Too Much to Do this Month

[butterflydreaming]

Vote tomorrow! (Me, that is.) Which means a free cupcake from Cupcake Royale in Ballard. Mmm.

3,752 / 50,000 (7.5%)

I met my goal today, four hours of writing. This first part is all stuff that I know really well, so I was able to produce 3752 words, almost 4 pages. I'm sure this will be balanced out in the next month by a day when I can't do as much. But meanwhile... Yay me!

I wonder what my typing speed is now? I used to be awful, but now I can backspace and correct as fast as just typing, so I have a minimum of lingering errors. My hands hurt a bit, but since these past days have been cold, they've been hurting anyway (as have my wrists, shoulders, and knees). I couldn't find my copper bracelet this morning. Where did that go?


I just looked at the musemuggers_2 info page. There are only 5 spaces left. {boggles} Is there anyone who wants in who isn't a musemugger already? Now would be the time, while the community is dormant for NaNo.


It's been raining a cold, slow rain today, and the drops are sitting in the branches of the evergreens like ice slush. They may, in fact, be ice. Winter is here, and I had forgotten what it felt like to be this cold. That's the thing with living in a place that has seasons. Like pain, your body can't remember being really hot or really cold. I can only intellectually think about being so hot that I couldn't sleep, having the fan on and the deck door open, prefering the danger of mosquito bites to insomnia. Being this cold, I appreciate my wool sweaters and my cashmere (they were a gift) socks, and especially the silk clothes that I have.

I have a moral dilemna about silk. Tussah silk, a wild silk where the moth gets to live, is becoming more widely available, but it's still really hard to find in clothes. Regular silk (Bombex silk) is a kind of perfect fiber to me; I've loved it forever and intensely. But it's tainted. The cocoons are boiled, to kill the moth inside and keep an unbroken strand, and the pale color. All that silk moths do once they hatch is find a mate and do the reproductive thing, and then die, but boiling them to death seems unfair; it breaks the continuity of their lives and leaves them unfinished. That's what I mean by tainted.

I'm by no means vegan. I eat meat, eat and use animal products, and I don't think it's wrong. I prefer to eat animals that have had good lives. I'm going to go ahead and sound crazy and say that I can taste the misery in an animal who has been fed newspaper and bloodmeal when it's supposed to be an herbivore, the sickness in most milk and eggs. It's a far from perfect philosophy, but I consider things and weigh my choices.

I used to get eggs from my friend Bette, who lived up in the Cascades in a little town called Concrete. (If you've ever seen This Boy's Life, that's the town.) She had 400 birds when I met her, all rescued animals, chickens and ducks, geese and peacocks, that people had given her or that she had pulled out of the "dead chicken bin" at commercial poultry farms. She fed her chickens trim from the grocery store, donated grain, oyster shells, and scraps from the local pizza place (that serves one of the best pizzas I've ever eaten). She let them run wild, even though sometimes she had to go looking for them in the woods, and she played the radio for them.

I have never again tasted eggs as good as those. It helped that they were often same-day fresh, but even two weeks later (I would buy a lot), there was so much flavor to them. I can't get them anymore, because as the chickens aged, they would lay less often. (When I last talked to her, she was down to a few dozen a day, and those were already spoken for.) Bette couldn't keep rescuing chickens; it was too sad. But she took care of all of her old hens, even though they no longer produced an income for her.

L decided a while ago not to buy pearls anymore. "They're a symbol of irritation," she has said. It's a valid point; cultured pearls involve cutting open the oyster's flesh and sticking an irritating bead in to become the nucleus. A lot of the oysters die from the trauma, too, since they are used over and over. That gleaming iridencense on pearls is called nacre, and it's produced by the oyster to ease irritation. A natural, non-cultured pearl would form over a small grain of sand or the like.

Pearls and silk are both quite beautiful, to the eye and to the touch. But I think that I can live without them. Why surround myself with pointless death? It has nothing to do with changing the world; it's just that I already have too much darkness around me.

Comments

[elihice.livejournal.com]

Well, 3752 words! That the highest in my flist for today, I'm sure you will make it to 50 000.