Interviewee

Rhea interviewed me. She asked thought-provoking questions that took me awhile to answer.

I noticed that you switched coasts so I was wondering what your thoughts are on the whole West Coast vs. East Coast phenomenon.

The beer out here is much better!

My Oregon-born niece is going to grad school in D.C. and she says no one there drinks beer. Here, I actually know a few people who brew their own.

What are your top 5 karaoke songs?

To be honest, the last time I saw a karaoke machine was in the mid-90s in a bar in Vilnius, Lithuania. I sing a lot, though, around the house. In the mornings I like to listen to booming orchestral music; it wakes me up. This is one of my favorites:

Do you believe in magic/miracles? Why or why not?

I believe that life itself is magic. I love to read (or watch or listen to) natural histories that describe the wonder of this world. Once my daughter captured a pregnant sagebrush lizard which laid eggs in a fishtank in our house. The eggs dried up and the lizard could barely move because she was so cold. Lizards need it hot. And I was all, How is it possible that lizards even exist? In Central Oregon it's below freezing eight months of the year, and even in summer the nights can be in the 40s. So how can a lizard live? How can it find food before the temps get so low it can no longer move? It is a Great Mystery.

What is your favourite food?

Once when I flew to Pennsylvania to see my parents, my mom picked me up from BWI and we stopped for dinner at one of those roadside places that serve only Maryland blue crab and bread. They sat us at a picnic table and dumped a load of crabs in front of us. HEAVEN!

Did you always know you wanted to have kids? And what do you enjoy most about being a parent?

I always kind of figured I'd marry and have kids but, like, really far in the future. Like, when I was thirty. And then all-of-a-sudden I was TWENTY EIGHT! Which is almost thirty! And I was married! So my husband and I decided to try for kids. I knew only one person with a child at that time, and I didn't know her well. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.

Now that they're almost-8 and 5 and sleep through the night, I have to say that I just really enjoy my kids. They're so interesting and creative and they make me laugh.

What is your favourite season and why?

For my husband, who's a skiier, autumn is a season of anticipation; he greets every sign of the oncoming winter with this intense joy -- like a kid counting down the days to Christmas. It's contagious, that enthusiasm. So I like autumn for the best, too.

Great Interview Experiment

For the Great Interview Experiment I'm pleased to share my interview with Sremmus, a relatively new and very sweet blogger. She makes me want to wear pink. It was fun to wander through her archives.

You blog is fairly new. What made you want to start one up?

I needed a creative outlet for all of my rage. I know how that sounds, but in my real life I am such a push over and a people pleaser. Internalizing everything was not a healthy lifestyle for me anymore.

Is Sremmus (your blog name) purposely "summers" spelled backward? Hee hee, now I'm feeling really smart for noticing that. Or wait, maybe sremmus is a word. I need to check the dictionary. Or maybe it's Lithuanian. Is it Lithuanian? .... How did you choose that name?

Yep, it's summers spelled backwards! I tried so many names in the beginning, and they were all taken! So, I went with my maiden name backwards, it wasn't until about a week ago that the official Summers family web site is also sremmus. There goes thinking I'm brilliant.

Do any of your friends and family read your blog? Mine do. That definitely changes what I write! If your family did (or did not) read, do you think you'd write differently?

The whole point for me was to not have to hide anything anymore, so I only told my husband, and he already knows I am insane. It's great to have someone who truly knows you and still loves you. I did tell my sister about it, no one was reading my blog and I was pouting. She only read it once, with her being Christian and therefore from a totally different planet then me. Oh well!

I live in a town without a real mall, too, but I moved here from the city. Have you always lived in a small town? What do you like best about it?

I like to jump around, at least until I got married. I used to move every 3-6 months. You can do that if you are live in help to the rich and shameless and only take jobs that are temporary. I have lived in Minneapolis and San Fransisco, those are the biggest cities. Not to mention the countless tiny places!

If I only knew you from the blog, and came to visit you, what do you think would surprise me? I mean, do you think I'd say, "Oh! You're so tall!" or, I don't know, maybe "You have the MOST GORGEOUS dreadlocks! I'd never have guessed!"

Cool dreadlocks! I wish I was that awesome! Alas, I'm not. I am a chubby, white girl that you would probably not even look twice at. You would be very surprised with the 'real' me, because I am all smiles, giggles, and sweetness in person. I truly don't know how not to be. I feel so unimportant in real life and it is rather hard for me to let anyone see the me inside.

I stole this question from Alejna's interview (she's funnier than I): If you were a dessert topping, what sort of blog would you write? And wouldn’t you have trouble typing? ... How about this question instead: if you were a fairy godmother, what gift would you bestow on your godchild? (Or do you prefer the dessert topping question?)

Butterscotch, and hell ya it'd be difficult to type what with me gumming up my keys all the time!

I guess the gift of am open mind and strong sense of self would be my gift to a baby. Then they could experience the world without losing themselves.

Any excuse for a party

Mt. Bachelor hasn't enough snow yet to officially open. From a great distance — from Bend, for example — it looks as white as an ice cream cone but from a near distance you see the summit is pockmarked with black. Next weekend, they say. Snow is expected all this week; Mt. Bachelor should open next weekend.

The mountain's being technically closed keeps the tourists away but people still drive up from town. Snow-seekers. Hard-cores, some of them: the cinder cone already has interlocking snaking trails down every side. The Main Lodge parking lot this afternoon was like at a tailgate party — not that anyone stood around drinking (that happens later in the season), but there was the same atmosphere of excited anticipation. A few snowboarders had hiked up the Pine Marten run to fly down, skimming over jibs; others sat in the snow, watching, as snowboarders will do. Families were sledding, little kids shouting and laughing. In the parking lot one rig after another went wheee-heeee-hew! in glorious four-wheel power slides.

As for us, we hadn't brought sleds, so we drove to the far side of the parking lot, where other people had packed a trail. Not that my children actually stayed on a trail.

A thin crust on the snow held his weight ...

for a moment. The snow's chest-deep to a 7-year-old.



Hiking out at sunset. (That's, like, 4:30pm in mid-November.)

Technical writers say the darndest things

Or, how lessons-learned in parenting can be applied at work

While explaining why video tutorials should be user-led, technical writer Tom Johnson gave one of the best descriptions of child-led parenting that I've ever read.

"...Child-led parenting doesn’t mean you let your children do whatever they want without rules. Instead, her [his sister's] model of child-led parenting is to allow the children to make decisions and determine their course of action by themselves (to some extent).

"Some examples of non-child-led activities might be letting your children watch TV or parading them around rides at a theme park. In both cases, the child is floored by the external stimuli, not making decisions on his or her own but rather sitting back and letting someone else drive the input and thought.

"In contrast, on the beach, the activity is much more child-led. The child drives the activity all the way, deciding where to dig in the sand, how deep, whether to build a castle or not. The child decides whether to wade deep or shallow in the water, to run from waves or into waves, whether to dance around or stand still. The child decides what seashells to collect, how many to put in his or her bucket, how to arrange them, which ones to keep, and so on.

"In child-led activities, the child makes a ton of decisions about how he or she wants to do an activity. The activity doesn’t drive the child. The child’s choices drive the activity."

And that is how I try to parent — and live my life — forever and ever, amen.

Empty, con't.

Alejna said she didn't realize that any part of Oregon was desert. Before I met my husband and moved to Oregon in '96, I didn't know it contained desert, either. (As a teen I daydreamed about moving to either New Zealand or Oregon, thinking them equal, climatically speaking.)

But here, look at this precipitation map of Oregon from nationalatlas.gov. Bend straddles the Deschutes River (on the border between the green & the orange), roughly mid-way between Washington and California. Dry, dry, dry. You can see why we have just two local CSAs, and why I'm thrilled and kind of mystified that mine begins providing vegetables in mid-May.

Bend is the most heavily-populated town in all that orange bit. By a lot. We have 80,000 residents.

P.S. My friend and fellow Bendite SMJ did a great write-up of the Nature of Words event, the one I mentioned last week — an especially incredible event in context of that map below.

Setting (II)

First drafted August 5. I cleaned it up last night.

Central Oregon is desert. My kids call it "the cold desert" to distinguish it from the deserts one sees on TV and in books, with their cactuses and Gila monsters. Around here people call it the High Desert.

It's empty.

Well, of course it isn't empty. The drier, lower areas are pockmarked by junipers, sagebrush, bitterbrush, rabbitbrush. The ponderosas grow at higher elevations: ponderosas with bunchgrass at their feet or, in a very narrow zone, ponderosas with manzanita. Even higher the ponderosas cede to alpine firs.

At all elevations, however, there's a lot of space. Juniper trees don't form a forest; junipers are individuals. They stand one here, one over there, like ancient oaks in a savannah. Sagebrush and rabbitbrush stand alone, too. They don't form hedges. Between the junipers and the brushes you see dirt, you see rocks. Above you see the sky.

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Photo taken near Silverlake on a very, very smoky day in August (hence the white sky). Fifty points if you recognize the place.

Relentless

In response to recent posts by Jody, Landismom and Chichimama, and an old one by Mimi.

This summer emptying the dishwasher was my son's job. He called it "the dish cycle": clean to dirty and back again, from the dishwasher to the cabinet to the table and back again, over and over, over and over, over and over. At first it amused him but by the end of the season he was almighty tired of the dish cycle.

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When my kids were tiny everything was so hard; I didn't know how to be either a parent or a housewife and had to learn it all — how to care for a child with a fever, how to cook a hot breakfast for four, how to entertain guests over the holidays, how to choose a daycare — all that stuff was new to me, mysterious, and though exhausting, though often overwhelming, it was interesting.

Now I have become a wife and mother. I'm no longer in the process of becoming. It's done. I've transformed.

I no longer have to blaze the trail. I just have to walk it.

It ought to make me feel victorious, don't you think?