The Hollosphere

Last night we slept out on the deck under the stars.  By we, I mean Conal, our friend Joe, me, and all the other critters we share our mountain with.  For the critters, it was business as usual.  For us humans, it was a magical, gorgeous night a bit outside the usual, everyday experience of life.

Conal and I tried sleeping outside once before.  It was a few weeks ago during the last full moon.  Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the experience was rather less than glorious.  The bright moonlight beaming in our eyes made sleep a challenge.  In addition, it ended up getting pretty darn cold that night.  We abandoned our inflatable-bed-ship sometime in the middle of the night and retreated to the house, snuggling under our cozy comforter indoors with great relief.

This time around there was no moon whatsoever, only stars, splashed across the night in exuberant, sparkly abundance.  I watched, fascinated and wide-eyed, trying to take in the whole scene from horizon to horizon, and not really succeeding.  It was a lot of sky.  The night was lovely and warm, a welcome coolness following on the heels of a day that had reached 106 degrees in the shade.

I set up our two large air beds on the north deck, complete with clean sheets and blankets and pillows from my stash of comfies in the hall closet.  We were going all out in the comfort area, I decided.  I made sure I had my eye drops (since I was sleeping in my contacts in order to fully enjoy the starshow), water bottle, and flashlight next to the bed.  I kept my wristwatch on, since I knew I’d be curious about the time if I woke up periodically.  I made sure the guys were comfy, too.  Conal and I cuddled together into our nest of blankets, and Joe laid himself out on top of his mattress a few feet away, choosing to forgo the covers in favor of full-body breeze enjoyment.

Wisps of heat laced the delicate wind, as soft and warm as kitten fur and perfumed with the fragrance of sun-baked forest.  Unseen small creatures rustled here and there on the hillside, accompanying the gentle wind-rustling of the trees.  I fervently hoped the skunk I saw the other evening was not among the nearest rustle-makers, but mostly enjoyed imagining who might be going about their business out there beyond the edge of the deck.

I did not so much enjoy the small bats flip-fluttering about just above our heads.  One kept buzzing us so closely I instinctively pulled the covers up to my eyeballs, keeping a wary eye on him.  I really am glad for the helpful bats, munching away on mosquitos and other bitey bugs, and yet they still give me a chill with their meaty flapping and squeaking.  Thankfully, no leathery face-brushings occurred before the bats moved on.

The three of us, as chatty as we normally are, barely spoke after bedtime beyond the occasional soft exclamations of wonder and sighs of happiness.  I guess we didn’t want to talk over the show.  Conal was soon sleeping peacefully next to me, his hand curled around mine.  I could tell Joe was still awake over on his air bed, but talking didn’t seem very necessary.

Hours went by.  The Milky Way slid westward as the night went on, arched in a majestic, mottled stripe from north to south.  The blinking red and white lights of tiny, distant jets inched along overhead in an eastbound flight path one after another, perhaps from the Bay Area. The faint roar of their engines was almost entirely muted by distance and reached us long after their light.  I saw several falling stars zip across the sky, almost faster than I could track.  Faint specks of light I guessed to be satellites were much harder to spot, and slower.

Sometime around eleven-thirty, a very bright object began to climb in the southeastern sky.  I am terribly lacking in astronomical knowledge, so I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you what it was.  Its unwavering character suggested a planet to me.  Maybe I’ll Google it later.  I did very much enjoy watching its strong, steady light, at first peeking out here and there through the oaks on the horizon, then radiating out in full glow once it made it into clear sky.

The calls of a hundred unknown night things were charmingly underscored by the Murray Creek Cricket Chorus, in fine form as usual on a summer night.  I drifted in and out of a light, pleasant sleep, alternating star-staring with snoozing.  After awhile, I noticed myself getting just slightly chilly in my light pj’s, so I tip-toed indoors and put on a sweater and some warm socks, grabbing extra blankets from inside for everybody.  Joe declined, saying he was perfectly comfortable, but Conal, awakened by my movements, accepted the offer of another layer.  I snuggled back down next to him, much more cozy now and starting to feel a deeper sleep coming on.  As I finally allowed consciousness to glide away, I made a mental note to write about the magnificence of choosing to spend and ordinary night in an extraordinary manner.  Who knows how the universe might shift with the simple act of shifting of one’s bed under the vault of heaven?

The next thing I knew, I woke to a lightening sky feathered with wispy clouds building up toward the east.  “August clouds,” Conal’s mom Ann called them yesterday, remarking on their early debut this year.  A perfect crescent moon, only just risen, shimmered whitely through the sunrise-pinked clouds.  My watch showed it to be shortly after five.  I felt peaceful and happy.

We’ve got three inflatable beds.  We’re thinking we should have a few more on hand.  We imagine regular group camp outs on the deck.  Everybody ought to get the chance to hang out with this sky, to find out if their universe might shift.  Wanna come?

Recently I attended a drawing workshop at The Mercantile in Angels Camp.  I’ve been drawing my whole life, but no so much recently.  I miss it, and jumped at the chance to get back into that juicy creative flow.  The workshop, hosted by local artist Paul Herek, was great fun and I hope the experience inspires me to do more.

Below is the sketch I did in the one-hour session.  This is Niki Robison, who manages The Merc, and may I say is a lovely human being, inside and out.

Niki sat with perfect stillness and patience while we all stared at her and sketched, even though she got roped into the deal kind of last minute.  Paul hadn’t planned on having a model, but Niki graciously allowed us to use her on a spur of the moment request.  I’m pleased with the likeness, and Niki told me she liked it, too.

The workshop was Paul’s first at The Merc.  He asked those of us in attendance if we’d like him to do more events, suggesting painting, additional drawing in various media, stained glass, and sculpture.  I said, “Yes, yes, yes, YES!”  I’m pretty much thrilled at the prospect of doing some new creative work.  Plus, I think Paul is pretty much the bees knees, so I’m thinkin’ I’ll be doing more of his classes here soon.

Conal, Ann, and I watched the inauguration this morning.  Never in my life have I seen anything like the throngs of celebrating citizens amassed to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office in the freezing temperatures of a Janurary day in Washington D.C.  And rarely before this past year have I felt cause to actually care about anything to do with politics and government.  Well, other than to be grouchy, sad, discouraged or just plain mad—or all that at the same time.  I know I’ve got lots of company, and I’m filled with optimism and hope for our country.

And mischief, as usual.

Make your own Obama poster here.  Be sure to check out the galleries, especially the top rated submissions.

Is just me, or is blogging beginning to be old school?  Passe?  So, like, five-minutes-ago?  Maybe, maybe not.  I’m reading that some forward thinking web gurus are blogging less and less, increasing their use of social networking tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others to connect with the wider internet community, passing around news, tech tips, pictures, ideas, articles, current whereabouts, party plans, and just about anything else you can think of sharing, all online and nearly in real time.

I’ve noticed that my public online writing energy has veered ever further away from blogging and into the developing world of social networking tools.  Blogging for me has usually meant a fairly extended solitary exercise of crafting an article (since I’m kind of picky about what and how I write), perhaps working on an image to include, then posting the article and maybe getting a comment or two.  Or not.  Even if I make the effort to eyeball my site statistics, I don’t really have an intimate sense of who’s visiting.  Now that I think about it, it’s about as enticing as junior high school homework assignment.  Unless there is something I’m hankering to write about just to get it off my chest, blogging has lately become a rare choice.  Apparently, what I’m after is a more lively connection and engagement with the world via online resources.  Hey, it only makes sense, since I live in the middle of nowhere.

Truth is, blogging is simply not as much fun for me as jumping in the chaotic fray of Twitter and Facebook, especially.  FriendFeed is cool, though it hasn’t really grabbed me as of yet.  LinkedIn has been excellent to keep in touch with professional contacts, but again, not quite as enticing on a daily basis.

In my sphere of social networks online I can connect with colleagues, friends, and family (and interesting strangers) all over the world in short order.  I’ve gotten back in touch with many high school classmates, former coworkers, and faraway relatives, and been able to enjoy their updates and pictures and even videos (For free.  Bite me, Classmates.com).

My mom and my daughter are both active on Facebook.  Yep, three generations.  My daughter is also pregnant with her first child, due this summer.  Will we soon have four Facebook generations?  Hah!  Hey, who knows what the brave new world of online socializing has in store for us.  My mom and uncle are also on Twitter now, which I think is totally awesome.

Twitter just got even more fun after I installed the Twitter client twhirl.  twhirl allows me to monitor the twitterverse in a small window on my desktop in close to real time, rather than manually following and refreshing the feed in a Firefox tab.  Just this evening, I read a tweet (the rather charming term for a Twitter entry) by a Seattle journalist announcing that it was snowing again.  I quickly IM’d my daughter, who lives in Seattle, and we had this hilarious exchange:

January 4  6:33:39 PM Holly: you got snow?
January 4  6:33:51 PM Tasha: snow???
January 4  6:33:56 PM Tasha: *looks outside*
January 4  6:34:05 PM Holly: gma’s got snow
January 4  6:34:21 PM Tasha: OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE IT
January 4  6:34:44 PM Holly: IS IT????!!!
January 4  6:35:20 PM Tasha: There’s an inch
January 4  6:35:23 PM Tasha: what the HECK

That kid cracks me up.  To be fair, she had been resting this afternoon, being a very sleepy pregnant person, but still.  I thought it was pretty cute and funny, and also interesting to note how fast news travels in this new world of online information sharing.

Now, if we can just upgrade the internet service here in our mountain hideaway from satellite (terrible latency issue and a tight bandwidth limit) to a fast, robust system based on Planet Earth, I’d be all over Skype video-calling and even more connected.  I’m sure my baby nephew in San Diego would enjoy having his auntie read him stories, for example.  Ah well, we’re keeping an eye out for developments in rural internet service, too.

Bottom line, I know I’ve said a couple times I’d blog more, but I think maybe I was lying.  At least for now.  I might get a wild hair and blog about some things, but till then you can catch up with what I’m really up to via my accounts on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  You’ll need accounts yourself to see the good stuff.

See you in the social internetosphere!

I didn’t sleep much last night.  I’d been struggling with keeping a headache at bay for a couple of days.  A long drive in the car yesterday over the twisty Sierra mountain back roads didn’t help, nor did having too late a lunch.  Getting too hungry always makes my head hurt.  During our delayed lunch, I got some family news that unsettled me, throwing me a bit further off kilter.

Then there’s the part where I always get a little grouchy around my birthday (December 22nd), which is generally overwhelmed by Christmas.  I usually put on a brave act of not caring, but it actually does bum me out sometimes.  Uh oh, I’ve outed myself!  All you other Christmas kids out there will know exactly what I’m talking about.

Back at home in the evening, I gravitated toward a bit of relative solitude, hanging out with my laptop in the rocking chair in the living room, enjoying the Christmas tree and the warm fire in the woodstove while Conal and Patrick spent time on their computers in the office at the other end of the house.

I’ve been very happy lately, contented and peaceful in my life.  The depth of my reaction to the collision of physical, mental, and emotional upheaval of the day surprised me.  Conal came out and checked in with me at one point, and I shared all this with him.  Oh, except for the birthday thing.  That didn’t occur to me till just now.  He thanked me for letting him know, and went back to the office since I wasn’t at the point of wanting any help.  I enjoyed his asking, and getting a little clearer on what was stirring in me, but I wasn’t ready to exit that introspective space yet.

The evening wore on into night, and I realized I was not getting sleepy.  Rather than toss and turn in bed and disturb Conal’s rest, I stayed up playing with my laptop in the rocking chair.  I caught up on email, read blogs, researched some products.  I listened to my collection of Christmas music and experimented with new software.  I watched part of a movie.  Have I mentioned in the last five minutes how much I love my new Mac?  Sigh.

A Twitter friend tweeted about this being the time of the longest night, and I was struck by the irony of my wakefulness near the turning of the year, when the dark hours stretch their longest.  What a long night to endure without sleep!  Anyway, the hours rolled on by.

I finally started feeling a tiny bit sleepy sometime around 1:30 a.m. and went off to bed.  Getting my eyes to stay shut required a bit of reading with my tiny booklight, but, snuggled into the cozy warmth, finally I fell asleep.

Perhaps an hour later, the discomfort of a developing UTI woke me up.  (Apologies for a tmi violation, but I guess I’m hankering to have the full scope of the night’s weirdness held and heard.  Proceed at your own risk.)  Four quickly successive trips to the bathroom later, I realized I was again rather wide awake, and too uncomfortable to sleep.  Perhaps physical stress and other factors triggered the episode, but whatever, I was desperate for some relief.  Jumping in and out of bed was certainly not going to help Conal get a good night’s rest, either.  Back out to the lappy and the rocking chair.  Surfing the net and rocking, hmm, surely there is some exceptionally clever metaphor in there somewhere…

I searched the Internet for information on home remedies.  Baking soda in water; apple cider vinegar in warm water with honey; cranberry juice; over the course of the next hour or so, I did them all.  Btw, drinking vinegar, even diluted and sweetened with honey, eeeww.  I also took a cranberry tablet and drank tons of water.  Anything, please!  Just make this stop!

Thankfully, I started feeling better pretty quickly, although you don’t want to know about the vinegar-flavored belching and impressive stomach gurgling that the baking soda water caused.  Gross, but totally worth getting some relief!  However, though I was feeling better better physically, I still didn’t think I’d sleep if I went to bed.  Good thing my friend the Mac was happy to stay up and keep me company.

Pat, Mr. Night Owl, was still up, putting together the new office chair we brought home for him.  After he had finished, he rolled it back into the office to give it a test run.  Test apparently successful.  Even he eventually went to bed, while I continued to rock and think and drink cranberry juice and play with the Mac.  Night waned toward early morning, but it was still perfectly dark.  The Christmas tree remained cheerfully on duty, doing its pretty, twinkly thing.  A gentle rain began to fall, water drip, drip, dripping from the eaves and quietly gurgling in the downspouts.  I felt a little better.  A bit sleepy, even.  The time was 4:38 a.m.

I oh-so-carefully slipped into bed, not wanting to wake Conal.  I’d left the heat pad on low, so the covers were already blissfully warm and welcoming.  In a few minutes, I was asleep.

This morning, it is a dark and rainy day, but Conal has the fire roaring again and I don’t mind.  I remember that every drop of rain is a blessing in this dry country.  Not feeling very ambitious, not to mention still a little fragile, I’m back in the rocking chair with the lappy. Writing it all down is such wonderful therapy!

I survived my long night and lived to tell the tale.  Not only that, telling the tale helps shake off the darkness.  Bless you for hearing it.  Tonight, the solstice brings with it the truly longest night of year.  I bet it won’t seem nearly as long as last night.

Until recently, I was the only Holly Croydon on the planet.  Or so I thought.  Having a completely unique name gave me something I’m not sure I can describe or even understand myself, but I liked it.

Whatever it was, I’d better get over it because I’m *not* the only Holly Croydon.  The other Holly Croydon is a lovely young blond woman just a couple of years older than my daughter, who lives in the U.K., is a cyclist, and–if Facebook photo albums are any indicator–loves to go out partying with her many friends.

Perhaps as long as a year ago, I started noticing my name showing up online in results for competitive cycling in England.  After four decades of life as the only Holly Croydon on Earth, it came as a quite a shock to discover I was no longer the sole possessor of the name.  Eventually, I found the U.K. Holly’s Facebook profile and sent her a friend invitation with a note that I hoped made it clear I wasn’t a weird stalker, just the only other Holly Croydon (or at least one of a very rare few) on the planet and thought that was cool.  She accepted.

Now my Facebook news feed includes items that say things like, “Holly Croydon commented on Jane Doe’s photo,” or “Holly Croydon is now friends with…”  Which is really weird when it ISN’T ME.

If you are someone who shares a name with lots of folks, you might not realize how big and strange a shift it is for me.  But I’m beginning to like it.  Perhaps that’s because I take it as yet another reminder that our separateness is illusion, that uniqueness is just an ego-story.  I think I’m ready to let that story go.

Holly, if you’re out there, I wish you many blessings and much happiness and grand fun with our name!

This morning my Gmail in box contained a message with the following notice:

Hi, Holly Croydon.

Stephen Fry (stephenfry) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Stephen Fry’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/stephenfry

Best,
Twitter

Okay, so Stephen Fry follows everyone who follows him, but it made me smile anyway.

Twitter, as you will know unless you have been living on a desert island recently, is an online site where jillions of people share whatever is going in on their lives and/or heads with short entries called “tweets.”  And I do mean short.  Each tweet can be up to only 140 characters.  My favorite descriptive term for what goes on at Twitter is “microblogging.”

I’ve had a lot of fun Twittering and reading tweets, although I tweet a lot less than some folks.  In addition to Mr. Fry, my list of follow-ees includes Will Wheaton (Isn’t that a familiar name? Think now, where have you heard that?), Xeni Jardin, Penn Jillette, Al Gore, and Barack Obama.  Also, hilariously, Jed Bartlet.

I’m enjoying Stephen Fry’s tweets more than those presidential types, though, because it’s obviously really him, tweeting away, not a staff member or something.

In our never-ending quest to discourage the local woodpecker gang from slowly turning our home into swiss cheese, we ordered a fairly realistic plastic owl to stand guard and hopefully fool the wood**ckers into thinking that they are being watched by a terrifying predator.

This life-sized plastic owl has motion and sound sensors, and when it detects movement or sound nearby it hoots repeatedly and rotates its head to peer in the direction of whatever it senses.

So far, the woodpeckers are not terribly impressed.  The owl has perched mute during the day as the hoodlums fly about.  They don’t go too near it, or anyway not near enough to set it off, but I don’t think they’re exactly scared.  Cautious, perhaps.

The owl apparently has other ideas.  It seems to want friends.  For several nights in a row, we have heard a wild owl trading hoots with the plastic owl.  I am not kidding!  We haven’t heard an owl for a long, long time, so I have no doubt that the realistic hooting attracted the real thing.  On one particular night, we heard two real owls alternating hoots with each other and the mechanical owl, which was quite entertaining.

The plastic owl is embarrassingly limited in vocabulary, being equipped with only one short hoot sequence to say over and over and over.  My daughter Tasha commented on the comic potential of the situation when I told her about it and imagined a rather one-sided hoot-versation:

Plastic Owl: “Hey!”

Wild Owl: “Hey!”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl:  “What’s up?”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl:  “Hey?”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl:  “Dude, we said hello.”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl: “Seriously, wtf is wrong with this guy!?”

Poor plastic owl.  He apparently needs to learn some life lessons or something before he can become a real owl. However, even though he pretty much sucks at scaring wood*?#!$!%!!’s, I might keep him around just to encourage the wild owls.  Perhaps having *actual* owls zooming about will make the rotten woodpeckers want to move on.

Articles on the “news” site The Onion usually inspire me to cringe, roll my eyes, shake my head in bemusement, gasp and cover my mouth with my hand in shock, or rotflmao.  Sometimes all of that at one go, which must be a sight.

And sometimes, The Onion calls it right on the money.  Twisting and mocking facts, they are capable of mercilessly aiming a light of razor-sharp clarity onto ourselves and our culture.  It can pretty much bring tears to your eyes.

Especially when viewed from the future.  Ouch.

From my perch on the steep slopes of Mt. Zion, as the Elliott family has named the peak above our home at Murray Creek, I have the luxury (so far) of watching the American economic fracas from a distance–literally and figuratively.

Our home is paid for. We live modestly, our freedom more than making up for any lack of shiny toys. We don’t own a car, sharing a fuel-efficient 2000 Honda Civic and the old ranch Blazer with Conal’s mom. We carry no debt, though we came within a whisker of borrowing money to do some major home improvements last year. Knowledgeable people advised us that using someone else’s money rather than our own was good financial sense. Thank heavens we got the willies about letting go of our debt-free status and went against that advice. We pulled money out of stocks to build our deck (now one of if not the best feature of our house). As Conal pointed out to me the other day, those stocks were worth a lot more then than they are now. We would have to fry up a much bigger hunk of nest egg to pull that off today.

My mom and I sold our big house in Seattle back in 2007 just as the market there was having a final peak of excitement. I don’t think we could have timed that sale much better if we had traveled into the future and then gone back, armed with the knowledge of what was to come. I still shake my head in amazement, wondering at our incredible good fortune. Ours was one of the very last bidding wars in our area, and a very merry, profitable war it was for us.

Though we value our life of freedom very highly, Conal and I are relatively young and can go back to work if we need to. Conal’s skills are highly marketable, and interest in his research is building around the world. His knowledge and expertise allow him to get paid well to pursue his passion. My professional skills are not nearly so unique or highly valued, but are broad-based and widely transferable. If it came down to it, I would not be worried about finding some sort of at least mildly enjoyable job. And that honestly would be the lazy way to go, ironically. We’re resourceful enough to figure out interesting, alternative ways to make a living, if we really put our minds to it.

My heart goes out to those who are losing their homes, or staging garage sales, taking on second jobs, cutting back on doing the things that give them joy, or all of the above in desperation to pay the mortgage on a house that may be worth less than they owe. I’m troubled and saddened to think also of those whose retirement plans have gone sideways, dreams evaporating along with the worth of their 401k’s. I can’t even imagine the stress and pain folks these situations must be going through. I have, however, had the experience of being laid off from a job that I depended on, and thus can viscerally relate to those many thousands who’ve lost their jobs. I wonder how bad it will get and how many people will sucked into calamity.

Even if things get a lot worse before they get better, Conal and I will be okay. If things were to get really weird, our property has an excellent well, tillable soil, and plenty of sunshine that could be harnessed to create electricity. With a big garden, some fruit trees (there are already a few growing down in the meadow) and perhaps some goats and chickens we could go “off the grid,” as the saying goes. Conal’s mom’s expertise in the area of animal husbandry and self-sufficiency would give us an invaluable resource of knowhow should the worst happen. Surviving and even thriving will be possible for us even if civilization as we know it ceases to function.

Here on my perch overlooking our private slice of paradise, you’d never know that anything was amiss. Conal is heading off into the cool of evening to gather kindling from the ample supply of downed wood that’s lying around, taking a break from working on his research projects. The evening sun is slanting streams of warm honey through the rich green boughs of the forest, while squirrels chatter and chase each other merrily about. The deep, gentle hiss of the breeze through the valley sounds like a far off, powerful river. Birds zip hither and thither among the craggy oaks doing their fall chores, and furry bees bumble about the rosemary hedge below the front porch. So much to enjoy and be thankful for.

I’m swept by a wave of gratitude for my life, my beloved cuddle buddy Conal, my family, the warm sun, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat, and a snug nest on a mountain to call home.