Spring has sprung... sort of

Sometimes writing a once a week topic for here seems so easy. It just happens and the topic is a natural. Other times, I get to Friday, like this time, and still have no idea of a solid topic.

It's not that a lot isn't going on. My own world is wrapped up in the current WIP (work in progress) where it seems I only care about the motivations of these characters. What works? What doesn't work? Whoops went too far that way and have to back up. I come up for air, look around and the world is still out there but my own awareness of it has been somewhere pushed to the back of my mind.

Even though we are still getting a lot of rain and gray days, spring is here and the first flowers are out, not as many here in the hills as when I drive into town, but it clearly is spring with leaves popping out. Last week the hummingbirds returned about a week after the vultures. We often joke that they leave and arrive at the same time and do the hummers ride the waves of the vulture's flight?

Our kids have a cabin on Klamath Lake and the birds are flocking there in record numbers as the ice seemed to leave the lake almost within a week. Their photos are inspiring but not quite enough to get us over there yet anyway.

The man who has looked after our place when we are gone is currently involved with a full time job, which means we are going to find it difficult right now to leave with so many babies on the place. 

The lambs got their creep this week (a fenced in area where they can get COB (corn, oats, barley) that they need now-- especially those part of triplets or twins. The lambs have begun running in gangs but getting a photo of them doing it is always a challenge. This first one was in the rain and only about one third of them in the image. Another photo had them running and totally out of focus even as I tried to ignored the rain on my camera lens.

 When it's sunny, they, like their mothers, lie in the pear orchard by mid morning.

Politically it's enough to drive a person nuts as so many issues all being thrust at us at the same time. Some are things we thought we had resolved like North Dakota trying to take away a woman's right to choose. One red state after another has done this and then they try to tell us women should support the Republican party. How can we? I mean all women have a right to choose now. Nobody forces an abortion and frankly if a woman wants to keep a baby that she can't really afford or who will be born with problems, the party fighting to end abortion is also fighting to end any programs to help her raise that child. Make sense-- not!

 
Then there is gay marriage which seems a given to anybody who isn't using Old Testament religion as the basis for their thinking. Did Christ condemn homosexuality? Not a chance, but the Apostle Paul did, who may have been a gay himself and whatever the truth of that, used the Old Testament as the basis for his condemnation. The Constitution is supposed to not be about religion and yet only religion would say gays should not have a right to marriage with all the benefits that includes culturally and materially. 

I have said for a long time that the right to gay marriage is more important for the youth than older gays. It lets them know there is a way for them to lead a life as normal as anyone else's. If gay marriage was regarded as equal to any other, then they'd have no reason to marry a heterosexual to try and fit in. They see their life as normal for them and okay for everybody. That's  commonsense though and it's not part of this debate.

The other issue that has attracted my interest is the raising of the minimum wage. If it had kept up with inflation, it'd not be an issue at all right now. That's why when they say vouchers are good enough for Medicare and the CPI is good for SS raises, don't believe them. It's all about making these programs, these entitlements have no meaning or value-- as they managed to do federally with the minimum wage.

Anyway I actually avoid the news a lot right now, but those issues are the ones I've cared about probably the most when I do click in. Otherwise my life is back in 1865 and dealing with the political issues that were a factor then, the Indian war that Oregon was experiencing, the arguments over how to deal with a lot of the same issues we argue over today. 

One problem with writing a new work, having a WIP, is that I tend to disappear into it. I come up for air once in awhile and wonder where the world went. It's not easy to avoid that happening. In the middle of the night I'll wake and all I can think about is did that plot element work? Oh wait, it didn't and I have to remember in the morning to redo it because 'that' character would never do that. The only way I can get back to sleep is start counting breaths to force my mind from the story and to nothingness-- which is where sleep lies.

Then I had a dream that my computer caught a virus and I feared my WIP had been be lost. I am being quite careful in avoiding going to offbeat sites for research as that very much could happen. I have never seen a screen do what mine did in that dream, odd distorted shapes and no ability to control anything.

Even without the dream, I frequently save my work as I go because i have had something go wrong in the past, what we used to call a blue screen of death, and I'd lose everything I hadn't just saved. I never felt I got it as fresh the next time as I imagined I had the first.

Photos all here at the farm. One recent visitor has been the wild Chinese pheasant, likely planted here some years back as they are not native to this region other than brought in for hunting. The above male comes around every so often to check out the grain supply for the sheep. Even before I see him, I hear him as he has quite a hoarse call. I haven't seen the turkeys yet, but our yearly wood duck residents have shown up for the smorgasbord of whatever the sheep don't eat. The small birds have their own feeder inside the area fenced off from the sheep-- generally.

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