I was messing with CSS. It was 4 in the morning.
This is what happened.
Maybe it’ll get fixed Monday,
so I won’t have to keep hitting the return key,
fearing the words will run into that invisible hole
in the right margin.

We aren’t! We, being everyone in this household besides myself. We like to carry little palm-sized circuitboards around all day, clenched in the grimy sweat of dirty boy hands; we have a pizza box full of different sized circuitboards in the boy’s room (the brains of a computer mouse, calculator, motherboard, to name a few); we leave them at the center of little robot crime scenes across the living room floor (and it really hurts to step on them, DAMNIT FORD).

All this deconstruction has led to a massive reconstruction project of knee-patching, due to all the time Ford spends on the floor laboring over his electronic hardware. Of all designing I could put into a knee patch, I never would have guessed he’d ask for circuitboards. Never in my life. So here we go:

Git yerself 2 layers to quilt with: fleece makes it squishy, cotton is a nice outer layer. Kids pick the colors if they’re lucky. Cut to size (to cover at least an inch around the perimeter of the holes? Use your judgement). I used the regular straight-stitch foot on my sewing machine to embroider the circuitboard design thingy, then I sewed around the perimeter of the patch. I then overlapped the edges with the cotton, ironed everything flat.


Next, I cut a piece of Heatbon UltraHold iron-on adhesive to match the shape. Affixed it to the bottom of the patch.

Then I ironed it onto the pants. I had to REALLY IRON that puppy down, with so many layers. A real pain because I’m pretty impatient. That’s why this isn’t much of a craft blog but I’m learning to find a quiet meditative religion in the whole craft process. Anyhow,

I decided to blbindstich (is that right?) around the edges, to really secore those edges down.

And viola

they turned out pretty cute he thinks, I think so too

I could shop for new pants. This rubs me the right way, though. Who doesn’t like being rubbed the right way?

In my mojo-less blogging hiatus, a few things happened with the chickens. Last week I alluded to the grim demise of Betty and the loss of a mystery chick but I thought I ought to give a status report for the people who might, for whatever reason, be curious about what remains of the three chickens we started out with: Betty, Boo and Abby.

We began letting the chickens roam freely all day between the woods and our garden. Like girls at the mall, they explored in chatty unison and fluttered squawking into the cedar boughs when the boys chased through the yard weilding light sabers and baseball bats. We don’t have a particularly bad problem with marauders invading our yard (just little boys) so it seemed perfectly natural to allow the chickens to peck here and there, nitrifying our soil and plucking up beetles.

But we returned one morning to find Betty slain at the edge of the yard, and we figured it was a pedestrian accident (although the chickens had never strayed close to the road before). We were all very bummed, well duh, so we drove immediately across town to the feed store so we could patch up the broken hearts in the backseats and get three new chicks: a Cuckoo Maran, another Auracana and a Golden Laced Wyandotte.

When we returned with our peeping little box of chicks, Abby and Boo weren’t in the yard to greet us, as they usually do. When Damon searched the perimeter for the missing pullets, we found Boo at the end of a trail of brown feathers, lying much like Betty had on the side of the road. We had been wrong: it was either the work of a dog or a cat, who had carried the hens to the edge of our lot before losing interest or appetite (which helped us rule out a hungry coyote).

A few days later, in the brooder, the Wyandotte chick was just lying there, heaving with both eyes closed. Damnit! To explain my swearing, I briefed Ford so he could part with his chick. Heartbreaking! Boxes of kleenex! Help! Parenting sucks!

The crux of the chick tragedy, as it turned out, lay not in the infection but with the senseless way I fumbled rehydrating the poor thing: trying to administer a few drops of water into her beak with a syringe, and watching with confusion as she lifted her wing, then raised her head, opened her eyes at me, and collapsed. I drowned her.

So we survived with a lump in our throats through another few days, shellshocked and expecting more grim findings whenever we checked on the chickens. Within a few days, my brother folded his plans to raise two chicks of his own in his backyard in south Austin. An HOA dispute. So he arrived with two new Araucana chicks and a coop. We painted it mustard yellow and started laughing at how ridiculous it was that we now had eight chickens, about how funny it is that you can never go buy one chick at the general store: you must by in multiples, think like a farmer. Always account for random plucking.

One morning I carried the now-heavy box of growing, agile chicks back outside from the garage brooder (where we keep them, at night). I smuggled the alpha chick into the coop first, only to watch her fly immediately back out the coop door and into the bushes, where she began a screaming that arced across the lawn behind me and towards the woods. Eyes following ears, I watched a tabby cat steal away with the screaming chick in her mouth, weaving quickly into the shadows. I picked up a branch and hollered after the cat, ramming it with the blunt end of the stick and dislodging the chick, who immediately ran for cover under the canoe.

Good news! With some boo-boo bubbles (a great thing to have on hand) she healed beautifully within about a week. We now call her Thelma. She is no longer alpha. She is no longer pecking Abby in the eyeballs and challenging her every move.

Moving along. This is Louise, the cuckoo Maran. She is a lovely little chick who will hopefully survive to lay chocolate-brown eggs.

This is Lucy. She is the cover girl of the Auraucana bunch, which is to say, rest rest are all Araucanas. They will all lay blue-green eggs in March or April, if they survive.

There are others: two identical chicks we call Pepper and Curry. There’s a large and dark brown chick who quickly became alpha in Thelma’s stead, and her name is Mona. And last is the runt, who is always whiny and always feels an ounce lighter than the rest, and her name is Whiney. In case you wanted to know all of this.

They really like sliced tomatoes:

Our new system of protection is humane but a disappointment: we are keeping them mostly in their coops, where they get plenty of fresh air and sunshine, but not a lot of scratching dirt and certainly not a lot of freedom. But they are safe from dogs and cats and coyotes and hawks. And we do occasioanlly let them all run about, when we’re doing yardwork and the like. And only on special days do we allow Abby to play with the chicks (you’re really not supposed to do this, because the little ones can get picked on, but Abby is surprisingly sweet in her disposition and alltogether outnumbered).

It took me a half hour to post my last entry because Ford was singing really loud downstairs in the garage with Damon and I kept turning an ear down the hallway and laughing. I wish I were this uninhibited:

If It’s Nothing

On Saturday morning, we rediscovered our old college schedule of getting up early and hauling ass to class, except this time we went to Elgin for a Sausage Run. I loved the morning drive, creeping out of night across the hills, still blanketed in fog. It’s so breathtaking, this yawn of daybreak. I usually sleep through it, as do my children; we are a family that wakes up twenty minutes before school starts, and somehow this works for us. But to see what I’ve been missing makes me want to curb my nocturnal habits. Passing by our neighbors along the road, little glowing windows inside each shadowed house reminds me of forgotten habits: frosty morning jogs along Balckburn avenue in Providence, cats on the prowl in driveways that I pass, concert flyers waving on telephone poles, and showering before breakfast; the opposite sequence to my current routine, a thousand miles south.

Ford, quietly pouting in the center of the universe, was disappointed that the race didn’t include him. So we pulled back, letting him sprint every now and then through the old town streets and across train tracks. I even gave him my number, and trailed behind him through the finish line. I want to be the family that runs together. It’s a lifelong sport. And my hip was killing me so this made good pretense. He ate it up.

A proper fun run, this race divvied up a kegger at the finish line along with steaming pork sausage (note: the best in Texas) and while I dislike eating pork, I couldn’t resist pints of beer and hot sausage to follow the trail of woodsmoke that carried me from start to finish along the uninspired smalltown route. Even better: a bounce house for the squirts to decompress while we shotgunned refreshments.

It’s midnight and I can’t sleep. The shelf above my desk retains a wall of towering fabric scraps, folded in assembly and ready to be all cut and sewn up. Into what? Perhaps a glow-in-the-dark circuitboard horse? Why not!

Cutting through thick wool felt is so satisfying, like the slow and steady joy of learning to cut through paper in preschool. And the way it sounds, like horses chomping on warm hay.

The surplus yarn in the office here is Fall-friendly and begging to be touched, wishing it were warm enough to get all knit up into scarves and pants and hats. Otherwise, it makes great manes and tales. But do you notice that Chas is wearing fleece?? After eight months of flip-flops I found myself wearing wool socks under my Air Jesus’ and I felt so…back in northern California. Layering is fun. 60 degrees F feels so nice, so much better than 90 degrees in mid-October.

A circuitboard made of white foam and leftover yarn that Ford’s friends made during his birthday party; Chas’ wild volcano painting, originally with volatile sound effects; A featherwreath adorned by Betty and Boo; Ford’s rock collection: “magic rock,” amethyst geode, coral from Galveston, birthday geode from CZ…

Our Fall nature table. Little Ivy Elizabeth Walker, Ford’s favorite character last year from The Village, sitting on the resting rock in the middle of a little Hill Country glade; Burr oak and Post oak acorns from around town; Edwards limestone; Ball moss from everywhere around town; chickenfeathers and unknown native grass, what I pretend is a White-Tailed deer…

at Ivy’s feet: “HEXAGONS!” that Chas found on our walk through the neighborhood (courtesy of a sunbleached, long-dead armadillo skeleton)…

Gretel, another storybook favorite, plays cavalier atop Big Billy Goat Gruff; and no nature table in our house is grounded without a chicken.

Quietly tumbling into the folds of my memory, like carded wool bundles, are little mundane moments gone undocumented. The smudged picture of Ford, placing a fistful of wildflowers atop his chick’s small stickpile grave. Chas, smiling in the kitchen with a half-eaten stick of melting butter in his hands. The pit in my stomach as I scan the decay in Ford’s dental x-rays while he squirms in the the chair and Chas wriggles out of my exhausted arms. The warm breeze lofting the sunlit red feathers on our chicken Betty, dead in the grass beside our driveway. Ford sitting before the nature table, arranging feathers and acorns and tiny baskets of glass beads. The electricity of change, orchestrating stifled conversations about not moving and interrupting my sleep. Like now.