that.” And you do. And then you move on. I’m trying to really adopt that attitude. Counselor says I have to. To survive. The blood sugar thing? It’s not the universe trying to take me down. It’s just a combination of medications being off and probably menopause creeping in and doing its thing. I can do my left-brain control thing and collect data and control it the best I can with that information, and prepare for its vagaries when it’s uncontrollable. Trying to plan for school over the next few weeks with the surgery and not knowing when I’ll be back at school and with testing starting? Fuck it. Does it really matter? I can wing it this week. I will deal with next week when I have to. The world will not end if we don’t finish DNA before Spring Break. Seriously. It doesn’t all have to make sense. I can give them a packet and it won’t even matter.

So yeah. I’m trying. I’m trying to let things go. I’m trying to let the crying happen when it needs to, because obviously it needs to. I’m trying to put the art front and center and not worry about the rejections, because they don’t really matter. I’m trying to stay out of that damn hole.

Hiking the Jamul Mountain Range

Last Saturday, I hiked with a group through the Jamul mountain range (a very small mountain range) on the hunt for wildflowers. It had only rained the week before, so we didn’t see many flowers, plus Southern California wildflowers are on the tiny side…but we did have a great excursion. We started on Otay Lakes Road…

Mar 9 14 001 small

One of the hikers had a GPS device that mapped the trip: 8.5 miles in about 5 hours with a ton of ups and downs and about a 1600′ elevation gain. The blue line is the elevations during the trip. The orange is his speed. The red is that actual trail we took. Cool technology…I’m totally jealous.

This photo was taken about 10 minutes into the hike, so we’re all well-rested and possibly a little goofy (additional photos are courtesy of Ken T. and Maritie, the group leader).

Where the hike begins is a graffiti-covered dam in the distance with the rocks by the side of the road.

Here’s the dam from a bit of a distance…

And right above it…

I thought the blocky quality of the graffiti painted over old graffiti was interesting…

And there’s Otay Lake (aka Lower Otay Reservoir) in the distance…

To the north was San Miguel…

Notice how everyone has poles? Yeah. I forgot mine.

The majority of the first part of the hike, I was OK without poles…the second half? Not so much.

The day was warm in the end…this is looking towards the first summit of the Jamul range.

This is looking towards downtown San Diego over Chula Vista in the front…you can see we’re starting to climb.

A closeup of downtown…

We were pretty spread out for most of the trip…you can see someone way up at the top. The ups were challenging…the trail was fairly steep in places and had lots of rocks.

The Marines and a bunch of rock-pilers had been at the top of the first summit. I suspect this is where many people turn around and go back…

In fact, the only people we saw the entire time outside of our group passed us on the way up to here and went on to the second summit, and then came back past us. Here’s the trail up toward the second summit.

Yes, we live in a desert. In fact, there were very few trees on this trip, although some shrubs could pass for a tree if you were feeling really warm.

You can see for miles up there…this is facing east, trying to figure out what each of the peaks are…

In fact, the little hill in the middle, between the two in the foreground, is probably McGinty Mountain from the previous weekend.

A few of the yucca were blooming…I think that’s El Capitan in the background…

Beautiful flowers…

At this point, we started to work down a rocky trail on the eastern side of the range…

The back side had a lot more rocks, but there was greenery to be seen. In fact, this is where I saw most of the wildflowers.

And sometimes my shitty old camera behaved enough to let me take pictures of them. This is the flower of buckwheat…

I was lucky to have Ken T. also taking pictures (with obviously a MUCH better camera than I have), and he was nice enough to let me borrow some for the blog, so here was his buckwheat…

His blue-eyed grass…

His black sage…

His deerweed…

(I told you his camera was better…I have all of these, but they’re blurry) His Dichelostemma capitatum (aka blue dicks)…

Way too pretty a flower for either of those names…there were apparently only two trees on the entire trail (not quite, but close enough)…and this was one of them. You’re almost required to stop under the tree on a hot sunny day on a hike with few trees, so we did.

You can see green on the hills from the recent rains, off to the east…

And there are more trees down in that valley, but you’d have to bushwhack to get to them…

This was the view to the east off the back part of the range, quite beautiful…

Way down in the depth of that valley below, though, there was this structure…and we all had to try to guess what it was, why it was there…

We had lunch at this high point overlooking the reservoir, with Otay Mountain to the left…it was hot, but not horribly so.

Another group photo after lunch…we are looking a little less energetic…but still ready for whatever the trail might show us…

And the panoramas…this one from Ken’s camera…

And my phone, which is a little harder to control…

But still gives you an idea of what Southern California looked like before we built all those houses…

I was reading about all the trails in this area, and it used to be open to these off-road vehicles until they decided there was some sensitive habitat there and closed it, so there are all these “roads” that aren’t super wide and are definitely not maintained well (which is fine)…so the plus is you’re not walking on a single-track trail, but there were lots of rocks and rough ground.

We saw lots of these caterpillars, apparently for the Salt Marsh Moth…

They were often walking faster than we were, scurrying along the path. I’m not sure where they were going in such a hurry…

This is the red monkey flower…

We also saw people parachuting from airplanes and landing on an airstrip to the south…

At this point, the trail looked nice…flat but some green, looking south towards Mexico over that mountain…

And then started the “sorta crazy” part of the trip (I think that’s how the leader described this section)…downhill at a significant angle. This is where poles were, quite honestly, as someone who didn’t have them, necessary…

I’m not really sure how I managed this downhill portion without faceplanting about 17 times, but I did. And I felt it for the next three days…you can see the airstrip where the parachuters were landing in the middle of the photo.

You can see everyone coming down the slope, which luckily had enough rocks that were planted in the ground to give me some traction going down.

More parachuting…fascinating. It was on many people’s bucket lists to do this sometime in the future (including mine)…

Some landed crazy, some landed calmly…I’m sure I would be doing the former…

I didn’t take a lot of pictures coming down that hill…I was trying too hard to keep from falling (went down on my butt once)…it was hard work.

After that, we had a choice of a very flat trail with part of it on the road or a trail with, as the leader described it, “ups and downs.” We chose the latter, thinking that after coming down that hill, how bad could it be? Well, it was a challenge, because it was about 5 significant climbs, plus more crazy downhills (not THAT crazy, but still…poles would have helped), and by this time, it was warm…low 80s. And we were tired. It doesn’t look too bad in this photo…

Now we are on the western end of the range, and the plants have changed again…

That’s more of what the up and down looked like…neverending…

You’d get to the top of one thinking you were in the clear, that you were almost there, and then you’d see the next one..

It doesn’t look too bad until you see the people climbing and realize how steep it is. Again.

Luckily, everyone was a good sport and realized that a trail is a trail…it can be easy, medium, or difficult, but it’s still being outside in the fresh air, and a challenge is never a bad thing out here…we all had plenty of water and were able to keep moving…

Ken’s shot of where we had come (I’m hiding behind the woman in pink) just to give you a better idea of the slope…

All in all, close to 9 miles, a hot day, lots of ups and downs, but there were flowers and wildlife…we saw mule deer and coyotes and California horned toads (I almost stepped on one…too fast for a photo), plus the caterpillars and the hawks and the parachuting folks…it was definitely worth the time and effort to hang out with a group with a remarkably good attitude about a difficult but not impossible trail. Will I do it again in two weeks to see more wildflowers (because it had just rained)? Um. Well. Probably not? But I’d consider it again next year around this time…we decided that some trails are like childbirth…you have to wait a while before it sounds like a sane thing to do again. It was good, though. Definitely worth the walk.

Mood Management

Managing my moods is becoming a full-time job. There’s food, there’s situations, there’s stress, there’s exercise. I’m now carrying my blood sugar tester thingie (it needs a name, like Ralph…or Daisy) with me everywhere I go. My meds get tested again in another three weeks…I’m suspecting my diabetes meds are off. I’ll email the doc before testing so she knows what to look for. I’m a little paranoid about hiking this weekend…in fact, I’m not sure I will do this hike, because it’s supposed to be really warm, but I really WANT to do it. So. I can pack carbs and sugar and…dammit…sigh. It’s not like I didn’t hike last weekend with no blood sugar problems. In fact, I’ve hiked ALL the weekends with no problems. I’m just paranoid now. The last thing I want is to be in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of people I barely know and have a major problem like last night. That would be bad. I remember one hike post-divorce with two guys I knew fairly well and my blood sugar dropped (it was also hot), and they dealt remarkably well, but I had all the right stuff in my pack and was coherent enough to tell them what was going on. And I’d warned them beforehand. It really has been a long time since I’ve had issues.

The moods are tied to blood sugar, but also to hormones and then the emotional sine wave that I seem to live on…I had the wave graphed earlier today (in my head, of course), with a listing of what made it zoom up and down and hold steady at numbness. Trying to control the seemingly uncontrollable (blood sugar and mood swings) tosses the curve downwards. Yet another art rejection (too many of those lately) sends it downwards even further. Analyzing my own life? Hell, should just stay away from that most days. It’s down down down, all the way down. Girlchild tells me I am in a bad/sad mood on the days I have detention. She’s right. I should just give up. Is detention creating world peace? No the fuck it’s not. Then why do it?

But I didn’t give up. I got my hairs cut. They needed it. They are getting fussy in their old age. And then I made it to the gym and that was good. I read. I cooked and ate dinner. I forgot to do a bunch of stuff (sigh. I always forget a bunch of stuff…I am the Queen of Winging It). But then I was ready.

So I drew.

And I can’t even describe the peace in my head, my heart, that drawing gives me. It’s like a wave of calm washing over. It’s therapeutic. It’s stupid that I don’t do it more often (I run out of time, no more hours in the day). I haven’t meditated in a few days (more time/energy issues). I completely forgot tonight, but it’s OK, because I drew. And that is Kathy Meditation. It was so worth it. So the bottom is mostly done. I think. And the middle section is done. So now I need to go back to the top, to the first page, the one I started in December…and I need to finish it. I don’t know if this is next in line to get done. I haven’t decided. Maybe. It could be. It’s kind of a crazy beast. The ones I love don’t get into shows. At the moment, nothing gets into shows. Artistic angst. Why am I making all this art if it never gets out to be seen? You make the art because you have to. It keeps you sane. The getting out and being seen? That’s the least of your worries. Just keep making it.

You’re so lucky. You get to hear all the conversations I have in my head.

Meanwhile, I remembered that I hadn’t finished ironing the Mammogram fabrics, so I headed into the office/studio/national disaster area and pulled everything out, reminded myself of what I was doing whenever I last worked on it (March 7), and started picking blood vessels and heart parts…

so often a part of my quilts, the heart. My heart, the one that’s destroyed, eh? So yeah. This drawing was done before all that. Broken hearts. Shattered. Cracked. This one is still whole. I wonder what that feels like. Maybe some day I will know.

I keep thinking I will be better. I am better. But I’m not BETTER. If you know what I mean. I’m someone else. That someone may never be truly better. She may just be OK. My hair person asked (sort of) if I was done with love, like how some (old) people say they have experienced great love and they feel OK with that after their great love dies and they don’t need to go through it again. But I don’t want to be alone for another 30 years. I still don’t feel like I’ve done it right…that sounds awful. But it’s not right if they can’t stick around, if they can’t make it through the hard stuff, if they can’t be supportive, if they can’t stand next to you as an equal. So no. I’m not done. I haven’t given up, but I don’t have a lot of hope. I’m not OK with any of it. I think I need a dog. Dogs are nice. Except then they die of cancer at age 6, and it takes you two years to get over that too. Maybe I just need to sit alone in my house for a long while. Quietly. In a corner. A dust-free corner. Then everything will start to make sense again. Or not. Because maybe there is no sense to be made.

I still cry every day. In case you were wondering. I don’t know when that stops. Maybe never. I was never a crier like this. This is hard. I would cry when really bad shit happened. I cried at sad bits in movies. I cried when I saw babies born (usually in movies or on TV…when I teach human reproduction, I cry every time the baby is born on the movie I show my students). I cried during PMS if something was really funky in my head or in real life. It wasn’t a daily occurrence. It was rare.

Now? Not so much in the rareness. I’m always on the verge. So if you’re wondering when you’re talking to me if you hear tears in the background, you do.

I ironed a lot…

And I was pretty sure I was done…until I started to fold up all the fabric…

And realized I hadn’t ironed the bird. That damn fucking bird.

I didn’t have the energy to do the bird. I couldn’t even imagine the bird, let alone decide on her colors (orange. black. maybe some turquoise.), so she will have to be done tomorrow. Thirteen whole pieces. I know. I should have just done it. But sometimes the brain just rebels and yells NO NO NO over and over again and you don’t really want to push it too hard, because it is your brain and it kinda controls all the important stuff, and you kinda need it to keep doing that. So maybe tomorrow.

Now that’s two quilts I have that are ready to be cut out (or nearly there). Maybe my goal for Spring Break will be to trace this one I’ve been drawing and then draw the one I need to have done by November, with the assumption that I will work on it over the summer.

Or not. I do know that the mood is better. Drawing AND ironing: the cure for a fucked-up mind. I don’t know what the permanent cure is. Maybe there isn’t one.

Ignore ALL the Voices…

So the good news is that I didn’t eat a donut today and that I finished all my Trimester 2 grades before the weekend started and the whole house smells like garam masala and the girlchild cooked so I didn’t have to (why I was able to finish grades so early). And I cut out fabric too…

Although I’m still not done. Not sure why this fucking thing is taking so long. It’s only got 300 and something pieces, but I’m 4 1/2 hours in…usually I can do 100 pieces in an hour. I still have most of the 200s to do and a few 300s. Basically, I need to do the heart, the lungs, and the bird…and the eyeball still. Then I think I’m done…

Not sure. It’s really not crucial though. I’m not on deadline. I’m just filling time and space with artmaking so I don’t go totally depressoid insane. I have to get up freakishly early for a hike, and it’s supposed to be hot tomorrow. But I packed my bag already and my water’s even in the fridge getting nice and cold and I have a plan for breakfast so I don’t get the dizzies. So there.

Then I will come home and deal with the post-hike downers and try to figure out how to install these external hard drives and I don’t know what else I will do to hold off the nasty depression beast.

But tomorrow is another day. Actually, tomorrow started 36 minutes ago and I need to be up really early, so there we are. I’m mostly incoherent and wishing I could stay up and iron EVERYTHING down, but mom voice is telling me I need sleep. Trying to listen to the voices…all of them. They clamor for my attention. Sometimes I just ignore all of them.

McGinty Mountain Hike

On Sunday, I hiked to the top of McGinty Mountain in the Jamul, California, area. It’s about 5 miles round trip and is fairly strenuously uphill. It was a day after a rather large rainstorm came through the area, so mud was sticking to our boots making me about an inch taller at times. Sticky mud helps on the uphills, but you slide on the downhills. The hike goes up about 1300 feet to an elevation of 2183′. Here’s a cool link to Derek Loranger’s 100 Peaks website, with video of rain and hail on the trail (hey, that rhymed). He also talks about the excessively sticky mud, but honestly, in San Diego, that probably only happens a few times a year.

Here’s the official government website. There is a regular Hike with a Ranger event on this trail, but amusingly, the government website doesn’t forward to the calendar properly, so I’m not sure how you’d find it.

There’s a nice little dirt parking lot at the trailhead with a view of this, which is NOT McGinty Mountain…

There’s another little hill and path to the left. Honestly, the hardest part about this trail besides the fairly strenuous uphill climb is trying to figure out which is the REAL trail and which are just dead-ends.

It is not marked particularly well…although you’re unlikely to get totally lost, you may wander around a bit if it didn’t just rain so you could totally track your own footprints back. There’s a chimney sticking up on this hill.

Here’s the trailhead itself, complete with warnings, doggie poop bags, and trail map.

Although again…it’s not always easy to tell where you should be going on the actual trail.

There are lots of sweeping views of the valleys on either side, with Rancho San Diego on one side, Jamul on the other.

The trail does track along next to houses on the lower slopes, and you can see more on the hills in the distance.

There is some steep climbing at the beginning and the end.

I think the parking lot is down in those trees in the middle of the picture.

We did see some weather, but it mostly left us alone…this is the view to the north, with Cowles Mountain in the distance (not the first peak in the middle, but the paler one to the right of it.

And a bird…which one of the hikers was able to identify…all I remember is that it’s a Spotted something (because of the wings, of course).

This is the view to the south of Jamul…the mountains on the right is where I’ll be next weekend.

Bailey was our faithful companion on the hike.

There was a mine off the trail on one side…

I’m not entirely sure what they mined (the Internet says gold), but these aren’t very big holes…we saw another one on the side of a rock on part of the hike.

I did not crawl inside. We took our first group picture up here…

It was a small group, due to the weather. And I am apparently short. You can decide which view is best…

Yes. I wore shorts. What can I say? It wasn’t actually super cold…cold enough that I had two shirts on for most of it, but went down to short sleeves for part of it…until the weather wandered back in…we could see rainstorms in the distance (or not-so-far distance). I have official zip-off hiking pants somewhere…I just don’t know where.

The trail consistently moved upwards…although most of the time, it wasn’t so bad that you couldn’t talk and hike (that’s my measure of how bad IS it…can I talk? Not so bad.).

Lots of valley views and vistas with big dark clouds…

It reminds me of what I love about San Diego County…all those mountains so close to home. I would die in Kansas…too flat.

This is looking north at where my house might be if you could see through hills.

On the right is San Miguel, which I’ve hiked previously. The trail was eroded by rain, definitely, but was also pretty rocky. Bailey was a trooper.

I think this is the portion the leader called “Heartbreak Hill”…here’s where talking and breathing had a bit of a conflict…

I was not the only one taking photos…you can see my naked legs up there in shorts…

McGinty6 small

Still easier than San Miguel though…more mountain vistas, off to the east, this time.

And northeast…

I think that’s looking at San Miguel again, but I’m not really sure!

That’s definitely north again.

North…

At the top, we climbed as high as we could (that rock) and took another group photo…

And here was the big money shot…

This was on the way back, I think…easier going down, but had some issues with picking the right trail.

We didn’t have much rain in the end. The hike was just short of 5 miles in about two and a half hours (with a few stops for people to rest and/or catch up, plus playing in mines and on rocks)…I would definitely do this again, although I suspect it’s particularly difficult in the heat of summer. Apparently snakes are a real issue up there too. This is closer to home than Cowles Mountain is and definitely less populated. Strenuous? Yeah…a bit…you need to be in some sort of shape, but if you’re persistent, you could go up it even if you are a slow but steady hiker…and you don’t have to go all the way up. It’s an up and back hike, so you could stop whenever you were tired and come back. The trail does continue past the mountain peak…I didn’t really explore beyond that…maybe on another day.