Call me Anat.

The first thing I did upon waking was clean up a regurgitated mouse from the bathroom floor.

The last thing I did was clean up a mouse head and a bit of innard Soph had left for me on my seat up in the stair-loft.  It was well-meant . . . and to be honest, kind of cute.  But maybe it's just that I'm inured to the blood and guts.

And in the middle of the day I took both cats to the vet and discussed mousing with her, and watched while she de-wormed them.  Here's hoping today's theme will be quite different.  Chocolate would be nice.  Or surprise presents in the mail.

I wrote about my favorite story for Good Friday: The Grail, Sir Parzifal, and the Fisher King.  I did a short, off the cuff homily on it a few Good Fridays ago, and finally got around to putting it in down on (e-)paper.

Tua had another round of tests yesterday and then met with the nephrologist, and the new meds are working!  Which means they've at least temporarily halted the kidney decline, which means no need for an immediate kidney transplant (or even worse, dialysis!).  The doctor's 99% sure Tua will need at least one new kidney at some point (transplanted kidneys only last about 30 years, a scary-ass fact I recently learned), but he's also pretty confident that new medications and techniques might make future transplants last longer.

Still, don't forget to register online as an organ donor.  :)  It's much more effective than the "organ donor" symbol on your driver's license.  

Today is also Bisextile, or Leap Day, the day I proposed to Tua.  So while we were engaged 8 years ago, it's only the second anniversary of our engagement, or, as Tua calls it, "announcing our candidacy."  (Somehow along the line we adopted campaign lingo for our marriage - we were, after all, married in an election year.  Which means every presidential campaign cycle we get to shout "Four more years!")

And tomorrow is the feast day of St. David, the patron saint of Wales.  We will make leek-and-potato soup.

Two recent posts: One on handmade presents, another on the return of wild turkeys to our woods.

So I finally wrote about how it feels to be one of the "barren" women in the Advent season, and though it's not received a single comment on the site itself, I keep getting FB notes and emails.  I had *no idea* so many other women were struggling with this.  Sometimes simply with the judgments that one receives for choosing not to procreate, sometimes with comments like "When are you gonna get married and give me grandkids?"  Sometimes with the inability to conceive and the grief around that, and the fact that no one wants to touch it.  It made me remember my dad saying he took a professional pastoral development workshop on helping couples with infertility, and helping churches deal sensitively with that while also celebrating pregnancies and births for other couples.  Because while it's easy for communities to celebrate with the birth of a new child, those celebrations can further alienate people working through the grief of childlessness.  And it's hard - really hard - for communities to name that grief and not try to "Jesus it away."  

But reading other Christian women talk about how affirming the Women's Seder was for them, I want to think about how we can create a Woman-affirming Christian festival.  It's challenging partly because of how much less community- and family-centered Christianity is.  And a lot of the Christian "feminist liturgies" I've looked at are clunky and much too obviously trying to compensate.  Whereas the Women's Seder names women's oppression and neglect with a joyful ferocity.  It relies on the standard (and awesome!) Dayenu, old folk songs, and Debbie Friedman's newer songs, some of which are clunky, too, but some of which work really well because of the way she draws images and turns of phrase from the Bible and Jewish poetry and song.  Also, while the Passover is an obvious choice for a festival for lesbians' and straight women's exodus from patriarchy and homophobia, this is one instance where Easter as a parallel doesn't seem to fit . . . or does it?  Hmm . . .

I've always wanted to post pictures on LJ but didn't want to add ads.  

Photo Introduction and Orientation, though I should perhaps have called it Pretties and Kitties.

Still, posting-of-photos-on-LJ-problem solved!

On the Milkweed Propagation Society, of which I am the founding member.

How to Be Alone  A poem performed with music, video, and animation.  Lovely.

I think I'll go take a bath now.

We were really lucky here in North Tunbridge: Although the rains were intense, there was almost no wind to speak of, and the winds were what I was really afraid of.  A massive locust tree once fell on Tua's house in a windstorm, and if it were not for the strength of post-and-beam architecture, Tua and his mother could easily have been killed, because of where they were standing when the tree fell.  Every summer, we get at least one really bad thunderstorm, complete with twisters, so Irene was kind of a letdown in that department.

Then there was the power situation.  I dread losing power only because our well relies on an electric pump; no power, no water.  Otherwise I can live without electricity quite happily, for the most part.  And the power goes out in rural Vermont at the drop of a hat.  So we filled 5-gallon buckets, bottles, Ball jars, even the bathtub, with water before the storm.  But though we lost power twice, even the longer period was slightly less than 24-hours long.

It was the sheer amount of water that did the state in.  Some places got as much as 11 inches of rain in less than 24 hours.  Route 110, the state highway 1/2 a mile from our house, was covered in water and debris; at one point, 110 was closed from South Royalton, where it begins, to Barre, about a 35-minute drive north from here.  It was only when the power came back on that we heard what had happened in nearby towns.

Because of Vermont's geography, and the low population density, 90% of our roads are unpaved, and those are mainly in the hills.  The well-traveled main roads, which are paved, lie in the valleys.  Vermont gets a lot of rain, and in the past century, the amount of rainfall in N.E. North America has risen by 67%.  All that rain and snow have to go somewhere: Every little hill has its little streams, often gathering to run down beside the main dirt road down the hill.  They gather in the valleys to make up Vermont's many small rivers, which in turn run beside the paved state roads.

Because of Vermont's history of deforestation (85-90% deforested in the 19th century) and overgrazing by massive numbers of merino sheep, a breed unsuited to the ecosystem, Vermont has terrible soil quality and high levels of erosion, despite its reforestation efforts.  Mudslides are pretty common, and some areas show bare bedrock.  So when those streams and rivers crested, they swamped almost every road in the state, undermining their foundations, creating sinkholes, and in some cases washing the road away entirely.

Thirteen towns were totally isolated - no way in or out.  A number of smaller communities, and even some individual homes, were also isolated.  The town my church is in is Bethel, one of the hard-hit; an area near the town of Rochester (called Bethel Lympus) was cut off, as were Rochester and Stockbridge, meaning half our church members were sort of MIA.  One priest, who has a Blackberry for her job, was able to tell us she was okay, but with the phones out we were in the dark about the other members.  Finally, phone service was restored and we heard from the remaining members.  Our other locally-ordained priest, from Rochester, we have not laid eyes on yet, but at least he's safe (and living in what must be one of the closest-knit, most communitarian towns in the country - google Rochester Vermont Irene).

The National Guard, VTrans, some burly dudes from the maine Dept. of Transportation, and local road crews are working their asses off to rebuild and shore up roads, though there are some questions as to how snowplow-worthy they'll prove this winter.  And there's still the issue of potable water; tests have shown that town water supplies are free of sewage, but haven't tested for benzen, gasoline, and other flammable and/or cancer-causing compounds.  Farmers are screwed: Any crops (even root crops) touched by floodwaters are assumed contaminated and can't be consumed or sold.  Dairy farmers can't sell their milk when the milk trucks can't make it to the dairies, so a lot of milk had to be dumped.  And who knows how many cows and chickens drowned?  Local dairy farmers told one of their number to loose his cows so they can try to survive the flooding.  He didn't - said he didn't want the trouble of collecting the cows after the flood.  So most of them drowned, chained in their barns.  Bastard.  I have no sympathy for him.  Many other farmers did free their animals, though - we got to see that cows can swim! - and then helped each other round their animals up when the waters receded.

All in all, I have learned never to envy bottomland: In my book, it's not worth the easy ploughing, the milder winds, the earlier springs and later winters that come with farming in the valleys.  And I am desperately concerned about the future of farming in light of global climate change.  The conditions different parts of our country have faced this year would make for famine conditions were it not for our ability to import food.  And on the downward slope of peak oil, we can't depend on that forever.

 In the last six months, I have finished my dissertation and thus put a cap on my nine years in seminary.  I have fruitlessly applied for jobs both within and outside of my field.  Some of those jobs were actually nixed, with no one hired at all, because of the economy and lack of returns on endowments or lack of tuition-paying students.  And with the admin. assistant jobs, nobody will hire a PhD.  We're just not perceived as team players (for good reason).

Ergo, new job plans were needed.  Enter C., a friend of Tua's parents, who is a free-lance indexer (she writes the back-of-the-book indexes after carefully reading the manuscript).  It's right up my alley, personality-wise and skill-wise.  I'm now a member of the American Society of Indexers, am getting high-speed internet access in the next two weeks, then I start emailing scores of letters to publishers.  I can't tell you how glad I am to be doing work where my degree is a help, not a hindrance.

For graduation, I was given an author-inscribed copy of Doc, by Mary Doria Russell, money, and a 40-gallon water-heater.  I have been taking baths several times a week, revelling in the fact that Tua no longer has to carry 20 gallons of hot water over from the house to the barn.  Although it was fun to joke about my "slave boy" drawing a bath for me.  Especially to sort of stuffy people.

In other news, my favorite pet chicken, Redneck, was killed and partially eaten by loose dogs last week.  I was angry and sad like you would not believe.  Still am, really.  But Tua wrote this short story about our girls that has pretty much redeemed the situation.  It's like a chicken (and duck) version of Watership Down.  He pulled out the main characteristics of our hens and elaborated on them, creating a story of the founding of an independent coop.  It's a sweet, funny, wonderful little story, and I love it.  It's a worthy tribute to a sweet, funny, wonderful hen.

Tua and I are now heading out on a dessert-before-dinner date, to get creemees at Sandy's.