chicken, dog bite, spider family

will you look at this? our city friends own this land and home in the wilds of mendocino and we were lucky enough to go spend time with them over the weekend again. we walked through redwoods and sequoias to the fairy corral, the kids gathered kindling and played many ball sports. we drank a lot of wine and ate delicious meals. it is so beautiful up there. the kids can just move around and make a lot of noise and throw things and we are not all on top of each other. i was sad to leave.

what was not so fantastic was that our little foster dog was attacked pretty badly. our friend's dog picked him up in his teeth and shook him like he was a rabbit. he is healing ok but had to get antibiotics for the big puncture wound. he was already fearful. it is hard being responsible for a tiny dog. maya was right there and i think it was traumatizing for her, too as we all screamed at the big dog and finally his owner had to kick him hard in the head to make him open his jaws..

we hit two libraries today. the first was the portola branch where i went down memory lane remembering my days working at e.r. taylor elementary. this is a sunny working class neighborhood with way less garbage than our hood. i see e.r. taylor has several school gardens going now. the portola library was full of people, kids lined up to play on the computers and lots of garandparents. we went to a separate room so the kids could participate in a storytelling theater type thing. i am always surprised that my son especially is so open to these unknown quantities, but in minutes they were in costumes and part of a spider family, miles as cushion and maya as see trouble, acting out a story from africa "why the moon is up in the sky" with the very talented storyteller sally davis.

later maya and i ventured out to the bernal library. she really really wanted to go because she had heard about this event and that there would be cookies and chickens at the library. she imagined the chickens roaming free, just as she imagined this morning that all the kids in china were sitting in the backseats of their cars listening to the same terrible katy perry song as we were "in their land". a wonderful author-illustrator and 20 year bernal chicken and duck farmer, jane wattenberg, showed us lots of different eggs, let us pet her chickens, read a book, took a wide variety of questions from the audience, and gave away postcards. maya was very impressed with the way the author's clothes matched the cutest chicken's feathers, and i was impressed by her life, making children's books and raising animals right up there at the most beautiful part of bernal hill north.

my kids are getting a good start to learning over the summer. i hope that other kids are too.

i spent my vacation with mushrooms and weeds

ha ha, little joke there.

the winter break is over and we are back in the thick of it with work, school, pta meetings, worries about budget cuts to education, rich squeezing in his music career, doctor appointments, etc. etc. i even had the opportunity this week to write up and report a substitute teacher at work who showed up with no teaching skills and some incredibly racist comments.
over new year's we visited friends on their rural property in point arena. our little friend ella was really interested in picking mushrooms, specifically candy caps, which we picked off a trail near her house. they have a maple syrup flavor and we cooked them in buckwheat pancakes, yum. i had a strong memory of picking hedgehog mushrooms on our other friend's property down the road ten years ago and wanted to try again. i ventured into the wet woods, pushing under and climbing over wild rhododendron branches, and there, amidst the dark earth and dead leaves and branches, were hedgehogs, yellow tops poking up in random little clumps. i could hear my kids calling "mommy where are you?" but i was in a pretty dense area and had a little quality time with myself picking wild mushrooms with trees and ferns for company before they found me. we ate the hedgehogs in an omelet and funnel chanterelles in new year's eve risotto.

i also became addicted to watching weeds on netflix. so easy to push "watch next episode" on the laptop. i don't usually do this, but i fell right into a serious addiction, and am pretty sleep-deprived from watching 2-4 hours a night for the last two weeks.

weeds, weeds, weeds. i would love to sink into it right now, curled up in bed watching a dysfunctional family and their underground adventures. escape escape. but maya is here, and laundry, and dishes, and the rest of the real live world.

the caption for maya's picture is "this is a clown who has a broken leg and he has crutches. he is smiling because he can't wait to get back to the clown show."

i am assuming the clown got hurt on the job. he must really love his work.