rant – Page 5 – The Hermits' Rest

You Can’t Un-Invent War

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

I saw this question and said, well, this is like going back in time and changing one thing, only to realize the consequences are horrible. Like the butterfly effect?

I first thought I’d un-invent guns. Then I thought that would be too complicated. What about hunting for food? But there are other ways to hunt. I don’t know. Maybe just un-invent automatic weapons and weapons of mass destruction.

Then I mused, well, we wouldn’t need those horrible things if there were no wars. If people lived together peacefully we’d not be fighting all the time.

We could just look at pretty horses. Ahh. I love watching Drew.

But people fight. It’s part of being human. And so much of civilization arose because of conflicts between groups of people. They lead to innovations, migrations, and of course heterozygous vigor. Maybe we’d be a very different species if it weren’t for these tendencies to want to eliminate “the other.” We aren’t alone. Other mammals, birds, insects, etc., do it.

People fight, and horses get annoyed. Drew is not pleased at how much work Tarrin made him do.

So. Screw it. I wouldn’t be able to make war not exist. And if our current weapons went away, we’d have something worse, or just go around poisoning each other. We may do that anyway, clever humans as we are.

I don’t like humans as a concept, I’m afraid. Or in real life, as a whole. I do like the urge to be kind, help each other, and create communities, which I hope is as strong as the urge to eliminate people unlike ourselves. We will see, maybe sooner rather than later.

My apologies that the blogs haven’t been very interesting this week. I’m lacking in writing inspiration. Tomorrow will be more interesting, I’m sure.

Drew had a hard afternoon. He was really scared by construction noise by the tack room when I tried to groom him. I ended up taking him to lessons early so he could relax a bit. It worked. He was only a little squirrelly for me, and Tarrin helped him stretch.

Daily Birds

It was a glorious and beautiful day today. Hard to believe it was 12° yesterday and 70° today. That’s Texas for you. I truly enjoyed standing in the woods surrounded by sparrows, chickadees, and titmice being their most cacophonous selves. Here’s to the tiny birds of the woodlands and their big voices!

The other bird is an intriguing mystery. Every time I go to Tarrin’s Merlin hears an Osprey. I don’t hear it, and I certainly haven’t seen it. I guess there are enough large ponds nearby to support one?

What I did see was this downy woodpecker.

Clutter, Not My Favorite Word

Where can you reduce clutter in your life?

I will first tell you where I want to reduce clutter: in my head. That goal is slowly coming to fruition as I discard guilt over past mistakes, sadness over lost lives and friends, my endless lists of rules I think I have to follow so my friends and family won’t desert me, etc. (Abandonment issues? Yes, thanks Mom.)

How to cope? Go out and watch deer when it’s 18°.

The last thing is still a big issue. I want to be considerate of others and respect their boundaries and wishes, but I don’t want to constantly second guess myself in deference to others. What topics do I avoid with Person X? Remember not to argue with Person Y! Never mention Person Z by name! It’s a balance. It’s definitely the reason I’m quieter now.

So, yup, I need to sweep out some mental clutter. It’s a good goal.

However. As for household clutter.

I’m not a minimalist. I enjoy having things to look at in my environment that I enjoy. Like I’ve mentioned before, some objects seem to carry a spirit somehow, of people who made them or gave them to me…they have meaning. So don’t tell me my house is full of clutter. I like it that way. If I want to live in a bland hotel I can go to a condo.

At least I keep the birds outside…except for my bird journal. Clutter.

That said, my house bothers me right now because there is mess. To me, mess is stuff with no purpose that is just sitting around waiting for someone to do something about it. There are boxes of yarn I can’t fit in my office closet because it needs to be rearranged to add shelves and such. There are two china hutches in the entryway, because I can’t move the big one so I can empty out the small one and trade things out. There are paintings and needlework that need to be hung. All this is from my Austin house and former office. IRS hard to consolidate.

I should just sleep outside. These guys do.

So I do need to rearrange things, remove what isn’t meaningful to me, and get the house back in order. Oh, and remove magazines that have been read so others can enjoy them.

But there will still be “clutter,” just organized into collections.

It’s too cold for daily birds, but I did see a lot of woodpeckers flying around today. After tonight, the Arctic air will head off and we will be back to more normal winter weather.

I’m still waiting for my yarn to arrive so I can do these extra cold days on the temperature blanket. Yes. Last year’s blanket is now “clutter” until I can attach the segments and photograph it. Soon!

What’s the Preferred Beverage of A**holes?

Wait. How do you define a**hole, Suna? Good question, Imaginary Reader!

I define it as someone who can’t wait to get home, where surely there’s a rubbish receptacle, to dispose of beverage containers, instead preferring to toss those containers gaily out of the window of their pickup truck along rural roads.

I wish Red Bull had given this can wings and flown it back in the vehicle.

I’m sure they think the cattle and horses will enjoy stomping on their cans and bottles, and the folks who mow the roadside (often their neighbors) don’t mind damage to their mower blades. No, no. I doubt there’s much thinking involved.

Heck, no one wants to inconvenience a rural jerk. It’s good exercise going down the road picking that stuff up. I should be grateful. But I’m not.

Mmm. Mow this and excellent sharp edges will magically appear.

In the last few weeks I’ve seen so many cans and bottles that I decided to document what my thoughtless neighbors deposited along Milam County Road 140 near Walkers Creek.

I can say that liquor is favored over water, energy drinks, or coffee, the other beverages I found. Oddly, there was only one soda can. Pibb.

There were two miniature Fireball bottles, but everything else was beer.

I’d have been more impressed by Hot Damn.

And I’m obligated to share that the most favorite beer of a**holes who are driving down my road with open containers of liquor is…

Congratulations to the folks at Budweiser! You encourage dangerous and thoughtless behavior in our area more than any other company! And congratulations to the runner up, Natural Light.

I’m glad the drinking and driving crowd are watching their weight. Not really.

The thing is that people drive down these roads hauling children, valuable livestock, and expensive farm equipment. The roads are narrow, poorly lit, and full of wildlife (a beautiful coyote crossed the road in front of us yesterday). It’s hard enough to drive safely sober. And that’s why I call the people who litter with their liquor containers bad names.

Now, I just posted that we should love our neighbors, with no exceptions. It’s true. I care about everyone out here and want them alive and their families safe. I don’t want to read their obituaries.

Daily Bird

There were a lot to choose from today, because I went up to the cemetery and back. I know I’ve probably chosen these before, but the red-shouldered hawks I saw up close made me very happy.

I also enjoyed a tree full of vultures drying off, a great egret with a duck, some bluebirds, and lots of sparrows and pipits.

I watched a downy woodpecker for a long time and saw an owl fly into a tree, but I couldn’t even get one of my blurry photos of them.

Instead, here’s Droodles looking majestic.

The birds made me feel better about all the litter. I’ll bring a trash bag one day next week.

This Is My Billboard

If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?

Love your neighbor.
No exceptions.
Suna

That’s my message. Maybe it’s a good one to counter the effects of today being Insurrection Day, the day I realized the country where I live is not going to last much longer.

But live in the moment. And love your neighbor anyway.

Is Someone Bothering You? Look in the Mirror to Learn Why

A quick note.

First, center yourself by meditating on the whorling shape of this red-stemmed stork’s-bill.

Okay, now read on.

Today someone who knows very well how to get under my defenses said something that I took as a passive aggressive swipe at me, the kind that on the surface seems innocuous enough, but stings. I mentioned it to my spouse, who said maybe they didn’t mean it that way. Maybe I was looking for a swipe.

I thought about it.

Then I remembered the time my neighbor cut me off for saying something mean to another neighbor that I hadn’t intended to be mean at all. I remembered the letter that our general contractor’s wife wrote to me about a set of issues she perceived in me (I’ve blotted them out of my mind). I remember the letter my ex-boyfriend wrote to tell me to stop writing him and bragging about buying a car and a house, etc. None of those things I intended the way they were interpreted. But their biases toward me were negative, so they interpreted my actions negatively.

Looking in the mirror of how people misunderstood me because they wanted to made me realize I might be doing the same. I’d learned this lesson before and have been tryingjj to interpret the person I’ve always known to be passive aggressive to me as if their intentions were good. I just fell into a decades-old pattern. I will now reset and do my best to go back to assuming good intentions, like I’ve always strived to.

Sometimes you just need a reminder to see that you’re falling off the path you want to follow. There are a couple of people in my life I’m going to work harder not to have a negative bias toward. That’s a resolution for the coming year that I can get behind.

How about you?

On that note, I’ll plod off into the sunset on my small but magnificent steed.

A Mood Blanket? In 2024?

One of my friends sent me a link to a Lion Brand pattern for a “mood blanket,” which they propose as an alternative to making a temperature blanket, like I’ve been making this year (in exciting news, it looks like the most frequent high and low temperature ranges are both shades of yellow – I made a spreadsheet). They have some cute suggestions, like charting your moods through pregnancy or other interesting times in your life.

My mind immediately went the other direction, for a couple of reasons. First, if you’ve ever read this blog you’d know I am moody. It’s one of my defining characteristics. Maybe I’m even proud of it? I don’t think just ten moods would fit me, and certainly not the generic ones they suggest (sick, mad, happy, neutral, loved, etc.). I need so many more. I need excited, calm, at one with nature (or a mood that corresponds to it), satisfied, depressed, confused…many more. It would be fun to think more about what my actual moods are, but they need to include anxious (there may be entire weeks of that one), grumpy, snappy, and irritated.

Maybe I’m as moody as a muddy creek reflecting clouds.

The other thing is that things aren’t exactly going in ways that make me comfortable right now. I’m afraid I might need some deep, dark colors to stand for “victim of a natural disaster” (red for fire, blue for flood/tornado),” “afraid for my life,” “despondent due to stock market/economy crash,” or “mourning because I lost another fundamental right.” If the blanket suddenly ended, well, you’d know it was either random gun violence or an insurrection.

Stop thinking about that! Look at these cute calves and their nanny.

So, I don’t think I’ll make a 2024 mood blanket. I don’t think I’m particularly looking forward to next year.

Let’s talk about birds. That’s a safer subject!

Today I added to my series of bird pairs (before I saw belted kingfishers, herons, and caracaras). Today it was red-tailed hawks. I really enjoyed watching this couple fly around, sit in a tree together, shriek a lot, and finally fly off.

They were my birds of the day, certainly, though the fox sparrow I heard and got to add to my life list on Merlin comes in a close second.

I was going to get some really good vulture photos, because they were helping take care of a dead opossum near our trailers, but as I tried to get there, Lee’s brother was throwing rocks at them and chased them away. Oh well, they were just about done getting rid of the meat on the carcass. I just didn’t want to touch it, so I was letting them help.

Apparently the vultures were bothering him.

When I Became a Parent

Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.

Maybe writing about the dim past will ease me back into writing.

When I saw this prompt, memories pushed themselves up from forgotten synapses and I remembered giving birth and the first day I became a parent. What a strange and incomprehensible new world it was for me.

I’ll gloss over the birth part, which involved my spouse barfing all over the place and having to go to the ER, leaving me to labor alone (no family or close friends nearby), then included every possible birth intervention I thought I’d never have, leading up to an unplanned cesarean due to my “incompetent” cervix. I never felt so powerless and out of control.

Then, after the anesthesiologist nearly paralyzed me (and I TOLD him I had a slight scoliosis), I was presented with a small person who used to live inside me. I felt like I already knew him.

Being a new parent who’d just been drugged up, I mostly remember smells from the hospital, from me, and from the baby. I’d never been hospitalized before, and it was a smelly experience.

I fell asleep after the lengthy labor and being surgerized at 6 am, and they took the dang baby away from me. When I woke up, not only did I have to listen to some woman with no pain tolerance screeching about needing more IV meds, but there was no baby. How the heck was I supposed to get colostrum in him?

Well, I could tolerate pain. And I figured out how to drag my IV with me and went to find my damn baby. I’m sure that was a lovely sight. Too bad.

I found the nursery about the time some nurse ran up and said I shouldn’t have walked unaccompanied. But no one was paying me any attention at all thanks to Old Screechy and I wanted my child.

That got me the child, who I would not put down henceforth except to hand him to my spouse. He was in charge of diaper changes, which also came with new smells. I can smell breasted baby poop right now. Neither of us had ever changed a diaper before. All new to us.

I left that place as fast as I could and vowed to do everything possible to avoid getting cut open like that again, surrounded by people who just wanted me to hurry up before the shift changed. (Didn’t work out, but I sure tried.)

One photo. Me immediately upon coming home, with newborn.

That birth experience was the first time I felt like my body failed me. I asked it to do something, breathed like a yogini, and did everything right, but I got the surgery anyway. I’ve always said I’m grateful to La Leche League for helping me succeed at breastfeeding after it taking 5 days to get my milk in and having babies who had to learn to open their mouths. It was healing to know my body could do something I asked it to do, after all.

This may have been garbled. I’m having some internal weirdness going on after being around a lot of negativity. Not the fault of anyone in my immediate family!

Daily Bird

There weren’t enough birds around to pick one! It was a dreary day with morning drizzle. I heard no birds this morning and only five when I tried again in late evening. Even the owl was quiet. Even the house sparrows were quiet! Gads! The loudest bird was the kingfisher, so I salute that bird for being out and about no matter what.

One Thing I Would Like to Change

What is one thing you would change about yourself?

If you’ve read more than a few posts on this here blog you know that this crone has a long list of things she’d like to change about herself, and that she at least says she’s working on them.

Today’s birds are white-crowned sparrows in a tree. They sang and sang.

So, what’s one thing I’d like to change about myself? Today I nominate my persistent and unwavering drive toward conflict and avoidance. I’d love to stop apologizing all the time and learn to take up for myself, whether it pisses people off and makes them dislike me or not.

The end.

Oh, Peeves, There Are So Many

Name your top three pet peeves.

Yet, more than once in my life I’ve been called elitist for mentioning some of my peeves. After all, educated folks who know and use standard English are looked at as suspiciously progressive or something.

I won’t put the Latin name for this common buckeye so I’ll seem less snooty.

I’m all for creative use of language, am well aware that language changes constantly. So I am fine with observing new language, even if I never call u bae.

And I don’t even know ow which checkered butterfly this is.

So my peeves are mostly language usage. Not New language, just wrong stuff. Other than number 3 below.

1. Please use the contraction “you’re” when you are shortening “you are.” It’s easy. The word “your” refers to something of yours. Like your ability to spell words even when you’re using autocorrect.

I hope this peevish list doesn’t make me look like one of these.

2. Speaking of apostrophes, (a word with no apostrophes in it, by the way), they aren’t like garnish on top of salads that you sprinkle wherever they look cute. You do not pluralize nouns by adding ‘s. Nope. If there’s more than one item, you add a plain letter “s” unless the word ends in an s or z sound. The. You add “es” with no apostrophe. Even people’s NAMES are pluralized that way! Lee and I are Kendalls and Brunses. Now if we own something? Stick an apostrophe in there! Ms. Kendall’s pet peeves are a great example.

3. Ooh, ooh! I have another one to add to my apoplectic elitist frenzy of prescriptivism! There is a recent trend to take perfectly innocent nouns and make them into some kind of cutesy verbs. Like:

What are you gifting this year? It’s the time of year to gift and gift some more!
What’s your favorite way to morning? Coffee, of course.
It’s time to football!

I think it started with things like weekending and breakfasting and has just kept spreading.

4. It’s versus its. At least this one’s harder. But in this one case, the apostrophe is only for smooshing two words together and not for possession. So I get it that it’s hard to get its nuances.

Enough of that. Today was a fine day with much sunshine, pleasant coolness, and many butterflies. As you can see, I got a few photos, but I saw many more, plus a caterpillar I can’t identify.

Daily Bird

Today, since it was sunny and not very windy, there were lots of birds to enjoy. I counted eight types of sparrows! But the bird I enjoyed the most was the hermit thrush. It’s hard to resist a bird who shares a name with your ranch.

Today’s thrush was skulking in the big brush pile that was created last year in the woods, and it was chupping up a storm. it even drowned out a very vocal wren. I saw it a couple of times, but like the pipits, it looks a lot like a little brown bird that’s hard to distinguish without binoculars. I’m glad I know what it sounds like.

I have to admit that once again I heard a cool “bird,” then sheepishly remembered we do have a few squirrels out here.

In Three Years?

What will your life be like in three years?

I’m pessimistic about life in three years, and it creeps into my nightmares.

I will probably stop working in Corporate America by then. I hope there’s still Social Security.

I’m three years I’ll still find tiny baby insects cute.

We may have to go somewhere we feel safer. Texas elected officials make policies that worry me, as someone who’s not an evangelical Christian white guy.

I’m not sure there will be places not run by extremist dictators in three years to go to.

And it will be hot and dry.

Hope I can still have horses. Though at the moment mine are getting on my last nerve. I’m addition to each being covered by burs, there’s this.

Drew broke the water line to the trough. It flew 20 feet. Drew then thought it was a snake and huffed at it.

All the people turning on each other with intolerance and cruelty messes with my mind. I think that’s actually a reasonable response.

Oh, I’ll probably just keep trying to be kind and work for peace in my own way. Mother Nature will still be here. Love will be here. They both may just be harder to find.