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The silence is deafening.

Submitted entry: I just woke up a 1/2 hour or so ago when Sage got up to go to the house to be online for a while. Paul, remarkably, is still asleep after his having been waking up before six for the past few days. I think with his cold he hasn’t been much into eating and as a result he wakes up hungry. It’s hard when you have a stuffy nose, after all. You can’t taste anything and chewing means you can’t breathe so I don’t blame him for eating just enough to get by. It has been hard, though, as he’s been tired and crabby (from hunger and from sleeplessness) much of the day. But it’s just another challenge of parenting. It’s hard days with him that I think have the potential for the most growth as a parent.

And speaking of hard days, Sage just came back from the house -the water jug she had brought with her had frozen shut so she came back for another one. She was pretty crabby, and before leaving for the house with a jug that spent the night in the warm yurt, apologized for being that way. See, we all have bad days - I expect it from me, I expect it from Sage but somehow many of us either don’t expect, or accept the fact that kids can have bad days too. Of course I think that children and adults need to learn to have bad days without venting at others around them thereby. And again, of course, I realize that whether I, Sage orPaul has a bad day it is always a learning experience for me.

Paul’s awake so I’ll stop for now, or for good depending on how many “learning experiences” today offers.

Okay, it’s 11:30. Sage brought back water and started working. Paul and I played, read and made pancakes. (and coffee for me speaking of which I’m back to 2 cups a day and I’m ready for #2) Things went quite well, actually. Sage worked for about four hours and Paul didn’t be terribly disruptive and even showed interest in what she was doing asking her to click on and move objects on the screen. He was amazingly patient with the whole process and went back a few times throughout Sage’s work to see what she was up to. He’s also quite helpful at times when he says what he thinks something is on the screen. He can tell Sage if she’s on the right track with a graphic that way.

Meanwhile I have a fair amount of work to do this afternoon. I’m just about at the half way point in my project. It’s exciting to be nearing the end and to be able to look forward to spending time not having to worry about working. The weather has been pleasantly cold outside, rarely topping 35 with icy nights in the teens. It’s way nicer to gather wood when it’s cold - even on 45 degree days I’m in shirtsleeves before long if I’m working very hard. And cold nights are the best. There’s something about going outside to pee at night and to look up and feel the cold and look up to see more stars than I had imagined existed (even without my glasses). I realized when we first moved here that aside from a visit here in 1995, I hadn’t seen the milky way since the late 90’s due to the light pollution of the east coast megalopolis. And the silence on a cold night is astonishing. Often all I can hear is my breath and when I hold that the silence is deafening. And it looks like it’s going to belike that all winter too as the National Weather Service says that it will be colder than normal and that we’re to expect nearly two feet of snow (which doesn’t seem much to my old east coast standards but after last winter’s 10 inches it seems phenomenal).

Now Paul’s down at the tipi. Kitey came to visit while he and I were painting and he asked to go to the tipi and make pancakes with her. In the beginning of his cold we were being very strict about his going outside even with lots of clothes on but he has such a hard time staying in and gets totally stir crazy. He was a barbarian all morning yesterday, doing things that he knew we didn’t like and after a short trip outside to get wood and a walk to the persimmon grove. He ate a ton - he really seems to have a good handle on what his body needs when sick even to the point of getting interested in medicinal plants (when he had the stomach flu he wanted to eat nothing other than sumac and juniper berries for example). It’s fun to think of how different I must have been at his age. Two nights ago we were walking back from the house and he was thrilled to be outside (it was the first time he’d been out in a while) and it was getting really cloudy and windy and he said “Bigstorm coming, daddy!” I don’t think I was outside even enough at that age to know when a storm was coming - I think I figured that out at about ten. I handed him a broken stick on another day and asked him to smell it and see if he could guess what it was. Sassafras was his answer- correct! Of course it has a very distinct and lovely smell nearly as nice as the red cedar that grows around here. All the things he won’t have to learn (as I did) at nearly 30 and still he gets the benefit of being exposed to technology too. How cool it must be. Of course he doesn’t think of it that way. It is his life after all. I’m wondering how long it will be before he notices that not everyone lives in a yurt like he does.

I have been having a ball with the writing for Themestream, and am getting a surprising amount of traffic there. It’s fun to have the opportunity to write in a different voice. Not that I, having a web site of my own, can’t do that anyway, but it’s different somehow. I like having a place for my ranting and raving beyond what I do here.

Having given up meat again for some reason has got me inspired about cooking somehow again. It’s not as if I cooked meat more than once or twice at the yurt - I guess it’s just that I’m thinking of getting back into the mailing lists and I remember that there were tons of great recipes going back and forth with lots of cool people too. I hope to find a more social list than the ones we used to be involved in. They were fairly good for the most part but quite often degenerated into flame wars either between omnivores and vegetarians or even among vegetarians over some subtle issue of ethics. Anyone here involved in any likely candidates? There were only a few back in ” ‘93 but now with places likeOnelist I’m sure that there are more than I can count or keep up with.Speaking of that, I tried subscribing to Diary-L for about a day. Literally only a day in fact. And it was then I realized that that kind of list isn’t something I’m able to be involved in these days. Back in the days when I could sit at my desk at work covertly sending emails throughout the day to keep in the conversation it would work but now whenI get email a few times a day and generally only do my email after 9:00 at night I haven’t the time to keep up with lists where topics come and go before I even have a chance to respond. I think diary-l was an extreme example though - I’ve never been involved in such a high-traffic listever. There were six digests in the day that I was involved. I don’t even think that if there were something I were completely and totally interested and immersed in that I could keep up.

I might just have a spoonful or two of peanut butter.

That Terrible Cycle