Sleep Deprivation and Yarn Tripping

This week I attended two births, which both ended well, but were long...I missed two nights sleep, and though you can try to catch up, it still takes days to recuperate. That half-gallon of coffee I drank today probably didn't help either.

We head out for Japan on Thursday morning, and nothing is ready. I haven't gotten my homework assignments finished, though I made mighty progress, and I still have the all-important task of deciding what knitting to take with me. It has to be simple enough that I can work on it on trains without buggering it all up, complicated enough to be interesting, doable with stash and patterns I already have, fit in my purse, and generate a finished object that I want in the end. Not too much to ask, right?

I always end up buying yarn souvenirs in Japan, too. They have the cutest cheap yarn, and a nice assortment of the finer-gauge yarns that I like without the barfy baby colors. In case you're ever traveling in Japan and need to know, here's a useful yarn buying guide:

The Girl Cave

is where I spend most of my days now. I'm chaining myself to the desk until I finish my homework (or at least, that's what I keep telling myself). This fall we're going to Japan for a long trip, and I decided yesterday that I was going to finish the next 5 homework sets before I go in three weeks. That's about as much homework as I've done in the last three months, but there's nothing like a deadline, right? Right?

Art Deco-rating

A few years back we ordered these "swimsuit form" mannequins from some mannequin dealer, who met up with me in the parking lot of a Carl's Jr. to make the sale. He wore a cowboy hat and drove a huge white pickup truck whose license plate read SXYMNQN. I love Los Angeles.

I'd been meaning to do something with them for all this time. They started out a strange pink color, so giving them a copper base coat helped a lot, and now I'm working on giving them all tattoos. These 4 ladies will be hanging in our grand room to give it a bit of funky sexy art-deco porn style.

The cats are strangely attracted to them - I have no idea why.

Art School

All the really cool skills I have I learned in art school. People say art school is useless, but if you go to the right kind of art school (the kind where you spend a lot more time buying supplies at Ace Hardware than Dick Blick) you'd be amazed how many problems you can solve.

We bought this motorcycle on Craigslist a few years back. It was a salvage job and had a rough life before we got it, which I made a lot worse by putting in my novice miles on it. I dropped it three times - always while trying to park, or get out of a parking spot - and each time the fairings got a bit worse.

Then another of our intrepid household put in her novice miles on it, and dropped it a few more times (always on the opposite side I did...funny) and the fairings got a lot worse. Some were even lost, never to be seen again. It was time for this bike to see some love, but there was no way I was going to shell out $500 for a new set of fairings for a chop-job bike that is probably going to get beat up by the next n00b who gets their mitts on it.

See above comments about art school, resourcefulness, and my deep, abiding love of 2 part epoxy resins. First:

Second:

Third:

And one more:

In this one, you can really see how bad the damage was. I was able to recreate entire sections by making a waste form out of crumpled brown paper, then layering pieces of fiberglass to make a strong backbone. The surfaces weren't great, so I used Bondo to smooth them, primer, and paint. The colors are pretty close, though the Rustoleum red is a little darker than Honda red...but there was no budget for little $40 cans of colormatched paint in this project. The bike looks better than it ever has since it came to live with us, anyway!

Mochi

Found wandering all by his lonesome on a Hollywood street corner, this friendly little dwarf rabbit finally made it through quarantine and has been installed in the rabbitat. He celebrated his first night there by squeezing through a gap to visit the girl next door...hopefully she doesn't give birth to a litter of flemish giant/netherland dwarf crosses next month! I hadn't anticipated having any rabbit so small, so I had to close up some gaps and make his home more appropriate. This one is just a pet, so friendly and personable that he has charmed even the rabbit-resistant members of the household. Mochi is named after Japanese folklore, where the moon rabbits are making mochi. Clearly he had to give it a taste test, because his paws and chin are white.

The Watering Hole

...was a bar my dad used to go to before I was born. Now, it's a nifty backyard watering system.

This keeps the chickens and rabbits well supplied with clean, fresh water - very important when we're having a heat wave, and hard to do when I'm on call so much. Two births in 24 hours this week!

The central feature is this bucket, which clearly needs a more stylish hat. The hose coming in at the top is attached to a float system that keeps the bucket topped full all the time. From here, the water is gravity fed out two hoses that fork off to the rabbits and chickens.

I cannibalized the chickens' old auto-watering trough to build this, but I hear you can do the same with toilet float parts.

The chicken's watering bar is now the coolest place to hang out in the coop. It is a PVC pipe with five saddle type nipple waterers.

We tried to "teach" the chickens how to use them, which was hilarious and entertaining, but didn't seem very effective...but when I looked out the window an hour later they were all drinking from the founts. Go figure.

The rabbit system features smaller clear tubing that runs the length of the hutch, with forks every two feet that go to little metal drinking nipples. I ordered those direct from China and ended up with 20 of them for much less than the cost at Klubertranz or Bass, but no instructions and weird sizing. Overall, it probably wasn't that great of a deal, especially since I only really needed five or six of them.

All in all, I think it cost a little over $100 to build, and a couple of days to put together (including troubleshooting and drying time for silicone sealant). Each morning this week I've checked to make sure that the water is running and there are no leaks, and so far everything has been working wonderfully. It is a huge relief and I think it was well worth the money! I'm hoping that all the animals will be healthier and happier too with clean water all the time.

Doula life

Last night I got home late from a long birth, had some top ramen (I added some miso to make it more like real food) and fell into bed for eleven hours. I'm usually a light sleeper and can handle sleep deprivation and interruption fine, which is good or I wouldn't be able to do my job, but it was a beautiful luxury to know that I could sleep as long as I needed.

I have the house to myself for a few days and that's really good too. I love my little family, but after a tough birth, I'm all out. I don't have any social graces or giving left in me, so it's better if I can putter around by myself for a while and process all that happened, good and bad, to make me a better future midwife without having to explain what I'm feeling by telling someone else's story.

This afternoon I was supposed to go to a workshop on preventing postpartum hemorrhage, but it got cancelled and I am so deeply relieved that I have a long afternoon of alone time stretching out ahead of me, with no more pressing concern than whether the lovely cared-for feeling of having food brought to me in a restaurant is worth the tradeoff of having to talk to anyone who isn't a cat. Usually after a birth, I treat myself to one good meal of whatever I feel like I need, but today I can't figure out what that is, so I'm having a Sapporo for breakfast while I think about it. My muscles feel like they've been massaging someone else for 20+ hours, so it's medicinal!

I love my work, and I mean that in all ways, cynical and not. I'm almost to the end of doula work before I start going to births with the midwives, though, and it will be such a relief to be dealing with birth in a less interrupted, artificial way, and not feeling such a weight of fighting for so much with so little actual power. It is amazing to be there with families in their moment of transformation, but it is frustrating to be caught up in a model that I don't believe is right for 90% of the women in it.