This just in…

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I’m just clearing out the cobwebs, waiting for the clothes to dry before I go to the farmers’ market.

Since Molly Ivins died, my favorite columnist has become NYT’s Gail Collins. I just read Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, and it seems to me that Gail has a similar voice, although definitely not profane. She is good at setting you up for a punch line. I like a combination of smart ass and common sense. Anyway, here’s a quote from today’s column, speaking to the “Obama hyperpartisans”: “Candidates who promise to bring everybody together are talking about meeting in the middle. The only people who think Barack Obama is a radical are you and Joe the Plumber.”

Not me - the reason I didn’t get wholeheartedly behind Obama from the beginning was that he is not liberal enough for me. But he was farther left than Hil, and that was good. Despite my utopian hopes and dreams, I did realize that we needed a uniter in the White House, and that means compromise. The country does need radical change, but it would never happen because the folks in Congress don’t have the guts.

Okay, enough politics. I need milk, hamburger, cheese, and bread from the farmers’ market. I’ll go to the mainstream stores for beer and cat food. That means Petsmart or Petco for the cat food - I have to get the “senior” kind and the grocery stores don’t have a variety. Guido lost 1.6 lbs between Oct. 17 and his surgery. We need to make sure that he eats. If I get the kind with gravy, he’ll only lick up the gravy. Then he defies logic by wanting dry food. He doesn’t like those spongy little bits of fake meat in the middle. Buying cat food requires careful thought these days.

I’ll make a pot roast today with the usual veggies, and some kind of soup for tomorrow. Maybe turnip greens from the garden with dried beans, also from the garden.

I’ll shovel out the ashes from the wood stove because it is supposed to get below freezing at night during the next week.

It’s supposed to rain heavily all day today, but there seems to be a break right now. I suppose that I should go. I would love to stay home all day. I’ve been printing out photos on photo paper for the first time on my Epson printer, and I’m pleased with the quality. I’m making the wooden book into a little book about John C. Campbell Folk School. Problem is, it’s a little tight for photos. I have to figure this out. I guess I’ll need to do a different binding for photo albums or scrapbooks, and that’s sort of a shame.

I’ve been trying to get a good photo of the finished front of the book, and it’s been a challenge. I’ll post it if I get one this weekend.

I changed my moderation so that your comment will go to moderation if you’ve never commented here before. The latest wave of spam that is getting through is getting on my nerves. Please don’t let that stop you from commenting since I check my email often.

Good news, I think. Guido’s test results came back and he is not in renal failure, which would not be curable. The vet thinks that he has early renal disease and he is at high risk for CRF. That means that I have to get strict about his diet, feed him low-protein foods, make sure that he is drinking enough water, and she has a supplement that I can add to his food that acts as dialysis for certain things that his kidneys have a hard time eliminating. I can do that. She sounded pretty upbeat about it.

After he hid under the bed yesterday morning before I could get his medicine in him, she told me that I could put his antibiotic in his food. Worked like a charm this morning. Now I have no excuse to go to work late!

Bad news, I think. Anne-Marie found out about some major work challenges this week and decided to resign as leader of our Slow Food chapter. She absolutely made the right decision, but she was just really getting started as leader and she would have been great. She feels terrible and I feel terrible because I just resigned and I don’t think that anyone will want to step up. I hope that I’m wrong. I am sticking to my decision to take a year’s break, but it will be hard to do if no one volunteers. I’ve invested a lot of energy in helping to build this chapter. This is really depressing.

Okay, time to get on with my day.

I’m trying to wait a while after Guido’s breakfast to give him his antibiotic, since he just threw up. Mornings have been like this for a while. He can keep it down if I wait about an hour. But I gave him some pain medication a little too soon, I guess. The main thing is to get the antibiotic into him. I should hear from the vet about his other potential problem today. My nerves are shot and I laid around listening to ambient music most of the evening yesterday.

I’m starting to get concerned about my mother’s money situation. I knew that she was beginning to feel the pinch since she retired (at age 82!) but with the stock market crash that really cut her income. She asked us to help buy the food for Thanksgiving because she said it was hard to live on $500 a month. She might be exaggerating, but I felt a sharp pain when she said that. We’ve always brought dishes, and sometimes the main dish, for Thanksgiving anyway, but she has never asked because of money and even when we bring food she usually fixes enough of her own to feed a multitude. The thing is, I’ve thought about what to do if Mama can’t live on her own because of health problems, but my planning didn’t include the Great Depression of the 21st Century. She could live with us, but she wouldn’t like it at all.

Now, aren’t you glad that Social Security wasn’t privatized? Not that I’m counting on it when I retire. I feel pretty lucky in our situation here. I have a stable job working for the state and Sandy’s company should continue to do well, since they provide outsourcing for other companies.

He only had one tooth extracted, but he had already lost four teeth on his own apparently. It’s amazing that could happen without us being aware of it. The vet said that cats have a high pain threshold and that they eat on one side of their mouths when they have a bad tooth until it “resolves” itself, and then they switch to the other side, because tooth loss seems to happen in symmetrical pairs.

Anyway, he’s fine as far as that goes. What is scaring the shit out of me is that his urine is showing a high protein count, high enough that she sent it off for further testing. That along with the elevated BUN count and his weight loss could mean chronic renal failure.

Auggh! I hate to say that I have suspected that. I didn’t want to think it. Maybe it will be because he was dehydrated before surgery and because of the dental infection.

The receptionist kept pronouncing his name wrong over and over. I corrected her each time. This bugs me. They did it with Squirt, too. Kept writing down “Spike” and forgetting his name. Dr. Sheets never made me feel this way. Damn it, I spend a lot of money there, and the least they can do is get my pets’ names right. It did end up to be $500, which is less than the estimate was.

Now I’m going to give him some pain medication. He’s rubbing his mouth against stuff - that’s the only clue I get.

I’m mad at Sandy tonight. Sometimes I wonder how it is that he can manage to say exactly the wrongest thing ever at the times when I need comforting words.

Al Gore’s editorial in the NYT today is definitely worth a read. He makes me believe that we could actually do it if Washington would wake up and find some courage. I’ve always been a big Al fan - even though I didn’t always agree with him on other issues, I appreciated his foresight and perserverance in opening our eyes to climate change.

Mmmm, mmmm, good!

Well, this has been a week. It was honestly the first time I felt really good the day after an election, having never been a Clinton fan, and I first voted in 1980. That’s a long time.

I had a lot of emails and work to catch up on this week. Last week was not the best time to take a vacation, but that was when the class was offered. However, as of yesterday I am caught up at work, and I can think about making paper and books again at home.

Guido is scheduled for dental surgery on Tuesday morning. The estimate is 600-700 smackaroos. Lord have mercy. He also has an elevated BUN count, but it is within normal range so I hope and pray that he won’t get CRF too. He lost a pound in three weeks! That’s a lot for a cat. The vet says that there is an enzyme supplement that I can mix into his food to improve his kidney function. Sandy and I are not inclined to lose another furchild this year.

So, since stress affects me the same way whether from good news or bad, my stomach has been rocky the last few days. Either that or a virus. I started feeling sick right before I went to Sweet Basil’s for the cider tasting/dinner Slow Food benefit, but I felt fine an hour before I left so I went anyway. I’m glad I did, but I haven’t felt quite up to speed since. I thought it might have been a hangover yesterday morning, but I left work early and slept a lot and it definitely was more than the cider. I feel better today and look forward to doing some garden clean-up and preparing to make more paper - maybe start a new book or work on the content of my alphabet book.

I had to make more paper on Monday night because with the unexpected above normal temps the buckets of artichoke pulp were beginning to ferment and rise like dough! I pulled about 30 sheets and then strained and froze the rest of the pulp. Now I want to experiment with coloring some of the paper because I’m doing an origami box swap on the papermaking list.

Believe it or not, we still have mosquitoes in the Back Forty. I actually picked a ripe fig off my tree on November 1. Two years ago, I remember that one of my eggplants flowered and produced an eggplant during the month of November. I picked it on December 1. This is one reason I don’t get in a hurry to clean up my garden every year. I now have new blossoms on my pepper plants. I didn’t need to pick my green tomatoes, but they ripened quickly inside so I have huge yellow Brandywines for sandwiches this weekend. I’m still picking butterbeans, but they are filling the pods much more slowly. The field peas have turned in their badges - so have the okra.

Money - I’m trying to save it more earnestly now. I have a $10 per week budget for any food eaten out, including vending machines. I’ve made big pitchers of iced tea and have been taking that and my own snacks to work. It was the first week in a long time that I didn’t visit the vending machine room. I didn’t drink any sodas at John C. Campbell Folk School either.

I had to exclude Thursday and this Sunday though, as we had long planned Slow Food events scheduled. Sunday will be a meeting and social at Foothills Brewing in Winston Salem. I will not resist eating or drinking a good ale at Foothills. I feel really good about Slow Food because we had several very good people volunteer for board positions, and I’ll leave my position feeling like Anne-Marie will have a good year. Her first year was pretty awful, with half the board quitting for various reasons, one of whom was simply a jerk.

Okay, one of the reasons that it’s not a great idea to blog only on weekends is because it makes for very long posts, but that might be the way it goes for a while. I’ll shut up and get on with my Saturday.

As much as I want them to definitely call North Carolina for Obama ASAP, wouldn’t it be totally cool if we were the ones to put him over the top?

I’m so psyched about Kay Hagan, who is my state senator and will be a fantastic US senator, whupping Liddy Dole that I’m as excited about that as anything. I was so sick of coming home to an answering machine full of messages telling me that I’m a do-nothing godless unAmerican. When Liddy got so desperate that she put out that incredibly slimy “godless” commercial about Kay, I would have been very upset if that had not backfired. That was so unbelievably low, and I’ve lived through quite a few of the nastiest Senate campaigns according to anybody, having endured 20+ years of Jesse Helms.

Deception should not pay, and I’ve been sorely disappointed that it does in this country. At least this time it did not.

My mother, who has always been a good Democrat until she came under the influence of an extremist right-winger preacher and, unfortunately, my brother and his wife, loves Liddy Dole. I think that she is entranced by the fact that she is an older woman. She also subscribes to the county newspaper, which is so far right that they regularly run Ann Coulter’s column as their main editorial. My sister and I get quite frustrated, and Mama won’t tell any of us how she votes any more, but I’d be willing to bet that she voted for Obama and Dole. This would be in keeping with my family history - my father once voted for Mondale and Helms.

North Carolina is complicated. We elect Democrats in the state government at the same time we elect Republicans to the federal government, and vice versa. I don’t know why we’ve been painted a red state (because of Jesse’s long success, maybe?) but from my observation, we’ve always been purple.

Looks like we might have a female Democrat governor, too.

I wasn’t playing the drinking game tonight because I’m sitting here alone, but I’ve heard “historic election” enough times to get a good buzz on if I had been.

Hope I’m not devastated in the morning like I was in 2000, but I think that it might be safe to go to bed with a book.

11 pm, with laptop in bed: Virginia just went for Obama. I love Virginia.

Now there is less than a 1000 vote difference in NC. Aughhh! What a nail-biter. I know, Obama will win, but it would be really groovy if he won in my state. Then there would be TWO Southern states! Okay, three if you count Maryland, but that’s a fuzzy call around here. And even Floridians know that Florida is not Southern.

Whee! President Obama! I wish that Miss Mary had lived long enough to see this day. (She was my babysitter, who lived into her 90s until this year.)

After driving through a cloud in Hayesville, North Carolina, this scene appeared.

Is it Avalon? Jim Dollar thinks that there must be a sword or a grail nearby.

Today, I have hope. This is the first election in years that I have not met with dread. In 2004, I wore black for a week after the election. This time I plan to wear purple.

I wandered down to Little Brasstown Creek late Friday afternoon and did a little reflecting. And picked up some pebbles, of course. On the way back I photographed a few wildflowers. This beautiful lichen was on downed limbs all over the place.

Every time I walked over this meadow I felt like twirling around and breaking into song like Julie Andrews.