Shortest day after the longest night

 It's the solstice! It's a dark, rainy day, as per usual. I don't think we're going to get to see the Great Conjunction tonight (THANKS RAIN), but I know it's out there.

I've been tormenting my housemates with endless holiday music, starting on the 13th, and we got a tree much earlier than usual - Dec 8th. Dog #1 met Santa at the tree lot (he wasn't very impressed) and Cook carried the tree home. 

We decorated the tree; Dog #1 was not interested in participating.

Cook and I are taking some time off this week, trying to vacate properly. I love Christmas vacating because I like cozy home time - everybody together, making cookies, doing puzzles, drinking tea. That is, however, more or less the way I spend all my time (except also working) these days, so it doesn't feel very different. However, the dog is very itchy and we've been dressing him in the clothes his adopters provided, which means that every once in a while I glance over at him in his US Army sweatshirt (we gave away the football jerseys) and get the giggles, so that's a delight. And my gosh, there's a Great Conjunction going on!

Sources of information

Cook and I both had encyclopedia sets as children.* I remember picking up random volumes and just leafing through them, marveling at How Very Much Information There Is In the World. My kids, of course, can just leaf through the internet any time they please, but they also have fingertip access to an extraordinary variety of information concierges who tell them what information is important to know.  Skipper has been watching not only Stephen Colbert, but also a lot of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which means that she is constantly surprising me with her knowledge about things like SLAPP suits and biased jury selection. (This knowledge has been relevant because of the presidential election and the fact that we've been watching The West Wing.**) She listens to podcasts when she runs, and she often sits on the porch for a little while afterward, cooling down, staring off into space while listening to a podcast about volcanoes or what it's like to be the organist at a baseball game. So much information, so many potential guides to point us to what's important and what's not. I don't know how any of us can organize it all,  but I guess I'm glad that John Oliver is one of Skipper's teachers in her remote schooling life. 

*Cook's family's encyclopedia set was procured by Mrs. Big Cook from a stranger in a parking lot. Cook doesn't know any more details than that, and I have secretly built it out in my head into an elaborate adventure during which she wears a fedora.

** Skipper started watching it, and then Duchess discovered that it's leaving Netflix at the end of December, so now Skipper is watching a LOT of it. She calculated she'd have to watch more than 5 episodes a day in order to finish the series, and I don't think she's going to make it, even though she skips an occasional boring-looking episode. The West Wing is also prompting her to consider all kinds of questions. What's "Don't Ask Don't Tell?" What's Kashmir, and why are India and Pakistan fighting over it? Why should a president do fundraising calls inside the residence instead of the office? Why doesn't C.J. get more respect?

Thanks

We're still here! Been snuggling Dog#1.

And we had Thanksgiving! I cooked turkey, which is weird because we almost never cook meat in the house (though most of us eat meat at restaurants and other people's houses when that used to be a thing) and because I've actually never cooked meat at all. (And I overcooked it because I'm afraid of salmonella.) It was good; we ate a lot. The poor dog, smelling food cooking all day, drooled giant puddles all over the house. (We gave him a little turkey in the end.)

 

This week

This week, Duchess turned 16. That means you are very old. (It also means I've been posting in this blog for nearly 14 years. AND YOU ARE OLD.)

Dog #8 has moved on to another foster home. We will miss her; we liked her a lot. As she got less and less fearful, she got sillier and more loving. However, the reason she moved is that Dog #9 was moving in and he doesn't like living with other dogs. The reason Dog #9 came to our house and not another foster home is that Dog #9 is actually Dog #1. His adopters returned him because a) they had to move in with another family that had two dogs, and Dog #1 is what dog people describe as "resource-guarding" and was fighting with the other dogs when they tried to take his toys/food/bed/etc and b) he has cancer and they can't afford to treat him. So this is pretty sad - his adopters cried when they dropped him off tonight, and he's sad and confused about what's going on. He is, however, still his charming, confident old self, and we're happy to see him. We'll take him to the vet this week and get some more info about whether this is going to turn into hospice care, or if treatment is likely to be effective.

Also, it's rainy and dark. So rainy and so dark!

Heading into winter

Hiya! It's November, it rains all the time, covid cases are skyrocketing, and it gets dark by 5pm. We're trying to hold onto some kind of hopefulness.  

Dog #7 got adopted, miraculously, in spite of being a weird, exuberant and bitey giant. 

Dog #8 has been in the house two days. She's a nice but fearful elderly lady. She smells very, very bad, but we're waiting on a bath until her terror eases up. So far she's afraid of going in the house, going out of the house, brooms, baskets, jackets hung on chairs, noises, movement behind her when she's eating or drinking, and the mudroom. She has big patches of scabby bare skin on her back, similar to Dog #4, but she seems to be healthy otherwise, and without obvious major behavioral issues (SO FAR)...

I enjoyed working on the porch a few golden afternoons in October, and now we do our socializing out there, too, even though it's cold and dark and rainy. We have a lot of blankets. We drink a lot of tea.

We may already have cabin fever. We got a big box recently, and everybody in the house has spent some time sitting in it, as a kind of den. The other day I came downstairs and found the girls sitting in it together, playing Mario Kart. 

We still have jobs and school. The girls seem to be in the rhythm of remote schooling, in so far as that's possible. Weird covid traditions and routines are getting us through. We order takeout or delivery for dinner every Thursday night. We watch The Great British Baking Show every Friday night. Skipper in particular finds great consolation in her routines, mostly around screentime - running every other morning, watching Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah videos over her breakfast (everything bagel with cream cheese), watching her TV show of the moment after dinner (she's been through Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, MASH, Brooklyn 99 and 30 Rock - currently seeking a new one, so let us know if you have suggestions). Duchess has been reading more lately, thanks to librarians at her school and the county library who will put together book bundles if you give them a little information about yourself.  She's really enjoying working on the school newspaper, and being pretty impressively tenacious in finding bits of joy here and there. Cook and I mostly watch the news unspooling on our phones and, like Dog #8, try to not be paralyzed by terror. (And fine, we read some fiction, too.) We both felt an unexpectedly deep sense of relief after the election, and are trying to eke that out as we look ahead...

Still here.

 Well. Here we are. It's a sunny day, and I'm sitting in the back yard with a travel book, imagining a vacation I might take some day* and listening to Patsy Cline. That's all good. I've got Dog #7** out here with me, and he's sleeping hard in the way that dogs do, making me feel sleepy myself every time I look at him.

Things are okay. We all continue to feel pretty crushed by current events, though Cook and I both do still have jobs and we all get up every day and do the things we have to do. We continue to recognize that we are extraordinarily lucky. And yet, this is a dismal slog.

We've been spending a lot of time outside since the smoke siege, trying to store up some air and sunshine for the long winter ahead. There may not be enough air and sunshine.

 

* I can't even tell you how much time I've spend thinking about multi-day walks in Scotland and Wales. Days. Maybe weeks.

** Dog #7 is a people-loving 80-pounder with a massive (mastiff) head. He drools abundantly, gets "mouthy" (aka "bitey") when he's excited , and is really leash-reactive to other dogs, which means that if he sees another dog, he lunges to the end of the leash, and sometimes gets so worked up that he leaps and writhes like a fish, barking and snarling and actually frothing at the mouth, which given that he already looks scary in his resting state, must look like a nightmare to the poor people walking past. He may never get adopted...

Dogs, an update

 Dog #4 was adopted in August, and we were dog-free for a month. During that time, we had two overnight dogs. Dog #5 was a refugee from a California shelter who needed overnight accommodation before going to a rescue shelter in Portland. She was allegedly a Great Dane/Border Collie mix, and I adored her. She was like a baby giraffe with feathers. She was adopted out of the shelter the first moment she was available the following weekend, not by me.

Dog #6 was another subfoster, a stumpy charmer who lay down flat on his belly in a way that made me laugh every single time. 

Dog #7, our fourth official foster, will arrive this weekend. We set up the crate and got out the tick jar in preparation!

Well, the AIR is better

Finally, yesterday, the air cleared up. We opened ALL the windows and breathed a lot. Cook and Skipper both went running this morning for the first time in 8 days. Breathing is AMAZING.

 

Air quality

We live only in our house now. Our lives have been constrained for six months now, but looking back on those constraints, they barely seem meaningful. We went to the library to pick up books (couldn't go in or browse), we took walks with friends (couldn't get close to each other), we lay in the hammock in the yard. We biked to the grocery store to shop (wore a mask, stayed away from people). But now the west coast is on fire, and Portland is full of the ghosts of forests.  This is how it looked at 8:30 this morning out our window (except a lot yellower than the phone camera will accept). It's not fog, it's smoke.

The air quality has been terrible for nearly a week now, and the last few days it's been beyond terrible. We were not prepared for this - don't have air purifiers or the right kind of furnace filters, and only realized that we needed them after the stores were already sold out. We can stay inside with the windows shut, which is more than a lot of people can do right now, but that's all. We have headaches and sore throats and our lungs ache. I am so starved for fresh air that I dream about suffocating. There's nowhere we can go, because it's like this everywhere around us. 

It feels emotionally extra-difficult coming on top of months of quarantine - even the little things we could control before we can't control now. We can't control anything. We're just waiting inside our box for something to change. 

 

Well, we're suffocating in wildfire smoke over here. The sky has been yellow for days, air quality is bonkers bad, and it's starting to feel really suffocaty and oppressive, and probably this will have long-term health effects on our bodies. HOWEVER, we are not on fire. So - yay?

In other news, we're a week into remote school. That's not great, but we're muddling through. Skipper is finding it difficult to get back into Japanese in this context, and Duchess is trying to figure out how to successfully take a dance class remotely. Skipper was assigned to write a paragraph about what she wants to be when she grows up, and I helpfully suggested a bunch of post-apocalyptic jobs like "diviner" and "food scrounger" and "dowser."* I cried in a remote staff meeting last week.** Even Cook, perfectionist workaholic of the family, is finding it hard to just Do The Work.

However, Cook and I STILL HAVE JOBS.*** And only some of our coworkers and friends have had to evacuate their homes. And we still don't know anybody who's gotten a covid diagnosis. So - yay?

I don't know. I hope you're all well, or well-ish, or whatever we can hope for in these exceedingly bleak times. Practicing your dowsing, maybe? Hang in there.

* These are all apparently not words she knows how to write in Japanese, so I don't even know what she's been learning for the last six years.

**The check-in prompt was "how are you feeling about fall" so there was no hope that we were going to get through the meeting with a less than 25% weep-rate.

***My job, btw, is to make transportation policy that supports good climate and environmental health outcomes. I am not feeling very successful. My boss, who has been fighting for climate policy in Oregon for a decade, watched the Republican legislators walk out and shut down the legislative session this year to prevent climate legislation from passing, which meant that a bipartisan wildfire prevention bill, among many other bills, died without a vote. She's very angry and sad this week. 

 

End of summer

 We're wrapping up our summer with some time in Washington. We stayed a few days at a house on Mason Lake, alternating swimming, inept paddling, dozing, eating, playing video games, and watching movies. Cook and I made the girls eat Klondike bars and watch old movies so we could relive our childhood vacations. (This is what children are for, right?)

Went for a short hike at Big Creek. (Staircase is closed, so we'll have to come back another time...)