Sculpin

Oh my God. I just soldered a component onto a scrap of circuit board. Neatly and effectively. On pretty much my first try. It’s not perfect, but it’s acceptable. This is huge!

You have to understand: soldering in middle-school metal shop was, for me, not just a failure but a thoroughly humiliating failure. Big blobs of solder everywhere but the joint, is how I remember it, and getting shouted at by the shop teacher for being such an incompetent and unteachable klutz. None of us were good at it, but I was notably bad. I think I may even have cried over it, though I was no crier; I was that frustrated. Soldering went on my list of things I’m disastrously bad at. Like juggling, I figured, it’s an anti-gift.

But with Josh’s new soldering tools, it’s easy. It’s just plain easy. It almost happens of itself. My mind is thoroughly blown. Now I feel like the guy in Richard Condie’s The Big Snit who goes around sawing everything, except that I want to solder everything.

Take that, seventh grade! Hah! And now I must go solder something.

I tell jokes the way some people sing: very rarely, very quietly, and only when I’ve been coaxed. Because this is me telling a joke:

So this frog walks into an office, I mean, a doctor’s office, no, not doctor, I mean, the one where there’s all the money, you know. Bank. A frog walks into the bank office and he says,”I want a loan” and the bank guy says, “What for?” and the frog doesn’t say anything because I forget that part of the joke. So the bank guy says, “What kind of collateral you got?” and the frog pulls out a small white wooden horse — he’s Kermit Hauser! Hah hah hah… never mind. Oh, hell with it. The end is, “It’s a knick-knack, Paddy Black, give the frog a loan.” Did I not say the guy’s name was Patrick Black? Oh well. What jokes do you know?

This week’s Free Will Astrology:

Libra:
“What have you learned so far this year?” I asked my newsletter’s readers recently. “I’ve learned that asking for what I want is the first step toward actually getting it,” wrote Sarah Pearson. “And I’ve learned that the journey you take to try and escape your fate can be as interesting as the fate itself.” Of all the lessons I’d love you to learn in the first half of 2007, Libra, those two are my favorites.

Is that the Sarah Pearson, by any chance?

Even if it isn’t, it’s the best Free Will Astrology horoscope I’ve seen in ages. Rob should quote liberally from his readers more often, especially if they’ll stay off the whole “sacred ecstasy” trip, jeez.

Still woozy, but on my way back. Looks like the bug took a swing at me and mostly missed. (That’s new.) My condolences to everybody with the various plagues going around.

Moderate fever, sore throat, comes on like a freight train… sound familiar? Anybody know how long this bug usually lasts?

And of course my judgment has gone to hell. Every time I start to get a fever, I get all weird and manic, and only later do I realize what’s up. I really should stay off the Internet and keep well away from sharp objects and open flames today.

At long last, we’ve bought a woodstove! An insert, actually, lined with soapstone for extra fabulousness: the Hearthstone Morgan. It’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Hooray!

If you ever wonder, “Why has Cam stopped getting her hair cut?” it’s largely because for the last several months I’ve been gauging purchases in terms of percentage of woodstove cost. (Oh, I’ll get the ends hacked off at Rudy’s one of these days, but I’m done with fancy haircuts for now.) See also, “Why have Cam and Josh finally given up DirecTV?”

He Thanks His Woodpile

The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once
lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari.

Oak burns with a peppery smell.

For a really hot fire, use bark.
You can crack your stove with bark.

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poem to stove to woodpile to stove to

typewriter.        woodpile.        stove.

and can’t stop peeking at it!
can’t stop opening up the door!
can’t stop giggling at it

“Shack Simple”

crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
all the others ever were and are

        Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man

        (which is not, at last, estrangement)

 
– Lew Welch

The Queen of Swords, with her upright sword in her right hand and the mysterious tassel dangling from her left wrist.

Fudo Myo-o, or Acala, with the upright sword in his right hand and the rope dangling from his left hand. According to the Shingon Buddhist International Institute, “With this sword of wisdom, Acala cuts through deluded and ignorant minds and with the rope he binds those who are ruled by their violent passions and emotions. He leads them onto the correct path of self control.”

That fits my general conception of the Queen of Swords with neatness so satisfying that it’s almost spooky. She’s always been one of my favorites. Now he is, too. Especially after stumbling across this page in which he is described as “the principal irritated form of Shingon Buddhism and the central figure of a group of five irritated divinities… called Vidhyadharas or kings of lights.”

Dear peoples of the internets: if you should happen to have a very young toddler, and if that young toddler should, heaven forbid, require open-heart surgery or some other highly invasive surgery, please ask your child’s doctor about post-surgical physical therapy. Watch out for the kid’s developing movement patterns. I don’t know if this kind of PT exists for kids, but it should.

I’ve got a nice big surgical scar wrapping around my left side and up my back from when I was two years old and my heart was stitched up. (Thank you, modern Western medicine!) The heart’s absolutely fine now — it’s been checked and checked again, believe you me — the stitching job was great, and I seem to have remarkably little in the way of physical restriction from the scar tissue now. But I learned to walk and stand when it hurt, and I suspect that’s a good part of why I’ve got this damned protective hunch seared into my neuromuscular system.

Posture and movement patterns send social signals; I wonder if that submissive element in my posture was part of why I used to be such a creep magnet. Whatever signals I sent, I doubt they were anything I would have chosen.

It’s a small thing now, but it’s been the devil to get rid of. I’ve managed to rid myself of a lot of it in the last couple of years, but there are some persistent little remnants. (”Hey, how ’bout we just stay contracted all the time?” say the hip flexors.) So I’ve been working on my tadasana this week. Tadasana is hard. Standing up is complicated.

Things just keep ticking along, steadily and undramatically getting better. In August 2005, I was flirting hard with crashing out if my heartrate went over 120 bpm — and I thought I was doing outstandingly well. Now I’m not flirting hard until it goes over 140 bpm.

ETA: oh, heh. So after three-plus years of bodywork I’m finally doing a fairly good job of standing up when I remember to think about it. I’m looking less as if I’m about to take off on a ski jump. (Note to self: straighten up, not forward.) And having started to get the hang of standing, I decide to give walking a try from my mindfully adjusted position. Oh. Heh. When I straighten all the way up but continue to place my feet in my usual manner, the result is, uh, insanely seductive. (I demonstrated for Josh. “Hellooooo, nurse!” said Josh, when he collected himself and stopped gurgling.) Yeah, I think I need to learn to turn that down. But if I ever want to walk like a hyperfeminine sex-charged tiger-goddess, there I go. I just have to practice standing up for half an hour first.