Crafting Madness

The weather has been perfectly dreadful. It has rained and been cold and dark for three solid days now: nearly non-stop cold rain. And I have become Crochet Mad in consequence.

Seriously, the worse thing I can be is BORED. And I feel like I get bored really easily. Even when I find something to entertain myself (obsess over), it doesn't last. I was all about painting for months, and then I put all my paints away and haven't touched them for months. 

Here's one of the last paintings I did before I packed it in:  Kobi giving me the stink-eye from under the coffee table. With the real Kobi giving me the eye from under my easel. 

Then for a few weeks I was obsessively making a big mosaic to go over the stove in the kitchen.  It was the biggest mosaic project I've ever done, but I got it finished in record time. 

Then I put my tiles away and started casting about for some new obsession. What did I find?  

Crochet. 

My mother crocheted when I was living at home. She always had an afghan in progress in her lap through the cold months... and she crocheted a host of other things, including some beautiful lacework tablecloths.  But it didn't really appeal to me so much. I learned to do it as a kid, but never really did much with it.  I took up knitting after my divorce, looking for something to do to occupy my mind and my hands and hopefully keep me a bit more sober than I would otherwise be. But I found I didn't really have the patience. I actually literally wadded up a knitted scarf one time and threw it across the room. 

But I must be entering my dotage, because this time around, crochet has gripped me.  It's much more forgiving:  meaning that when I inevitably make a mistake, I can easily unravel it back to the error and redo it, which is much more challenging with knitting.  Nobody with patience like mine should be asked to put knitting back on the needles after having unraveled ten rows. 

So, I'm stitching away like a madwoman. I've made a "handkerchief" scarf (which is slightly wonky, as I was just learning to read a pattern and got my stitch count all out of whack. So, instead of pointing straight down like a proper bandana, it pokes off to the side a bit, like its nose is bent), a puff-stitch cowl (which came out looking okay, but I hadn't perfected turning at the ends of the rows yet, so one end looks like a mountain range. Plus I made it out of wool yarn, which means it's so scratchy that I can't actually wear it, though it looks really pretty). Now I'm feeling overconfident, so this afternoon I bought nine skeins of yarn to make a big, colorful stitch sampler afghan.  That should provide hours of entertainment and/or frustration.  

It will hopefully keep me relatively sober and fend off boredom and depression--which, in the present global and national environment, is nothing to sneeze at. 

In which I try to cling to hope

 Colorado is burning.  The barn and some other buildings at C Lazy U Ranch have burned down (though thankfully the horses were all evacuated a week ago). 

Ice is falling on Oklahoma and trees are falling with it.  The power is out at my folks' house so they're holed up with no heat or way to warm up any food. 

Meanwhile the sea ice at the North Pole has still not frozen, long past when it should have. 

The trumpies confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, tilting the court hard to the right for the next 20 years. 

tRump signed an executive order last night that somehow gives him the power to clean out career staff members from the government and put in his cronies, poisoning the system against Biden, even if he does manage to get elected in spite of all the shady shit the republicans are doing to try to fix the election. 

Which is just one week away, which seems like a year in trump time.  He can wreak a lot of havoc in a week. Anything could happen. 

It feels pretty depressing right now. John keeps saying that the Rump is not gaining any new supporters in his madness these past few weeks. But there seem to me to be an alarming number of his cultists still in action, and emboldened to do weirder and weirder and more and more violent and hateful things in his name as the election gets closer. A ballot collection box was burned in an area where mostly democrats were using it. Mail-in ballots are getting lost and mis-delivered. And of course now the Supreme Court is in his pocket.  

I have to admit, I'm a little scared. I want to believe that there will be a blue wave:  that sane, responsible, normal people will come out in droves to wash this abomination out of office. But I've also seen some of the intimidation that's been taking place, and the zealous religiosity with which trump followers defend him.  It's madness. And even if he is swept out of office, I know he will fight the results, claim illegitimacy, pull strings and fight dirty to stay in power, and his minions will fall in line. 

I'm so tired of it all.  Nothing seems to stop them. And it feels like the world is burning around us.  In some places literally.  There are more than 500 children still in cages at the border whose parents cannot be located. Tiny infants, little kids. Their parents must be beside themselves. Nothing changes. It doesn't seem like anyone is doing anything about it. It doesn't feel like anyone can. 

Meanwhile, the number of virus cases is rising again. ICU units in Oklahoma City are full. Over a thousand people a day there are getting sick. I stopped following the numbers here in Arkansas.  I don't think I'll see my parents again until after this is over. I couldn't bear to be the cause of their catching the virus. But I fear for them. For us all. 

Today I will just take a deep breath, focus on the things I need to do at work. Be grateful for the peace and love and stability that I have in my life. And just keep swimming. 

Don't Even Say It

 I'm not going to say that I'm back.  Nope. I'm not even going to say that.  This blog, that I cherished for so many years, is limping along at best now and I recognize that.  I'd probably be better off just printing it out for my archive and closing it down. But I just can't do it. 

Back when I was doing the original Scrawlspace, it was almost a religious thing for me.  All day I'd be looking at my experience with an eye to the blog:  how I could spin things, what stood out as relatable or interesting.  I'd like to start looking at my world that way again. 

Working in city government does not have the same cache as working for a nationally recognized museum, to say the least. I'm no longer able to shore up any sagging parts of my self image with a glamorous job. Two years into this position and it doesn't look like I'm going anywhere else any time soon. Job hunting in your 50s is a whole different ball of wax. Especially as a woman, I think. I don't even get return emails on jobs I would definitely have at least gotten an interview for ten years ago. I've interviewed for jobs that never even called me back afterward. I think they take one look at me and see a woman ten years from retirement. Someone who is probably technologically behind and may need to be paid more than someone just out of school.  At least, that's what I've told myself when I've applied for jobs and not heard a response. 

So:  without my "career" to give me a sense of importance and usefulness, I look around for something else to sprinkle a little sunshine on my daily life. And blogging was one of those things. It's just about being motivated to keep my eyes open for some sense of wonder every day. 

My latest sense of wonder is not a new one. It's one I experience every year at this time. It's monarch butterflies.  

We raised three sets of caterpillars to raise in the Mayor's office this summer.  First there was a black swallowtail:  a green, black, and yellow monarch lookalike that made a strange greeny-brown chrysalis like a broken bit of twig that hung from a silken sling from a stick for 14 days before "eclosing" (that's the official term I learned for "emerging as a butterfly.")  as a gorgeous swallowtail.  

Then there were the two pipevine swallowtails, which look like giant, creepy centipedes with their fat black bodies and red spines.  These are really twisty, active caterpillars that go on a day-long walkabout right before they pupate. I spent a lot of the day before the first one pupated plucking the traveling 'pillar off my desktop, my computer screen, the edge of my keyboard, out of my pencil cup, etc., and putting it back into the punch bowl we were keeping them in.  Finally I stapled it, punchbowl and all, into a mesh recycling bag for the night so it couldn't wander off and get lost.  In the morning we discovered its brown, spiky chrysalis that looked like a crumpled brown leaf.  The next day the second pillar went walkabout, and in the morning that one had formed a similar chrysalis, clinging to the glass wall of the punchbowl. 

This one emerged (excuse me, eclosed) as a gorgeous, glossy blue-black butterfly with irridescent blue hind wings. Breathtaking in the sunlight. 

The second one, however, has yet to emerge.  Turns out, some pipevine swallowtails overwinter in their pupal stage.  And some remain dormant for much longer:  a year, three years, five years, even SEVEN YEARS.  So this guy could be hanging with us for quite some time.  They say you can simply refrigerate the pupa through the cold months and then bring it back out again in the spring to see if it will eclose.  I imagine the Mayor's office staff dragging this little brown capsule out of the employee kitchen fridge every April for the next seven years...

Our latest caterpillar, however, is a monarch, the Queen of autumn butterflies. This little cutie, in its striped pajamas and adorable black antennae, recently pupated into this beautiful, delicate jewel of a chrysalis:  a jade and gold marvel that looks as if it belongs on a Christmas tree.  

What on earth can be the evolutionary advantage of such a gorgeous chrysalis?  That looks like actual gold on there.  How can this be?  Sure, it's sort of camouflaged if left in a green, leafy spot.  But a lot of things are getting pretty brown around now, so it has the potential to stand out: the opposite of what evolutionary common sense says it should do. To say nothing of all that bling. It's one of those things that shows you how sometimes nature just likes to dress up for no reason at all.  Beauty for its own sake. 

I believe this generation of monarchs: those that emerge this late in the fall, are among the ones who make their mind-blowing migration to Mexico for the winter. That place:  Michoacan, in the Sierra Madre mountains, is one of the places at the top of my bucket list to visit someday.  That and the little pub in the little town in Ireland where Shane MacGowan of the Pogues goes to drink.