Light and Momentary

The Biggest Little Farm

Elwood and I went to see The Biggest Little Farm tonight and I enjoyed it immensely. It's a documentary about a couple who bought a 200-acre farm near Los Angeles and decided they would Live In Harmony With Nature. So it has its eye-roll-y moments -- like, seriously, shoot the damn coyotes already -- but I really liked it. 

They bought a farm that had been neglected, and when they started trying to work the soil it was a little alarming: compacted, dried out, mostly sterile. You see them trying to dig into it with a variety of implements -- they might as well be trying to break into a boulder with hand tools. Somehow they found themselves a traditional farming guru who walked them through the first two or three years. (I want to know more about their traditional farming guru, actually. How does a person acquire that job title?)

We meet their critters. They raise shaggy Highland cows, and sheep, and ducks and chickens and an accidental crop of snails, but my favorite is Emma the pig. Emma is laid up with mastitis not long after her enormous litter of piglets arrives (I loved the pig midwifery scenes!), and I found myself armchair-quarterbacking. Or, you know, armchair cross-species lactation-consulting. "Don't take the piggies away!" I wanted to shout. "Keep the milk moving! Protect the milk supply!" I'm still not sure if Emma got any antibiotics despite her 106 degree fever, but (spoiler alert) she managed to rally. Go Emma! Snort long and prosper!

The cinematography is beautiful: big-picture shots of the surrounding mountains and the skies overhead, and tightly focused shots of birds and bugs and gophers and snakes and all of the beauty that surrounds them on the farm. Big swaths of the beauty involve things a person might not find beautiful up close. I can say with confidence that if there were squirming maggots in my own personal hand I would fling them away, shrieking. But when our farmer scoops up a handful of cow manure teeming with maggots, it's cool to see.

It is a slow-paced film. Elwood and I went out afterward and talked it over. He thinks they could have cut half of the movie; I said a quarter but maybe I only meant a fifth. If you're looking for an action flick, this is not your movie. But if you're looking for an appreciative close-up view of a complex farm ecosystem -- fluffy hawk fledglings and graceful ladybugs in flight and sneaky weasels and luscious nectarines and a sweet snuggly farm-born baby -- check it out.

On Persistence

My arms and hands are aching again. Joe and I went to the rock-climbing gym tonight and I climbed until I couldn't climb any more.

I've been feeling a little discouraged about climbing this week. There's a route I've tried a couple of times unsuccessfully, but I thought it was just a mental barrier keeping me from sending it. Earlier this week I decided I would push through the mental barrier. I thought once I put my mind to it I could zip right to the top. But I just couldn't get it: Could. Not. I could describe the move I needed to do to reach the top, but my arms and legs would not cooperate. Going by the numbers, it shouldn't have been a problem. The route is only rated 5.8+, and these days 5.9 is the difficulty level where I feel reasonably confident about getting a route on the first try. "Lower me," I called down, feeling utterly defeated.

"Maybe I'll just sell my climbing shoes on eBay," I said flouncily.

There are hardly any other middle-aged moms at the climbing gym. I have one friend who climbs pretty regularly with her husband. Earlier this week I saw someone new at the gym, a woman my age who was a few levels ahead of me. But mostly it's teens and 20-somethings, who seem to sail up the wall as if they're wearing anti-gravity boots. 

The last time I posted about climbing I was telling you about a 5.10b. I had to work and work and work to send that route. The video below shows most but not all of the route -- at about 1:04 you can see where the topmost hold is. (I am attempting to reach to the top using only the green holds. The lavender thing dangling from my harness is my chalk bag.) The moves at 0:10-0:16 took me dozens of attempts to perform consistently. Eventually, though, I figured it out.

Tonight I tried a new 5.10a. "Maybe I'll flash it," I said to myself. ["Flash it" = climber-speak for nailing a new route on the first try.] Instead I had to rest for a minute in the middle, and I put one of my feet in the wrong place when I started moving again. I'll get it soon, but not tonight. I was feeling defeated again at the gym. It wasn't until I got home that I realized that I've never before been able to tackle a new 5.10 route and get all the moves on the first try. I couldn't string them all together this time, but I also didn't fall.

It's easier to be persistent when progress is faster. I know it's progress, even when it's slow. I know it's better to make slow progress than to sell my climbing shoes on eBay. It's still a little discouraging to watch the teenagers zipping past me.

Huh, how did it get to be the 20th of June already?

I know the answer to that question, I suppose. In the first week of June I was prepping busily for a retreat. In the second week of June I was catching up on post-retreat sleep and biting my nails about submitting my first NIH grant and prepping for an all-day workshop with my boss and ALSO lining up ducks for last weekend, when Elwood and I were going to be away on separate trips, leaving the teens in charge for a night. (I saw my college roommates in Chicago. SO lovely to spend time with them. He was competing in the finals of a national Settlers of Catan tournament.) And the third week of June has been a bit of a blur, because I needed to upload my grant documents by Wednesday and present all day today. But! Tra-la-laaaa! The grant documents are uploaded and the workshop went well. 

The younger kids have had camps to attend, which has allowed me to spend time in the office without worrying that they are adrift at home. This is a good thing, because it turns out that submitting an NIH grant is not only an exercise in planning a rigorous investigation but also an exercise in following unhelpful directions. Here's an example: there's a big section on human subjects that I knew I needed to complete, but our grants office wasn't very familiar with that portion of the application. (Most applicants for NIH funding from Gladlyville U. are studying mice or turtles or bacteria or tumor cells. Something that can't sign a consent form.) I was trucking along on the human subjects section when I discovered that I had filled in part of the form in error. I googled to figure out a classification and discovered, much to my surprise, that my application would be automatically disqualified if I completed sub-section 4 since I am not proposing a clinical trial. Wouldn't you think that would be useful information to share with applicants? It feels a little like they're saying "If you have to be told how to perform the secret handshake, you can't be in the club."

But my application wended its way through the university routing system today (lots of people have to sign off an external grant application), and I am sending it off tomorrow with low expectations and great gusts of relief.

This feels like the first summer in a while without a blog post on summer goals and summer fun. I've had too many things on the must-do list to focus on the want-to list. But starting tomorrow I have exactly 8 weeks of summer before I have to head back to work, and a plan is always a helpful thing. "Are you going to read Ulysses now?" my 19yo asked me at dinner tonight, and I do believe I will. More soon.

Impostor Syndrome: Activate

I loved the Wonder Twins on Saturday morning cartoons in my childhood. They would reach for each other and say "Wonder Twin powers: ACTIVATE!" And sproing, one of them would be a -- hmm, the memories are blurry, 40+ years on -- maybe a harbor seal, while the other would be a hydroelectric dam, so that the second one could immobilize the bad guy by pouring water on his head while the first one bit him on the ankle. That doesn't sound very plausible now that I have written it down, but I am not going to google it. Am. Not.

This blog post is itself a procrastination, and it would just be too meta to procrastinate further in the middle of my procrastinating.

I am supposed to submit my first NIH grant on the 19th of June, and instead of Wonder Twin powers I am observing the ferocity of untrammeled impostor syndrome. I open the interface and something inside me says "Impostor Syndrome: ACTIVATE!" Impostor syndrome speaks with measured skepticism: you, Jamie Gladly? You are going to submit an NIH grant? For real?

Maybe you should do another KenKen first. 

Maybe you should see if eBay will sell you replacement spice jars for the 1960s spice rack you got from your MIL when you were engaged. (Answer: I can get jars with no lids, or jars plus rack. I just want 5 or 6 jars with lids. Why is this hard? Wait, it is distracting me from the scary grant-writing stuff so I don't actually care if it's hard.)

Or maybe, just maybe, I should write the stupid grant like an actual grownup.

I am going to harness the power of the internet to arrest my procrastination instead of fueling it. I am going to put words in a row until I have a draft personnel justification that I can send off to my contact in the grants office. I'll report back when I've done so.

And maybe then I'll find some spice jars. Impostor Syndrome: DEACTIVATE!

The mission

Do y'all remember that I'm part of a retreat team right now? Some folks from the retreat program at my parish are working with the central office of the national retreat program; five of us will be part of a mission team offering the first retreat to women in a town about 3 hours away.

It's been about 70% more work than I had anticipated.

Some of the additional work was voluntary -- I didn't have to give a talk, but I volunteered to. Some of the additional work was not voluntary -- the music coordinator quit and I was promoted from musical dogsbody to musical co-lead-dog. I was happy to plan Mass music and teach songs as needed but I have been less happy about planning and providing a bunch of recorded music. I'm too middle-aged for all of this Spotify playlisting and downloading and Bluetoothing. (Also, if I were the sole musical lead-dog I could decree "We're not doing that song because it's irredeemably cheesy" instead of saying diplomatically "I would prefer not to do that song." But then I would have even more work, I guess. Life is full of tradeoffs, man.)

Anyway, it will all be over a week from now. I believe it has the potential to bear good fruit in the lives of the women who attend and in their parishes. It's just been kind of painful getting it together.

Every time I go to Mass out of town I am filled with gratitude for our church here in Gladlyville. We visited the town where the retreat will be held three weeks ago and spoke at all the Masses there. They were, I suppose, perfectly ordinary Catholic Masses. We are awfully lucky here, blessed with a pastor who believes with his whole heart that he has been entrusted with good news, who calls us to go deeper in homilies that are full of truth, and almost always thoughtful and witty. Our music directors are faithful and reverent without taking themselves too seriously; they are very clear that our focus is on worship, not performance. Our leadership team is unified; they stand with Pope Francis and the Magisterium in their efforts "to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of [them]."

This morning's Mass left me with a fiery little glow inside, grateful for the gift of the Word and the homily and the Eucharist and also for the power of community. When we go to church these days we are surrounded by friends from the retreat community, people who have encountered Jesus in a new way through the retreats and who are determined to "press on toward the goal," sharing good news as they go.

SO. Maybe I need to stop thinking about all of the (plentiful) annoyances associated with taking this retreat on the road. Maybe I need to do some pressing onward toward the goal myself.

Shoes and Ships and Stripey Socks

Long ago, maybe ten years ago, I picked up a skein of Noro sock yarn on clearance and stashed it in the fingering bin. It sat there for ages. In 2017, when we were taking the train to NYC, I cast on a sock and knitted away as the miles rolled by. I worked the cuff and the heel and the gusset before I realized that something was wrong: it was huge. I had thought I was making a sock but somehow I had accidentally crafted a file cabinet cozy.

I realized belatedly (and disgustedly) that I had chosen size 3 needles instead of size 1 or 2, resulting in this bold new line of outerwear for file cabinets. I stashed the unhappy result in the bottom of a tote bag for many months. It felt like such a hassle to frog the sock and soak the yarn and dry it and rewind it, so for a while I just ignored it. But when I finally did start it over, it caught the eye of my second son. "Who's that for?" he wanted to know. "Do you want it?" I asked him. He did.

I worked big swaths of it on our New Year's trip to my parents' house. (The thing about socks for man-sized feet is that they require only slightly less knitting than an actual file cabinet cozy.) When I reached the end of the first sock, I wasn't quite sure how to start the second one. Noro sock yarn is famous for its long stripe repeats, and this skein had been designed so that a woman's sock would consume about one repeat, with some wiggle room for long cuffs or long feet. A man's sock, though, ate up a little more than a single repeat. This meant I would have to wind a lot of yarn to make the socks match.

But when I consulted my son about his preference for the second one, I learned he didn't care whether the socks matched exactly. We agreed on a plan, and I finished up the second sock yesterday. (They are shown on my feet. They are much less baggy on his.) He is very pleased with them. We both love those yummy pink-shading-to-coral stripes across the mid-foot.

I might take a wee break from knitting man-socks now.