Quiet Foggy Days

 First Christmas without Mom and I'm trying not to care...she always said she preferred Thanksgiving anyway, so first Thanksgiving without her. But I don't really celebrate either day too much...just enjoy a day off and sometimes cook something. It's hard to live without pie so it's usually that. I will think of her when I make pies and eat, and watch birds, and read books...I think of her often. I miss her, even the bits of her that kind of fell away over the last couple of years. I might have gotten over actively needing her but there is still an emptiness where she used to be available as a person I could reliably love.

Holiday Market takes up all of the weekend time and the weeks go by fast with little accomplished. Retail is exhausting even with the fun of the dress-up theme days and seeing people I enjoy. Just focusing on selling for two or three days in a row is a pretty hard gig, though I should definitely not complain as at least I have a good way to make money. And then I can actually take the offseason to do other things, which are also work but more on my own terms.

This winter I will try hard to really get the archiving accomplished, at least the Saturday Market part although I will probably not get far on any of the others. It's mission-type work that I feel I have to do and then I have to find places for these archives, or people who will take them in for the next phases in which I may not be available to participate in. No guarantees on living...just keep doing it until you can't, I reckon. Mom set a good example of a relatively graceful way to do that.

I definitely suffer from SAD in these foggy and darker days. Sunshine cheers me up and there is always work to do outside so I can generally navigate it adequately with some effort. I eat a lot of bread and meat in the winter. I wish I did have a fireplace to sit beside. I actually built support into the living room wall so I could open it up and put in a hearth and chimney, but I know I won't. I still have some ants in the walls from the chimney I removed and have absolutely no desire to open up any walls.

I did manage to cut down the holly tree and still feel good about that, as it gives me wood to manage outside too. Holly is good wood so I kept the logs though I have no real use for them. I collect sticks like some people do books (okay, I collect books too, and "good boxes" as well) as I find them beautiful and fascinating and like to use them for supports for plants and things like grape arbors. My yard is messy and so I have a lot of birds and even a regular possum or a few, and probably raccoons. I rake the leaves of two neighbors so I will have lots of messy mulch. Everything is wet today and the fog isn't lifting, but I was out yesterday filling up the stick tote. Today I'm just trying to stay warm and keep getting ready for the HM load-in tomorrow. 

Despite having sold at EVERY Holiday Market I still get anxious about the set-up. I will fill the available hours. It used to be 9 hours, and this year is only 7, so I will be going in early on Saturday too. I will not be bringing t-shirts though, so maybe it will be a little easier. 

There will be an exception to that rule. I will be attempting to sell off the Saturday Market t-shirts I made, as I did last year. They didn't sell, and I had plans to make more in better colors but...they didn't sell. I can't fit them in on Saturdays so this will be my big chance to liquidate them. My plan is to make them $10 each (maybe even $5) and donate the funds to the Kareng Fund. I've been donating 50% to the Market all year for my bags and hats (the SM logo ones) but the Market finances seem good and the KF is a bit short compared to previous years. Plus the need for the KF keeps increasing and the donations seem to have slowed. 

We will probably not have the Art Bingo event this year, although we will discuss it. What we need is a really splashy fundraising campaign event that will draw a lot more people. None of us are really the right kind of promoters to pull off such an event so we may try to find someone who can do it for us, or with us anyway. It's such a small organization with a narrow mission that I find it hard to promote. I know there are people looking for ways to give, though, so I try not to get in the way of that. Anyway I will see if I can drum up some dollars with my merchandise.

Two of the subjects I want to write about are sensitive, and I am sensitive about them, so I'm doing some circling around trying to figure out how to write about them. One is the OCF...I quit my volunteer job of being the scribe and member of the Craft Committee. I've gone to my last meeting though I still have some tasks to complete to pass on my work in hopes that at least some of that work will continue. This is really the first time I have pulled back my support from something I do still care about, so it has been interesting to navigate. There is certainly relief, but at the same time it kind of tarnishes my commitment to the handcrafting life and I have to process that. Crafters need support in many ways and I am still going to be acting in many of those ways, but just not in a formal group discussion way for OCF. I did a lot in my years there to support what was already in progress but it's time for other people to step in and do their parts. I hope they do. I'll be annoyed if they actually get the diversity training I asked for since 2020, but whatever. It's unlikely, since diversity is all fixed now if you ask people still there. Or, you know, not as important.

I hope not a lot happens with their hijacked Board that I feel I have to do something about, as I have no more energy to do any of those possible things. I don't trust people who feel they should manipulate elections and fellow members for their selfish ends and I am not confident that damage won't be permanent from the last iteration of that. A false narrative was spun, disseminated, beat into the culture and is now prevalent. I'm not going to forget what really happened. It was galling to listen to the last meeting and I may not watch another. It was not amusing to hear that OCF is now "walking its talk" in promoting to leadership one person who stepped on, vilified, and drove away a whole, active group of marginalized people whom he could not gaslight and dominate until he spun a fiction and mobilized supporters for it. A lot of us witnessed that and we're not in the mood for some hippie bullshit phrasing to hide the reality that OCF talk is cheap. White supremacy culture encompasses more than just racism and dominant forces I am starting to call Me-supremacy are well in place to push it along. Obviously this is not new culture and it will always try to dominate, but I am not interested in building that selfish reality. 

I don't know what is so hard about working toward a world where war and domination is not the automatic action for different opinions. I suppose the great monetary value of weapons and power and ownership of land and property is the driving force that is seemingly so unstoppable, because the common people rarely want war as they are always the victims of it in one way or another. People want peace. People embrace a multicultural world where everyone can contribute...but obviously not all people, and my own me-supremacy asks these innocent questions as if the answers were not complicated. They get complicated because the real truth is so rarely told. Weapons are made to destroy and control. Control is the problem, forced control and compliance. Dehumanizing control. 

Like many I find these subjects overwhelming and draining. At a time when my emotions are going overboard, I have to try to use my methods of self-control, to maintain what I have committed to. I don't post political things on FB because almost all of my friends there already agree with me, and I don't want to argue about politics if they don't. I'm not big on arguing. I try to stay informed enough to have my opinions and actions more or less clear to me, but I don't want to convince other people. 

There's pressure for healing, however, and I may be interested in helping with that. I like digging down into my own emotional blocks and fissures and maybe I can help others by example. I've ventured a few comments here and there. Mostly I dislike the algorithms too much to want to put my opinions on FB. Mostly I just want to stay home and journal and read and eat bread and listen to my kitty purr. 

Might not get a lot of that in the next few weeks, but I will try.