A PR Day

Trek, before the Ride

Today was a PR day.  A Personal Record, which was the result of Personal Resolve (thanks to my friend Jen for that way of saying it).

I've ridden the 50-mile on the Tour of the Unknown Coast many times, back in my 20's and early 30's.  I stopped seriously riding my bike around 2002.   Sometime in January of this year, I started riding again, with an eye to riding the 50 on May 5th, today.  I trained for three months, riding my bike nearly every day, and running 4 days a week.  Today was an absolute blast. I rode hard and strong, and felt better than I ever felt in my 20's.   My time was 3 hours and 37 minutes.  The last 20 miles had a pretty strong head wind that just sapped everything I had.  Thank goodness for the man in his late 60's that I picked up at about 8 miles out from the finish line.. He was struggling with severe cramps, and he started drafting off me. We blasted the last 8 miles in, switching on and off to block the wind. 

I'm waiting to see the results on line, so find out how I did ranking wise.  On the way out, I was in the front group of 5 or 10 riders, but on the way back I lost ground in the wind because I was all by myself fighting for every mile.

When I got back to Ferndale, I had someone take a picture of me (below).

Back home, my neighbor took this one as I was unloading Trek... It must have been a good ride, because I'm grinning!

Looks like I need a new target to shoot for...

Gloria, My Walking Buddy

Gloria.  2000-2012

On February 6th, 2012, Gloria was found to have metastatized cancer.

On February 27, 2012, she left this world.

Here is her blog, celebrating our 14 months together.

Our story started at 10 am on December 13, 2010.  I successfully defended my dissertation on December 10th in Idaho, and my "gift" to myself was getting a dog companion.  I'd actually selected Gloria ten days earlier at the county animal shelter.  She had been there since September, and I felt drawn to this senior who had not found a new home.  She was 11 at the time, by all best guesses.   

Gloria's favorite place to be, in the car, going somewhere.

Thus began our partnership, one marked by daily hour-long hikes at the beach or other outdoors locations.  My original intent was to get myself back in shape, after too many years of holding my nose to the grindstone of running a school and then academia.   I was ready to reclaim my life.  However, I was not prepared for how much Gloria loved to hike and smell and explore.   She was a dog after my own heart!

My adventuresome hiking buddy.

 Thus, every morning, we were usually at Clam Beach by 7 am.  And we'd often take in a second hike in the afternoon. Rain or shine, light or dark, we were out and about.   I fondly referred to her as my personal trainer.

January, 2012. At the beach, surprise, surprise.

 Gloria loved to eat.  But she was kind of a picky eater. Human food?  Oh, yum.    I often had to hand feed her dog food, but she'd always inhale treats of the non-dog food variety.

Begging for muffins!

Her Christmas pic, 2011. But she was begging for treats from her Uncle Stuart.

Not sure who's more excited to taste the fruitcake...

With our daily hikes, anyone who came to visit was invited to come along. Most people took us up on the offer. here are a few pictures from the last year of our visitors and hiking buddies....

Dora's visit, summer 2011.

Dad and Stuart's visit, spring, 2011

Sinead's visit, June, 2011

Dora and I took Gloria to see the old-growth redwoods...Gloria thought there were LOTS of good smells.

Gloria had two good dog friends. The first was her neighbor, Kiah, an enthusiastic, exuberant dog, a veritable fountain of youth.  Kiah came to meet Gloria at the shelter before I brought her home. They hit it off, and remained good friends.  When I was gone, Gloria would go stay with Kaih, and vice versa.  I was sad to find I had no pictures of the two of them together.

Gloria's friend Kiah

Gloria's other good dog bud was Zen, a husky we met on "Dogbuds.org".  For nearly a year, we hiked once a week.  Gloria and Zen were friends, but they didn't play together. They liked each other's presence, as a companion and fellow hiker. 

On a huge adventure together. Emily and Hebe took them cross-country.  The people kept saying they weren't lost. Zen and Gloria knew otherwise, but they didn't care. 

They both have husky smiles.

One of their last hikes together. Two huskies, happy.

Wither my nose goes, there I go...

Both dogs got to the point where they recognized each other's cars, and when we'd pull up to Zen's house, Gloria knew.  Good friends.    It made me very happy that Zen and Gloria got to go on a hike the day before we went down to Davis.  It remains a good memory.  She barked and barked, so happy in that moment.

Last beach trip.

Some special memories I have of Gloria include a trip we took to the beach with Stuart, just a week before she was diagnosed with cancer.  There were banks of foam everywhere, and we explored, smelled, and even jumped the foam.

Foam Leaps.

Looks like a whale leaping out of the foam.  We have good balance.

Another special memory, which is hanging on my wall, is the pastel of Gloria that my brother had done for me, for Christmas.   

Gloria posing with her pastel.

Gloria posed well, usually in the same position. But one day, when I snapped the camera, she yawned. 

The shadow is pretty cool, too.

Gloria's decline in January was rapid. She went from doing hour long hikes to barely 10 minutes at a very slow pace in a matter of days.  I took her into the vet's on Feb. 6th.  Her x-rays revealed tumors throughout her lungs, and another tumor near her stomach. I took her home to keep her as comfortable as possible, for as long as possible.    At first, she was miserable, and I thought I'd have to take her in  within a week to say goodbye.     I struggled to get any food in her, but she always took her pain medications.   Finally, I took her to what I thought was going to be her last trip to the beach.

Tired pup.

Love you, pup.

However, she rallied, showing us all again what a strong girl she was.  Soon she was feeling much better, but still in a lot of pain.   Pain meds helped enough to get her to the beach a few more times with Zen, and  a hike with my Dad.      Meanwhile, I knew the end was near, and I was searching for a place that might want her body to help with cancer research or teaching veterinary students. Finally I found a clinical trial at U.C. Davis that she could participate in. 

Proud of this patient.

 Without going into too much detail, she was part of a 4-hour study that will help human and canine cancer research.    I was so proud of her, for her bravery and composure during the whole thing.. We were able to spend the 4 hours exploring the Davis campus, walking along a river and seeing jackrabbits and squirrels. Gloria wanted to chase the jackrabbits. It took some convincing to keep her in the car!   I picked some flowers along the river trail. They kept well for a week, a little bit of Gloria's last day, keeping me company back home. 

Sweet Narcissus.

Sage, Rosemary, and Lavender

One of the positives to come out of going to Davis was the knowledge that I called the timing right. When the vet performed her necropsy, he found tumors in all of her abdominal organs, and said it was only a matter of a few days before her organs would have shut down. The way I see it,  she got one last adventure, and was able to contribute to maybe helping some other dogs, somewhere down the line.  

Thank you, Gloria, for the time.   I am a better human being for knowing you.

See you again someday, running free, sweet girl....

Tumblefoam and Foamdrifts

At the beach today, there were drifts of foam, looking like slabs of snow.   I named them "Foamdrifts."
Hunks of the foam would break off in the wind, and begin turning end over end along the beach, leaving a thin trail of foam on the sand as the foam hunk gradually grew smaller and smaller.  I named these pillows of foam "Tumblefoam."  They reminded me of a herd of sheep, clustering together to weather the wind, and then breaking apart to scatter and flow. (Thank you to my brother for capturing the foam in pictures!)



I feel like the beach this morning was a good metaphor for my life right now.  I have drifts of foam banked up all around me--the detritus of my working life, which consumes most of my waking hours.  15 work projects, with all the associated books and papers and supporting materials.  Four different email accounts to check every day, again connected to various projects, and connections with people in all of these projects and daily interactions with them.   It isn't the work that's so hard, it's managing the transitions from project to project and person to person.    It's all good work, as the foamdrifts are good.   It's a juggling act though. 

 And then, at least once a day, I break free from the drifts, like a tumblefoam hunk, to scatter and run and be free.  That mirrors how I feel about life. It's magic, life.

Nature Tidbits

Fall is a great nature viewing time. All the animals getting ready for winter...   I've seen so many interesting sites lately, I wanted to write some of them down, let I forget.

Rose-hips collected in Hiller Park.   Tea sounds good!

Plover Prints.
At the beach the other day, Gloria and I walked alongside deep tracks that Ber and I made in the sand the day before.  Picture a straight line of hoof prints, and in each hoof print  is nestled a Snowy Plover, hunkered down below the wind with just the top of a head poking up to keep watch.  As I walked, the shadow of my head passed over each bird, causing it to hunker down even further. Some birds flew off to evade my shadow, hopping into hoof prints further down the beach. As my eyes adjusted to the pattern, I saw more and more plovers, in other rows of hoof prints made by Ber and other horses.  Tiny shelters from the storm.

Photo from Mendocino Coast Audubon Society Web Page.

Raven's Tutelage.
Pulling off the freeway exit the other morning, I looked up at the light pole to see a Raven perched above the light.     Along the arm of the light, like a line of students, sat about 20 small light-grey birds.  Looked like raven and little birds were together, but they couldn't have been.   Quite striking, the black bird, the almost white steel of the pole, and the grey line of birds.

Glow Worm!
Has been 30+ years since I last saw a glow-worm.  I remember late summer/early fall walks in the evening spent looking for them. We'd find patches of them, and I imagined how long they had been living, growing, and reproducing in that small area.  When I walk in the evening, this time of year, I think about them.   And last night, Gloria and I saw one!  At first I thought it was a bubble of dew reflecting my flashlight. Except it glowed when my light was turned off!  Sure enough, it was a fat, scaly glow worm.  It was the only one in the area, so I can only hope it has friends who were just hidden.  Because I'd like this patch of glow worms to keep going...  Here is a link to information and photos of glow worms, though the author states there are non in the Americas. Good pics, though.  

Photo from Flickr Album. 

Orb Weaving Pumpkin Spiders
In a plum tree by my house, there is an industrious, ambitious pumpkin spider. I first met her one morning when I walked right through her web.  Ugh!   The next day, she rebuilt it, with reinforcing tensioners going down to the ground. I like imagining how she did that...brave spider!    Each night, she builds a new web after the ravages of insects destroy them, one after the other.  At first, each web was bigger than the last, until she was taking up a 2'x2' area with her web. 

This is one of her largest webs. It takes up the whole picture, though hard to see in the dark.

One day I spied a male spider courting her, something I have never seen in all my years of watching spiders. He had a strand of his web running parallel to one of her supporting strands. He would run down the strand to where she was sitting in a corner of her web.  She was in a submissive pose, with all her legs hunched up around her. The male would run up, dapple his front legs all over her, like a blind man trying to figure out what was in front of him.  Then he would run back to his branch, picking up his web behind him. He repeated this several times, getting braver and braver with his tap-ity-taps.  Finally, she stood up, severed her support line that he was using--sending him hurling into space--and raced back to the center of her web.  Luckily he had his line, which he crawled up. 

That evening, I saw bundled up in the middle of her web a corpse that looked quite similar to the male spider. And since the day of the courtship, her webs have gotten steadily smaller, including the removal of the ground-tension line, until they are more the size of a dinner plate now, and are tucked up higher in the branches. She seems to be slowing down, and I keep looking for her egg sac.

The spider is now using this bunch of lichen for her resting space. This is new, and I am willing to bet she lays her egg sac in this lichen nest.

At Hiller park the other day, we saw several bright orange spiders, the ones I think of when I think of pumpkin spiders.  My neighbor spider is nondescript--she blends in perfectly with the lichen and grey-brown tree bark.  But the true pumpkin spiders, they look like rose-hips that have fallen into a web!  Just today, my landlord/neighbor gave me a cartoon from the Northcoast Journal.  A cartoon my mom  would have loved:

"Fall is the best time of year in Humboldt County...Except for the pumpkin spider facials!"

Canning Storm

Spent the better part of the last week canning.

Picked up a huge box of pears from my house that I rent out, and then picked up two lugs of prune plums in Rio Dell.

Add three quarts of huckleberries, and this is what you get:

I love canning.   The whole process is just enjoyable labor. And I enjoy the fruits of that labor all year long.  The Christmas gift baskets this year are going to be mighty scrumptious, I do believe.  :)

From left to right, pear sauce, pear butter, plum butter, plum jam, lemon-ginger-plum jam, royal plums.

From left to right, royal plums (repeat), harlequin pear jam, pear chutney, pear marmalade, Asian pear sauce, plum chutney.

From left to right, plum chutney (repeat), pear jam, spicy plum chutney, hot pear chutney, huckleberry jam, canned pears.

Not pictures: 6 pints of dried plums, 4 quarts of canned plums, and two quarts of plum juice.

Phew.  I think it will be a while before I pull out the blackberries, peaches, and nectarines in the freezer to make jam!

I'm a Barn Cat

Bobby, 2005

Bobby, 2011

Anyone who has spent any time at my friend Sharon's pasture knows Bobby. He's a barn cat with a rap sheet.  He was kicked out of several barns before landing with Sharon, where he's lived a great life. 

Phenomenal hunter, he weeded out all the weak quail until the flocks that dared to live in his field were slim, fast, and wary.  He slimmed down the population of gophers, as well. Many a riding lesson has been interrupted with a gift of a severed gopher's head, laid in the dust.

Bobby and his Sam, June 2011

Take 2, June 2011

Bobby and his boy, in the grass, June 2011

Bobby was a force to be reckoned with, and not a cat to be trifled with. If he wanted petting, he'd let you know. And when he was done being petted, he'd let you know that, too. Part Bobcat, Bobby had tenacity and fire, legs that could send him in a vertical leap a kangaroo would be pleased with, and a wrestlers bandi-legged walk.

Bobby is well loved, and he leaves a large hole in many lives.  He will be missed and remembered.
Rest well dear Bobby.

Bobby, out standing in his pasture, 2011

A video from Youtube, "I'm a Barn Cat"   dedicated to Bobby....