Seeds

All is not doom and gloom, however – far from it. I'm enjoying all the fall things there are to do around here. Over the weekend we cleared out most of our summer garden and got the space ready for fall plantings, which will be carried out over the course of this week.

One of my favorite things to do when we clear the garden is to save seeds of all the things that were successful, to try again next year. Sometimes the plant that results bears little resemblance to the parent, but it's usually still good and always interesting, and even if it wasn't what I expected, I've still never been disappointed.

Some of the plants I'm saving seeds from this year: black sunflowers, sweet peas (four kinds), nasturtiums (two kinds), marigolds, winter squash, various melons, pole beans, peppers and basil. The basil seeds are especially fun to do, because they're so small and so intimately attached to their plants that you have to really get in there with your hands and fingers to get them out. I've ended up with a lot this year, about two tablespoons of seed, from three varieties: plain sweet Italian, a small-leafed Thai basil that a friend gave me for my birthday, and a beautiful purple one that I've never tried to grow from seed before.

There's also the ginormous tomato we tried on the recommendation of a friend. Mortgage Lifter, it's called. We put it in a standard 3-foot tomato cage and realized before a month had passed that we had deeply underestimated the size and vigor of this plant. It's easily the largest one I've ever grown, a full 8 feet across as it sprawled all over creation looking for support. The fruit is also large, tends to split (at least ours did), sweet-tasting with not much acidity, and super dense. None of those big open cavities full of seeds with this one – every slice is almost completely solid tomato, dark purplish-red and glistening with flavors ... Definitely one to try again, and since it's an heirloom and not a hybrid I'm hoping we'll get the same plant next year, for a change.

For fall we're not planning anything fancy: just some greens, garlic, onions, fava beans, Brussels sprouts, cauliflowers and cabbages, even though I've never had much luck with anything cruciferous, as the aphids seem to love them even more than I do. But it's been awhile since I've tried them, and I'm excited to try again.

As much as I've been complaining lately (if not here, then at least in my heart — a bad habit I need to replace with a better one – gratitude, for example), I have to say that one blessing of being underworked this year has been just having the flexibility to spend time around the house at times when normally I would be chained to my desk at work. I still take about 40 minutes for breakfast every morning, which I never used to do, and I actually cook myself something good and eat it outside all year round, unless it's really pouring.

This morning I also had time to spend working on some of those seeds, straightening up inside and outside, running a load of laundry, and then – at about 9:40 a.m., knowing I had to be at work by noon, I looked at a row of pears sitting on the windowsill and realized if I got right down to it I would still have time to make a little batch of pear-ginger butter as a surprise for Mr. A, who has heard all kinds of wistful stories about of my semi-prowess as an aspiring Depression-era farm wife (a la Olivia Walton, for example), but so far seen little evidence of it.

The pears are from our tree, and they are delicious. Because there were only four of them left (the tree itself is sort of a naturalized bonsai at only just about seven feet tall, and leads a rather rough and rugged existence out at the edge of the field where birds planted it), I ran out and picked two apples off our eastern-most apple tree, the one that is about to split all the way in half any day now but whose fruit is so crisp and sweet and tart I'm glad it's lasted long enough to contribute a few pieces to this combination.

I peeled them all but one (I like just a little bit of that gritty pear texture in there) and sliced them up, and then put in a totally exorbitant amount of fresh ginger and a little honey from the bees I kept at the community garden two years ago, and also a splash of brandy that Mr. A's friend gave us last Christmas, and it's all bubbling away on the stove right now and it makes me so happy to know that I've actually achieved almost everything I set out to do in my life so far, at least in terms of the day-to-day. I've enumerated these blessings plenty of times here already and don't have time to do so again, but I will be giving thanks for them and thinking of ways to share them on my ride to work in a few minutes – on this perfect gold and blue fall day that I'm so happy to be here for.

P.S. If anyone would like seeds for any of those things I mentioned, let me know in comments or email tina at tinarama.com. There's plenty.

More numbers

Last night on my way home from work I stopped at the pharmacy to pick up the last prescription refills that will be paid for by my insurance. I asked the pharmacist how much they would've been if I were paying for them out-of-pocket and found out it's even more than I thought. Today, I paid $45. If I refill the same prescriptions next month, it will cost me a whopping $385. That's more than an 800% increase, folks.

An eight HUNDRED percent increase.

The most expensive part of that by far is the test strips for my meter, which I'm pretty sure I can find online for less than the pharmacy charges. How often to test is a matter of much debate in the T2 community, but I like to test at least three or four times a day, or even more than that if something unusual is going on (new food, I get sick, etc.). With my current insurance, it's been costing me about 7 cents per test; with the new insurance, it will be anywhere between about 65 cents and $1.50 per test.

The result, of course, is that I'll be cutting way back on my testing. If I scale back to just one test a day I can make this latest refill last through the end of the year, and then the next time I buy them, at least the cost will go toward my deductible. For me, this is probably okay. For someone who needs to test a lot to keep from crashing and dying, it could be a real hardship.

All I keep thinking is, I'm so glad I'm not really sick! Although I guess if I were, that's about the only time I would get anything out of this new insurance .... Or at least that's what they've told us. Hopefully I will remain lucky enough never to have to jump through those particular hoops.

In other news, I have a new nephew, born yesterday. No name yet but I saw the pictures and he is, as you would expect, adorable. I'll meet him in October when I go back to Utah for my dad's 70th birthday party.

An enormous beret

Well, I've kept my eyes peeled all week and have not seen anyone to inspire a fashion photo this week, so instead I offer this: the biggest beret I've ever seen, perched atop a big hairdo I suspect is pretty fancy once she takes the hat off.

Soon it will be chilly and cold again – beret weather – and I am so ready. I had a meeting halfway up the mountain this morning, followed by work, followed by shopping and a party on the opposite side of the valley and finally a long ride back to the base of the mountain (home) in the dark – a good 20 miles by the end of the day, and most of it was hot as hell. I actually set a personal record for most sponge baths taken in public restrooms in a single day. There's definitely an art to getting clean in one of those places without actually touching anything – a critical skill because who knows who's been in there, you know, Touching Things.

Except the restroom at my office, in which case I know exactly who's been in there. Not that that makes me feel any better.

Anyway – I had a good time at the party and even allowed myself to have one bite of an exceptionally fudgy brownie, knowing I would work off at least a few of the carbs during my half-hour ride home. I also had six 1.5" square crackers with pâté, a big plate of salad and about a half a glass of white wine. I'll be curious to see what my blood sugar is like in the morning.

Six point one

That's my new A1C. I had the blood drawn for labs on Monday and actually rode over to the hospital during lunch today to get the results in person – couldn't wait til my doctor's appointment next week to find out.

This is not a terrible number, but it's not great, either. It isn't as good as the last one, which was 5.7. It depends on what chart you look at, but according to MY lab (every lab is a little different), an A1C of 6.1 corresponds to an average blood glucose over the last three months of around 126 mg/dL. The number appears with a little "H" next to it on the lab report, indicating this number is "high." Yeah, I know! I get it! I'm a fat pig and a lazy ass and I'm killing my pancreas with miniature toast triangles and tiny little teaspoonfuls of ice cream.

I may be exaggerating a bit there. Then again, maybe not. Prolonged exposure to blood glucose over about 120 mg/dL destroys the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas (not to mention doing damage all throughout the body), so an average of 126* definitely requires taking some action. I'm just hoping it's gone up because I've been slacking off, and not because my pancreas is actually losing its ability to make insulin. I'm not ready to start taking injections yet.

Well, one crisis at a time. Not that this even exactly constitutes a crisis; maybe just a red flag. Or even a yellow one. In any case, the plan for now is to knuckle back down and see if I can get it back into the low 5's again by the end of the year when I can re-test.

* People on a forum I post to have assured me this is not necessarily as bad as it sounds – a brief but very high spike after eating something particularly carby can skew your average somewhat, etc. Still, I'm willing to forego the occasional hash browns and greasy-spoon breakfast if it means I get to keep my feet when I'm old.

Forgiveness is a form of generosity

I just heard someone say that on a podcast I'm listening to, and am writing it down because I want to remember to share that thought with someone I know who suffers a lot from a lack of ability to forgive. This person has a saying, "There IS no forgiveness," reflecting a deep belief that ... well, I'm not sure I really understand what is meant by that sentence. It's not how I see the world.

The person who says it is also in many ways one of the most generous and kind people I know, and it just occurred to me that this could be why this one particular belief causes so much pain – because it's so starkly in conflict with the person's real heart of hearts.

Another friend always reminds me that when you want to make a change, nothing will happen if you postpone acting differently until you "feel like it." You act first, and over time, your feelings change. I've found this to be true, for myself.

It's easy to see how this would work if you're trying to change a physical habit, like quitting smoking. You just have to stop doing it, whether you feel like it or not. Eventually you won't feel like smoking anymore (at least, not like at first). But how do you change a habit that happens only in the mind? Like the habit of believing there is no forgiveness?

What actions can a person take, to give some kind of physical reality to a belief (or desire to believe) in forgiveness?

Also, forgot to mention

Because of all the upcoming changes in my insurance, I've been going to a lot of doctor's appointments lately. At the end of this month we go from a $20 copay to a $2000 deductible per calendar year ... which basically means all I have now is "catastrophic" coverage – all of my usual healthcare expenses will now be paid out of pocket. Kind of a ripoff, but under the circumstances I'm just glad to have any kind of coverage at all.

Anyway, I just wanted to record the fact that in the last couple of weeks I've seen the dentist, podiatrist, ophthalmologist and dermatologist for complete checkups and screenings, and have been given a clean bill of health (although the dour hygienist at my dentist's office always scolds me for not going in more often, which I hate – both the going in, and the scolding). So that's good. My feet show no signs of nerve damage, my eyes are exactly the same as a year ago (also good), and I have no periodontal disease, suspicious moles, or any other signs of imminent decay. Good to know.

The last appointment before my coverage is dropped will be with my regular doctor, a week from Monday. That means that THIS Monday I have to go to the lab and have all my blood work done again, so we can review it at my appointment. I really should have done this at the beginning of the summer but I spent the whole spring dealing with panic attacks and was afraid to find out what all that adrenaline and cortisol had done to my blood sugar, so decided to give myself a couple more months to try to get it back down again, in order to not have a higher A1C on my chart again.

Thinking of this just now I'm realizing how silly that was, putting it off. If I hadn't been so anxious and freaked out maybe I would have realized that that was actually a GREAT time to have an A1C done, because then I would be able to know what that kind of stress really does to my blood, instead of just guessing. Plus, if I'd done it in June, I could still have had another one now.

It's funny to see how easily I can still slip into that trap of wanting to look away from the things I'm afraid of, despite all my soapboxing about how important it is to always face up to the Truth, no matter how scary. The result is that now instead of having about eight months worth of information about what my blood has been doing, I will have only three months. I won't be able to find out what really happens when that anxiety hits, until three months after it's happened again.

Which hopefully it won't. I always hope I'll never have to deal with it again, even though I know that's probably not very realistic. I was actually thinking this week about some of the things I've done over the last six months or so to avoid having to interact with people, and it suddenly became clear that I'm still not quite over this latest hurdle. So I'm doing some things now to try and address that.

One thing I've done is started being a little more active again on some of the diabetes forums that helped me so much when I was first diagnosed. In fact, I even outed this blog on one of them today – in a very unassuming (I hope) way, not really promoting it, but putting a link and a brief explanation on my profile page so people can find it if they want to read about my "excellent diabetes adventure."

Why would I do that, when it's so important to me to stay anonymous and not make waves or draw attention to myself, especially among people I don't really know? Part of it is because I know I really need to stop indulging every single urge I have to hide, and make an effort to engage more every once in awhile. A more important part is because I started reading posts from people who have just found out they're diabetic, and started remembering how I felt and what I did at the very beginning, and I thought it really might be helpful or reassuring for some of those people to be able to read about my experience. So I just put it out there.

Now time for bed. There is a full pint of banana split Häagen-Dazs® in the freezer and if I don't get out of here right now I might do something I will regret.

Rim of light

Another picture of my new favorite thing, this one taken from the plane last week. I'm assembling quite the collection of these, these days. Here's one of the horizon over my road, heading toward my house the other night:



If you look just left of the middle and blur your eyes a bit, you'll see the reason I took this shot: there was a cloud formation hovering there that looked just like a big beautiful pink and white bird. It was fun to ride up the road looking at that.

Here's a shot of what I did this morning: stacked about two cords of firewood.



It's sort of back-breaking work but at least I didn't have to load and unload the truck – Mr. A and his brother did that part. This is from that down white oak and other wood Mr. A salvaged a couple years ago, when we rented that log splitter. It's totally dry now and ready to burn, which is a very satisfying feeling. One of these days we'll need to split and stack the wood from the dead 50-foot Monterey pine we took down last winter, as well as a 20-foot madrone (also dead) that came down today. This is not even to mention the additional woodpiles in several other locations around the lot ... which I would love to someday consolidate.

Realistically though, I'd rather tidy up (and eliminate) the multiple piles by burning through them than by moving them – so it's good we finally got the stove installed. I can't wait to start using it.

P.S. The sharpest-eyed among my loyal fans may notice that this header has been recycled from a previous fall. One of these days I'll do a new one for this year but until I get around to it – what can I say, I just love those persimmons!

P.S.2. Urgh – looking at the picture of that woodpile I'm seeing a few sticks I want to reposition. Next time we do the splitting I'll need to make extra-sure we don't end up with so many weird-shaped pieces (like anyone reading this cares if my wood pile is less than 100% perfect – whatever THAT is!).

A disturbing scene

They were driving in a truck – he was driving, it was an old-fashioned English truck and she turned her head to the right to look at him. His white enormous hands on the wheel, ten and two. Eyebrows raised, fat stub of cigar clenched in his teeth (just from the habit – not lit), lips pulled back. At one time his hair had been nice but not on this day; it was thin and dry, bristly. His skin looked bad, too.

"Still dead then, are you?" she said.

"Oh yeah," he said, talking around the cigar, and opened his jaws to laugh. The cigar fell out and she saw the pale putty-colored roof of his mouth. "I've been dead a loooong time."

Just then the truck went over a deep pothole in the dusty road. They were bounced against the low ceiling of the cab and thrown back into their seats. That was when she woke up.

And knew he didn't love her anymore.
________

I don't know just what this dream is about but it's stayed with me all day. The man in the dream was my old buddy-slash-antagonist Jack, who died a few months ago – someone I never had anything like that kind of relationship with when he was alive.

Usually when someone appears in an obviously symbolic role in some dream, it's pretty clear to me what they represent. This one, I will have to think about.

It started raining this afternoon, the first real rain in months. I know it won't last but I'm enjoying it, washing all the dust away.

Somebody who looks like somebody

I saw this gal in the Las Vegas airport at the end of a day of switching back and forth between CNN coverage of the latest economic crisis, and an MTV so-called reality show about Paris Hilton's search for a new BFF.

This was the first press check I've done where I sort of started to feel like it was more work than fun – although I did have some fun, met up with my two aunts for dinner at the hotel restaurant the night before, and always enjoy my time sitting in the clients' guest lounge with a giant flat-screen TV, big comfortable leather chairs and an endless supply of diet Coke.

Anyway – this is my fashion offering for this week. She does sort of look like ... someone ... maybe just a little?

In other news, as of this week it's now cold at night and feeling very distinctly like fall during the day. I love it. We're going to rip out the last of our garden tomorrow (except for the black sunflowers, which are still doing great) and start putting in our winter plantings. Garlic, onions, leeks, spinach, more lettuce of course ... I can't wait to start eating from the garden again. Speaking of which, we'll also be harvesting several beautiful hard squashes to save for the winter, grown from my parents' seeds of a variety that has been one of my all-time favorite things to eat since I was a kid.

Fall and winter food is something I look forward to every year at this time ... and as soon as it's rained enough to really wet things down – hopefully within the next month or so – we'll be able to start using our new wood stove. This will be my first winter since 1997 that I'll be heating exclusively with wood. Different fuel sources make different-feeling heat, and I'm especially partial to the feel of heat that comes from wood. Plus it's so cozy to sit in front of the stove and watch the fire.

Now off to the farmer's market in search of something fresh and good for lunch.

World Diabetes Day: Nov. 14

I'm just loading this graphic here until I have time to add it to my sidebar. Find out more about the campaign here.

Being diabetic is kind of kicking my ass right now and I would love to think there might be a way to fix it someday – preferably soon!

P.S. Since I'm on the topic, here's something funny: Beet the Beetis! Or maybe it's only funny to diabetics. The star of the game, in case you're not familiar, is the infamous Wilford Brimley. You know – the diabeetus guy. Pay attention around :36, when he does a crazy little dance in front of the fireplace:



Gotta love this guy ... he has the 'beetis, and still eats oatmeal every day!

Everything's tight on this one

She looked so young to have been wearing such a tight facelift! But maybe she wasn't as young as I thought; hard to tell, with such surgery. It seems my Friday fashion photography is becoming limited to stealth snaps of tourists; they're the only ones usually wearing anything interesting enough to notice. And in fact this outfit isn't even all that interesting; it's just the most unusual thing I saw all night. Oh well – there's always next week!


Here is another dusk image from the skyline series of camera phone pictures I've been collecting. I've realized that this is my favorite time of day right now – those few minutes where you think it's finally gotten too dark to see, but then you look at the horizon and realize there's still just a thin rim of light still shining up from beyond the curve of the planet. I love watching that light disappear – and then there's another few minutes after that, as your eyes adjust to the dark, when you can start to see that there's actually a lot still visible in the darkness, as well.

This brings to mind one of my favorite poems:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

I love taking Tater on long walks at night, in dark places – like our road, which has no artificial lighting except people's porch lights, few and far between. In contrast to the daytime, when I never know who might be watching me, at night I feel safe and protected. I suppose in a way it's like a child who covers her eyes and says, "Now you can't see me!" But I feel comforted by the darkness all the same.

It's funny I should come around to feeling this way. As a child I was terrified of the dark. I remember making my parents promise to leave the hall light on, and to make sure I was sound asleep before they went to bed.


I also went to a bike festival last weekend. The turnout was fairly small, but I saw a lot of friends and some very cool bikes, and got to test-ride several different weird new concept bikes including my first-ever recumbent and a semi-recumbent three-wheeler built like a scaled down La-Z-Boy recliner.


This guy was my favorite thing all day. I love this contraption for carrying a large dog – or any other cargo – on the back of a bike, using the tray from an old metal wheel barrow. I wanted to ask him to stop so I could see how he attached it to the bike, but he never slowed down, just kept riding up and down the venue with the dog in the back, and I was too shy to try to flag him down.

Food fight followup

Just wanted to report that the injury to the Jeeps's nose is not nearly as bad as the blood caused me to believe. It's sort of like biting your tongue, I think – even a small cut just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. But Mr. A didn't even notice the wound, and in fact by this morning I could hardly see it myself.

I did still tell him about what happened, though, and we decided that feeding them in totally separate rooms is probably not really necessary as long as we stand firm in watching them the whole time they're eating, and pick up the bowls as soon as they're finished.

I called it a food fight, but I think "fight" is the wrong word. To me, "fighting" implies that they're both engaged in an ongoing, violent struggle, and both trying to win, and that isn't what happens. None of these incidents has ever lasted more than one or two seconds, and this was only maybe the fourth or fifth one in five years. Basically, all that happens is that the Jeeps tries to steal or in some other way shows what Tater believes to be inordinate interest in some food item that Tater considers his, and Tater makes a show of flashing teeth to chase the Jeeps away, and the Jeeps backs down. It's not fighting, and it isn't even really what I would call an "attack." It's just one dog defending his food from another. All dogs do that. Jeepies, too – although Tater has never been so presumptuous as to approach the Jeeps when he's eating.

If it sounds like I'm trying to minimize what happened ... well, I don't know if I'd say that. I'm just trying to see it for what it was. The blood scared me, but I don't think it means we have a vicious dog on our hands. Clearly not. We just need to do a better job of controlling their access to food.

Food fight

Something happened tonight that's never happened before – the dogs got into a fight over food, and blood was shed.

I'm not sure exactly how it started, even though I was standing right there when it happened, but from what I saw it looked like both dogs had wandered away from their bowls and Jeepers was trying to check out the remains of Tater's meal, and when Tater saw that he decided he wasn't done eating after all.

I was standing at the counter eating my own dinner when I heard them scream, and when I turned around they were both on the floor and Tater was trying to get the Jeeps in a headlock. I took a step toward them and said (did not yell), "Tater!" and he backed off right away, so it wasn't an all-out ferocious attack or even what I would call a serious fight ... But then I saw the blood and realized that he had chomped a little fang-sized notch out of the middle of the Jeeps's nose.

Mr. A is not going to be happy about this when he gets home. He gets very upset when there's any tension at all between the dogs. Usually I can kind of take it in stride as just the way dogs work thing out, but this one has kind of upset me too. The Jeeps is so old and frail – he really can't afford to be getting wailed on by a bigger, stronger dog. And what was he doing on that side of the kitchen anyway? His own bowl was still full of food! Did he think there might be something better in Tater's bowl?

And I know it's just in a dog's nature to protect their food, and that it's my responsibility (not theirs) to make sure this kind of thing does not happen – but I still wish Tater could just chill the hell out about stuff like that. It wasn't like he wasn't going to get to eat! There's always plenty of food for everyone. And he wasn't even interested in his food tonight in the first place! He'd walked away from his bowl – that was why the Jeeps thought it was okay to take a sniff.

So I guess the time has come to start feeding them totally separately – not just on opposite ends of the kitchen, as we've been doing for as long as we've all lived together, but physically separated into different rooms where they can't see each other. No more wandering over to see what the other dog might have left behind when dinner's done ... they'll each have a given amount of time to eat, after which the bowls will be picked up and put away until the next meal. Not left empty on the floor anymore to drop an occasional treat into – too bad for them, but it just doesn't seem worth the risk.

It seems like kind of a hassle to have to make such a production out of it every time they eat but I've been reading about food aggression online all night and now I'm thinking maybe we're lucky nothing like this has happened before. All the major dog people recommend dogs should never be put in the position of even thinking they might have to defend their food against another dog – you're supposed to feed them separately just as a matter of course, even if they've never fought over food before.

Anyway. The Jeeps's nose bled a lot, as those kinds of wounds always do, but it isn't a deep cut and I hope if I keep it clean it will heal quickly. I keep looking at it to see how bad it really is ... it might be possible that Mr. A would not notice the injury, and I would never have to tell him what happened.

I really wish I didn't have to tell him. Mostly because I feel like the whole thing was pretty much my fault. It would never have happened if I'd been paying attention to them as I should have been doing. But my shame as a negligent dog guardian has to take a back seat to his need to know, because we're both going to have to be even more structured and vigilant about their food from now on.

I'm also starting to think maybe we shouldn't get another dog when the Jeeps finally goes. Some dogs, they say, are better suited to be the only dog in the house; maybe Tater is one of those dogs. I hate to think of him all alone all day while we're both at work, but I also hate to think of more blood on the floor, or coming home to a dead puppy. That happened with some friends of mine about 12 years ago and it was way beyond awful. I don't want any of us to have to deal with that kind of stress and horror.

A couple of hours have passed since "the incident" and neither of the dogs seems fazed at all. Amazing.

A beautiful late summer night

My old friend Beautiful Hands Man invited me to come see him play in a little jazz duo tonight. He and my other friend E. were going to be opening for a slightly famous guitar act that would be performing later in the hotel lounge.

Normally I like nothing more on a Friday night than to take a long, leisurely ride home, share a little dinner with Mr. A and spend the rest of the weekend more or less hibernating. Beautiful Hands Man is an old friend whom I've been woefully neglecting of late, though, and I've also been complaining lately that I never go out and do anything anymore ... so I decided to go. Miraculously and to his great credit, Mr. A agreed to join me. He is typically even more exhausted by the end of the week than I am, so it's always a treat when he feels up to an evening on the town. He's so funny and smart and fun to go out with .... and I enjoy remembering that.

So we sat in the hotel bar, drank some wine, chatted with friends – there ended up being far more familiar faces in the room than I would have expected – and then walked across the road to have dinner at a different restaurant. Eggplant and lamb, plus a caesar salad, plus tomatoes and garlic. Yrmm.

When we came out of the restuaurant the sun had gone down and most of the day's heat had dissipated. It was still warm and the air was very soft. No traffic – it was that time of the night when it's too late for dinner people, and most of the wedding parties are still just getting under way. It would be hours before the roads began to fill with drunken tourists trying to find their way back to their rooms.

So partly because I wanted to work off some of the carbs I had just eaten (imagining numbers starting with 2 or even 3 in an hour or so), and partly because it was just such a perfect, beautiful, soft summer night, I decided to ride home instead of going in the car with Mr. A. We got my bike back out of the car and I strapped on my helmet. "See you at home," we said.

I never know what to say when I'm overwhelmed with the urge to wax rhapsodic about all of the various and sundry beautiful experiences I've had in this amazing place. I'm not good with that kind of language. And anyway, the experience is the main thing – not the talking about it. Still, isn't that what art is for? There's something in me, in the light of a night like this, that wants to be able to share the way that feels.

Not that I'm making any claims here upon the designation of this writing as "art." I do think of myself as an artist, but not that kind.

Anyway. I felt good while I was riding home under the sky, watched by the zillion stars. I still feel good, remembering it.

Getting back down to earth for a moment: As I was riding along the road out of town, along the base of a long row of redwood trees, I happened to look up and notice the lights of a jet flying far above at what appeared to be a very great speed. It really struck me as I watched it disappear behind the branches: What an extremely improbable way to get from one place to another. Here was ME, a human-sized person creeping smaller than an ant across the ponderous and interminable skin of the earth. A simple six- or seven-mile ride would take me a half-hour or more to do. Meanwhile, high above the surface I am circumscribing, a hundred people just like me are hurtling through the atmosphere at speeds so far beyond the human scale as to scarcely be believable (here I am speaking in the style of a certain author I've been reading this summer).

The desire is the same. To get from one place to another.

Somehow I think (and I'm aware I'm not the first to have this thought) that a lot of new questions were born the day humans gained the ability to transcend the limits of one's own body. Flying in airplanes, talking on the telephone, using a computer – even a bicycle – most of the people who have ever lived have had no concept of that kind of experience. I'm sure though that even a half a million years ago the drive to Move was the same. Clearly it must have been.

People are curious. We like to watch the sky at night.

Someday I would like to live someplace where the sky is completely quiet of human noise. I remember such great silences from where I grew up, in Northern Idaho, all night long in the lingering summers. I used to like to sleep outside on the deck when it was warm. I would fall asleep staring at the stars, and then by 3 or 4 a.m. it would be light enough to wake me up. I'd pick up my blanket and pillow and go back in to my bed to sleep until morning. The pillowcase felt cool and fresh from being outside in the dew.

This has been a good summer. And I'm enjoying the slow turn into fall. I love it when the seasons change. It's going to be a good fall, too.

Re-fashion: an amazing trick

I love to dye things, and over the years I've found out that certain dyes work way better than others. Even within one brand, some colors work great, and others, not so much. For instance, black and brown are always tricky – on any natural fiber except wool or cashmere, they tend to end up way too red. Still, I dye a lot of things brown. It's one of my favorite colors.

So I have this dress I made several years ago out of yellow flowered cotton that I dyed with Rit cocoa brown. It looked great for awhile but over time the color has faded until the dress was a weird almost mauve-ish shade. I kept thinking I would just dye it again with a different brown – one of these years I want to use the walnut hulls from our tree, since I know they stain everything they touch – but so far I hadn't gotten around to doing it. It's gone sort of limp and baggy with washing, so I don't wear it anymore except around the house. On the other hand I was not ready to put it in the rag bag yet, either.

So I went to the art store to pick up some new dye and happened to notice a product I'd seen before but never considered: "color remover." Interesting! What if instead of being forced to overdye the dress a different and darker shade of brown, I was able to remove the dye I'd already put on it, and start over from scratch? I didn't really expect it to work, but figured it was worth an experiment.

The results amazed me. It really did remove pretty much all of the dye! It's no longer a faded purplish-brown, but a warm, buttery yellow with pale peach and brown flowers. The original colors were not damaged or changed at all. I'm wearing it right now and it's almost like having a brand new dress. Cool!

Except for the dark brown thread, and the fact that I don't do much yellow, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Probably I'll wear it this way for awhile and then dye it some other color. Maybe orange – or green! As for the thread, it's not worth it to me to take it all apart and sew it up again with a different color, but I might go over some of the more visible seams with some embroidery or decorative machine stitching. That could be fun.