Hiking in Town

East San Diego is great for hiking close to home, yet seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We’re within 10-20 minutes of some seriously good hiking areas where you will see few people and only traces of civilization. Of course, in summer, these hikes are unbearably warm, unless undertaken in the early morning hours or in the dark (not recommended for most), but at this time of year, even when it’s 80 degrees in wintry December (seriously, that’s been the high temperature the last few days), it’s a nice walk with plenty of water at hand.

On Christmas Eve, the boychild and I took the dogs on a hike in the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge near Jamul. We picked Millar Ranch Road as our start…the road goes out into the foothills…

It wasn’t too hot or cold…which for December is nice. There was still some green on the hills, showing the effects of the little bits of rain we’ve gotten this month.

There was still mud in some areas on the trail. We hiked out the dirt road for about 30 minutes and came back. There were lots of offshoots of the trail, which goes around the back of Mt. Miguel. We saw one coyote in the distance melt into the bushes, and then there was this guy…

Wow. That is some gorgeous winter coat. He watched us for ages, while the dogs panted along, oblivious. He was quite a ways away, which is why the picture is fuzzy…but clearly sitting there and watching us.

Then on the day after Christmas (Boxing Day to the Brits out there), we dragged both dogs and the girlchild with us to Hollenbeck Canyon, which is about 15 minutes away, east of Jamul proper, so a little further out than where we’d been two days prior. Yes, Jake was excited…

We spent about two hours hiking through here, getting lost at one point (yes, we had a map…no, we didn’t get TOO far off of it). There are many crisscrossing trails in this area, and random signs with mileage markers to unknown areas.

It was a gorgeous day, but hot, over 80 degrees. Yes. In December. I think hiking here in summer would be difficult in the heat of the day.

But it was OK…we did leave a little late in the day (I had to visit the vet with a couple of animals).

We brought food and water, although we forgot a bowl for the dogs…a plastic bag that had been destined to carry poop managed to hold water for them though.

There were some “quad-busting slopes” (not my terminology…someone described a couple of climbs that way).

And some beautiful vistas…

We all peed in bushes…OK, the boychild didn’t. There was poison oak that the girlchild tramped through unknowingly…luckily, no one seemed to get a rash. I did wash Calli when I got home, mostly because the vet had told me to anyway, but it seemed like the possibility of her having the poison oak oil on her fur (it won’t bug the dog, but it will bug you if you pet the dog) seemed high, since the girlchild had dragged her through there. I loved her comment…”But LOTS of plants have three leaves…” Um. OK. But this one is pretty damn obvious. I guess my years in the Girl Scouts came in useful, but I did not transmit information well to the girlchild. The boychild seemed to realize it.

We definitely tired the dogs out…five miles.

At some point, the girlchild stopped whining about how tired she was and how hot it was and how downhill sucks and uphill sucks and it all sucks, and she took off without us.

She had headphones on. It might have helped.

All in all, lots of calories burned, nature enjoyed, time with kidlets, dogs exercised, new vistas explored. Not a bad couple of days. I’m looking at going back to Hollenbeck for a geocaching experience…apparently there are multiple caches in the area.

Both of these are within a 20-minute drive of most of East County, San Diego. Bring lots of water, even for the dogs, and always bring food. Oops. That’s the diabetic talking. There is a map at the beginning of the Hollenbeck trail…it was sort of useful…except when we wandered OFF of it. Probably more our issue than theirs. We didn’t see anyone on the Millar Ranch walk until we were almost done. We saw more people at Hollenbeck, although mostly on horses and a few on bikes. That said, they were both technically workdays for most people…weekends may be different.

To Settle My Soul

Christmas Day: The house smells of red velvet cake, then cauliflower soup, and now short ribs. The deviled eggs are made, spiced with fresh pepper and mustard (it’s one of the two things I was allowed to cook). I’m watching The Paradise, a British program set in the 1870s (supposedly an “intoxicating love story”…I’m not sure about either the intoxication or the love, but it’s so far from my reality with the young girls falling in insta-love that it doesn’t hurt to watch it), while trimming fabric for the Celebrating Silver quilt. I’ve cleaned up all the gifting trash and the girlchild is cooking dinner. She’s a freakin’ expert at this point, needing zero help most days, creative in her exploration of food while simultaneously destroying the kitchen. Seriously…it’s now 24 hours later and I still haven’t cleaned it all up.

The day is quiet…

We have parents and dogs and cats, but their dad is missing (yes, he’s usually here), and the girlchild misses him. The boychild may as well, but will not admit to it (yes, he’s covering his face).

Calli is quite happy with her new toy…

And with all attention thrown her way.

I stitch through most of the present-opening. Stitching occupies the part of my brain that likes to wander off into WishLand or Depressoid World. So it’s better to keep it working on something.

Girlchild put on an amazingly presented meal, which of course, I do not have a photo of…or maybe I do on the phone. I don’t know. She even gifted me placemats and napkins for the dinner table, plus borrowed matching plates and bowls from her dad’s house (she preferred his color scheme to mine apparently)…

Impressive. I don’t know where all her cooking/presentation brain power comes from…it must be related to the part of my brain that makes art…the creative bent. But I couldn’t care less about food presentation…it’s just fuel to me…although she makes very good fuel, that’s for sure. I feel exceedingly lucky to have her and her cooking expertise in my life. I am a better cook because of her, and I eat better too (tonight’s open-faced chicken sandwiches with pea pesto were to die for…seriously. I wouldn’t even have made them, because it sounded too weird, but they were damn good).

After dinner, we play a rousing game of SmartAss (you know, like you do). It goes on for a long while; we don’t set an ending time (besides, I won in about 10 minutes on the first round…apparently I was a super SmartAss on Christmas Day…probably to make up for being a Space Cadet the rest of the time). I stitched through most of the game as well. By the end of all the festivities, I’ve managed an hour and 37 minutes of cutting out pieces for the new quilt PLUS I’ve sewed almost everything on the wool birds…

Actually, last night I thought I was done, but I realized this morning that I still have two cotton pieces to sew on…

Whatever. It means I start embellishing at tomorrow’s soccer game. I don’t know if it’s healthy to always be distracting my brain from the bad sad stuff, but I’m getting pretty good at it. It won’t go away all day, though. It always surfaces somewhere: at the gym, in the car, during meditation, when I wake up, in my dreams. There’s no escaping it. It’s just there. I don’t know when it will go away…maybe never.

We usually do a family photo with the kids in front of the tree with whatever animals we have that year. This year, we decided to toss me in there as well, because we have three cats who don’t like each other enough to be held by the same person. Kitten is my cat; she barely tolerates Midnight, the girlchild’s cat, and Babygirl, though she likes me as well, is definitely the boychild’s ward…as much as she is beholden to anyone (she really does channel her previous dead owner’s personality). Calli belongs to the girlchild, and Jake is their dad’s dog, but he was better at sitting still and in place than Calli, so we gave him an honorary spot…

There it is…the official 2013 family portrait. I do have copies of the real-live official family portraits my mom had done a few weeks ago…maybe I’ll post them later. It’s sad that I’m the shortest…by far. Oh well. I never claimed to be tall.

This is my Christmas fabric haul…

Mom says I needed more dirt because I seem to be making quilts with lots of dirt in them. OK. And flesh. I’m always using flesh…although I think some of that flesh fabric might be better as hair. And that black spotty fabric…now I feel a challenge to use it as flesh. Or dirt. Or both. Or not. I did enlarge a bunch of smaller drawings at the copy place on Christmas Eve…I had to go pick up my Sightlines quilt, which has now returned home after almost 4 years of traveling, so I decided to use the copy machines as well, since I was already there and it was on my To-Do list for break. I’ll hopefully be doing some of those in January. I copied WAY TOO MANY drawings, but they’re small. I’m worried about not having anything to do. Crazy, that, really, considering the number of big drawings I have sitting around too…and my To-Do list is staggering for the rest of life too, at the moment. But if it’s 10 PM on a school night and I need some art-related activity to chase away the depression, then I should be prepared. I’m a Girl Scout through and through.

I cut more pieces out today…almost three hours’ worth…

I’m over 14 hours in now…you can see the pile of trash is big. I was hoping to get everything done today, but the bin on the left still has a couple of hours’ worth of pieces to do. So I quit. I’ll hopefully finish tomorrow. Then I can start ironing on Saturday. I got all freaked out about getting done…with everything. I’m going in to school tomorrow to grade stuff too. I can’t let stuff slip, however much my brain is trying to force my hand, make me wallow in shit and not get work done. It needs to grow up and deal. The eye-twitch is gone. That’s good. I’ve been sleeping more…although not well. That’s good. Exercise has obviously been a priority, and that is helping. Spending time with the kids is also good…we’ve watched movies and played games and hiked and shopped (seriously, the boychild stayed shopping with me rather than go home with the girlchild…stranger things have happened!). I appreciate this time with them, because they will be gone soon…off to college and then to their own lives…and I hope they do it better than I did. I haven’t been the best role model for relationships, although I have definitely taught them how to get back up off the ground and survive, despite all the shit. I guess that’s something. I hope they have less shit in their lives…there are people I know who never go through anything really bad…may my kids be in that group.

The title to today’s post come from the PBS show I was watching…”I long for peace…to settle my soul.” Mr. Moray in The Paradise. I actually think Moray is a total ass in this show, but whatever…I’m with him on the sentiment.

Cuyamaca Peak

Sunday was supposed to be a 6 1/2-mile hike…until it mutated into a 10-mile experience…it was totally worth the muscles that are still sore two days later. We started across the street from last week’s hike. The easy way up to Cuyamaca Peak is up the fire road…but that’s always the boring way…so we started out through Azalea Glen on a trail that was apparently probably closed (whoops). Signage was confusing.

For some reason, I don’t have many pictures from the first part of the hike…probably had something to do with the 1700-foot-plus elevation gain. Here’s near the peak…small people, awesome view…

And a closeup on the people…yes some were in shorts.

They didn’t stick around for the extended dance mix at the end (goosebumps).

You can just see the radio towers at the very top.

This is at the very top…

We took a few detours on the way down for the sake of “pretty” (the extended dance mix) and saw these large pine cones…there were at least 3 varieties of pine cone…

This is still fire territory, but it’s great to see the dead burned trees with all new growth surrounding them…

In fact, a lot of this trail, ironically called Burnt Pine, was seriously overgrown. We had to climb over some trees that had fallen while fighting thorny bushes.

All that green is new trees.

This is the view towards Cuyamaca Lake, coming down the fire road.

Then we detoured on another road past the creek, where we saw multiple deer…this guy kept an eye on us as his peeps ran through the meadow.

This is Stonewall Peak from the valley below, last week’s hike.

Poop. What else can I say?

These are morteros near Paso Picacho.

The sun is going down as we get near the end, illegal paths, all blocked. We end up just picking what we think is a trail that will get us back, ignoring the signs. Bad hiking etiquette, but we couldn’t find a pattern to the signs or a reason for their existence.

10 miles, 5 hours. The peak was at 6512′. Tired? Yeah. Good hike? Yeah. It’ll be a while until the next one unfortunately. Life conspires against me.

Out of the Dirt

I managed the gym, finished a good book (in one day…no idea how many pages it had, because the Kindle app says things like Location 405 of 3606, and I don’t know what that means), graded one period’s worth of journals (I only had one period left, so that was OK), bought thread so I can quilt up in the mountains, hung out with a friend for an hour or so, and ironed fabrics. Not a bad day. I managed it. There were some bad moments, true, but that seems to always be the case. I weathered them. I cried, but it wasn’t as bad as some Saturdays have been. I do miss going out to dinner and the movies. I wish I could go out dancing, but that seems to be out of my cost range, plus requires more people skills than I have at the moment. Doing things with other people is not my strong point. I even meditated, but my brain was like a 5-year-old with ADHD, so I just let it wander and reeled it back in over and over again. I’m not sure it was particularly helpful tonight. Oh well. It can’t always work ideally. That’s the wonder of the damn brain. It’s fucking unpredictable. Or maybe it’s predictably random.

I have about 2 1/2 hours in on the fabric choosing for the Celebrating Silver quilt…

I’m about halfway into the 200s as well. I’m up and out of the dirt as of tonight. When I start up again (maybe tomorrow?), I will be in the flesh of one of the daughters…I think of the Maiden and the Mother as daughters of the Crone…not sure why. Because they’re smaller and younger? Who knows. I didn’t want to start dealing with flesh yet…too tired tonight for that. Flesh has to be a run that flows, and with a quilt like this, it might need 7 fabrics in the run. Or I might decide to do two different runs, two shades…with the daughters in a lighter, pinker shade, and the crone in a more muted, greyed shade. Who knows? I won’t know until I pick them, and I kind of feel like I need to have a fresh brain for that, and I don’t have that right now. I have late night tired brain.

All the 200s are laid out…

There’s a bird in there too. And a heart, I think. Maybe a fetus. All that before I even get to the daughter, whichever one it is. Can’t tell…maybe the Maiden. There’s only 1237 or so pieces in this thing. I’m going to be ironing for a while. It would be nice to get it done before we leave, but I don’t know if that’s possible.

My plan is to start cutting these out at my rescheduled quilt class Monday night and continue up in the mountains.

I’d like to have half of it ironed by Tuesday…more if possible. It sounds like a lot of time, but I have a hike and dinner tomorrow, then doctor, soccer, groceries for Tday, some other errands, and quilt class on Monday…and Tuesday morning is a mess. So I don’t know how far I will get. When I type all that out, the thought of getting 615 pieces ironed seems unrealistic…that’s another 400 pieces, probably another 4 hours. When I’m not tired. Ha! OK, I have a goal. I’ll do my best to meet it.

I did go through the older sketchbook and marked some of the drawings with post-its. I don’t know if I’ll get more serious about making some smaller quilts this week, but I’m trying to at least keep it in mind, since two of my smaller non-nude pieces will be in Poway starting next week, so there is a market for these. I think I’m afraid to NOT have multiple pieces in progress at the moment…I don’t want any down time. Down time leads to depressoid time, and I’m good at that without any encouragement from a nonbusy brain. Trying to keep the brain occupied is an important task.

After finishing the cross stitch I’ve been working on for my SIL for the last 3+ years, I was trying to decide what to do next and decided that the girlchild’s Xmas stocking should be next on the list…I mean, I started it before she was born and she is now 16. Seemed to make sense. So I pulled it out and stared at it for 20 minutes, trying to figure out what in hell I had stitched…

I really did think I had stitched more, but more importantly, this line of stitches didn’t appear to match anything on the pattern…until I realized I had stitched it in the wrong color. Wow. I was about 9 months pregnant with the girlchild and the boychild was about 18 months old when I started it. It’s surprising my brain didn’t just fall right out of my head. I ripped out all the stitching from over 16 years ago and will start again at my next stitching meeting. Fresh start. Funny stuff. I did tell her not to expect it until she was 21, based on how long the one for her aunt took me…it’s not that I’m a slow stitcher…I’m not. I just only work on it for about an hour and a half a month at the one meeting.

I’ve been staring at this card all day…it was sent by two good friends sending me encouragement a few months back…but I love the dog and birds. Bright colors and funky.

Much appreciated. They’re the ones who posted the article that talked about the meditation app I use, Headspace…so it’s their fault I’m calmer now. Damn them. No, not really. I did actually use it the other day with a student who was in a mood…and it worked. Welcome to the calmer Kathy…or something.

I started and finished this book today, Every Day by David Levithan.

I liked it. I thought it was well-written. I can’t remember why I read it, although it could have been as simple as seeing someone else’s review. A person (hard to tell if A is male or female) inhabits a different body every day, and one of those days, falls in love. It was nicely done. I would read another book by Levithan. Because I don’t have enough books to read? I remember the boychild worried once about what would happen when he ran out of books to read. I don’t think it’s happened yet. I have two more books on the library ebook system and another two on the Kindle app at the moment. I guess vacation is time to read.

I’m hiking tomorrow; far as I know, the hike is on…looking forward to this one…will be dispelling some head demons up there, I think. Hope. Trying to figure out if taking the sketchbook makes sense. I can’t draw and hike, but maybe I can draw in the car (mountain roads? Might be a mistake…don’t know).

Out of the dirt…into the snow.

Hiking and the Brain

I went to sleep early last night because I knew I was going on a hike today. I shouldn’t have wasted my energy. My overactive depressoid brain woke me up two hours early and then fussed over stupid shit and wouldn’t allow me to go back to sleep. And just so you know, putting your pillow over your head works for blocking light and the noise of cats licking their nether regions, but it doesn’t do shit for shutting up an overly active brain. It’s like having a 2-year-old in the house. They don’t know it’s the one morning in the week when you can sleep in. They just know it’s morning and they’re bored.

Stupid brain. Maybe I should just take sleep off my wish list. I hope for 6+ hours a night. I rarely get it. Not by choice.

Anyway, I got all my hiking stuff ready and headed out for the meeting spot…we drove out to Cuyamaca Rancho State Park to climb Stonewall Peak…

I’ve climbed this one before, at least once, maybe twice…right after the divorce, I hiked a lot with the Sierra Club local singles group. I was young then…no really, I was. This hike today was with a local women’s hiking group.

The weather was cool, but not freezing, and the day was beautiful, blue skies and bright autumnal weather.

Great views…sometimes the weather conspires against, especially this time of year, but today was perfect.

There is an 850-foot elevation gain from the parking lot to the top…

It took us an hour to do the first 2 miles…we weren’t walking super fast, but not slow either…

We weren’t even halfway through the hike at this point, but we stopped and ate, and then headed down for the back half of the trail…

Instead of going back the way we came, we went down the northern end of the peak…

Which was gorgeous, despite being full of trees that had burned in the Cedar Fire of 2003, which raged through this area…in fact, I hiked another peak in this area the week before, and then three weeks after, went through (illegally…because fires were still burning inside the trunks of some of the oak trees) and was devastated by the loss of the big oaks. I have pictures somewhere of before and after. So walking through a valley like this is a little like walking through a graveyard…

A beautiful graveyard…and then you notice these little guys…

Tiny little trees shaded and protected, growing…and you see some that were burned halfway up the trunk, but survived and seem to be thriving.

And at some point, the brain stops remembering all the stupid shit that woke you up before 6 AM and it’s just staring at the trees and the path and the oak leaves that had fallen on the ground and the patterns in the rings of the trees that had been cut to clear the trail post-fire. And the clouds in the sky and the smell of the skunkweed and the burnt log that looked like a bear and the taste of the sandwich and the sight of an expansive view. And the brain stops being such a fucking 2-year-old and starts to resemble Kathy again.

Some of the trees look dead but have new branches coming up from the trunks, surrounding the old, dead wood.

And some parts just seem completely untouched by disaster.

It’s a beautiful area, no matter what. Charcoal and all. Five miles, a little less than three hours. My brain left all the stupid behind and I communed with nature and a few humans. If I could do that and draw every day, I’d probably be almost human pretty damn quickly.

Not really a plan I can stick to at the moment…but I can certainly try to add a few hikes a month to my therapeutic plan.

I came home and rushed through school stuff and grocery shopping and we went out to dinner with mom, because dad was still in an airport in Texas…managed meditation and cutting out of Wonder Under. Midnight approves of the newly cleaned-off table (OK, I did not get everything cleared off, but quite a bit of it, plus I washed the table runner that she loves to deposit her hair on, so that’s a plus).

Meditation talked about communing with our own minds as being helpful with knowing what’s in the minds of others. I’m usually pretty good at that, although the few times I’ve been slammed by NOT knowing were particularly devastating. Mr. Meditation talked about Being There for the experience…I did that successfully this weekend, I think…mostly. I just need to translate it into my whole life, and maybe kick my brain back into a mode where sadness doesn’t overwhelm me. I had my moments today, trust me. I felt it in the post-hike exhaustion in the car…my brain crept back in and was trying to drag me down. In the grocery store. On the phone with a friend. It’s a relentless beast. But he says that I can better understand where people are coming from, empathize with them…he talked about most people conceptualizing, thinking about how they THOUGHT someone would feel, instead of KNOWING how they feel, and how this practice helps with that. I got caught in that this year…someone assuming they knew what I was thinking and feeling, and actually ignoring what I was saying and all the evidence that was there to make assumptions about what I thought and what I would do. I hate that. I do have a pretty good sense of what I think and feel, and I’m pretty good at saying it. I appreciate those who respect me enough to actually have the conversation with me before assuming they know what I would do. I had a couple really respectful, human, responsible, and mature conversations today…and it reminded me that is how they should all go…not behind my back, talking to other people, guessing at what I think. Fucking ask me, man. I’ll tell you. And you don’t have to agree with me, but if we’re talking about MY mind and how it works, I hate to tell you, I know better than any other person on the planet.

I did an hour of cutting…

Look any different? Fuck no. It will. Maybe.

I’m exhausted…physically, emotionally, whatever. I’m going to bed early again. If my brain really loves me, it will let me sleep.