I am trying to get so much done all at once all the time.  Work is a little nuts right now- not in a bad way- just requiring extra time and attention to make some changes happen.  It’s also canning season.  I made some garlic dill mixed veg pickles last week as well as some more blackberry jam.  (I am working at perfecting my jamming skills- so at least one more batch of blackberry jam is required).  Today my mom and I go picking pickling cucumbers on Sauvie Island.  Tomorrow I will be pickling all day.  I love canning so much.  Like writing does, it makes me feel right in my skin.

I want to thank all of you for speaking up to remind me I’m not alone last week.  It really does make a huge difference to hear it even though I intellectually already know I’m not alone.  I found a local support group for parents of special needs kids and I will check it out probably next week and see what I think.

I don’t find much time for crafting these days and mostly I’m okay with that.  If I want to get where I intend to get then writing and querying agents is what I need to be spending “extra” time doing.  However, just before my trip my back went our for a couple of days and I watched old movies (30’s and 40’s) and made this camera case for my new camera.  I’m notoriously hard on everything I own and with my last camera I never kept it in a case.  I want to try to take better care of my new one because cameras (good ones) are super expensive and having a really good working one at all times is really important to me.  So I made this case for it out of things I had on hand.  I used wool felt and then did free-hand embroidery all over it.  Winging it as I went along.  I would have chosen different thread if I hadn’t been determined not to buy any.  So I was guided by what I had and in the end I’m really happy with where it took me.  I’ve been good about keeping my camera in its case while bouncing around in the dark perils of my bag.

The bloody noses are back.  In the past couple of weeks Max has been getting quite a few of them.  This is nothing compared to how it was two years ago which is something I make a point of being thankful for.  The days of my bathroom looking like a murder scene are obviously not quite over though.  This is sometimes how I find out Max is bleeding again.  He doesn’t always tell me.  The up side of this is that obviously he’s handling them well by himself.  He’s only had two recently that required my help because they were much to bad for him to deal with.

The fact that I feel compelled to photograph blood whenever I see it suggests that I might have missed my calling as a forensics photographer.  Indeed, I think I would have loved that.  I do take photographs of dead things when I see them and though it does give me an occasional uneasy pang (exactly how macabre AM I?) I do it anyway because it’s fascinating.  I have a photograph from Santa Monica of an impressive bloody street scene.  It’s already on my flickr pages if you want to seek it out, but eventually it will be used in a post.  Blood tells the most interesting human stories.  The evenly splattered blood drops Max and I once followed from Jay’s Landing (a sports bar near our house) held our rapt interest- we were thinking a drunken brawl was the cause.  The drops disappeared up at the top of the hill.  But several days later we picked up a new blood trail along the fence of his school down the street from our house.  Was it the same bleeder?  Or a whole new event?

Blood stories.  I can never look away.  Maybe because, like Max, I lost so much blood as a teen myself.

I must tear myself away and get ready for my farm adventure with my mom.  The most difficult question I have to ask myself today is: should I put make up on for this pickle picking, or not?  And: when I come home tonight will there be a corn snake living here named Angelina?

Did I mention that wee Pete died?  I can’t remember.  There’s more to say on that and I think Pete deserves his own belated memorial post so I will save details for that.  We miss that baby snake more than you can imagine.

Have a great Saturday!  For those here in Oregon- stay as cool as you may unless you thrive on heat in which case- get out there and don’t waste your moment to wallow!!  For those of you on the East coast-please take care not to jump into the eye of the hurricane- okay?