Becca's Blog

The Christmas Bird Count, as told to...

Hey, I did it again: I blogged about something colorful for my local hyperlocal blog, Berkeleyside.com. I thought the natives would like to know something about the crazy birders in their midst.

Baby, it's cold outside: Share some warmth

[Cross-posted (or will be) at Berkeleyside.com. You, my few but loyal readers, are probably aware that the Women's Daytime Drop-in Center is where I have taught knitting to clients for a couple of years, and the beneficiary of Kate's & my learn-to-knit class last spring.]

Right now, when we're having the lowest temperatures of the year and wet weather to boot, the clients of the Women's Daytime Drop-in Center could really use your help. The Drop-in Center needs warm clothes for women and kids, including rain ponchos and coats, umbrellas, socks, hats and gloves.

The center, which has served Berkeley's homeless and low-income women and children for over 20 years, provides breakfast and lunch on weekdays, along with support groups, referrals to social services, and a children's program. The center always needs toiletries to provide to clients, including toothpaste and deodorant.  Diapers, especially for toddlers, are also an ongoing need. An easy way to donate diapers is through the center's Amazon wish list.

The center hosts a holiday party for clients as well. You can donate gifts for women and kids, especially older kids, or even volunteer to help put on the party. To arrange for a donation, contact the center by phone (510-548-2884) or e-mail (staff@womensdropin.org).

Photo courtesy of the Sisters Project.

Don't faint or nothin'

... but I blogged.  Like a real post, where I had to string together more than a few sentences and used photos and everything. Just not here--it's over here. 

I visited Kristine and Adrienne and Wondermike at A Verb for Keeping Warm yesterday (they called out the Cupkates truck--how could I not?) and I got all civic boosterish (hence the post on the Berkeleyside blog).

Actually, a couple of months ago I saw via Twitter that some folks were starting up a local blog, and I thought "I'm as nosy and opinionated as the next Berkeleyite, so why not let my neighbors hear from me?" I haven't posted there often, but I'm hoping to do so more frequently.

Here are a few pics from Verb's holiday party yesterday, which I couldn't shoehorn into the Berkeleyside post.

 

 

This last image is from the studio of Mirto Golino, around the corner in the same building as Verb. I loved her stuff, and she was a blast to talk to. She showed me a hat she made from Verb yarn that was pretty pretty.

Don't confuse me with the facts...

Another highly fanciful embroidering upon facts. It's worth clicking through to read the transcript of the debate, including a Democrat calling this crazy woman on her bullshit.

Pam's House Blend: NC: Rep. Virginia Foxx claims GOP led on civil rights in the 60s

h, it's pathetically ignorant, perpetually re-elected NC U.S. Congresscritter Virginia Foxx opening her trap again to contribute batsh*ttery to the public discourse and historical record with the ludicrous claim on the House floor that the Republican party had a progressive record on civil rights and Congress passed legislation in the 1960s without much help from Dems. (Think Progress)

via www.pamshouseblend.com

Still missin' my boy.

devil_cat.jpg
Originally uploaded by beccaf

That is all.

Take it to passiveagressivenotes.com.

Today I carped at my coworkers via e-mail for leaving yucky stuff in the sink. Amazingly, no one retaliated by piling the sink full of garbage or throwing a slushie in my face.

Really, though, nothing jaundices my view of humankind more than being the lunchroom lady (aka on kitchen cleanup duty) for a week.

Reading a Book a Day, Every Day

Last Oct. 28, on her 46th birthday, Nina Sankovitch read a novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” by Muriel Barbery. The next day she posted a review online deeming it “beautiful, moving and occasionally very funny.”

via www.nytimes.com

I don't think I'll ever try reading a book a day, but this does remind me that I've wanted to post reports on books I've finished, particularly those that make me think.

Lately I'm reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is very amusing. I'm loving the alternate reality and the hardboiledness, but I have to wonder: Why are some Yiddish words in the glossary in the back but not others?

Fourth St. will have a bookstore again.

Books Inc., a small independent that traces its roots to Gold Rush days, is expanding, with a new store on Berkeley's Fourth Street, a stone's throw from the site of the late, lamented Cody's Books.

via www.sfgate.com

I never went to Cody's on 4th Street, because it was pretty clearly aimed at ripping off the 4th St. bridge-and-tunnel crowd. But I'm very happy that a bookstore is reopening in the only healthy shopping district in town.

And I hope Black Oak does reopen as a bookstore-coffee shop. Coffee shops seem to thrive regardless of market saturation, and even location. If/when Black Oak reopens, I'll be there to buy important-sounding political books that I never get around to reading...

Yes, you can too knit a place setting.

Some knitters seem to think there is no occasion for which a knitted item is an inappropriate gift. I am definitely one of those knitters.

I can't help myself. Sure, I can be snarky about charity knitting--but then I find myself knitting baby things for new parents whom I know only slightly. Is it my fault that my siblings won't breed?

My latest seizure was deciding to make a little lacy something for a young girl I'll be seeing this weekend. I pulled out some yarn that's been waiting in the stash a couple of years for just such an occasion--I bought it with a little girl sweater in mind but without a fixed occasion or certain recipient in mind. As I said, I can't help myself.

So I'm crocheting Tracy Moncrieff's "Shrug It Off, Girl!" with the aim of being done by Saturday morning. I honestly think I can do it. Really. 

And while I was digging through the stash at 9:30 last night, I again ran across the tweedy oatmeal wool that would be *perfect* for a man's vest, if only I had 400 more yards of it. I have a twinge of regret every time I look at that yarn, because it is not quite enough to make anything, and it's from a small producer and was purchased several years ago.

But it got me thinking that I would really like to make Jane's dad a vest for his birthday at the end of next month. So I just came home with 10 skeins of O-wool Balance in a nice dark gray. So much for my "finish two, start one" rule--and so much for the desperately needed decluttering.

And I think right now I shouldn't be blogging, I should be crocheting. I have a gift to finish.

Knitting can't solve everything, but...

I wrote the following guest post for my friends at Help a Mother Out. The full post can be read here.

Some knitters seem to think there is no problem that can't be solved by knitting something. Whether it's for servicepeople deployed to combat zones or a neighbor who's lost everything in a house fire, a certain type of knitter will always leap into the breach and organize a drive to knit socks or a cozy blanket or a prayer shawl.

I've been knitting and crocheting since childhood, and don't get me wrong--I've done my fair share of charity needlecraft, starting with granny-square lap robes for my local nursing home when I was in junior high. I just don't think that knitting is the right response for every problem. For one thing, it's slow. Do you know how long it takes to knit even a preemie cap? If handknits were really the solution to a problem, there would be a serious imbalance between supply and demand. That's a bit facetious, but I wonder if all that knitting time wouldn't be better spent lobbying or protesting for change, and whether knitted donations aren't more about gratifying the the donor than fulfilling a need.

I had these doubts in mind when I approached the Women's Daytime Drop-in Center and asked if they needed a knitting teacher.

Red Chief 4/24/1991 - 6/17/2009

Goodbye, my boy. I'll miss your companionship, love, and lap-warming.

 

 

So, the animal situation.

To cut to the chase, for now we are six. There are twice as many quadrupeds as bipeds living here, and that doesn't count the feral family in the back yard. And as I mentioned, it's been a fairly eventful three months; here's a (not so) brief history:

Go Josie, Go!

 Alpha dog Josie has arthritis that has caused nerve degeneration in her spine, so over the past few years she has lost more and more mobility in her back legs. We've tried lots of different adaptive leashes and harnesses and slings to help her get around, and we're pretty used to cleaning up the accidents she can't help because of her disability. We've taken to carrying her outside if she can't get there under her own steam, and one of us always comes home at lunch to give her a bathroom break. We know that her diminishing abilities get her down sometimes--she doesn't like stumbling around and falling. Because of her loss of function and depression, we really wondered whether we should let her go soon.

Sometime in late March a neighbor saw us on our morning walk/stumble and stopped me. She said she had a cart that belonged to her dog who had passed away, and she'd be willing to give it to us. I was definitely interested; in fact I had wanted to check into buying a used doggie wheelchair/cart but had no idea where to begin looking. So the offer of a hand-me-down was providential. Even better, it fit pretty well and Josie took to it immediately. 

The cart is from an East Coast company called Eddie's Wheels, and they custom-build based on individual dogs' measurements, but the carts are adjustable to some extent. One of their former employees lives in Guerneville, so we took a day trip out there to have Josie fitted to her new/old cart.

 The result has been better than we expected: She goes out in the cart twice a day, and it has strengthened her back end and improved her balance, so that she even gets around a bit better without it. And it's given her back confidence--she gets to choose where she walks, and she even challenges other dogs again. For an alpha dog, that's huge. We don't tell her she still can't do much damage; it's the attitude that counts.

New Year's 2009 was the 15th anniversary of the J-Dog coming to live with us (which makes her 16 or 16 1/2), and I was mentally composing an elegiac post for her back then. (The stack of photos of her that I pulled is still waiting to be scanned, and I still owe her a real photo album.) But here it is six months later, and she's holding her own.

Cat Rescue

Our next-door neighbor is an elderly woman who has always been eccentric, but in the past year has shown clear signs of dementia. And the companion who was her main source of support left the situation (with the complete approval of everyone who knows them). I've never liked this woman (she was the self-involved, talk-your-ear-off kind of crazy and staged screaming fights in the wee hours; since I'm prone to insomnia, this made me murderously angry), and I've avoided her for years.  But around Thanksgiving I shamed myself into making sure that she got something to eat periodically.  We realized then that she couldn't take care of herself and called Adult Protective Services.

When she was briefly hospitalized in December, Jane wanted to make sure her cats were cared for, so we went into her house and found it was filled with trash. I called her social worker and said the house wasn't safe for her to live in, but legally they had to let her return home. For the next few months she stayed in her house as her family and APS tried to improve her situation and she resisted. In late March one of her two cats died, and she called us to help her. Jane went over and took the dead cat out to the trash for her.

Finally in early April she was hospitalized again, and again we worried about the remaining cat. Her family asked us to look after it, and we decided to try to trap it, so we could at least care for it over here, rather than going into the house next door. But Zizi resisted trapping for weeks on end. I consulted with animal control, and they also tried trapping him without success. On their advice even the water was removed, and they left a way for him to escape the house, with the idea that he'd leave and maybe show up with our ferals for food.

More weeks went by, and Zizi never showed himself or went into a trap. The city got involved in cleaning up the house and yard, and I pretty much convinced myself that he had died. Jane heroically made a final walk-through of the house to look for him (going in meant picking up fleas, as well as climbing over garbage), checked out the back door, and caught a glimpse of a cat that looked like him diving under the house. We set a trap in the crawl space and caught him by the next morning.

We took him to the animal shelter, where he got hydrated and fed, vaccinated and flea-treated. We visited him regularly because we also became shelter volunteers in the past three months. Amazingly, one of Jane's work friends adopted Zizi within a week of his coming to the shelter. He now lives in a San Francisco studio with another cat, and he's adjusting nicely to his new, uncluttered life and getting lots of love and playtime.

The Shelter and Little Big Man

In March Jane and I went through training and orientation to be volunteers at Berkeley Animal Care Services, our municipal animal shelter. I can't really explain my motivation to volunteer at a shelter when we have our hands full of pets at home, but knowing I'll need a kitty fix when we no longer have the Orange Boy is part of it, and rescue fantasies are surely a big chunk of it. Also, I inquired about volunteering with Bad RAP late last year, and for whatever reason they never got back to me.

So once or twice a week, sometimes together and sometimes individually, Jane and I go to the shelter and play with cats or walk dogs. BACS is a low-kill shelter, which means that they euthanize only as a last resort. Even though they work hard to get animals out of the shelter and into homes (even foster homes), sometimes animals are there for weeks and months at a time, and we volunteers get to know them and get attached to them. Jane and I have talked often about how doing this volunteer work requires compartmentalization. Mostly, I just focus on what I can do for an individual animal in a single hour, to avoid being overwhelmed and just wandering the aisles of the kennel, bawling.

But I see the potential in every dog I walk, and engage in a mini-rescue fantasy about how great it would be to have him or her in a good home with a loving owner. I've already tried to persuade my parents to take Satin,

a deaf 9-year-old shepherd-cattle dog mix. (She looks like Tina's big sister, and she's a sweet old thing.) Since Satin has been in the shelter for two months and still hasn't found a home, I'm not done working on my parents...

 Jane and I have also talked often about what to do when Josie goes, and what kind of dog we'd get next. I've always said I wanted to scale back to two pets, and that we should wait and give Tina a chance to be top dog. I was also emphatic that our next dog needed to be dog-social, not a terror like the young Josie was. We agreed that we wanted a small dog next, who wouldn't threaten scaredy-cat Tina. As much as our hearts went out to the old dogs at the shelter like Satin, no one was talking about getting another dog now. 

But then the shelter volunteers and staff began a campaign to find a home (either foster or permanent) for Coffee, an arthritic 9-year-old chihuahua who had lived at the shelter for three months. And I started to fantasize about whether it maybe, possibly might be OK to add one more small dog to the mix at home. I knew that senior shelter volunteers sometimes took longtime shelter residents for a weekend taste of home life. Jane agreed we could "check him out" for a trial run, so I asked the shelter director if we could. Coffee exhibited some dog-aggressive behavior while in the shelter, so a seamless transition wasn't a sure thing at all.

Last Friday I brought him home for what might have been just a weekend visit--but he joined the household pack with relative ease. Josie has magnanimously decided to tolerate him. Tina isn't thrilled about the competition for love and treats but thinks he's kinda OK. We can see that the two of them are going to team up and be pals in time. Orange Boy spends most of him time in bed, but when he's up, he isn't threatened by Coffee, merely annoyed.

 Last Saturday I headed out to buy pet supplies, and Jane told me to get Coffee a bed and a nametag--because we both knew all along that he was home to stay.

Orange Boy's Long Road

In dealing with kitty's illness over the past couple of years, we've done things we never thought we would or could, like sticking him with a needle to administer subcutaneous hydration. We've learned not to be thrown into high anxiety by a few days of lethargy and low appetite, and we've learned to appreciate the way he is now rather than constantly mourning the way he used to be. I miss him making a beeline for my lap in the mornings, but I'm glad now when he wants our company.

 And yet I'm feeling with increasing certainty that it's time to let him go, because he's losing ground. He's had a rough week, even after visiting the vet following the last rough week. He is being treated with everything that makes sense (4 drugs in addition to the hydration). It's really, really hard to know how much quality of life is enough, and whether we are keeping him here for him or for us. I just know he's a huge piece of my life and my heart.