Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 18

Bebe kittehs!

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One of these two will be joining the household come Thanksgiving #kittens

A post shared by Sarah Wynde (@wyndesarah) on Nov 8, 2020 at 5:22pm PST

I discovered a great thing about masks this weekend: if you’re allergic to cats, but hold one while wearing a mask, your chances of having an allergic reaction are greatly reduced! Or at least I held a kitten without winding up miserable. Three kittens, in fact!

So Suzanne’s co-worker’s wife rescued a cat in need of a home. Said cat turned out to be seven cats, actually. I only heard the story second hand, but it sounded like the co-worker was feeling sorta gloomy about that when he said to Suzanne, “Want a kitten?”

She laughed at him and then said… “Wait. Yes. Yes, I do.”

This weekend we went to meet them. Properly socially distanced and masked, of course. Suzanne’s pick came down to one of the two in the above picture, currently known as Explorer Girl and Boots.

I thought Boots (the more solid gray) was the cutest, but I think my opinion was probably affected by the fact that Explorer Girl was already known for being the most interested in food. My favorite of Suzanne’s current cats, Gina, is also highly interested in food (when Suzanne is at work, I feed her a few times a day most days), and I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about having competition. But one of the kitten goals — if such a thing is possible? — is to give Moe, the current youngest pet on the Mighty Small Farm, someone to play with, and Explorer Girl might be the best bet for that. Plus, Suzanne is hoping to bring her home for Thanksgiving, when she’ll have plenty of time to supervise introductions, and Explorer Girl is going to be the most ready to leave home by then. She’ll be a little young, but she’s already eating cat food.

Honestly, though, I don’t think it matters which one joins us. A kitten is a kitten! I’m probably going to be wandering around in an allergy drug stupor for a while, but it’s going to be so much fun! Totally worth it.

Things I Like

Halloween night was a sleepless night for me. As you probably know, it was a full moon. Also a blue moon, the second full moon of the month. In Arcata, a lovely light layer of fog turned it into a literal blue moon. It was extremely pretty, so much so that I texted Suzanne around 9PM to tell her how beautiful it was.

Zelda, however, did not share my admiration. Or maybe she did. Because the moonlight was so bright shining through the skylight in the tiny house that sometime around midnight Zelda decided the day had begun. She was highly committed to this idea. From midnight to about 3AM, she did her absolute best to convince me that it was morning, and we should be going for a walk. She hardly ever sleeps through the night anymore — she almost always wants to go out at midnight — but usually I can sleepily get up, let her out, then five or ten minutes later, sleepily let her in again. This was different: she really believed we should be going for our walk together. It’s tough to convince a senile dog that moonlight and daylight are not the same thing. But you know, it was still beautiful. And I love the skylight in the tiny house and the light it lets in, even when it is the middle of the night. And I adore my dog, even when she’s confused.

[image error]Jack-o-lanterns and dogs.

Suzanne likes Halloween, so even though we suspected this year would be weird, on Halloween day we carved Jack-o-lanterns. Well, Suzanne carved Jack-o-lanterns, plural: I carved a Jack-o-lantern, singular. As it grew dark, we set them up with lights on hay bales, with our socially distanced chairs six feet away from a bowl of candy. As it grew cold and foggy, we managed to give away a single tootsie pop to a homeless guy wandering by, before we acknowledged that it was a year of no trick-or-treaters and retreated to our respective cozy houses. It was still fun.

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You might notice in the above picture that Zelda is wearing a jacket. Yep, I have turned into a person who dresses her dog. Or she has turned into a dog who wears clothing, which might not be exactly the same thing. Not that she dresses herself, but she trembles when it’s cold and seems to welcome her coat, so… *shrug*. And I have to admit, I think she looks adorable in her various layers. Mara, Suzanne’s next door neighbor, gave us two of them; one which seemed a little small; one (above) which is pretty big; and I bought her a sweater at Target, which fits just right. Yep, my dog now has a wardrobe. I like it, and I think she does, too.

Another thing I like: the cozy pajamas I bought at Costco. One pair is plaid and one pair has snowflakes on them and if you had asked me as recently as six months ago if I would ever wear something plaid or with a snowflake print, I would have scoffed at you. Clearly, no, never. But, oh, these pajamas are sooo comfortable. I would be tempted to stay in them all day if I didn’t think that was unhealthy.

Another thing I like: the crispy cold morning air turning into sunny afternoons. I’m not excited for this upcoming Friday where the high temp is predicted to be 48, but the past few days have started out chilly and then become warmer with clear blue skies by the afternoon. Yesterday I convinced Suzanne that we should walk the dogs in the forest instead of at the beach. What I really wanted was the crunch of leaves, which she pointed out to me I wasn’t going to get in a redwood forest, but it still felt like autumn.

[image error]The community forest

Another thing I like: my friend Christina’s taste in music. Every season, she makes a Apple music playlist. I’ve been listening to her autumn playlist all morning. It’s filled with songs I would never have discovered on my own, some of which I would also probably have skipped through if they actually showed up randomly on the music Apple picks for me, but I’m loving it. I really like Run Far by Elliphant, among others. Weird, and delightful, IMO.

Another thing I like: playing with covers. I didn’t make one yesterday because the day wound up being filled with others things: phone calls and errands and laundry and pumpkin-pie eating and long conversations. But Saturday I went for the fairy tale & painterly look for a horrible title:

[image error]Note to self: never use a long name in a title. So awkward to place.

And today I did a sci-fi cover for my font project. This font is Encode and it’s definitely a good sci-fi font. Straightforward, but the curves on the top of the letters and the straight lines down the sides make me think of spaceships. I would absolutely have sworn that I’d downloaded a spaceship, but I couldn’t find it, alas. It would have made a nice background element. I tried about six different backgrounds before finally settling on a texture and those splashes of color, but it was mostly experimenting with fonts. Still, I like it.

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Still more things I like: leftover Halloween candy, gluten-free bagels, complicated cooking plans (pork carnitas for dinner, I hope), and Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education, which I’ve read three times now. It’s maybe not a book I want to look at too closely (how does the narrator know everything she knows?) but I love it anyway. I downloaded the author’s entire 9 book dragon series from the library to help me make it through the next days of uncertainty. Distractions & more distractions! That, plus plenty of candy, are going to make this week much easier, I hope.

Cover Design Projects

On Twitter yesterday, NK Jemisin said:

Said to my therapist this morning that I can't plan anything, bc the next few weeks are a singularity of possibilities that I can't see past. She gave me permission to play video games all day — "practice radical self-care," basically. Anybody else needs to hear this, you too.

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) October 29, 2020

My immediate reaction was, “OMG, yes!” This is what I’ve been wanting. Permission to stop struggling to accomplish things every day. Permission to let go and not worry and not feel sad and scared. Permission to just kill monsters. Or build farms or take care of gardens or whatever non-real simulation thing I want to do. Permission to wander around Pandaria, my favorite land in World of Warcraft, if that is what I want to do.

Writing has been impossible lately. My imagination is broken. I have no stories left. NaNoWriMo starts in two days and first I was planning to finish one of the multiple novels I have underway. But they’re all stuck for a reason: I don’t know what happens next in them. Then I thought I’d start something new and fresh — it’s always easier to begin something than it is to persist through a murky middle. But I don’t have any ideas. Nothing fun is happening in my daydreams.

Next I thought maybe I’d just write fanfiction of my own books — scenes and short stories with characters I already know, no worrying about plot, just character and dialogue and moments in time. I even for a brief moment had Maggie and Max in my head, with Maggie getting annoyed at Max in December 2019, when he provides her with blueprints of a diner renovation that would improve all the little annoyances in her kitchen. How can she shut down for the three months it would take to get that work done? she demands, but he grimaces and suggests she schedule it for the spring. Yay, an idea! But that’s all it was, an idea of that one moment and it didn’t lead me to anything else.

The usual writing advice is just to persist. Keep thinking about it, keep sitting down at the computer, keep opening up the file and staring at the blank page. But I fill my blank pages with endless ruminations about my failures as a parent, what it means to have been so wrong about a relationship. To believe it was one thing — love and affection and appreciation of one another, a firm belief in the other person’s value and worth as a human being, the very definition of family — only to discover that all that appreciation was a one-way street. That while I thought my son was fantastic and interesting, he thought I was condescending and annoying and not even worth reaching out to when the world was burning down. When I called him from the desert, sick and scared and crying, and he didn’t call me back… well.

Can I tell you how much these ruminations do NOT serve me? They don’t serve me. I’m trying very hard — very, very, very hard — to stay out of that black hole, which means that I delete those words and close that file and move on to other things.

I am tempted, of course, to do that very thing right now. (In fact, I did, for about an hour.) Writing words and sharing them, even in the form of a blog that only a few people read, means accepting that other people will judge those words and, of course, the person behind them. Are you going to think I’m a bad mother? Are you going to think I’m over-sensitive? Do I need to care? A helpful friend this summer told me I was co-dependent for hurting so much and I should get help. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine how that felt. Fortunately for my state of mind, around the same time the Best Sister-in-Law Ever (married to the Best Brother Ever) sent me the Best Email Ever. So you, oh, reader, can feel free to judge me for my over-sensitivity and my wallowing; I can pretty much guarantee that your judgement won’t be as harsh as my own anyway.

What does all this have to do with cover design? Well, I was eager to accept the internet’s granted permission to play video games. I truly was! Yay, video games! I actually started downloading WoW again, so I could go take care of my farm in Pandaria. But back in August, shortly after I posted my Daughter of Flame cover, I decided that my graphic design education needed a focus. My daily drawings (never actually daily) were entertaining but it didn’t feel like they were getting me anywhere, and I don’t have nearly enough book projects to keep me learning design via my own stories. So I made up a project, or rather, a series of them. I found a random title generator on the internet, generated a bunch of titles, and started making covers to go with those titles.

This is that project to date:

[image error]August 28 – I love what I did with the typography in this cover, but my first achievement was really changing the once-red dress on the figure to the green dress. I made her hair kind of crazy, too, using the sponge tool, I think.



[image error]September 6 – Real designers can probably do a cover in a day, but it was taking me close to a week. (Obviously, it wasn’t what I did full-time.) The figure was a free download, the background was a photo of my own, but the fog around her feet was what I was learning how to do.



[image error]September 7 – Um, no. This is a lousy cover. I kind of gave up. The owl, though, was pretty cool. It was a stock photo that I selected and then played with to try to get that drawn look. I just didn’t know enough to make what I was imagining work the way I wanted it to.



[image error]September 8 – I tried a second time with the same title, because I didn’t like giving up on it. Admittedly, it’s a lousy title — the person who names a book something so vague needs to get some marketing assistance. Still a lousy cover — what genre is this book, anyway?



[image error]September 10 – I’m not convinced this one works, but it was fun. It was the first time I really had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish from a story I had in mind. I don’t think I’d use it as is, but it’s a starting place.



[image error]September 21 – After my owl frustration, I spent several days playing with brushes, learning (not all that successfully) how to make fur and hair. I did the previously posted dragon picture during that week, too. Eleven days later I was ready to try a cover again. For this one, I used the Symmetry tool with a brush in Affinity Photo to draw the background image, then added some smoke with another brush.



[image error]October 7 – A second try at the head swap and this time it was a full body swap — I let the girl keep her neck and gave her a mermaid’s tail. Some magic in one hand, some lightning in the other, some fancy borders — and honestly, I think this cover sucks. But the body swap flows pretty well, I think, and I like what I did to her glove (using the clone tool).



[image error]October 8 – Check out the author name. I was learning how to do a watercolor effect in Affinity Photo and I liked the way it turned out so much that I turned it into a cover and put my own name on it. I have no idea what story should go with this cover — or if any ever will — but I think it’s really pretty. I even like the type treatment & the font, despite thinking that font would be completely unusable as a cover font.



[image error]October 9 — And I love this one. Totally different, not like any cover I’ve ever seen, and with a kind of comic book look that suggests it’s going to be a comic book sort of story — maybe with superheroes? Or zombies? Definitely with attitude! It needs another blurb to go under the series name or maybe some graphic element there — maybe extending the lightning down. The stock photo in the background has been duplicated, inverted, blurred and blended using Color Dodge as the blend mode, with another duplicate layer on the top using Linear Burn as the blend mode. That makes the light areas blurry and the dark areas super-defined, for the comic book effect. If I was really going to use this as a cover, I’d probably re-do the typography, since it tells me nothing about the genre — it was sorta just thrown on there when I liked the image. (Having utterly failed to make a watercolor effect out of it, which is what I was trying to do.)



[image error]October 23 – Not a final cover, because I gave up on the typography. But the original character had sort of pinkish-gray hair and I changed her hair color and eye color. The background was a texture: I changed the colors, and used the clone tool and some painting to make it hint at being scenery behind her. I liked my tag line, though.



[image error]October 25 – So different! So probably not a real cover! But I stumbled across a link to art posted by the British Museum, free to use, and downloaded a grayscale image of a line drawing of gears from an old book. I selected the gears and turned it into a brush in Affinity. Now I can add gears to any image just by painting them on. This is actually a fairly useless achievement, since how often does one want to add gears to an image? But I made multiple versions of the gear, different sizes, different opacities, stacked them all together, did some layer blending and painting, and added a title from my list.



[image error]October 27 – Notice the ground that she’s standing on. That’s my pile of gears from the previous cover. I used the perspective tool to push it backwards and turn it into a surface. I spent a ridiculously long time trying to get a background to work, though. I painted in rocks. Used a selection from a stock photo to put in columns. Tried a night sky. Everything looked wrong. I’m now at the point where I know enough to know when I’m missing something, but not at the point where I know the answer right away. Still, I like my end result here. I would not be ashamed to have this cover on a story. (Another stupid title from the random title generator, though. Eventually, if I’m serious about doing the whole random list, I’m going to have to do one titled “Dogs and Goblins.” Um…”)



[image error]October 29 – The problem with this one, IMO, is that it doesn’t know what genre it wants to be. Also, I specifically wanted to create a science-fiction cover so that I could experiment with fonts for science fiction books but none of my random titles were particularly sci-fi. But this cover includes a head swap (seamless, IMO, although it might be cheating to have her half off the page), some smoke, text effects, layer blend modes, and use of the Tone Mapping persona in Affinity Photo, which is a ridiculously cool tool that took me months to discover. If I had a story that was, as my friend Tim suggested, “neo-noir with a side of Raymond Chandler,” I’d be pretty happy with this cover.



[image error]October 29 – And if I had written something that was cyberpunk except optimistic and fun, I’d be delighted with this cover. Truly, delighted. I’m pretty delighted with it anyway. I used a macro to change the colors, an overlay to add the faint green computer-ish lines, the ripple live filter on the reflected text, masks… I’m completely pleased with my work on this one. The starting place was to make a science fiction cover so I could experiment with science fiction fonts, but it so makes me wish I had a cyborg girl with attitude in a story. Any story. Also, though, in August, it was taking me a week to create a cover. Yesterday, I made two of them. Shine on, me.

And this bring us to today. Am I going to create a cover today? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just going to play video games, the internet having given me permission to grieve for my son and my country and our world in whatever way gets me through the day.

But I am also going to pat myself on the back and acknowledge the shine I deserve for having created this portfolio of mostly lousy, sometimes great work in the past two months. I am halfway through my list of titles: I don’t want to stop now. Despite the temptation of video games and escapes from reality, I’m looking forward to what I’ll be able to do and how much I’ll know by the time I reach the end of my list. (Although I’m willing to bet the very last one will be either Gnome of Time, Nymphs And Foes, or the aforementioned Dogs and Goblins, none of which strike me as particularly good titles. I guess that’s the peril of a random title generator.)

Meanwhile, I’ve actually started another cover design project, which is maybe going to turn into something I share with other people some day? I got tired of re-inventing the wheel typographically. I like playing with fonts but I also wanted to create some cheat sheets for myself of fonts that look good together, specifically for book covers as opposed to web sites, and that are also genre-appropriate for given genres. The last two covers in my list are actually part of those genre tests. I’ve got multiple versions of Crown’s Power using all kinds of different fonts, most of which I rejected, while Chasing Destiny was my Roboto test. I used Roboto for the title (with some playing around with tracking and leading) and then tried out approximately nine or ten other fonts for the author name and tag line before settling on versions of Roboto.

My notes say:

Roboto  – Available on Google fonts. Roboto was designed for Android and is sort of a mix of styles; a rounded san serif that feels straightforward and simple. Per Wikipedia, Google was aiming for “modern, yet approachable” and initial reviews were mixed. But it’s everywhere and has the kind of clean lines that could easily work on a science-fiction or modern tech cover. (It might also work on contemporary romance if it was a geeky romance.) Because it’s used on interfaces (Android, Switch), it feels familiar. I’d say it’s not a noticeable font, but possibly a good choice for a cover where you want the art to stand out more than the type treatment.  

Pair with Lato, Josephin Sans, Rubik, or stick to a different weight of Roboto. 

Note: this is NOT Roboto Slab, which is a serif font and which doesn’t work for me. It looks more typewriter than tech. One source suggested pairing Roboto and Roboto Slab, but while that might work for a web page, it doesn’t work at all for a book cover, IMO. The Slab would be better for blocks of text, rather than display. 

See Chasing Destiny cover for Roboto example. 

I’m going to try to do one font a day from a fairly lengthy list of fonts I generated by reading all the articles on “best fonts for book cover design” on the first couple pages of Google’s search results. I’m hoping to end up with five to seven sets per genre — enough that I have plenty of flexibility and choice but not so much that I feel consistently overwhelmed by the thousands of font combinations that are available. It doesn’t feel like information I should share on my blog — admit it, even if you’ve read this far, you skimmed that block of italicized text, didn’t you? — but maybe I’ll make a new blog for indie author cover design tips. Or maybe I’ll turn it into a tiny ebook or something. Or maybe I’ll just have it as a useful tool for my own future fun in cover design.

Meanwhile, if you need permission to make it through the next few weeks/months by playing video games all day, you hereby have my permission. And NK Jemisin’s permission and her therapist’s permission, too. Go forth and conquer Azeroth! Or Animal Crossing or wherever your gaming takes you. But please vote first. (Um, for Biden-Harris. If you’re planning on voting for this guy, you might be codependent and should consider seeking help.)

As good an ad about Trump as I've seen. I hope you'll retweet it. pic.twitter.com/G5e5L0HyRu

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) October 29, 2020

Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary

At the beginning of the summer, Suzanne had a dozen chickens in a coop next to the tiny house, with a second, smaller coop near the shed at the far end of the yard. The ground of the enclosures around the big coop was bare dirt, all traces of plant life gobbled down by the birds inside, but the area by the back coop was surrounded by brush and weeds with plenty of opportunities for thriving communities of bugs and spiders. You’d think this would be a no-brainer for the chickens, right? Smaller coop with prolific food and snack sources should always win out over bigger barren coop, right?

Not so much. Chickens do not like to be separated from the flock. The small coop — overflowing with snacks! — was the punishment zone, and the chickens hated being relegated to it. Suzanne, however, wanted them to clear out the weeds for her. Her solution was to add a few more chickens to the flock: young ones, who would start out in the small coop and stay there.

She bought four… teenage chickens. I’m sure there’s a name for that in the chicken world, but I’m equally sure that I’m not in the mood to start browsing the internet looking for it. Well, it’s not that I’m not in the mood, but if I fall into an internet rabbit hole today, I will probably not manage to pull myself out anytime soon. So whatever, four teenage chickens, mixed breeds of ameraucana and something else that Suzanne can’t remember.

[image error]Their royal majesties

Suzanne, having had many chickens over the years, doesn’t feel the need to name every chicken anymore. She calls the flock of them, “the ladies,” and pretty much leaves it at that, although a few of the older ones do have names. I’m not so nonchalant about cute teenage chickens, though, so within a few days, I’d decided that these birds should be named after the queens of England.

If you look closely at the above picture, you’ll see that the bird who’s looking out at the camera has some dark fluffy feathers around her beak. Another one has white feathers in the same spot. I named the one with white feathers Elizabeth, for her Elizabethan ruff, and the one with the dark feathers Victoria, for her expression of disapproval. The other two, somewhat interchangeable, were Mary and Anne.

Their royal majesties, however, did not grow up to be interchangeable. To begin with, three of the four of them were escape artists. The area around the small coop was enclosed with soft fencing, boards, and buildings (the shed and the coop), but Victoria, Elizabeth, and Mary treated that whole enclosure thing as more of a suggestion than a rule. I’d regularly go out into the garden and discover chickens wandering free. After all, given a choice between gobbling on thick weeds or tender basil plants and strawberries, who would choose the weeds? Anne, apparently, who never seemed to wander with the others.

Because Suzanne wasn’t inclined to let the chickens feast on the plants that she wanted in her garden, she decided their majesties needed to move into the main coop with the rest of the birds. I was worried about them — wouldn’t they get picked on? Were the older chickens going to share their food? I’m not going to say Suzanne laughed at me, but she definitely didn’t share my concern. And rightfully so.

Possibly I shouldn’t have named them after royalty, because the teenage hooligans took over the main coop within a few weeks. They stay up later than the others — everyone else has gone to bed and they’re still roaming, hunting for the last of the daily pellets of food — but despite their late bedtimes, they sleep on the top rung of the roost. They share it with a couple of the others, but all four of them wind up squished in on the highest row, which is the power position for chickens.

And Mary, formerly the Queen of Scots, now known as Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary, has continued her escape artist proclivities. She’s still light enough to fly to the top of the fence on the big coop, then fly down on the other side and wander around the garden, selecting leaves of basil and flowers to snack on at her leisure.

Initially, getting her back into the coop was a challenge for me. But chickens are not nearly as stupid as I was always told they were. Now when Mary-Mary gets out, I grab a chicken snack — maybe some scraps of vegetables leftover from cooking, or a handful of berries, or maybe a little granola — and head to the door of the coop. Mary-Mary hurries back to get her share of the fresh loot before I can leave her out of it. She would probably say that human beings aren’t as stupid as she always thought they were.

[image error]One of these chickens is not like the others

Yesterday I spent $20 at the feed store to buy a big bag of chicken treats. Suzanne laughed and said the chickens would adore me. I, somewhat smugly, said that her chickens already adore me, and she promised that adoration would turn to worship. I am pretty sure that Mary-Mary is not the worshipping type, however. She thinks those treats are nothing more than her due.

I am ridiculously fond of her.

Magical Cave Photo

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The cave photo from a few days ago, made just a little more fun. I didn’t actually do any of the complicated compositing things I’ve learned about — atmospheric perspective and balancing light and shadows and so on. I just gave it a magic bird and a path of clouds and a pretty sky and some sparkle. It was very satisfying. Sharing so Carol can see!

Sunstone Mining in Oregon

[image error]The Oregon desert

I didn’t check the temperature, but I’m pretty sure the night we spent in the Oregon desert was the coldest I’ve ever been in Serenity. That was mostly because we hadn’t been on the road for more than a meal or two before my propane died again, which meant I had no heater. Fortunately, I’ve been living in Arcata long enough to have stocked up on my warm layers: I wore a t-shirt, a sweater, a thermal layer, a fleece, my jacket, leggings, socks, and blue jeans, and huddled under a sleeping bag and three blankets and I was fine. Even Zelda got to wear a jacket.

[image error]Zelda, wearing her doggie jacket, which is a size too small, I think. She did not complain after the first few moments, though. And Riley was all about the cozy — he buried himself under the blankets quite willingly.

Our spot in the desert was located outside Plush, Oregon, near the sunstone Public Collection area, at the Spectrum Mine. The people at the mine apparently also thought it was too cold. We got there after a day of driving at around 4:30. According to their sign, the office was open from 9 until 5, but no one was there. We wandered around for a bit, then found our way to their camping area (free for the night) and settled in.

The next morning, we waited some more. 9AM went by with no signs of life. 10AM also went by with no signs of life. Eventually — and I’m going to say it was probably within fifteen minutes of our deciding to give up entirely, despite having driven twenty miles down dirt roads to get to the mine — a guy showed up and said it was too cold to do the conveyor belt, but maybe we could do it in the afternoon, if it warmed up. Meanwhile, we could dig in the dirt if we wanted to. So we did. I wish I’d taken some pictures, but I was too busy digging.

Lava Beds National Monument

Suzanne had camped at Indian Well, the campground at the Lava Beds National Monument, before, so she knew exactly which site she wanted: #18.

Or not.

[image error]They’d gone somewhat beyond Severe Fire Risk.

The campground and much of the surrounding area had burned, recently enough that the damage was still obvious. Site 18 was black and charred, looking out onto a vista of ashes and soot. Fortunately, other parts of the campground had survived and we found two sites together without any difficulty.

And the fire didn’t damage the fun parts of Lava Beds, aka the caves. Suzanne was still under the weather, but not so under the weather that she didn’t want to go clambering around underground, so we spent our Tuesday wandering from cave to cave, managing to explore five of them — Golden Dome, Sunshine, Indian Well, and Upper and Lower Sentinel.

Was I efficient enough to tag my photos with actual names of the caves when I took them? No, of course not. Honestly, though, pictures of caves don’t strike me as all that interesting in retrospect — rocks, rocks, and more rocks, really, with not a lot of color — so it’s probably just as well.

[image error]I think this cave was named Sunshine. I spent a good while trying out everything I’ve learned in Affinity Photo hoping to improve this photo — but you know, rocks are rocks.

My favorite cave, though, was definitely the one that most reminded me of every video game I ever played in my childhood. As we climbed down into it, I told Suzanne that I fully expected to be attacked by either orcs or goblins any second.

Lava Beds also had truly spectacular sunrises, sunsets, and night sky. Desolate scenery is always good for a good sky. So are wildfires, for that matter. (There were none burning anywhere near us, of course, or we wouldn’t have been there, but fire season isn’t over and I’m sure the amount of ash in the air had something to with the colorful skies.)

[image error]Sunrise at Lava Beds. Note the sliver of moon. Not all the trees around the campground burned, but most of the undergrowth is charred stubble.

This final photo is only sort of a photo of the Lava Beds. Or rather it is, but it has been extremely thoroughly tweaked in my image-editing software. Those aren’t the real colors, that’s not the real sky. The weather, in fact, involved beautiful blue skies with spectacular clouds every day that we were on the road. But I was experimenting and I liked the way this one turned out. And it does capture the charred desolation well, even if it was a lot less apocalyptic in person.

[image error]Not the real Lava Beds.

Junction City Campground

[image error]Suzanne’s spot at the Junction City Campground

Last week, Suzanne and I went camping. I brought my computer, but I barely used it — I didn’t even write morning words most days, which is something I’ve done every day for years now — and I never connected it to the internet. It was so relaxing. An escape from the news, even if only for a few days.

Our first campground, Junction City, is only a couple hours away from Arcata. Suzanne had caught my cold, so after a reasonably relaxed morning of loading up, we agreed to drive for a while, then stop for lunch and consider our options from there. She was sure she’d be fine to keep driving for a few more hours; I, having just spent several days with presumably the same germs, thought she probably ought to be resting instead. By the time we made it to Junction City, the germs were winning so we snagged two sites side-by-side and made it a stop for the night.

The campground has twenty-two spots, I think, and definitely the nicest ones – in terms of privacy & aesthetics — were the higher numbers, but those were also deeper in the trees and seriously buggy. The campground hosts (very friendly and helpful) warned us about the bugs before we picked our spots, so we walked the dogs around the campground before deciding and then chose two spots that were more exposed, but much less buggy. The highway – 299 – was within view from our spots and definitely within hearing, but apart from that, the spots were nice. Very spacious, great trees.

Zelda, as always, let me know at about 3AM that she was ready for a walk. Sigh. But the night sky was fantastic. Beautiful and clear, with no moon, the kind of night where so many stars are visible that it’s impossible not to feel like an infinitesimal speck in the immensity of the universe. Well worth getting up at 3AM.

[image error]Mount Shasta in the distance

The next day was mostly a driving day. We stopped at the Veterans Living Memorial Sculpture Garden outside of Weed for lunch and did not do nearly a good enough job of exploring. Zelda was doing the slow-mo, elderly dog walk and Suzanne should have been in bed with some chicken soup and bad television, so we saw the Memorial Wall, which is basically in the parking lot, and I managed to walk to the nearest sculpture, just to prove that there really were sculptures out there, but it was very low-key touristing.

[image error]Veterans Living Memorial Sculpture, Weed, CA. The one sculpture I saw was the Korean Vets Memorial. If I’d looked at the above link ahead of time, I would have realized that I was very, very close to the other sculptures, too. Ah, well, maybe next time.

After lunch, we kept driving. Our destination was Indian Well Campground at the Lava Beds National Monument. Spoiler: we made it there with no trouble. But for some reason this blog post has taken me forever to write, perhaps because I’ve spent so long playing with the images, so I think I’ll write about Lava Beds tomorrow. It was excellent, so there’s lots to say and many pictures to play with!

Paths leading elsewhere…

I’ve been sick for the past few days, which has seemed extremely unfair. Also, practically impossible! I’ve been such a good isolator. I stay at home, I go nowhere, I see no one except Suzanne… how could I have possibly caught anything? But there’s a ton of smoke in the air and I realized this morning that I might have a sinus infection, not a cold, which would explain how I could have gotten it without being exposed to someone else’s germs. Bacterial infections just need a good environment and all the smoke has left me permanently congested.

The good news, of course, is that sinus infections are mostly easily curable with antibiotics. Alas, the bad news is that I do everything in my power to avoid taking antibiotics, because my gut bacteria have the fragile, delicate sensibilities of Victorian women wearing ten pounds of corsets and laces. The slightest hint of aggression and down they go, turning my already limited diet into one that includes yogurt, yogurt, and more yogurt. And not much else. But I’m feeling better this morning than I have been, so maybe I’ll continue with the zinc and elderberry syrup regime prescribed by Suzanne and hope for the best, at least for another day or two.

[image error]

My entertainment during my sick days has been watching youtube videos about my graphics software, Affinity Photo, and then playing with the software. Ostensibly I’m still learning how to design my own covers, but I have no idea what story this picture would be a cover for. Maybe I’ll write one someday. I really like it, though, mostly because that path is actually the path running alongside my dad’s house. If you look closely you can see the chainlink fence. And I love the thought that such a familiar path might actually be leading to a castle.

I actually have a vast collection of photos of paths. I’ve been taking them for years, all sorts of paths. Some roads, too. Most of them have been backed up on different USB drives, but I might spend a few days organizing photos and looking for them, because playing with this software might not count as “productive” but it definitely counts as “creatively satisfying.”

In other news… nope, I got nothing. Life goes on, one day at a time. Suzanne and I are planning another small camping trip next week, so hopefully the weather and the fires will cooperate. I’m trying not to worry about my failure to write words — well, actually, I’m trying not to worry about anything. It’s not an easy task these days! But I remind myself of all the things that I’m grateful for — hot running water, a happy dog, music playing, a comfortable bed, good friends, toast… so many things. Including the opportunity to learn more about my graphics software, which I am now going to get back to. Take care of yourselves and if you can, vote early!

A Mighty Small Farm Menu

Meals cooked this week:

[image error]Wednesday: Eye of round, sous vide cooked, topped with zhoug (aka spicy cilantro sauce) and roasted potatoes, Maddie style. We started with salads, but I didn’t get those in the picture.



[image error]Thursday: Baked chicken thighs with kale, tomatoes, and leeks.

Friday (not shown): Rice bowls with eye of round, sautéed greens & peppers, tomatoes & avocado, plus chili garlic sauce.

[image error]Saturday: Spicy sweet potato hash with bacon, carrots and avocado, topped with an egg over easy. That was brunch, so also Saturday, sautéed summer squash and chicken apple sausage topped with a lemon herb sauce for dinner.



[image error]Sunday: Ling cod baked in parchment paper on a bed of spinach, topped with tomatoes and cilantro, with a side of roasted broccoli.



[image error]Monday: Butter chicken on rice, with tomatoes, spinach, and cilantro.

This is more in nature of a reminder to myself than anything else. It’s almost noon and I haven’t walked the dogs or made the bed or exercised or written good words or learned anything… I haven’t even taken a shower. It’s not a good sign when I’m trying to give myself Shine for putting on pants. Go, me, I’m wearing clothing…

But, in fact, even if I’m an abysmal marketer who doesn’t know how to sell books, and even if I’m a lousy writer all out of ideas, and even if I’m a bad mom whose son doesn’t care about her, much less love her, I’m still doing a damn good job of feeding an essential worker. Go, me.

Sometimes we have to take our Shine where we can get it.