Sculpin

I dunno about aikido for me, folks.

Here’s the thing. Chronic fatigue syndrome (I still dislike that name) has made me well aware of the varieties of fatigue. I divide them into three basic stages:

• Stage 1: Your brain is telling you that you’re tired. Really, really tired. Man, would you like to sit down. A nap seems like a good idea. Sheesh, what a long day/week/month. You just don’t think you can bear to drag yourself around. Your limbs are heavy. When I had mononucleosis, it was generally an advanced Stage 1 phenomenon.
• Stage 2: You start making unusual cognitive errors. Word-finding becomes difficult. Your judgment may become questionable. Your balance goes off. Your circulation may be somewhat restricted. Aural and visual perceptions get strange. You start having little mini zonkouts; you sit down to a plate of scrambled eggs and suddenly come to with your face a couple of inches from the plate. You become very spacey — I once nearly left the house without pants on, and while that’s pretty bad, the fact that I was actually ambulatory puts it into 2 rather than 3.
• Stage 3: you hit the Wall and you go down. I don’t care how much of a badass you think you are, or how much positive thinking you can muster, you’re going down. Maybe you have time to take off your shoes, maybe you don’t. Maybe you can be awakened, maybe you can’t. You may lose time in some kind of blackout stage before you actually sleep, and wake up to find that you’ve put your keys somewhere really weird.

In stage 1, you can suck it up and deal; in stage 2, you can often fake it; in stage 3, forget it, you’re toast. Hey, at least it doesn’t hurt.

I’m convinced that a fair bit of some able-bodied people’s jackassery about CFS comes from their applying stage 1 rules inappropriately to people who are dealing with the realities of stages 2 and 3 in their lives.

Anyhow, as I’ve been recovering from CFS, I’ve been able to spend a lot less time in the nastier stages of fatigue. That’s great. Stage 1 is really not all that bad; the difference between being unfatigued and being able safely to ignore and manage your fatigue is not as big as all that.

My strategy of the last couple of years has been to accept that I live in stage 1, purposefully visit stage 2, and avoid stage 3. (Too much time at the Wall of Fatigue seems to make things worse, not better.) You can imagine it this way: I live with a full-time flu and I put myself into light shock a few times a week. And this has been great. For somebody with my health history, I’m pretty badass. I attribute this to working tenaciously at my edge, not to mention having a lot of luck and support.

And here’s my problem. The edge is tricky. The edge is in stage 2. I can get sloppy when I get tired enough to be stupid, pale, and unbalanced. Usually it’s fine, but sometimes I screw up and injure myself. That’s okay when it’s just me. But in aikido, if I’m defending (the “nage” role), it’s my responsibility to make sure that the other person (”uke”) is safe. I’m not sure I can work at my edge and take care of uke.

I’m thinking I might have to wait a little while until I can be sure that I can fulfill that responsibility. Aikido’s a real reach for me, and it may be slightly too much of one. There’s not a lot of slack in the system right now, and I’m feeling pretty stretched here. On the other hand, I understand that things happen to everybody. I’m not the only person who can get sloppy in there. I just don’t know. We’ll see.

ETA: And having thought about it — it’s not cool of me to risk somebody else’s getting an elbow in the face because I’ve stretched it too far and can’t bring sufficient focus to the mat. I need to take some time to regroup, get over this damn lingering sinus infection, practice some rolls in the park, and build my strength and stamina for a few more months. Well, crap. I’m disappointed, but there it is.

Or as Garfield Minus Garfield puts it:

The coop is finished, and it’s adorable. Looking at it critically, there are a few little alterations we may make:

1. Hinge the window so we can get at the coop more easily from the outside.
2. Augment the chicken wire with hardware cloth.
3. Install some latches that are more raccoon-resistant.
4. Landscape around it for better drainage.

The bones of it, though, look really good. I’ll be ordering chickens soon and requesting an arrival date in mid-late April, which should mean that the chickens will be grown up enough to move out there in early June or so.

Paul Beard came by with some spare raspberry suckers for us and complimented us on our urban farm. It is looking rather farmish these days. (Right down to the random stuff left out in the yard.) The place is coming together. Every year we get a little closer to Granola Paradise.

Speaking of random stuff, we’ve been making out like bandits with free stuff lately, and every find was serendipitous. Stuff we’ve picked up off the street in the last month: a two-foot-tall steel milk can, a bike trainer, a fondue pot, a green cone composter, and half a dozen tiki torches.

ETA: I have ordered chickens! They’ll be here in a little over a month, if all goes as planned. Yay!!

It’s tempting, so tempting, but I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to go out back and ask Josh and Brad if they’re going to put in a henweigh.

I don’t think I could pull it off.

(”What’s a henweigh?” “Oh, about six pounds.”)

Josh has been working with Brad from the Seattle Urban Farm Company to build a chicken coop! They were out there leveling the ground today and will start the actual building tomorrow, if all goes well. It’s going to be a long few days of coop-building in the rain, looks like; too bad our spell of nice weather didn’t last.

I’d originally thought we’d start with pullets because raising chickens from chicks looked intimidating. But after a lot of reading, I changed my mind. Going to the City Chicks class at Seattle Tilth confirmed it: we can totally do this. When the weather warms up a little bit, we’ll be ordering day-old chicks in the mail.

Chicken catalogs are a lot like seed catalogs. I want 75% of what’s in them and have to talk myself down to something reasonable. (Or, in this case, something legal. Seattleites are generally limited to three hens.) If I were to decide today, I’d probably get a Delaware, a Buff Orpington, and a Welsummer. But I might yet change my mind. Those huge Jersey Giants are tempting, and so are the Wyandottes, and the Dominiques, and the Barred Rock, and gosh aren’t those Golden Campines pretty, and Ameraucana eggs are neat, and… Or maybe what I really want is an Australorp. And there’s always the possibility that we won’t order in time and will wind up getting random chickens from the feed store, which would probably be fine.

Whatever we get, we’ll probably order from My Pet Chicken, because those guys will send you as few as three chicks with a little heating element to keep them happy. Day-old chicks ship very well as long as they keep warm. Most hatcheries have a minimum order of 25 chicks, and they all cram together to keep cozy. Ideal Poultry will ship a small order too, but they pad out the box with male chicks for warmth. Baby chicks as packing material, jeez. I’m glad nothing else comes packed in chickens.

These are my links for March 8th through March 10th:

• Pastefix - “Pastefix is a brutish little utility that strips or converts non-ASCII characters out of UTF-8 and other fancy encodings in text selections from your clipboard so they can be pasted into old-school venues such as IRC”
• American Livestock Breeds Conservancy - Conservation Priority List -
• Chicken Breed Chart: Henderson’s Own - Notes on various backyard breeds, including temperament.

So this is a neat thing: I have a gig. Kind of a weird one, but it sounds like fun. I’ve been hired into the Standardized Patient Program at the UW. Basically, I’ll be a sort of medical actor/educator. My job is to play a patient for med students to interview and examine. More about that when I actually have some kind of experience to talk about! So far I’ve just watched some SPs at work; my first training is in a couple of weeks.

Sheesh, I’m going to be paid to act. How often does that happen? What a weird job! But I like the people there, and I like that it’ll use both sides of my brain.

I was a little concerned that my new classes in aikido would be a problem. Josh and I started lessons in January, and there’s been a whole lot of limping going on. After my first class, my left knee couldn’t hold me up reliably; it’d give out suddenly, and I’d crash into a wall or a sofa. I wasn’t injured, just extraordinarily sore. The soreness was epic. It’s gotten a lot better since then, but still, I’ve gotten stepped on and bruised; I’ve taken an elbow to the face; and I think I’ve got a pretty good shot at dislocating a shoulder in the next couple of years.

So I can see how I might confuse the med students, limping in all beat up and bandaged. But that’s nothing. They’ve got a guy there who does bike stunts. I would certainly not be the first standardized patient to come in with some interesting physical things to work around.

I’ve wanted to do aikido for a very, very long time. In high school, I had no money. (Not to mention how broke I was as a dropout.) In college, I couldn’t make the time work. After that, I worked at a startup, and then I got sick. I came back from that, I had one aikido lesson, and the van hit me. So now, finally, I am back and I am doing this thing.

Aikido is fun and fascinating, and I’m glad to be trying a discipline with more complicated movement, but I’m unsure. Sometimes I think I might have been better off doing tai chi. “Well, duh,” somebody’s thinking now, “You like your shoulder where it is,” but it’s not the injury potential. I’m just having a hard time in there, session after session. Part of it is that it’s just intrinsically really tremendously difficult, but what gets me down is that again and again I hit the same problem that I don’t know how to fix. I thought the CFS would be the limiting factor, but that I can work with. No, the hard problem has been the minor nerve damage in my left hand from that burn I took a few years ago. I hadn’t realized how strong the outside of my hand would have to be, and I don’t know if I’ll regain enough strength there. I keep having to slide on the side of my hand, and it folds on itself and collapses painfully. It’s probably time for me to talk to somebody about that, or a couple of somebodies.

On the other hand, I bring some weird strengths to the aikido practice as well. My time in Pilates has mostly served me very well there. If nothing else, aikido’s shown me more what it is that I’ve been doing in Pilates. (More about that later, probably.) I’m well aware of my hara, and I’ve learned to think my way through some movement chains in useful ways.

Also, you know, I fought my way back from a serious illness, all the way from being housebound until I could walk six miles; then I got hit in a crosswalk and had to do a whole lot of it all over again. Aikido is pretty hard, but I remember that it’s not nearly as hard as learning to go up stairs was: two stairs on one day, then three, then four, and then the amazing day when I did six stairs, oh hell yes. And after a couple of months, I could actually leave the house and get back up the stairs again. You learn a lot about your capacity for badass tenacity that way. Not that I can recommend it, exactly. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean, and I know some readers have been there, are there right now, or are having an even deeper exploration of their capacity to be badass. (Hi, Desolina.)

That said, it was a whole lot more important to me to go up stairs than it is for me to do a perfect front roll. So we’ll see. I figure it’d take eight weeks to get a taste of it; a year to settle in; three years to understand if it’s right for me over the longer term. I’ve done my eight weeks, and I’m ready to try the rest of the year.

These are my links for February 22nd through March 6th:

• Botanicalls Twitter DIY - Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What’s up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via Twitter status updates. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love.
• Killer Military Robots Pose Latest Threat To Humanity, Robotics Expert Warns - Surly Ben was right: “A robotics expert at the University of Sheffield has issued stark warnings over the threat posed to humanity by new robot weapons being developed by powers worldwide.”
• Meat Wagon: Cow-feed misdeeds | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist - Distiller’s grain left over from ethanol production isn’t so great an animal feed after all: it seems to make cows even more susceptible to E. coli 0157 than whole corn, poisons their brains, and greatly increases potassium in their manure. Boo.
• The Monastery Store Architectural Fittings - I covet that inchworm sculpture.
• Onigiri On Parade: A guide to onigiri (omusubi) rice ball shapes, types and fun | Just Bento - Gosh, I haven’t made rice balls in ages.