Sculpin

One of these days soon I’ll write a New Years Resolutions post. But first, a resolution I won’t be making. This year, I will not learn to drive.

Driving was on my resolution list for years, and I took some mighty hard cracks at it, each one more vomit-inducing than the last. Eventually I recognized that my fear was unusually strong and that cranking down on myself was making it worse, so I started to deal with it more appropriately as a phobia. That made me a much less anxious passenger. (A problem I didn’t even realize I had! Man, I must have been a pain.) But progress on the driving end of things was slow while I recognized my car-related freakouts and retrained myself to knock them off.

“You don’t have to learn to drive,” said Josh, but I didn’t believe him. Everybody has to learn to drive, right? That’s why, when I say I don’t drive, most people look at me like I’m a freak of nature. That’s why that librarian said of Octavia Butler, “I hear she’s some kind of recluse. She doesn’t even drive.” Everybody’s gotta drive! All sane people drive! If you don’t drive, somebody might give you a ride somewhere, and then you’d be a needy loser! Ew! And I keep hearing that driving is freedom. What kind of a person doesn’t want freedom, right?

So I didn’t believe him. And yet, it started me questioning, just a little. Josh generally has his head on straight, after all. I reprioritized the driving thing and started to concentrate instead on improving my health. That took up all my spare time for a while, and I got hugely good results. It took several months, but eventually my wobbly lumbar spine was stable enough for me to take the bus and walk more easily, even with packages. My sacrum and pelvis started to come back into alignment. My energy improved. As I saw that my physical functioning was getting better, I thought, “Hmm.”

All I’d really wanted from driving was freedom and social acceptance; freedom was coming back on its own, and social acceptance can go hang. (Well, that, and being able to lug around large heavy things and get way the hell out to West Seattle to see some friends more regularly. But these things are workable.) And I didn’t want fear to beat me, dammit.

And then I met Sarah’s husband James. Sarah, if you’re reading this, I hope you will thank James for me. He readjusted my head in a big way. There was a moment in conversation when I hung my head and had to admit to James that I don’t drive and have never had a license. James looked at me and exclaimed, “That’s so cool!” I was totally confounded. It is? Are you sure? That can’t be right. It is? It took a while to sink in, a good long while.

But, you know, he’s got a point. Phobias aren’t cool, but maybe a car-free/car-light lifestyle is. I don’t want to come over all sanctimonious, but car culture is obviously problematic, and Josh and I have lives that allow us to ditch the car and step back a wee bit from the general fossil-foolishness. And not only can I live with this, I recognize that I like it. Fear gave me the motivation to gain the skills required to organize my life in a way that wasn’t structured around having a car, but it isn’t just a fear thing. It’s a good way to be; I’m aligning my actions with my intentions. And I’m meeting more and more people who agree with James.

The work I did on not freaking out about cars still comes in handy as cars and SUVs whoosh past the bike. I’d feared I might just freak out and toss myself at the sidewalk when a car came by from behind, but I’ve gotten quite sanguine about it all. Rain or shine, I love that tandem. There’s nothing like zooming down a long gentle hill in the open air.

My friend Ian Johnston recently test-drove an impressively tiny electric truck, the ZAP Xebra, and wrote up his conclusions about it. (Compressed version: it could have been good, but it’s not good enough.)

Seriously, have you ever seen a truck this tiny?

“Oh, this area is a priority. We think you’ll have power by Wednesday.” So say the Seattle City Light crews in Lake Forest Park. My mom has been out of power for almost three days now. She’s putting a brave face on it, mostly, but she’s looking pretty stressed. I’ve pressed extra firewood and Duraflame logs on her, given her a place to take a hot shower, and bugged her several times to come down here with the cat and crash. Not much more I can do, I think.

Next time we have a long winter outage, I want it to go like this: we have a woodstove, and we invite all the neighbors over for coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies. Blackout party at Sculpin House. I wish I had thought to knock on neighbors’ doors with a thermos of coffee during the outage. I could have made the day of some coffee-addicted owner of an electric stove.

Today I dragged most of the downed branches and twigs out of the front yard and piled them in back. They might act as a windbreak for my sage bush, and small birds might enjoy hiding in them.

Update 12/19: At last, my mom has power. She toughed it out for almost a week, through below-normal temperatures in the darkest time of the year. Here’s hoping that tomorrow’s storm doesn’t cut the power right off again.

Power’s back on, after being off for about nine hours. That’s the third not-entirely-trivial outage we’ve had in the last couple of weeks. And thunderstorms are on their way this afternoon; maybe we’ll have Outage #4.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but now I’m thinking more strongly about getting a little woodstove to put in the fireplace, or possibly an insert.

Buying a hand-cranked coffee mill has turned out to be a surprisingly good idea. No electricity? No problem. No coffee? Problem.

This is what I need on a day like today. No doubt it is perfectly safe. No doubt. Now, if only it had pontoons, it’d be perfect for today’s weather. The rain’s coming down in buckets out there, and the lights keep flickering.

The power went off for a few hours today, then on again, then off, then on. I suspect it’ll flap again pretty soon; there’s said to be another fair-sized storm coming in.

If you want to reach me when sculpin.com is down, the speediest way is probably to call my land line; odds are pretty good that I’ll have an old-fashioned telephone plugged in. (Really old-fashioned. It weighs about ten pounds and has a rotary dial.) Another way is to write to me at gmail, where my username is eclarios. Otherwise, the mail may take a day or two to get to me.

Delores, that Grundig wind-up radio you bought us a while back is the best thing ever. Thanks again!

Yesterday in Pilates I did something very dumb. I was kneeling on my left knee on the reformer, with the right leg straight and resting on the floor. And as I got out of that position, I put too much weight on the left knee while moving. There was a sickening creak as the patella seemed to slide toward the outside of the knee, in a way that patellas ought not to do. That leg is much stronger than it was last year, but it’s still pretty atrophied and probably has some minor nerve damage; so I’ve got this weak, sluggish VMO on that side, and… well, I should have been paying more attention, because I know better than to do that. (I will be calling my PT soon, because all this bicycling requires good knees.)

And then Part II of The Dumb: hey, it didn’t seem too bad, and maybe I was making a big deal out of nothing, and I sure had a lot I had to do that day. So I said to myself, “Quit being a whiner!” and walked around on it a lot. Then it seemed too bad. It puffed up a little and got very stiff and a bit hot, so I did the usual things one does for inflammation. “Do not,” I said to Josh, “let me ride a bicycle tomorrow.”

“Got it.”

Later, predictably: “You know, I’m feeling a lot better. I bet I could totally ride that bicycle.”

“Nope. I have my orders! No riding the bicycle!” And thus was The Dumb Part III averted.

Anyway, this seemed like a pretty good time to try out Josh’s ability to haul me to and from the U District on the Xtracycle — we’d never gone more than about 2.5 miles round trip before, and that was almost entirely on the flat. I grabbed my bus pass just in case, and we headed out to the Farmers Market. Our haul: three kinds of cheese, cider, apples, cardamom bread, potatoes, beef jerky, soup bones, kale, collard greens, onion rolls, garlic, and two tiny pies. And the trip home is gently but insistently uphill. But Josh hauled all that, plus me, and did just fine.

I try to get a massage once or twice a month from Mark Pearlscott in the U District. They’re effective as hell, these massages, but they leave me extraordinarily woozy, and I often crash hard within 30-60 minutes of receiving one. (And not because they’re soothing, friends. Myofascial work is not soothing.) Josh has been picking up a Flexcar to get me home on those days, but I think we’ll be able to use the Xtracycle instead. I reckon I can hang on to the back that long.

I’m proud and happy for Josh when I think of how much fitness he’s gained since he started riding his bike to work. It could be that crashing his car will turn out to be one of the best things he’s done for his health.

Via Faintheart, the letter meme. Here are ten things I like that start with the letter V. If you’d like to carry on the meme, you can ask me for a letter here.

1. Veronica Mars — The only TV show I watch regularly. (More Weevil, please.)
2. Vampire bats — I find them winsome. They run around on the ground with such an adorably goofy-looking bounding motion. Hop hop hop! (Don’t you wish your day involved putting bats on a treadmill? Or is that just me?)
3. Vasectomies — the sexiest accessory a man can have.
4. Venn diagrams — How did I ever think without them?
5. Vegetables — from artichokes to zucchini. Especially the artichokes. (I also like verbena, violets, and verdure in general.)
6. “Vacuum” — for its spelling.
7. Versification — “I wish I were a jellyfish/that cannot fall downstairs…”
8. Vindication — I told you so.
9. Veracity — Every year, I have less time for liars. At this rate, when I am eighty-five I will be stumping along the streets with my cane and smacking anybody who looks dodgy.
10. Velocipedes — This one could be an ancient cousin of the Stokemonkey.

Josh and I went down and got our Xmas tree today. I’d seen an announcement in some email from Seattle Tilth: it turns out that the UW Forest Club grows noble firs organically in power line right-of-ways. They were taking orders until Friday, cut them yesterday, and sold them today. My eco-hippie sense went all a-tingle.

I would have mentioned this before, but in addition to being a lazy blogger, I kind of figured that they’d probably tend to be a little, let us say, natural-looking. You know, rustic. What with UW students not being experienced, professional Christmas tree farmers and all. We biked out at a very cold 8:15 a.m. to pick up the Flexcar and zip down to the Center for Urban Horticulture in time to be one of the first in line and get the pick of the bunch. But damn if they weren’t the best-looking trees I’d ever seen; every one looked great. I waded in, grabbed one, gave it a good look, said, “Good enough,” and we strapped that sucker to the top of the Flexcar.

It was a nice scene down there, too. Friendly folks in line, with sort of a Mountaineers Club vibe. It was nothing at all like the manic, sharp-elbowed crowd that I remember from the old days buying cheap trees at Chubby and Tubby.

Maybe next year we’ll be able to get our tree home on a bicycle trailer for the Quadruple Hippie Score. This year, no. It’s all uphill from the CUH, and I had my fill of hills yesterday. We took a trial ride up to the View Ridge PCC on the tandem, and got a pretty good idea of where our reasonable limits are when it comes to hills. Severely short of that, is where they are. But we’re getting obviously stronger; in a few months we’ll give it another try.