entering the whirlpool

Yesterday morning, we had some of the best weather models in the world; apparently today we have not got any because the whole team that ran them is no longer employed by the federal government. I haven't been looking up any of this, but while I heard about scrambles to un-fire the team working on bird flu & the nuclear weapons minders, I have heard no such thing about the team that tracked down food safety recalls. Whether there will be flu vaccines in the fall is now in question also. (You're all here, you're seeing this stuff...) I have a long essay about how human innovation works, greatness, and the things my father taught me about research somewhere in my head that I'm not entirely sure what to do with.

We hosted a small birthday party for the Megatherium (who is now 12!!! And old enough to sign up for a webtoons account, much to her gratification) with a smorgasboard of art supplies that devolved into 3 of the 4 kids watching anime (while the 4th sat with the adults & painted a bluejay) which means the downstairs has been declared sufficiently not a mess that I can also perhaps invite a few people over. I'm still working on optimal positioning for the giant air filter, and grauwulf is working on not freaking out about the existence of people in this space, but it's a start.

In lieu of calling, I have taken to writing lists of top 5 concerns of the day to send to my government representatives, which is a bit scattershot, but probably better than silence. And I was just invited to contribute little clay creatures to a fundraiser that's going to send out tea pets to people who donate to trans-helpful organizations which is a delightful brick in my little tower of "hey, I can make something better!" (more details, presumably, when there's publicity & stuff)

Wishing all of you safety & enough good things to get on with as well.

Happy December, fellow humans. (Though I have missed the beginning, so no rabbits for me, I guess?)

Not the most promising of months and all that, but I miss celebrating my festival of light in the darkness, and we've had our tiny festive fake evergreen up all year because even grauwulf wasn't ready to take it down last winter.

Also this year I'm attempting a trial selling of clay things here until the 10th. US shipping only this round, but if it's successful I'm likely to do this again periodically. (and there will definitely be more of all the things I currently have listed, so no worries if it's not in your budget right now or you haven't got a stateside address.)

May all of you remain safe & find some light in your darkness somewhere, and if you would like a year-end mailing but have moved since I last sent you one, please do get in touch with your new address.

I just re-read *Nettle and Bone* for the first time yesterday, and I had forgotten how many Mythic Things Ursula had packed in there. The thing about re-reading is that all the places and bits are already in my head somewhere, and so with things I haven't thought about in a bit there's a lot of "oh, this is the one with [thing,] isn't it?" plus cross-referencing with all the other thematically related bits from other things I've read (seen, watched, talked about, etc).

I know where (my) other goblin markets are (mostly Neil Gaiman), and I'm pretty sure the parallel between Fenris and Martha Well's Rian was a new thought this re-read, tho it was right there waiting, but I'm still trying to figure out what the other thing with catacomb mazes was. (wait! I think it was the latest Katherine Addison. That sounds more likely than the other things I'd come up with...)

Right then, answered my own question, carry on.

People keep asking me about what I'm doing (researching local ancient pottery, making a tiny net, etc) and the actual answer requires quite a run-up.

Things that have come together in the last few months include:

*hand-building pottery (a thing I've been doing off and on for some time now, with the decision that wheel requires a level of specific skill-building I wasn't really interested in putting the effort into when I can muck about happily with more ergonomic clay nonsense and buy lovely things from people who have nurtured that skillset)

*two years of helping with the reproduction 14th century English kiln at pennsic, with this year featuring both an enthusiastic digger of clay out of the streambed so that we had lots of local clay in raw form and my sudden obsession with Neolithic grape pots which it turns out are *easier to make* when you're using sandy riverbank clay rather than finely processed commercial clay. (I came back to the studio & looked at the one I made before I left & realized I had created the Most Punk Grape Pot Evarr...)

*the several bags of subsoil that the people who built our deck dug out of the post holes & have been living under said deck since I refused to let them carry it all off to the dump. Full of quartz of all sizes, but also quite nicely claylike and workable when I screen out the pebble-sized bits

*my vague intention to make it to consult the Joan Cass Beck collection regarding books the library won't let me interlibrary loan because technically they have them already

*the slow accumulation of ancient string technology, now as wildcrafted cordage (the milkweed in my back yard is slowly being gathered up and turned into string, and I have finally found someone who will tell me how to get a full length of nice clean fiber out of it, even if I did have to watch several wildcrafter guy videos from people who just left the bark on to find the good one

...and probably five or six other things that seem obvious to me but most people don't know.

In any case, I think I have finally arrived at a definable area of interest, that being pre-wheel pottery forms. There's lots out there-- publications, people like Potted History (see the grape pot link) doing reproductions, well-labeled museum collections-- from Neolitic & Bronze Age Europe, but as I live here, I also wanted to know about what people used to do with *this* clay. And the answer is, mostly fairly big storage pots of which we don't really have a lot of good examples (tho I still need to go back & search the Smithsonian collections again with actual ware-type names in hand) because while there were lots of cool & elaborate things going on the other side of the mountains from here (not to mention the cool stuff you've probably even seen before in the Southwest) the mid-Atlantic is kind of a hole in usefully published research. Maryland has a lovely round-up of ware types on their diagnostic artifacts site which is probably quite useful for identifying sherds in the field and not particularly helpful for trying to make reproductions.

I haven't got a great deal to show for it yet-- most of my clay tests so far are in little hand-sized forms from the other side of the ocean (presumably around here they were using wood or gourds or bark containers for cups? Still not sure on that either) but I feel like I need to start drawing skill trees of "things you need to know to make Mockley ware"-- finding usable clay, processing it, but then you need shell temper which involves making crushed shells which you had to collect (& presumably ate for dinner), and you need a paddle & an anvil stone to shape it with and a net to keep the paddle from sticking (or so it is surmised...) which means you have to be able to *make* a net, which also involves making string to make the net from, and once you've finished making the pot and dried it for a nice long time you also have to pit fire it, which is another skill and equipment set.

And of course, the various Woodland-era people around here already *had* nets and shells and fire and suchlike, but my string is all machine-spun and I'm getting shells from a friend at a museum that gets donations they can't use & don't want to dump somewhere and confuse future scientists about what lived where, and so on. I need to get over my random dislike of wordpress so I can cross-reference my explanations.

notes: grape pots are so cool! Little hand-sized spiky things, we don't actually know what they were for, but the best guess is a way to carry coals without burning yourself, which means they're also effectively neolithic hand-warmers. (also, don't believe the Potted History making video-- you don't need to make all those little bobbles as cones before sticking them on. Just make a whole bunch of little balls around the same size, wet down the side of the pot, & smush them on. The smushing process does the pointy bit for you. Magic!)

Shell temper-- modern firing people will tell you to avoid anything with calcium in your clay, because above about 900 degrees C it undergoes a chemical change where it absorbs water when it cools, and this does not go well for the inside of a pot wall. But according to research done with modern potters who do bonfire and other "primitive" firings, in rapid low-fire conditions even if the clay gets up to that temperature, it doesn't stay there long enough to cause the change, hence shell and fossil limestone tempers in various early technology contexts. (I think this may also apply to salt, but would have to double-check.)

eta-- I also have plans to make it to a primitive tech festival next weekend & a Native American festival the weekend after, which might help track down anyone else who has been working on this longer; it doesn't help that both northern Anne Arundel county & out where the annex is are in what was a hunting-camp-only buffer zone between territories when europe turned up & started stomping on everything, so we don't have a direct ancestral land affiliation. The Piscataway Conoy are just south of us tho, & hosting the festival I'm hoping to make it to (on *cough* the day after my child has an "all night bowling" girl scout event, while grauwulf is off at an SCA thing, so er... we'll see how that goes.)

Once upon a time, in the days before I had made it to the internet, I ended up going from intermediate school with friends & kids I had known since third grade to high school with Nobody I knew (ok, with three other boys from my intermediate school, one of whom was the arch enemy of one of my best friends...) and for the next few years I spent a huge amount of time on the telephone with friends. Old school land lines, of the sort where you got a busy signal if someone was already using that phone line. Mainly three close friends who went to two different high schools, and then I also pestered the heck out of my first crush (who I suspect put up with me b/c he was flattered at having an endlessly attentive audience) by calling him daily before he went off to college.

And then I went off to college where phone calls cost money and e-mail existed and was free, followed by the rise of essay & blog platforms shortly after I was released into the world... So, a few years of our arty blog site, followed by a decade on livejournal and the migration here to dreamwidth, somewhat overlapping with having a solid writer friendgroup on twitter before that melted down in the politicapocalypse, and now I'm a regular on a discord group that began with pandemic lockdown, plus side moments of craft forum swapping over the last 15 years and now photos via instagram (tho I still draw the line at facebook proper)... as I observed in a holiday card to my high school best friend (which I do not know if she got, since some of them got eaten due to the tea bags I tucked into them being too thick) I don't know why I expect to keep up relationships I built in person & over the phone when my entire adult life I've spent maintaining community in a text-based & often asynchronous manner.

The other problem, of course, is that as we chart our various courses across the internet we lose people with every platform switch; I could probably find most of my writing buddies again if I gave in to the evil of facebook, as well as the preschool moms group and the *entire SCA*... I think a few of my doll-friends from lj are on tumblr still, but despite its reputation as a low-toxicity weird fandom space their format still gives me conniptions. I have no idea where to find the college friends I briefly reconnected with on AIM... it's a wide world out there on the internet.

Our county moved the school schedule this year so that all the elementary schools (and the high schools, so the bus problems are appalling) start at 8 am, which is a bit of a shock after our previous 9:30-4 school experience, but now school lets out at 2:30 and my child is living her best life running about with her kid posse for half the afternoon. Her friendships are basically entirely proximity-based still; while she has friends from camp and other occasions, some of whom are now in my phone, she doesn't have her own phone yet (a point of discussion that has been coming up recently...) and so they kind of disappear rapidly. It's entirely consistent with childhood and ADHD and the way communities work in general, I guess, and the Megatherium being the little extrovert she is, she has not really clicked with conversations that don't happen in person. (Occasionally video-style chat works, but it comes tinged with the stigma of e-school, and she'd far rather run about with whoever happens to be around, or bury herself in book or video content instead.) If she ever breaks thru the barriers of typing and gaming (both of which she's working towards, tho so far she shares my dislike of games where things attack her) I suspect that the gaming w/ friends may take off-- so far she has been enjoying the "educational" version of minecraft with buddies on adjacent computers.

The downside of the semi-feral kid posse is that in these days where the kids are old enough to roam up and down the street on their own, the adults have far less interaction. I used to get to have grown-up conversations with my child's bestie's mom at least a few times a week, and now I mostly see her in passing or text about kid availability or sending my child home. The days of the pre-school group meeting up at the park are mostly over, I think. It's a shift, and maybe one I should Do Something about, tho in the realm of Doing Things, there are (as always) several other urgent things vying for my attention. And of course I have my pocket friends to type to.

~~unfinished entry, backdated to when I was actually writing it (& madly planning the Megatherium's Zelda-themed 9th b-day party, which is part of why it never got finished...) actually posted April 1 so it will stop being in the way of posting something more current~~

I ended up with head-cold-symptoms-only covid at a week+ lag behind the others in the household (presumed from grauwulf deciding he was done being contagious on no evidence & then coughing on me between panic attacks while flipping out about leaving a job he deeply disliked because traumatized brains are idiots) but got thru to negative tests in time to go to the Megatherium's school concert. Given that the band & orchestra director began by reminding us that this was the first concert for everyone but a few of the 5th graders, and what we'd been hearing of our child's deeply reluctant practicing, it was remarkably non-horrifying and even more or less resembled music. We also got to see the dance she's been learning on Monday afternoons.

And somewhere in the midst of this my youngest aunt-- who moved back home over a decade ago to help with her aging parents and had been slowly hermitting herself into a smaller and smaller radius since her mother died two and a half years ago until she ended up in the hospital where they (and her sisters, once my aunt S called the police & found out what happened) made her try to deal with her cancer plus the cascade of neglect-based health issues she'd managed to accumulate-- ended up back in the hospital with sepsis followed by cardiac arrest.

And she is the last of the family to live in New Jersey; everyone else has lives and houses in other parts of the country-- in fact, somehow I am now the closest geographically. Which means clearing the house of going on 60 years of *things* (some easy to recycle or discard, some precious, some that nobody we know wants but probably ought not to end up in a landfill...) and then-- well, my aunt didn't get as far as making a will, but my mother's generation has unanimously decided that my next-youngest aunt gets uncontested inheritance, and so she is the one who gets to figure out what to do with the house & how possible it is to protect the woods it's in. (I am in some ways more upset about losing the house my grandparents built, which is the last continuous family *place* that's been there longer than I have than family I don't see that often, who one expects to move around & not stay put forever.)

Came home from worldcon with a minor sniffle of the could be anything sort; the others humans of the household were also moderately sniffly and everyone's been going in and out with cold-like symptoms, mine now including a minor ache at the top of my lungs. For anyone who hasn't been watching the omicron-Covid spike in North America, it is *off the charts* and the testing capacity is not even remotely keeping up-- my healthcare recommended having them fed-ex me a pcr test (ha) which then I have to return either via fed-ex or to a lab location to be disclosed in the package, which presumably is on its way, since the next drive-thru test available was not until late next week. Grauwulf traded for another rapid test from a local SCA friend, which was also negative, but there's enough uncertainty & potential vectors that my mother opted to stay home & video call for Christmas.

Meanwhile, I felt better on Christmas, & the ghost of a sore throat & lungs is back today, which could be going from one head cold to the other, or could be very mild Covid, and we've no way to tell. In either case, I'm at peak vax after a booster three weeks ago tomorrow & don't have anywhere I was planning to go in the next week, so despite maximum uncertainty, the only household drama is being provided by the Megatherium, who wants to spend her entire break running with her friends & watching videos, with occasional pauses to run back and forth thru the house singing whatever phrase happens to be in her head at the time. Things like cleaning and keeping her knees below the dinner table are Deeply Unacceptable, apparently.

So all this to say that aside from presents & making breakfast, I spent most of the last two days packing up the second half of my holiday cards (Christmas is for writing Christmas cards, right?) and playing a timed level in my silly dragon phone game, and next up I'm due sitting down to read a book or something, none of which really covers a lot of future planning introspection. The timeless void has swallowed my brain or something. I think I downloaded a "year compass" booklet, glanced thru the pages, and decided I had no interest in filling any of them out. As I said in the discussion on the space gnome discord, my words of the year last year were "Patience" and "Persistence" and perhaps since there are two of them, they should be good for two years. Onward. Or back to the to-do lists. Something like that.

Here's to 43 years of me, with hope of enough more to come that I get some of this sorted out.

I don't actually remember what I was going to write up last friday, but as I still semi-regularly have delusions of typing heartfelt essay posts and then, well, don't... in that particular case because grauwulf was having a particularly bad brain day, but there are any number of reasons. The local art center started doing handbuilding clay classes again, so I've been taking those since the end of summer and spending at least a few extra hours a week in open studio time since the Megatherium went back to school, playing with pressing oak leaves into slabs of clay & painting underglazes on with stencils. And then staring at my time usage & the skads of tiny clay bowls & beads I'm creating (most of which are presently in a box on the living room floor) and the fact that I haven't written any actual fiction in almost 2 years now and Questioning my Choices.

Painting on clay is not at all the same creative brain space as not just creating but beautifully communicating worlds, and I have actually done some of the world-building & background work for the thing I left off working on after the schools went virtual, but I feel increasingly hypocritical describing myself as "writer, crafter, naturalist," when actually the writer part usually comes last. And as always, there's the underlying ADD uncertainty of whether this is something I *could* just push through if I tried hard enough. (I'm fairly sure trying "hard enough" at the moment would break several other things, but I haven't done it, have I?)

At any rate, despite never having signed up to do anything, I'm still going to worldcon next week (eep!) and after a week of brain-Drama on my part, they even changed the COVID policy so that the Megatherium's Dec 2 second vaccine shot will allow her to attend for the weekend. (There was originally a hard cut-off of Dec 1, rather than 2 weeks before you show up.) So in theory I will be heading down next week, and grauwulf & the Megatherium will be joining me for the weekend, and we will all stare at art & probably buy too many things in the Dealers' room, and possibly even talk to other humans and go to panels and whatever else one does at conventions. And if we can't stand it, the zoo is a mile away.

The Megatherium is slowly regaining the ability to write by hand voluntarily, but I will be very surprised if her handwriting ever recovers. (the school not only doesn't grade on handwriting, they never actually taught letter formation at all.) Her 5s are consistently backwards. The night after her 2nd covid shot, she got up at 2:30 am to go downstairs & watch ridiculous videos on kids' youtube. (I got my booster on monday evening, and was feeling ok-but-sore until I tried to eat breakfast yesterday morning, at which point I had to go lie down so I wouldn't faint in my oatmeal.) But on the whole she is probably doing better than the rest of us, despite my evilly insisting that she do things like practice her violin.

We tossed over the turkey feast of Thanksgiving, since my mother has been up in NJ taking care of her youngest sister who's dealing with health issues. Instead I made hand pies for a portable feast and we went off to search for fossils along the bay near Calvert Cliffs. I found a "snaggletooth shark" tooth, some skate mouthparts, and a whole bunch of other interesting things where I don't know for sure which ones are fossils and which aren't; the Megatherium found a nice large bit of conglomerate with fossil shell imprints, and grauwulf says he probably accidentally tossed a shark tooth back into the water, but he wasn't looking quite as hard as we were. And then my mother brought back a box of various rocks & things she found in her parents' dresser drawer, so we are Well Supplied with interesting geology we have no good places to put. I have begun culling the giant stacks of aspirational reading in hopes of taking some of them to release at Worldcon, tho, so perhaps it balances out a little?

For the first time in 18 months, I walked my child up the hills to school this morning; she is super excited to be back in a roomfull of 3rd graders, mask mandate notwithstanding, and I am hoping that prioritizing mental health over Delta infection risk is not sending her to her Doom. I'm pretty sure we're the last, waiting not only for Labor day, but also Rosh Hashanah; we've heard about school systems that reopened mid-July. Our schools appear to be doing... the best they can when running on the assumption that stuffing everyone back into the classrooms is their best option. I am still furious at the FDA for deciding that the cautious path of action is to spend another 3 months double-checking their testing for elementary school aged children; my father talked about how the hippocratic oath inclines people to avoid an action with a small chance of risk rather than evaluating it against the harm inherent in *not* taking that risk. Which is even clearer at a population-wide level; run your numbers: How many children might have issues from the vaccine? How many children *will* die and/or be permanently disabled from 3 months of intensive viral spread? Act accordingly.

Anyway. Today the Megatherium is happy, and reteaching her how to write is someone else's problem for this week. (We went thru a 2nd grade review workbook over the summer, so she's not nearly as writing-averse as she was before that, but half her numbers still regularly come out backwards, & a bad habit of attempting to spell words without vowels.) We'll see how long any of it lasts, and how much of the next couple weeks I spend curled up in corners shaking with reaction.

Some day I might even have a writing brain again, although that seems kind of optimistic.

Brood X has risen. I missed the last round because I was in Colorado 17 years ago, but 34 years ago was second grade, and among other things it was the only year I walked to school. I remember trying not to step on cicadas on the sidewalk. The Megatherium (finishing second grade without walking to school at all) has taken to cicadas with her usual enthusiasm, decided they're super cute, and convinced her friends to be enthusiastic also.

I've been uploading all the cicada pictures to the Cicada Safari app and watching the (thoroughly skewed) ranks update... I'm currently at #62 on the Cicada Scout leaderboard, with 413 of my 1272 photos approved. (What is getting approved seems to be very dependent on whether you're submitting photos when one of the people doing the approving is online... I assume they'll go back & catch up after the bulk upload season, so the rankings will change dramatically after all the photos are in.)

But since it's the season that I wake up far too early with the daylight anyway, and early morning this week seems to be a lovely time for wandering around documenting cicadas on the shrubbery, I've been adding hundreds of photos before 8am, and generally the volume of the treetop chorus is a little less oppressive before it heats up.

A couple months ago, another Baltimore-local linked to the call for artists by the Cicada Parade-a, and we adopted two of them to decorate, and then was brave & talked to people and got permission to put them up at our library. (Every time I go in now, one of the staff tells me how much everyone likes them!) Pictures & some progress/process stuff on the craft forum here.

So I guess I do public art projects now, as well as citizen science and too many silly video games* and de facto auditing virtual second grade.

*I've been playing Cozy Grove on the switch, which is sort of an Animal Crossing game mechanic, only you're a Spirit Scout whose job is to quiet the restless dead and you've gotten in way over your head on your first solo overnight.


ETA: and then someone went through a few hours after I posted this & approved my Cicada Safari backlog, and we jumped to #15.