Three outta four ain't bad.

I've been in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin for almost a week now, staying at my usual retreat: my favorite aunt and uncle's house. This trip had been planned and thwarted twice in the last six months by events out of my control, and finally getting to go has been such a relief.

My aunt and uncle's house is outside a small town on a few acres of wooded land with pockets of rusted horse-drawn farm equipment and 50's era car husks. The biggest excitement of the week is driving down to the recycling center. The coffee pot starts brewing at 6:15am every morning, and I wander out of the spare bedroom and curl up on the sofa with a cup of coffee and a blanket until the wood stove warms the house. I'm never happy about being awake before 9am except when I'm here. At home, being awake before 9am means I've got a workday ahead of me or a massive to-do list looming. Here, being awake before 9am means drinking a hot cup of coffee, having breakfast cooked up for me with a side of sarcasm by Uncle Larry, and getting a good view of the day ahead, which is always laid back even when I have a to-do list.

Aunt Suzy's cat Kolipoki demonstrates how I feel most days that I'm here:


Yeeeeessssss.

On top of the laid back lifestyle up here, this house is just about humming with creative energy. Suzy is a jack of all arts and crafts. She's painted, drawn, woodburned, thrown pottery, carved, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. The house is covered with her handiwork - my room is the one least touched by Suzy's art, and it still has a lamp she woodburned, two framed paintings, and a large underwater mural on drywall screwed onto one wall. Being surrounded by things she's created makes me want to surround myself with things I've created. She's been working on a new carving while I've been here, but it's large scale and won't be done before I leave.


Larry is an inventor. He spends most of the day up in his shop, welding together weight lifting machines of his own design. Three days a week, he's also the personal trainer for the household and his and Suzy's friends. He invents things other than weight lifting machines, but they're not for sale. He makes up songs to sing as he walks around the house, episodes of CSI that ought to get shot, ways to tease me, and over J-term of 2008, "Bidet in a Box" - which, combining his singing and inventing talents, had its own theme song at one point. Every morning for three days when I woke up, Larry would pass me at the coffee pot and say, "I made probably a million dollars this morning working on my Bidet in a Box idea. What did you do this morning?"

It pains me that Bidet in a Box will never be an actual product, not because Larry won't get his millions but because I would love to see a commercial with a cartoon box of toilet wipes singing, "Bidet in a Box, Bidet in a box! Buy it and you'll feel smart as a fox!"


(To answer your questions about this picture: No, he only wears a coat when it's below 0 degrees F; about 65 years old; and yes, he could bench press you.)

Anyway, so: Peace? Check. Quiet? Check. Crazy creative people? Double check. Perfect creative sabbatical.

My to-do list for this trip was:

• Finish a chapter from Sum (AKA book 3 of The Fantasy Series What Ate My Life)
• Finish knitting my Sylvi coat
• Write the first chapter of an upcoming novel, which I plan on submitting to the WisCon writers workshop at the end of the month
• Work on the multi-chapter fanfic I've had in my head since the fall

On Thursday night, I finished a chapter of Sum that I had started in 2008.

On Sunday night, I posted the first chapter of the fic.

And today, with the exception of buttons and a good soak and blocking, I finished this:



This coat was the knitting project mirror to Or Your Money Back, a project I took up thinking I could sit down and knit on it when I was stuck on the story. It turned out that the story itself had few places to get stuck, and the coat turned into more of a symbol of my confidence regarding the project. For a long while it was on hiatus, then it came creeping back into my current WIPs once I was submitting queries, and this week, watching my aunt read (and cry over) OYMB, I finally worked up the guts to finish it.


Like the book, the coat turned out whimsical, twisty, and just a tad shorter than I expected. It also took a mad dash of what seemed like for-fucking-ever to get the finishing done.


I did wind up making some progress on that first chapter I need to get done, but not as much as I had hoped. Normally, not hitting an intended deadline drives me a little nuts. Today, though? Too much else has gone right, and I am far too relaxed to care.


Big dumb grins all around.

I go home tomorrow.

Feels like survival

I've spent most of the last week with my dad, aunt, uncle, and second-cousins (or cousins once removed, or cousins squared? I can never keep up with those labels). Sunday and Monday, my dad and I slept in a tent outside my aunt and uncle's house, which is currently in a process of major renovation. Tuesday through Thursday, the lot of us packed up and went camping at Little Girl's Point, a spot on the Upper Michigan end of Lake Superior.

I finished this the first day of the trip:


It's another Verity beret, this time done in my own handspun (my first project in it!), for my aunt Suzy. I had promised her one of these hats ages ago, started one and frogged it, and then woke up a few days before my trip and realized that the skein of handspun hanging from my bedpost was the colors of Suzy's favorite costume from when she was a belly dancer in Alaska in the 70's. It's even a little shiny because of the bamboo content - it's not sequins, but close enough!

I love the way the colors came out when knitted up.


So that was my first finished thing of the vacation, wrapped up in my aunt's cozy living room. The next thing was finished here:


That's my dad's spare tent. The one he and my mom honeymooned in, oh, thirty years ago? And no, that big pale canvas flap isn't original to the tent. It's glued and pinned in place as a makeshift front door because that little bit of zipper action you see in the photo is about as zipped up as the original front flaps get without prayers and human sacrifices.

Also, it has a worm hole in the bottom. And it leaks from the seams. And it's constantly trying to pull away from the ground. It was like sleeping in a really flat-bottomed moon bounce. But it beat sharing the new tent with my dad, who goes to sleep hours before I do, snores, and emits gasses unfit for discussion in this delicate internet. So he got a tent to himself, and I shared with my sixteen-year-old whatever-cousin Abi, who has a sleeping schedule similar to my own.

And HA to my dad. We got the view.

That's a drop-off overlooking Lake Superior, five feet from the front of the tent. At right: anti-wendigo device. (And yes, the mesh is actually zipped in that shot. Sacrifices were made. But whatever-cousin Jacob was ten and loud, so nobody will miss him that much.)

The first night at the campsite, it thundered and poured. Abi and I were up most of the night, laughing nervously about how the leaky, bouncing tent was going to either flip and crush us or drown us in our sleep. The weather gave us one short window to make a midnight run to the restrooms down the road, then rained diagonally in our faces so hard on the trip back that we almost couldn't find the campsite.

I think it's worth noting at this point that I had not been camping since childhood, when camping was one of my most loathed activities. Having survived tenting in my dad's ghettofabulous tent a thunderstorm, I say again: HA.

Speaking of survival, I had an enlightening conversation with whatever-cousin Jacob over the campfire one night. We were cooking hotdogs, and when his was done, he held it up and announced, "I like cooking my own food. It feels like survival."

"Really?" I asked. "You're a great survivalist?"

He nodded. When I pointed out that his hot dog had been bought by his grandfather and stored in an RV freezer, Jacob just said, "Well, I could hunt a wiener pig all by myself if I wanted."

"A wiener pig?"

"Where hot dogs come from."

Oh. Well. I did not know that.

So, there you have it: the true origin of hot dogs. Wiener pigs. By the way Jacob describes them, it sounds like they're running rampant in the wilds of Upper Michigan. Be careful hiking around Little Girl's Point, or the wiener pigs might get you.


Lake Superior is a pretty good place to get some writing done, improbable wildlife aside. I finished chapter three of Or Your Money Back while sitting on the rocky beach, looking out over the waves. Even though I'd just slid down a small cliff on my butt to get to the shore, it was very peaceful.


I'm not sure I like camping. The lake was freezing, it ate my flip-flops, and it tried to bowl me over with big groping waves when I tried to wash my hair, but it was so very pretty. And sleeping in the tent--well. My first night back I had a nightmare about the tent flooding and flung myself out the tent door, only to wake up as I fell out of my loft bed. Bruises everywhere.

It seems like my regular life is a tad more dangerous than camping. But at least in my apartment, I don't have to hunt wiener pigs for food.

(By the by, if any of you knitters are ever in Superior, check out Fabric Works on Tower Avenue. We stopped there on the way home, and even though I was in gross post-camping garb, the ladies there were nothing but friendly.)

TV is the cure-all.

Well, I'm home.

I was going to write about how awesome it is to travel by myself because I can step off the bus at a McDonald's and order a Happy Meal just for the hell of it.

...But then on the way into St. Paul, I watched a hit and run on the interstate. A sedan in the next lane over got rear-ended and crashed into the median. The cop car that hit it didn't even slow down. A woman on my bus called 911, and the operator didn't seem to believe her when she said a cop car was responsible. Half the people on the bus saw it - the lights and siren were going, and traffic was trying to pull over for it (the sedan included, but not fast enough evidently).

Oh, hey, faith in humanity, how're you today? You look a little thin. Have you eaten today? I'd give you my Happy Meal, but I already ate it.

As soon as I got home, Kiah started cheering me up with my usual insta-cure. We took a trip to Super America for energy drinks and candy, followed by a marathon of all the shows I missed while I was away: House, Battlestar Gallactica, Supernatural, and now Lost. I'm loving Desmond's mismatched shades/cap/scarf combo.

Me: "Desmond, you look doofy."
Kiah: "He's in his rock star/professional baseball player/gay scarf designer disguise. So Whitmore can't find him!"

These are the things I care about after two servings of mango-orange energy drink and a Wonka Bar.

Out, off, away

I love long bus rides. When I sit down on a Greyhound bus, my shoulders go slack and all the tension from my daily life seeps away. I can't read, write, or knit in moving vehicles without feeling sick, so I have nothing to do but listen to music on the bus. This should make my rides boring, but instead I adore them. In everyday life, I'm always supposed to be paying attention to something, whether it's a project at work or a bad scifi movie at home. I rarely relax fully at home, even when I'm vegging on the couch. On a bus, though, I can't do anything. So I put on my headphones, queue up a band I know well, and watch the scenery slide by. A masseuse couldn't get this level of relaxation out of me.

I'm on vacation for the week. This is where I've been hanging out since yesterday. My aunt and uncle's house in northern Wisconsin is my favorite retreat. Every inch of this house has been modified to suit their needs and aesthetic - from the hand-made shelving to the multiple additions - and the walls are covered with my aunt's artwork. I walk inside and am immediately struck with an urge to create something.

Unfortunately, this time that urge didn't extend to writing. I have a short story on my harddrive waiting for an ending, but instead of working on it, I've been sitting in a patch of sunlight, knitting my Snow White sweater and chatting with my aunt. It's currently sort of a Snow White tube top.


But that fit? Perfect. It's at the point where I need to set down the body and knit the sleeves, and I've promised that short story I won't cast-on the sleeves until I've written a proper ending.

Projects I've got to work on while I'm here:

• "No and the Walking House"
• Novel #3 (currently stuck in the midst of chapter seven)
  
• Snow White sweater

And one book to finish reading - The Bone People by Keri Hulme.

But for now, I hear my name being called for dinner.