it occurs to me that this section of anklebiter.net isn’t focused on the kids all the time (pointed out by one of my sisters who asked, do you still have kids?), and that i need to rename it something else, like ‘anklebiters’ mommy’ or something. i dunno.
so, this thursday marked the end of my course work for my mfa in creative writing. can i just say, WOO HOO! and last night marked the actual start of my thesis writing (although i have been working towards it for several semesters now). while working on my proposal this morning at a bookstore, feeling all academic and stuff, waiting for the car to get a tune-up, i got really excited about what i’m working on. really excited. so maybe this writing thing is what i’m supposed to be doing…
for the first time in my life, that i can remember, i am reading not one book, but six. all at once. (up until now, i have usually forced myself to read a book in its entirety, whether i like it or not, before picking up another.) i’m worried that i’ll get them mixed up. but i have a list of at least 30 books for my thesis of which i have only read about 10 or so, and homeschooling is going to start happening this year in theory if not in practice. i feel like i’m using more than the usual 10 percent of my brain right now, and i have to say, it feels good. well, it feels good when it’s in the middle of the day and not 3:30 am and i can’t sleep because my mind is so full and i feel like i can’t keep it together.
here’s the short list of current reading: For the Children’s Sake, Macauly; The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer and Wise (this may not count, ’cause really all i’m reading are chapters 3 and 4 as they pertain to my kids); Through Painted Deserts, Miller; Of Woman Born, Rich; High Infatuation, Davis; Walking on Water, L’Engle… an ecclectic little list.
anyway, i think i have a pretty interesting booklist for my thesis, and once i get it all typed up and looking pretty, i’ll post it. i have enjoyed the ones i have read. mostly. so it’ll be like a list of recommendations for anyone who cares.
Posted on August 16th, 2008
smells a little bit like body odor. it’s not me! well, it is my hands, but i just finished cutting up rhubarb for this shortbread dessert i’m making for a picnic today. the rhubarb is from the backyard, a place that tends to produce bitter veggies, so i hope it doesn’t taste like body odor too.
a lifetime ago when i was 12 or 13, my little sister and i traveled with my grandparents for a month or so. we ended up in michigan, and i remember “helping” my grandmother make strawberry-rhubarb preserves. i mainly remember snarfing a good bit of it on saltine (or was it keebler club?) crackers. i don’t remember, however, the rhubarb smelling like body odor.
Posted on August 8th, 2008
The tomato plant has completely smothered the green pepper plant and is starting to oppress the limelight hedrangea. The sumac weed (tree) we cut down has sent hundreds of shiny new shoots sprouting throughout the entire backyard. The aphids ate the birch tree. The bind weed is trying to strangle the black-eyed susans. The pineapple mint has forced its way into our neighbor’s yard where the chihuahua likes to stand and endlessly yap at us. The hemlock trees have reached the electrical and phone lines. The forsythia is fighting for light between the lilac bush, which has suddenly decided to flourish since I pruned it last fall, and the humongous spreading clump of maiden grass.
I have to leave the backyard and go to the front.
A young morning dove has made our and our neighbor’s front porch its hang out. It’s cute. It lets us come stare at it while it blinks and makes herky-jerky bird movements, then it scuttles away and poops. And then it scuttles to a new place and poops again. it’s cute, but its poop, which is like mini piles of cement, is all over our front porch now.
It makes me want to go back inside where I step in a pile of cat puke.
@#$&* nature!
Posted on August 6th, 2008
go here and click on the slideshow for a funny story about a t rex we lost while climbing a couple weekends ago. a special thanks goes out to our friends john and danielle.
and tyranny did make it safely home.
Posted on July 6th, 2008
mommy, they aren’t ALIVE. they’re EXTINCT. they’re just BONES.
this was seb’s response to my question whether the t. rexes were fighting over another dead, partially ingested dinosaur. the boys and daddy (theirs, not mine) visited the carnegie museum of natural history while i was away at class all afternoon. the t. rex exhibit was out visiting other museums and has finally returned. as seb described to me, the dinosaur skeletons are arranged with the t. rexes standing over a partial (broken up) other skeleton as if they are eating it. i don’t think my question was unfounded under the circumstances, but what do i know?
now that i write this down, it was waaaaay funnier in the moment. guess you had to be there.
Posted on July 3rd, 2008
once upon a time, there was a little Dante (a robot NASA has developed to explore volcanoes to start and other planets possibly in the future). he went into a volcano, and it exploded. he fell apart! *giggle giggle*
and then he added a penname: shannon toughlite. (don’t ask, ’cause i can’t tell ya.)
Posted on June 13th, 2008
Pumped Out
Muscle contraction is chemical. The hand reaches for a pocket in the sheer rock face. “Contract!” says the electrical impulse from the brain. The motor nerve and the muscle meet at the neuromuscular junction. Acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter transfers this message across the junction and is then destroyed by the enzyme acetylcholinesterase. The muscle membrane has received the message, however, and the fibers begin to release calcium. Calcium comes from the sarcoplasmic reticulum inside each muscle cell. Calcium enables the very basic proteins of the muscle cells –actin, the sheath, and myosin, a rod inside the sheath– to slide towards one another. These sliding filaments are called sarcomeres. The sarcomere shortens. The muscles contract. The hand grabs the hold.
Muscle relaxation is chemical. The hand needs to let go. The brain says, “Relax!” Acetylcholine transfers the message from the nerve end to the muscle just to be destroyed by acetylcholinesterase. Again, calcium enters the sarcoplasmic reticulum in the muscle membranes, and the actin and myosin slide away from one another. The sarcomere lengthens. The muscles relax. The hand opens to move to a higher hold in the sheer rock face.
Muscle contraction and relaxation are chemical reactions that use up energy. A very specific type of energy called adenosine triphosphate or ATP is needed. Hands clench, muscles contract. Hands open, muscles relax. Before the climber, who owns these working muscles, tires, highly oxygenated blood is being pumped to the action site. Oxygen allows the muscles to produce ATP by burning fuels such as glycogen, glucose and body fat. This is a clean process called aerobic metabolism. The climber, who owns these working muscles, tires over time and repetition. Blood being pumped to the site contains less and less oxygen. If the muscles are using more oxygen than the blood is pumping to the site, fuels can still be broken down for ATP production, but a residue called lactic acid is left. This is called anaerobic metabolism. Hand and forearm muscles begin to tire. They begin to ache and throb. The lactic acid swells the muscle and oxygen level is further depleted. The hand clutches but only for a few seconds before the muscle stops working. The hand opens up.
The climber, who owns the hands that have opened up and let go of the rock, falls. Back on the ground, while massaging and kneading the aching forearm and hand muscles, allowing blood circulation to clean up the mess of lactic acid, the climber says, “Man, I just couldn’t hold onto anything anymore. I was so pumped out!”
Bibliography
Herlihy, Barbara and Maebius, Nancy K. “Chapter 9: Muscular System.” The Human Body in Health and Illness. 2nd ed. Elsevier Science: Philadelphia, PA, 2003, pp 139-161.
Posted on June 7th, 2008
What is it that pulls me out of the city and into the so-called wilderness? The comparative silence? And what is it I am listening for in this quiet that we find? Myself? Nature? God? It is all three of these combined because they cannot be separated. Wilderness to me as a young girl, although I did not think of it in exactly that term at the time, was a place where I could find quiet and God. Growing up in a small town of western Kansas, in a household with three sisters, quiet was something longed-for but not always attainable. Certainly not in the house. Growing up a pastor’s kid, I heard over and over the stories from the Bible of people escaping to the wilderness and finding God: Moses hearing the voice of God in the burning bush; the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness after being led out of slavery in Egypt; Elijah, the prophet, encountering God in the mountains of the wilderness and hearing His voice in the quiet whispering wind.
I usually found quiet outside in a cottonwood tree next to the house. High above the ground, I left the noise and trouble of family behind and listened to the papery whispers of the tree’s heart-shaped leaves, the whistle of the wind through its branches. There was comfort in that quiet, and peace, and an understanding of something wider and deeper than even the endless Kansas sky.
Wilderness was just outside of town. Out over the tops of the buildings, stores and houses, the wide Kansas sky was blue, darker in the middle with a hazy white ring around the edges from the summer heat and the dirt blown up into the air from the dry prairie just outside of town. Sometimes, sitting there, I could see a plume of dust, like a distant brown feather against the blue sky miles and miles away being puffed up into the air. And sometimes I could see the distant tops of thunderheads, billowing and white, blinking with lightning. Although sunny and clear in town, if the wind is strong enough, it carried to me the smell of the raindrops falling down out of those faraway storm clouds.
My mind wandered out across those miles, past town, past I-70 at its edge, and into the rolling plains of yellow grass, broken up only by creek-bottom cottonwood trees, fields of sunflowers or wheat. A barn here. A silo there. A windmill. I closed my eyes to imagine the land before men settled it with the dark, towering thunderheads rushing in over the prairie, a slate gray wall with white sheets of rain trailing underneath.
Posted on June 7th, 2008
oren: mommy, put you glasses on. you scaw me.
seb: mommy, you need to get new glasses. you’re scary when you look at me with an angry face.
oren: mommy, you make me cwy!
seb: mommy, you’re pretty when you smile.
oren: something fwum the dawk scawes me!
seb: you need to let me have my decision!!
oren: i have a bad dweam!
Posted on June 7th, 2008
that i am writing. this is the first of anything i’ve written about our fall 2007 trip to the red river gorge in kentucky. it will be growing over the next few months to actually include what we did there and with whom…
Oren
He started out clean. Cherubic even. His smooth, round cheeks and chin like porcelain. His straw-colored hair and pale, pudgy appendages shining in the morning sunlight. Then we hiked up the hill from the cabin to the dirt at the base of the cliff. He isn’t clean anymore. Regardless of our vigilance in wiping his nose, the copious amounts of running mucus has attracted the dust. The groove under his nose is a muddy river leading to pouty, red lips. He stands in front of a newly-cut section of log that he is using as a drum, tap-tap-tapping away with two gray sticks, bobbing his head and sticking out his belly in time. His bright blue eyes have a glazed, feverish look to them, but he smiles showing tiny, white, square teeth. Still clutching a twig, he swipes a grubby fist across his mutinous nose painting a streak of brown completely across one cheek. I think it’s in his ear too. There the snot/dirt mixture will dry like cement, and we will have to pin him down and chip it away to make him recognizable again. Perhaps in preparation for this event, he begins a caveman-esque diatribe, howling along with the pounding in a raspy, baby-boy voice. He is a little barbarian, a prehistoric boy, if you will, aside from his multi-striped tank top– resplendent with a dark drool stain at the neck– and navy blue shorts. I imagine him perfectly content living outside in the forest, in a wilder place than our little rented cabin in the woods; at least, in a place where no one would confine him to such things as a “bed” or “clothes.” I imagine him a North American Mowgli, snot and drool landing where they may and mixing with the dirt to camouflage him from the other wild animals, whether friend or foe.
Posted on January 15th, 2008