The year certainly started out well - in January I put up a butt-ugly greenhouse and Sandy and I hauled almost 4 tons of composted leaves from the front driveway to the Back Forty. I built raised beds and covered them with Reemay/Agribon fabric and made plans to do some winter market gardening in the winter of 2008. The 2007 winter farm was a test. I also exposed a seed company whose name rhymes with Dark Greed for spamming gardening bloggers. I think that they have stopped, but I think that they are still checking on me. ::::paranoia::::ooh:::: Nah, it’s just that I don’t feel like getting them all stirred up again, but if you’re interested, you’ll find the posts in January 2007 archives.

February was full of seed starting and I was still planning to go to Italy in the summer, at that point.

In March, I took some great pics of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse reenactment. I enjoyed using my new camera, a LOT, and I spent most of my energy on planting the Back Forty.

Early in April I spent a week at John C. Campbell Folk School, where I learned to weave hats. I gave away bags and bags of salad greens. I tried to kick out the narrator in my head and only blog when I was blogging, and have been mostly successful.

On May 16, 2007, Sandino Galore and I celebrated our 20th anniversary, so I wrote about our wedding. On May 21, 2007, I had the most incredible dinner in my life with Carlo Petrini and leaders of Slow Food USA and Slow Food in North Carolina.

June brought my usual trip to Lake Waccamaw. I put a window air conditioner in the studio and got serious about using it.

In July, I did more Slow Food thingies and suddenly burned slam out. I spent a lot of time in my studio and began participating in One Local Summer 2007. My garden was at its peak for beauty and I did some before and after photos.

In August, I started my last class, hoped that our air conditioner wouldn’t break down, said good-bye to rain for a long time, got this laptop for $60 (woo-hoo!) and wove kitchen towels. I cured garlic and onions for the first time.

A Crafting 365 project became a Crafting 25 project in September, as part of an effort to jumpstart my new enthusiasm for weaving. However, my depression and anxiety and all the sadness I was repressing brought that to a screeching halt. I’m glad that I switched gears to concentrating on art and creativity though.

My friend John died in October. We blocked, for a few months anyway, a ruling to put black dye in raw milk in N.C. I ate a lot of butterbeans, but didn’t have enough to freeze. My husband made a very bad decision and took a new job. I realized that the winter farm wasn’t going to happen this year because of the worsening drought.

In November, Squirt was diagnosed with multiple health problems. Our focus was treating hypothyroidism and planning to do surgery on a thyroid tumor. At the time I was totally unaware that the “beginning of kidney failure” was incurable. I attended two major food events: the RAFT picnic at Celebrity Dairy, and the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association Conference. Sandy lost his new job.

And in December I graduated with my M.A. in Liberal Studies. We installed a new Slow Food convivium chair and set up a board/committee structure that we hope will bring new energy and ideas to the convivium. And you know the rest. Oh God. Let’s move on to 2008, shall we?

Since I have the day off (a mandatory vacation day for me, not that I wouldn’t have jumped on it if it had been voluntary), I’m doing a coffee post today, when I write until the coffee pot is empty.

Tonight I’m doing something completely different for New Year’s Eve, and I think that it is entirely appropriate. I’m going to spend New Year’s Eve night with Stew, who I have only met over the Internet. Stew and I share similar interests and a wicked sense of humor, and we are both struggling with depression. So I am starting off the new year with a friend that I have wanted to get to know better.

My dreams have been strange and meaningful lately. Not that I always know the meaning, but usually there is something about them that make me think a little more deeply about the subject during the next day or two. For example, last night I dreamed that I was on my way to Durham on a bicycle and I stopped in Burlington because there was a new yarn outlet I wanted to see. I ended up in a park where I ran into my old best friend, M, a friend who I was heartbroken over for years and probably has had more to do with my inability to make new friends than anything else. M was quiet, but peacefully so, and we climbed a tower and looked out. I noticed that she was with two of her friends that I didn’t know.

“I suppose that you’ll tell them all the stories about us,” I said with a combination of sorrow and bitterness, thinking about our last fight and the lies that her husband probably planted in her head since then.

“I suppose so,” she said, and turned to walk down the stairs. I realized that she had no hostility at all toward me. In fact, she was rather indifferent about the whole encounter. And I felt fine about letting her go.

I guess that later I will do the obligatory post for the last day of the year, but this is one tradition that I think is worth doing. I’ll have to give it a few hours of thought though. This year has not been one that I’ve cared to dwell upon, but I’m going to try to pick out the good things and remind myself that I am not living in a black hole! Although I still have this fantasy of living in a cave…

The nights have been the worst without $quirt because that’s when I spent so much time petting him and talking to him and playing with him. Mealtimes have been tough too. I realized that I had certain rituals with him - when I got up in the morning and when I came home from work (or wherever) the first thing I asked was “Where’s my baby $quirt?” or “Where’s my little boy?” and if he didn’t come running I’d go and pick sleepy $quirt up off the bed and carry him around. Sometimes I carried him outside to the deck or the front porch and let him look at the birds and his mother meowing at my feet. I never let him go, though, because the one time I did he took off and scared me to death. He had a spot on the sofa arm where he would sit beside me, and if my hair was wet from the shower, he would rub his face in it.

Guido is thrilled to have more of my attention though. He and Lucy have been grooming each other and I hear a lot of loud purring at night on the bed. Just then they went galloping through the house chasing each other. So they’re okay. I doubt that spoiled Miss Jazz has even noticed the difference. The other cats are a pain in the ass to her because they both stalk and attack her, and she and $quirt almost totally ignored each other. He did give her a kiss last week, which surprised both of us and I was most surprised that Jazz didn’t whack him.

We have watched a lot of good movies on DVD lately. Last night we watched The Lookout, and last week we watched Stardust, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Deja Vu.

I also have drowned myself in fiction, just as I vowed to do when I finished my degree! We went to the library and I checked out Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich, Joe Jones by Anne Lamott (my goal is to read all of Anne’s books), and The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg, an author I’ve been wanting to read. Last week I read Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman. And I am still in the middle of Another Country by James Baldwin. I have a huge stack of books that I got from the free shelf at Edward McKays and a few that I bought very cheaply, so I am set for reading material for a long time.

The seed catalogs came trickling in over the last month, providing me with a lot of fantasy, although I have so many seeds now that I swear that I will only buy a couple of packets that I have run out of, such as Roma or Amish Paste tomatoes for canning. I saved a lot of my seeds this year, especially beans, and for the first time I let my basil go completely to seed and saved that. I also picked some up at the CFSA conference.

My favorite seed companies are Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Fedco, and I’m giving this Baker Creek catalog some serious consideration. All of these do not knowingly carry GMO contaminated seed and SESE and Baker Creek in particular specialize in heirloom seeds. Fedco is a co-op who has been vocal about not doing business with Monsanto. They are very inexpensive if you need small quantities of seed.

Okay, now I’m heading over to Earthfare to pick up a bottle of prosecco for tonight, and I’ll try to get some weaving in. I’ll write up my 2007 retrospective a little later, which will probably be (thankfully) short. I am ready for a new year, believe me.

Here they are, the first two fabulously ugly scarves, woven with the fabulously ugly yarn I hoarded for years because I couldn’t decide if it was fabulous or the most hideously ugly yarn I’d ever seen. Somewhere in the two studio moves the labels were lost, so I’m not sure of the content. I got the yarn at a swap, and at the time I was pretty snobby about natural fibers, but who knows where my head was when I voluntarily adopted this yarn. I might do a burn test, but the left one sure wrinkles like cotton. Anyway they look much more beautiful worn than this scan shows, and are soft and cuddly.

The left one is totally fab ugly yarn in a plain twill. The right one is tabby and alternates fab ugly and red cotton flake in the weft.

I think that I have enough yarn left to make one more, and my goal was to use every bit of it. If I was not lazy and liked math, I would have calculated first whether I had enough. But since I am a wild and crazy woman, I decided to live dangerously and do it this way. It was more fun because I approached it as a puzzle.

I decided to tie on to the original warp so that I wouldn’t have to rethread the heddles and reed. I had 82 ends at 12 ends per inch. First, I wound as much of the fab ugly yarn as I had for a length of about 7 feet. (Tying on to the original warp reduces the warp waste.) I had 54 ends, so I had to rework my warp design a little. I made the red and blue stripes wider to bring it to 82 ends, and I hope to have enough red cotton flake to weave the whole thing. Using this shareware WeaveDesign program helped a lot, and the design is below. The red stripe on the left is actually in the center, and it is symmetrical. We’ll see if the treadling drives me insane. Well, more insane.

I have it tied on the loom now and hopefully will begin weaving this afternoon.

I think that today will be a day of numbness, thank god. I hope so. Thank you so much for your sweet comments - I feel loved and blessed.

Yesterday when I woke up groggy from a very patchy sleep, I had the idea that this whole thing was another bad dream, and Squirt would come running up to me on the bed to meow for his breakfast, as I would wait for him to do on weekends before I’d get up, and everything would be okay. Of course, he didn’t, although he did sleep in the bed with us for at least half the night.

He was in a terrible mood and was very unhappy with me pilling him and forcing him to drink water. He wouldn’t take any food and I didn’t have time to assist-feed him because I had to get him to the vet.

He did not cry in the carrier as usual, and when the vet tech tried to pick him up he hissed and growled, which surprised both of us. Dr. Hunt didn’t bother to do the blood test. She took one look at him and could tell that he was dying. She suggested that we euthanize him that day since he was suffering.

She gave him a sedative and I held him wrapped in a towel until Sandy could get there. There was a lot of crying and I had to wait a while before I could give the go-ahead. It was very peaceful - I stroked him and told him that I loved him as I looked into his eyes. It only took a few seconds before he was gone.

I worried and worried that I would not be able to do this. But I knew that if I were dying that I would want Squirt to be with me, so I figured that the least I could do was to be with him. I think that it was not as hard as I thought simply because I knew in my heart that it was coming and had already grieved so much, and I knew that it was the best thing I could do for him.

He will be cremated and the ashes returned to me so that I can bury him in the flower garden. I also took a little of his fur to make paper for a memorial book I’d like to do for him.

So, onward to my life without Squirt. I think that I’ll try to spend some time in the studio today, and maybe go to the library. At some point before I go back to work on Jan. 2, I’ll try to put up my greenhouse. I’m lucky that this crisis happened when I had a prolonged holiday from my job, although my boss is so understanding that she would have let me have all the time I needed.

And although it has been extremely helpful to me to get all this anguish out in writing, maybe you’ll see some other subjects here that might be a little less depressing. I don’t expect to get over this for a long, long time, because I do not handle any kind of loss well, and this was a huge one. But I’m going to try to do some other things and go on with my life.

Despite the fact that John Cusack is in it, I’m still too wimpy to watch the scary movie that Sandy brought home from Video Review. So I decided to come in here and write up my recipe for pot roast. Because it really is good and easy, and you deserve this on a cold weekend.

First, coat your roast with a mixture of flour, salt and pepper, and brown it on all sides quickly in oil in a cast iron dutch oven. Take it out, and add the following to the pan, chopped finely, quantities negotiable:

1 leek, white and light green part
1 stalk celery
1 carrot
3 stalks parsley (leaves)
1 approx. 5 inch sprig of rosemary (leaves)
2 large cloves garlic
a handful of dried mushrooms (I used porcini)
1 bay leaf

Spread out in pan, put roast on top. Pour 2 cups of water over all. Put cover on pan and simmer for 3 hours, turning occasionally.

Serve the sauce over mashed potatoes. A little red wine would be great in this too, but I didn’t have any tonight.

Sources:
Bottom round roast: Rocking F Farm
Celery, flour, salt, pepper, oil, bay leaf: Deep Roots Market
Potatoes: Dodge Lodge Farm
Porcini mushrooms: Mercato Centrale, Firenze, Italia
Leek, carrot, garlic, rosemary, parsley: the Back Forty

Buon appetito!

Mr. $quirt decided to stop eating a couple of days ago. I’ve been feeding him with a syringe. It reminds me of when he was a baby. I thought that today might be the big day for him, but I talked to Dr. Hunt for a long time on the phone, and we decided to do another test on him in the morning. She admits that his numbers were really bad, but seems to have some hope that we can pull him through this crisis and give him some more quality time in his life. She says that the test tomorrow will help me decide.

She suggested a couple of things that I’ve tried this afternoon - rice baby cereal for his food, and a quarter tablet of Pepcid AC for his stomach. We’re going to try to give him more fluids tonight if he can take them. So far he has absorbed the amount we have given him every night easily. He hasn’t been throwing up as much, and he seems to do better with a little food in his sweet little belly.

He was so mad that I was making him eat that his tail was all puffed out. But a little earlier today I sat at the computer playing a game and he relaxed on my lap. Every now and then he will give me a little purring.

I appreciate the advice from those of you who have dealt with this. It is so hard to decide what to do. I have found several web sites that have been helpful to me. One person regretted that she put her first cat to sleep so quickly when she gained more experience with her second cat with CRF, and I’m trying to remind myself of that when $quirt looks unhappy.

This morning I was deeply depressed, and I still don’t feel like talking to anyone about it, but at least tonight I have a little hope and it picked me up enough to put a pot roast on simmer and stop looking at job ads and real estate ads for the Asheville area. I have this little fantasy of joining an intentional community.

Because, boy, if I lose $quirt right now, my first instinct is to cut and run. I am miserable. Sandy is miserable. We are of absolutely no comfort to each other. I feel completely worn out and I’m in literal pain, with migraines and little sleep and muscle aches. Sandy is lost in his own world of denial and computer gaming. That’s how he copes. I asked him if he was depressed and he said that he was always depressed.

This sucks big time.

Web sites:
Tanya’s Feline CRF Information Center
Feline CRF Information Center
Pet Loss Support Page

Oh great Spirit of Surprise
dazzle us with a day full
of amazing embraces,
capricious, uncalculated caring,
great hearts, kind souls
and doers of good deeds.

~Molly Fumia

$quirt seemed to have a pretty bad day yesterday. He was kind of out of it and threw up a couple of times. After we gave him his fluids last night, which he seems to welcome now, his energy picked up and he began acting more like himself. This morning he doesn’t smell bad and his fur looks better. He kept his breakfast down. He’s never been one to gallop around and play a lot, but he looks more alert and he has been talking to me. I found that if I feed him from my hand, he will eat a lot more, including the food with the phosphorus binder. We started our relationship this way, me feeding him by hand.

I had a bad day yesterday as well, and didn’t bother to do anything much. I researched feline chronic renal failure online and what I found both upset me greatly and gave me some good information for his care. I cried a lot and my face hurts today. One of the bad realizations is that he has so many things wrong with him that treating one problem seems to aggravate another.

One of the good things I found was the advice to give him fluids for at least a few weeks before making the big decision - that cats with his condition don’t really suffer until the very end stage unless they are dehydrated, which makes them feel like they have a hangover. So I guess that is why the fluids picked him up so much - it must feel like that wonderful drink of cold water when you first wake up from a bender. My worry yesterday was that he was already at the end stage, because I now think that he has had this condition for quite some time. The feedback from other caregivers is that cats with kidney failure will have good and bad days, and they refer to it as an emotional roller coaster.

So I am thinking about that big decision. It’s very, very, very hard to think about. It might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. We’re (me and $quirt) talking about it, and so far I think that he’d like to wait and see if this treatment continues to make him feel better.

This morning I realized that I hadn’t showered or changed clothes since Saturday morning, so that oughta give you some idea of my state of mind! So I washed up, cleaned the kitchen, and I’ll go to Deep Roots and buy some asparagus for my traditional holiday dish to take to my sister’s tomorrow. I’ll let myself mourn and grieve this week as I need to, but right now it’s time to get myself together and do the holiday. I feel better today and I’ll take advantage of it.

And I missed Festivus! Oh well, I don’t want to think about grievances anyway. But I will go pin Miss Jazz just for the hell of it.

Heh - forgot to mention that I graduated from graduate school yesterday. I now have a Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies. Yeeeee-haw!

No, I won’t be going for a Piled Higher and Deeper degree!