In all honesty I didn’t want to wake up. Instead I distracted myself by reading. Then the dogs needed attention. Then I was reminded that I had to leave early to give someone a ride in to work. Then I discovered a couple of presents left for me by the dogs and was suddenly running late… If I really believed nobody was ever going to read this I’d describe what I think the dog had discovered to be indigestible, but that’s too much honesty even for me.
I promised six days a week. I don’t really know what I’m doing yet but I will never find out if I don’t make an effort. I’m pretty sure I have a bug smasher quote to lean on…. Actually, I have two.
Habits are an entrance ramp to productivity.
Start moving forward and new paths will become visible.
I want to create habits so that I can see new opportunities. That’s why I’m not skipping today. I don’t have much to say other than that I won’t let my excuses get in my way. I don’t have a real routine set up yet but if I keep going it will come. After a couple of weeks I might choose themes for days so I know what to focus on. I’m not there yet but it’s coming. As long as I don’t skip.
I had an interesting conversation with a coworker yesterday. We were at Gateway Transit Center, a super busy crossroads of humanity, light rail, and buses. On the other end of the platform there were some transit police with a working dog. My coworker saw the high energy of the dog and immediately commented that it was ill behaved for a dog in public. I then tried to explain that a police dog is not a service dog and should not be held to the same standard. It was interesting because I find that he, like so many other people, is ignorant of the many roles that can be filled by dogs and the range of behavior that is acceptable depending on their role.
Most people are used to dogs as pets. Good dogs should walk nicely on a leash in public, come when called, drop things when told, not bite anyone, and not soil the carpets. There are some people’s pets that fail on one or all of the above, but these are universally recognized traits of good dogs. Pets are usually treated as member of the family, if not a favorite child. It makes sense because they tend to operate on the level of a 3-5 year old for life. They just need structure and rules and play and love to be happy like the eternal optimists they are.
Then there are working dogs. Everyone can recognize a Seeing Eye Dog when they see one. More and more people are using dogs to provide services for them. The legitimate ones are highly trained to perform behaviors that are not naturally occurring, whether it is leading a handler through hazards or calming a panic attack. Police dogs can either sniff out illegal items or give an officer a longer reach when dealing with more dangerous people. Livestock Guardian dogs bond with their livestock more than their people. Hunting dogs tap into their natural instincts to provide a method of eliminating vermin without putting poison into the food chain. Each category of working dog has a different ideal temperament and many of them would not make ideal pets. Herding breeds, for example, are well known for nipping at heels, even of their family. That violates a huge rule for proper pet behavior. Don’t bite! Some dogs are just not happy unless they are given a job and if they don’t have one they might make one up.
My dogs are mostly pets. Probably 95% of the time they just laze around the house or wrestle or run crazy out in the yard. There are four of them, and they each have distinct personalities. Three of them are almost 12 years old while the other is 4. Two of them would like to work. The other two would learn if I had the time to teach them.
Freddy is kind of the old man of the pack. He came to us as an Australian Shepherd mix, but he looks like a Golden Retriever dipped in chocolate. We call him the stoner dog because he’s so chill. He lounges around almost everywhere he goes. Children can climb all over him with no fear. I thought about training him as a therapy dog when he was young because of his great personality. Now he patrols the property. If he turns into a fur missile the boys usually follow with the .22 because he might be after a coyote. He would probably be a great Guardian dog if not for his age.
Another nap? Don’t mind if I do! Freddy chills out.
Bruno is our German Shepherd mix. He’s a bit of a special case since he obsesses over his toys. I’ve used him to herd goats a couple of times, though he had no idea that’s what he was doing. I just threw the ball to the area I wanted the goats to leave and they avoided his intensity. What really gets him excited is rats. He would make a great ratter if he could calm down enough to focus.
Bruno wants attention.
Angel was my brother’s dog. She came to us when he got divorced and moved into an apartment. She’s a herding dog through and through. She runs the others in circles, nipping and barking. I haven’t allowed her in with the goats though, because she doesn’t listen to directions and has the attention span of a gnat. We call her the frou-frou anime girl because she flounces everywhere.
Miss Angel found a snack.
And then there is Clay. He’s the youngster of the pack. He has decided that his place is at my side forever. He actively tries to block the others from sharing my attention and guards me from all threats, even if it might be just a bird flying overhead. He also believes he is a ratter. I have many stories about all my dogs, but Clay tends to top them all. To my knowledge he has only ever killed one small rat, but is determined to kill more. My entire yard is filled with trenches from his rodent hunts. I need to figure out how to smooth it out again. But it’s hard to be mad at him or any of the dogs. Their lives are so short and full of enthusiasm. They bring joy even if that enthusiasm cannot be fully directed towards useful endeavors.
I’m sure I’ll write a lot about my dogs in the days to come. They are a big part of my life and I have many opinions about them. But this is a good enough start. I might ramble on to much, but that’s okay if nobody’s reading. I’ll get it out of my system and by the time anybody pays attention I’ll be better at keeping it simple. Maybe. After all, I’ll still be me.
I didn’t have to do any back to school shopping this year. My boys are done with that part of their lives for now. But I have a notebook addiction that must be fed at least once a year. This year the notebook made a Dire Straits song run through my head. (Fun fact about me: The weirdest things will make me think about random songs. I have many favorite weird songs and an odd sense of humor.)
I decided this notebook is perfect for the collection of quotes and paraphrases I have been accumulating for the last few years. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks and sometimes someone says something that strikes me as inspirational so I note it down in my mini notebook with the thought that I’ll do “something” with it down the road. Now I think I have found my something.
To continue this unwieldy introduction…Last night I was thinking about this blog and my attempt at a website and the self-doubt rose up again. It’s ugly. I have these moments where I sit there and wonder why I am even trying. I wonder if it is even worth the effort. I resent having to get up or think of what I should write. I wonder if confessing my doubts and weakness will make me look unstable or unprofessional to anyone who might find these ramblings. Then I whisper to myself…shut up, NOBODY IS READING THIS!!! This is why I collected all of those quotes.
Self-doubt is a nasty little bug. Worse than a spider, it hides in the darkness and skitters around the edges of your consciousness, eating away at what might fuel your success. It must be squashed! So all of my quotes are bug smashers. They are there to help me squash the self-doubt, the depression, the anxiety, anything that can keep me from moving forward. I will use them like weapons. I will share them freely and what they mean to me. Sadly, I have no idea who said most of them and I apologize for not having proper attribution. Some of them are not even direct quotes, but are amalgamations of the discussion in whatever podcast I was listening to. At some point I might even share some of my favorite sources of inspiration. But now let me choose today’s bug smasher…
It’s not about working towards the end of the tunnel. It’s about making sure the tunnel is always lit.
Hope. Journey over destination. Peace with where you are despite moving forward…
I am lighting my tunnel. Every day that I show up to write, regardless of whoever is or is not reading is lighting my own tunnel. It has been pretty dark for quite a while. I have tried to light lamps that have fizzled, so I have focused on that end of the tunnel without knowing if I could even get there. It’s time to focus on where I am instead of just where I could be. Let me improve me so I can move forward more efficiently. Maybe that will bring the tunnel to an end faster, or maybe I will find that the tunnel is a figment of my imagination after all and I am already out in the real world with a thousand paths waiting for me to choose from. Let me squash the bug of hopelessness.
Driving for a living is bad for your health. I know nobody’s reading this, but I feel like I should put this out there.
I have been driving bus for nearly 14 years. It is physically and mentally demanding. It has me away from home for 12 hours a day, 5 days a week. It pays a very good wage, but that comes at a cost. I gained 30 pounds that I didn’t need. I deal with gallstones on an occasional basis. I have lower back pain that sometimes flares into sciatica so bad I can’t sit to tie my own shoes. I also deal with anxiety attacks sometimes, triggered by things that almost happen but leave a residue in my mind. I’m glad nobody’s reading because it’s hard to admit that much in public. There’s more that I will keep to myself.
If you don’t pay attention these kinds of things will kill you. It’s easy to become complacent about your health. You come home mentally exhausted and there’s no energy to fix a healthy dinner or go for a walk before bedtime. It’s easy to grab fast food on the way home. It’s easy to just sink into the routine of the machine that you have become a cog in. But I know better than most that this is how you die. My husband drove bus for 14 1/2 years before his heart attack killed him. That will not be me.
There is never any energy to take care of your health when you have to choose to every day. Instead it must be made a part of the machine that drives your existence. Grocery shopping has to include the items that will go into a lunch that feeds your body without harming it. Exercise has to be scheduled like an appointment and turned into a habit. It’s still a daily battle to not fight off the plans I have made for my health. I have to stop hitting the snooze button on the alarm that tells me to get up and go for a morning walk. I have to not carry cash that lets me buy candy from the vending machine in the breakroom. I have to choose the long term good over the short term pleasure. I don’t always make the best choices, but at least I am thinking about it.
I do not want fitness to look good, though that is a nice side benefit if it happens. I want fitness so that I can feel good. I want health so that my body will do what I need it to when I need it to work. I want health so that I can live a life that does not revolve around my next doctor’s appointment. That is worth making the little choices ahead of time and making myself follow through. There is life outside of bus driving. I’m ready to grab it.
I know nobody is reading this. It doesn’t matter. Let’s talk blackberries. They are delicious when made into jams, jellies, pies, or any of the many other things that can be done with them, right? But when they get growing on a property they can take it over in just a couple of years. I hear that the south has kudzu and there’s poison ivy back east. There are invasive plants wherever you go. My battle is with invasive blackberries.
Himalayan Blackberries grow especially fast. They shoot up canes bigger around than your thumb and 30 feet long. They build on themselves to create mountains 14 feet tall or more if they have support. They are like a tidal wave washing over the land, starting fresh clusters with roots on the end of canes in the fall. Everyone told me that I should mow and then spray everything with herbicide to knock them down and keep them down. I’m not very fond of that idea. It’s tempting and easy, but I don’t like the dependence on poison. I also don’t have easy access to anything that can mow down mountains, and my good brush trimmer has been down for a couple of years. It broke and a helpful friend took it apart and lost the parts. One of these days the parts will turn up. Until then we get to use other methods.
My favorite tools in the blackberry war are simple hand held pruners, a Fiskars billhook, large pruning shears, a curved pitchfork, goats, and a cattle panel. I started out pretty complicated, but now I keep it simple. T-posts and cattle panels fence off an area that needs to be worked over. Then I go in with a single cattle panel, lean it up against the mound of growth that I want to take down, and climb. I’m not a dainty thing and this is one area where my weight is an asset. I jump and crush and smash the panel to the ground. I trim anything that keeps it from descending. Then the goats swarm. We like the berries, goats think the leaves are candy.
When the blackberries are crushed the goats will strip anything resembling greenery from them. Once that is done the canes dry out pretty fast. Then I can cut them close to the ground and rake them into piles for burning. There is a pile waiting in almost every area that the goats have worked. I could probably also let them just rot into the soil, but burning is more satisfying.
There is now plenty to burn. A year ago I felt like I was fighting a losing battle, but now that I have the hang of it we have cleared nearly to the midsection of the property. The only thing holding me back is goat containment. They have little respect for most fences, and my neighbor’s choices of fence are anything but goat-proof. There will have to be some fencing improvement in the near future.
Hey, look at that. Two posts in two days. It’s easier now that I remember that nobody is going to read this stuff. I have a lot more pictures of the blackberry war on Instagram. I joined that platform to share and follow quilty stuff, but instead I have ended up posting a lot of other stuff, including a takeover of the blackberry war hashtag. Feel free to check it out.
I think every journal I have ever kept has that sentence at some point. I got started and then froze. I overcomplicated things in my own head. I forgot the most important thing…. NOBODY IS GOING TO READ THIS! At least for now anyway… I might have to start every post with that for the next while just so I remember.
I feel compelled to sum up the last four years. In a single word, SHIFT. Everything has shifted. I am in a very different place now. My responsibilities have changed. My goals have changed. I have let go of a lot of plans that weren’t working out. There are still some that could go that I’m not ready to drop, and time will tell whether they go or not. The boys are finding their way into being functional adults. My bus driving job is starting to do more harm to my body and soul than the salary is worth. I have done a lot of thinking over the last few years and kept writing the same thing over and over again in multiple notebooks: I want to travel. I want to live with the seasons. I want to simplify my life so that I have more control over how I live. I have started to realize that my life is about to be more wide open than it has been since I graduated high school and I have created an escape plan to take advantage of it.
I want to use this blog to share my journey. Yes, I say journey because that is definitely how I see it. The last few years the journey has been in my head. I have been searching out and absorbing input that fuels my inspiration. I have been refining the idea of what I want for my life. I know how much reading about other people’s journeys through life has helped me, so I want to share my own. I have a lot to fight through. Health, finances, distance, and the ever present blackberry war are all on my mind. I plan to discuss them all at some point, and I’m sure more will come up as I go.
Here’s my commitment to myself and anyone who ends up reading this blog: I aim to post 6 days a week. Let me write that with more impact: I WILL POST 6 DAYS A WEEK!!!! Starting today. That means I have to get up when I wake up, not lay in bed and play candy crush. I will treat this like my never-ending NANOWRIMO. That’s how it starts. May I never have to write that opening title again.
I love puns. We used to play with words in the most horrible ways when I was a kid. The worst we came up with was “possumbly.”… One day someone said, “Oh, no there’s a dead possum in the road. Do you think maybe he came from the swamp?” I replied, “Possumbly.” Everyone died laughing. Funny thing, though. Nobody seems to appreciate my puns as much now. We lost something growing up.
Anyway, I married into the name Cao. The proper Spanish pronunciation is “cow” but my kids prefer “K.O.” I can’t imagine why… Now if you have a family named Smith you would refer to them as the Smiths. The English convention is to add an ‘s’ to make it a plural. So with Cao we become the Caos. In Spanish that means exactly what it looks like: chaos. It fits. My husband had ADD in the best of ways and our boys continue the tradition. When they were little I kept threatening to rent them out as demolition experts.
Now it isn’t so bad, but life is chaotic. I try to keep a handle on it but things keep slipping through the cracks. The poultry refuses to be contained, the fridge is a constant terrifying science project, and the blackberry vines laugh at the goats, who can’t get out of their pasture, but escape any other enclosure I try to put them in so that they have a chance at consuming the brambles. Before we moved here I knew that I would call this place Caosville because it fit in every way. And I like it that way.
It has been a busy couple of weeks. Finally it is Sunday, my day to just be at home and not running around like a crazy person. Of course, that means it is also the day I do the most work around here. Usually the hardest part of that is rounding up the teens to do their share.
Last Sunday was a gorgeous, sunny day and much was accomplished. The lawn got mowed, then dragged with a blanket harrow to break up the weeds to make room for the seed I had Little Miss throw on the ground. As a reward for all her help she got to drive the mower a bit and then we finished the day by making a coop for her chicks to move into from the brooder box.
This Sunday is gray and rainy and so far I have done almost nothing. We had a road trip to Bend yesterday and the driving and not enough sleep really caught up with me. So today will be focused on indoor stuff. The house needs a good cleaning and I have four boxes of apples that have a grand destiny ahead of them. Applesauce is coming! How better to spend a gray fall day than with a house filled with the scent of apple and cinnamon and a chicken roasting in the oven. Yeah, it’s that kind of day.
Hello Internet! After ages of telling myself I was going to jump in, here I am. Caosville is a place, a theme and a state of mind. Here we know that whether you are going to make an omlette or hatch a chick that eggshell is going to have to get broken. And that’s okay! My life rarely goes according to plan and I am always having to adjust what I wanted to do to fit what I am able to get done, and that is okay too. It has to be because otherwise, who could stay sane? I could tell you everything there is to know about me and my world in one post, but that would make for a very long and boring read. Instead, why don’t I just introduce things a bit at a time.
Here’s the short version: Bus Driver, Quilter, Mom, Voracious Reader, Farmer, Lover of Delicious Food, some more dedicated than others, and not necessarily in that order. I get stories from every facet of my life and I think it would be fun to share. I hope you enjoy!
