4:44am

That is not the time I had my alarm set for this morning but that's the time I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep.  Arrrgh!  I could have slept for another hour and fifteen minutes, but, no, I got up to use the bathroom, looked at the clock, and could feel my brain kicking in.  Don't get me wrong, I laid in bed until 6 o'clock just in case the Sandman decided to swing by for a short visit, he didn't.  Why does my brain do stuff like that to me?  Why?



I've been meaning to show this to you for more than a week but I forget until I've published the blog post and turned off the computer.  It's a Nuthatch.  For once it stayed at the edge of the feeder just long enough for me to take its picture.  It isn't a fancy bird but it's a fast one so I'm extra glad to have gotten this shot--in focus too.

Oh, bad news.  This morning a hawk swooped down to try to nab one of three squirrels raiding the peanut wreath (it missed) and when I went out to see if it had landed someplace where I could see it I noticed this.  It's one of the rat holes reopened.  The other one by the corner of the shed is reopened too.  Double arrgh!  I have a new plan.  I'm going to fill a couple Dixie cups with rat poison pellets, then melt some bacon grease (I have a canister of it in the fridge), pour the melted grease over the pellets, and make a couple rat poison pellet pucks to drop down the holes.  I might melt in some Nutella to sweeten the deal too.



In the "kinda creepy" department, this was the entry hall to my hotel room in Gurnee, IL last Tuesday night.  I have no earthly idea why there was a twenty-foot-long hall to get into the bedroom but there was. And the bathroom door was just to the left of the edge of the frame so it wasn't that.  I've been puzzling over it and can't figure it out.  Not that it's such a gripping mystery but it was just so... odd.






I got an early Christmas gift today.  It's my Zambaldi Brewing Founder's mug!  Cool, huh?  Everyone who bought "Beer for a Year" or "Beer for Life" three years ago when they first started on this adventure will be getting one in either orange or teal.  I picked orange, can you tell?  I'll be having my coffee in it tomorrow.




My knitting mojo seems to still be on hiatus.  This is as far as I've gotten on OJ's hat.  A few more inches of green and I can start the crown decreases.





15November--Barbara Malcolm, Spies Don't Retire. 

It was difficult to tell if Irina was writing poetry or just staring off into space.  She would sit in a hard chair holding a pad of paper and a pen.  Some days there would be a drift of crumpled paper around her chair and other days the paper would be pristine as the day it left the factory.

Irina’s poetry was not for the faint of heart or the casual poetry reader; her works were distilled anguish and pain made visible.  Most of it was in Russian, which limited her audience quite severely.  The few works that either she translated or were translated and published suffered mightily for it.  Since Russian was her mother tongue she didn’t have the command of the nuances a native English speaker might have.

The other thing that no one knew was that most poets do their best work, sometimes their only work, before they are forty.  Those poems of Irina’s that were most well known were written in her passionate youth, before time and circumstances ground down all the rough edges.  Years of living in the desolate grayness both in mind and body of the well-muscled Soviet Union had diluted any fervor for change or poetic fever she had once had.  Days of plodding from store to store, standing in lines to buy bread enriched more with weevils than flavor or meat that was more bone and gristle than actual flesh had beaten down her once-vivid spark.  Even though Dimitri’s position had made them eligible for a better apartment and their own car, the money he earned wasn’t quite enough to keep despair and depression at the failure of the great socialist experiment at bay.

Many times she sat with her pen and pad only as a way of reliving her past glory.  She would close her eyes, dreaming of herself in her passionate youth, sitting in dingy cafes or dank apartments dimmed by clouds of eye stinging cigarette smoke, interpreting the words of other poets and looking for ways to subvert the hard-liners who had the people in a stranglehold.  She and others like her wrote to cast a lifeline to themselves, to drag themselves out of the sameness, the grayness of life in their vast and dying land.  It is a paradox that both Dimitri and Irina married at all since they were each working tirelessly at opposite ends of the same thing; he to make the Soviet Union safe and strong by keeping her secrets and stealing knowledge from the West to make her stronger; she by writing inflammatory poetry that would make the people rise up and abolish the oppression that kept the passionate Russian people crushed.

This afternoon I met ACJ down at The Attic for a couple hours of writing.  I wrote a little over 600 words about the roof and roofer.  A good start and I used a character that had a cameo in the manuscript and just gave him a much bigger job than grilling fish.  Woohoo!  Tomorrow morning my neighbor is stopping down to see if he can't get my snowblower started.  Keep your fingers, toes, knees, eyes, everything crossed.
--Barbara