I used to count the feet.

At sundown all the chickens march into the chicken coop and hop onto the roost to put themselves to bed. I go out a little bit later with a flashlight to close the door of the chicken coop so that nothing would get at them at night. Every night I open the door and look in and count the feet to make sure that all the chickens were in there. Twenty feet; ten chickens.

And then one night I counted eighteen feet. I turned from the coop into the chicken yard with my flashlight: no chicken sleeping on top of the coop. No chicken hiding in the bushes next to the coop. No chicken wandering about in the dark looking confused, having forgotten to actually go to bed.

The light caught a bit of movement toward the back of my chicken yard. I turned the flashlight on the back fence and two glowing neon eyes stared back at me out of the darkness. Chickens do not have eyes facing forward. I took a step back, and then a step forward.

And the bobcat stopped chewing on my chicken, climbed right up the fence, jumped into the bushes and ran away.

This was only the start.

I live just outside a town called Los Gatos (the cats), originally named for the large number of bobcats in the area. We have an especially large population of bobcats that make our property home because most of our land is uncleared and we don’t own dogs. We see bobcats on the lawn, on the driveway, in the fields, and in the bushes. Bobcats are fun to watch because they behave just like very large house cats; they sleep in the sun, they wrestle like kittens, they bat pine cones around for fun. They have big tufty ears and spotty bellies. Given how cute they are it’s hard to remember that bobcats are not house cats; they are wild, and they hunt to eat.

By keeping chickens, I was putting bobcat food on a buffet and ringing the “free food” bell.

I thought that the chickens were safe. Although I had lost the occasional chicken to predators in the past, I had beefed up my chicken yard security, and it had been two years since I had lost a chicken. When the bobcat took the first bird I was momentarily struck stupid. But…I have a seven foot fence. I have a secure coop. How could this have happened? The rule I neglected to fully grasp is that a chicken yard is safe right up until the moment it isn’t, the predators have all the time in the world to look for a way in, and they will wait until the one night you forget to shut the door or the one time you have your back turned. And a fence now matter how tall is ineffective against a smart cat who can climb.

While I was wasting time dumbly trying to understand what had gone wrong two more chickens vanished, one after the other, and there was just a pile of feathers on the ground where they had been. One pile of black feathers. One pile of grey feathers. Like ashes left behind after a fire.

I put up a hot wire, a strand of electrical fencing, just short of the top of the fence. I covered the back corner of the fence with netting, where I thought the bobcat was coming in. I put the chickens to bed well before dark and let them out when the sun was well up. But all of this seemed ineffective; every few days I lost more chickens.

One afternoon in the middle of the day three chickens vanished, including my favourite, an enormous white orpington I had hatched from an egg. The white orpington had been my guard chicken, the mean one who would confront bobcats and coyotes standing just outside the fence and raise a ruckus that had all the other chickens running for the safety of the coop. My guard chicken was not mean enough. I found a big pile of white feathers and nothing else.

I seemed like I was fighting a losing battle; my yard was just not safe, and it was only a matter of time before the bobcats got all the chickens. I needed to do something and fast if I wanted to keep any chickens at all.

But I was too slow. Only a few days later I went out to the coop at dusk and there were no feet to count. I found more piles of feathers and two dead chickens. So that’s it, I thought, as I trudged back into the house, depressed. I’ve lost. It’s over. The bobcats had taken all of my chickens, wiped me out, in less than a week.

The next morning as I was looking out the kitchen window I saw movement in the chicken yard. Curiously, I went out into the garden, and froze in the middle of the path. There were three bobcats in the chicken yard — one large parent and two smaller half-grown bobcat kittens. They had come back for the last of the dead chickens.

“Eric!” I rushed back into the house. “Bobcats! In the yard!” Eric came out of the house with a pellet gun; I turned on the garden hose. We had talked on and off about what to do if we ever actually caught the bobcats in the act. We didn’t want to shoot the bobcats and had joked that maybe turning the hose on them would scare them away. This was our last chance.

Eric cornered the larger parent bobcat in the back of the yard, but it went up and over the fence before he could get it. The two smaller cats were not as smart, and both of them got stuck in the narrow space behind the new coop and the fence. I turned the hose on “jet” and unleashed a stream of water. Wet, and frightened, one cat managed to climb the fence and escape, but I cornered the remaining one with the hose. It climbed the fence but then stayed perched on the top, growling at me as I dosed it in the face over and over again, hoping it wouldn’t decide to lunge at me over the fence in a panic.

The cat seemed to be stuck there on top of the fence, miserable, angry, soaked. I turned off the hose. Why hadn’t it hopped over? Why was it just sitting there?

“Turn off the hot wire,” I called to Eric, who had been chasing bobcats on the outside of the fence. Once the power was cut the cat finally dropped off the top of the fence into the bushes. The fence had been zapping the terrified animal at the same time I was hosing it down.

I haven’t seen any bobcats by the chicken yard for a long time now, but I suspect that is more because there are no chickens left to eat rather than because of our ninja bobcat-frightening skills.

The plan now is to rebuild the chicken yard with a stronger fence and with a roof on it. The yard will become an impenetrable chicken fortress against any known predator in the area. Given my current rate of progress on the new chicken coop this should only take four or five years, tops!

I was talking about resolutions the other day and Eric asked me incredulously if I actually sit down and make resolutions every year. I don’t, but I do spend time at the end of the year to think about things I’d like to do and things I’d like to change.

These then are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about:

• Read more books. I only read 23 books last year, but many of them were very long and intense books. I think I can do better than 23 this year, especially if I spend less time screwing around on the internet.
• Read more books in genre, especially recent urban fantasy and horror. If I am going to write urban fantasy and horror, I should probably be reading it.
• Run a half marathon. I’m doing 9 mile runs now so unless I get injured I should be able to do this. (there is about a 50/50 chance I will get injured.)
• Successfully do pull-ups. Almost there now. Pull-ups are badass. I will end the year being badass.
• Less social networking (on the internet). More social networking (off the internet).
• Finish the novel I’ve been working on. Figure out what to do with the novel I’ve been working on.
• Write more in general, in increments larger than 140 characters.
• Stop fussing.
• Get rid of more of the crap I’ve been tracking around for years. Be realistic about the hobbies I actually do versus the ones I just think I might do again because I am pathetically still trying to hold onto my 20′s. (this one is really hard.)
• Finish the shed/chicken coop. (maybe.) (sigh.)

Most of all:

• Be Notable.

(Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

So you’re probably thinking, “Hey Laura, it’s been a really super long time since you wrote about that shed/chicken coop of yours. Surely you’ve made some progress that you could write about. Surely the shed isn’t just sitting there in your yard, incomplete, in the rain, taunting you with your short attention span and inability to actually completely follow through with a project.”

Yes, well, um.

I will point out that there is a roof on that shed now, and it took me a long time to put a roof on that shed, and that roof is what I want to talk about in this post mostly. But the real reason the whole shed to chicken coop project has dragged on this long is for a particular reason: I no longer have any chickens. I had a family of bobcats come through and wipe me out in August, and I want to write about that, too, because it’s been an important albeit not very amusing part of the story. But for now let’s talk about the roof. And about math.

Rafter Math

When last we left our stubborn intrepid narrator (me) in June in Part Three she had finished the foundation and framing for the walls of the shed, reusing as much of the old wood as possible and widening the shed by about 3 inches. There was a great sense of accomplishment and no small amount of back strain felt by all involved (me).

The next step was to set rafters to hold the roof. The original slanted roof of the old shed (as shown in Part Two) had rafters, thick redwood sheathing, and then about four layers of asphalt shingles. My plan was to replace all that with a simple corrugated (wavy) metal roof. But I would still need rafters.

The existing rafters were 10 foot 2x4s with notches cut into them so that they would sit at the correct angle on top of the vertical walls. The notches are called birds-mouths, and there is some fancy complicated construction math (otherwise known as “trigonometry”) that you can do to figure out where to cut the notches and at what angle. (You know when people say that you’ll never, ever use eighth-grade math ever again? This is where they’re wrong. If you ever want to cut birds-mouth notches in rafters, it will help to remember your eighth grade math.)

About three of the six of my old rafters were in fine shape. The other three were too rotted to use. I figured — no big! Lay the old rafters on top of new 2x4s and use them as templates for the notches. No fancy complicated construction math needed!

But here is where I will bring your attention to that thing back in Part Three where I widened the shed by three inches. The notches in the old rafters no longer line up with the top of the shed. I needed new notches in new places with new angles. I had to do the math after all. Darn it.

I am told that a common framing square has markings on it that are supposed to help you with rafter math. But I don’t actually have a framing square, and, honestly, every time I looked up a description of how to figure this out I felt like despite my actual college degree from a technical school no less I was sitting there in front of the computer slightly drooling and muttering “wut?”

I spent perhaps a month standing around sighing over this, and then I stumbled on a tip in the magazine Home Family Handyman (which, by the way, is total DIY homeowner porn, and if you’re still bothering to read all of my crap here you should be reading that). The tip said you could use hurricane ties — bent metal plates you can buy anywhere — to hold the rafters right on top of the framing, and not have to measure or cut notches at all.

Huzzah!

12 hurricane ties: $11.76.
3 10 foot 2x4s: $9.48

After the rafters come purlins, which are just boards that go perpendicular to the rafters to support the roofing panels. I’ll skip this part because it was boring; I used lengths of 1x redwood I had left over from various other bits of the old shed and nailed them in mostly random places to the rafters.

Idiot on The Roof

Which brings us to the roof itself. Wavy metal roof panels come in several different lengths and are 26 1/4″ inches wide. For the length of the roof, front to back, I needed 12 feet of panel. I actually had some eight foot roof panels left over from roofing the barn a few years back, so I ended up buying a few more eight footers and a bunch of six footers. The 8s and 6s overlap by 2 feet to give me 12 feet. Easy peasy.

Width was somewhat more complicated. Math was required (darn it). I had a 10 foot wide roof span. The panels are 26 1/4″ wide, and overlap in the waves in increments of roughly 2 3/4″. I wanted to overhang the roof on either side by 6 inches. How many panels across would I need?

This actually seemed a lot harder when I was trying to figure it out a few months ago, and seems obvious now; five panels to cover the roof itself (width – overlap = ~2 feet; 10 / 2 = 5), plus one extra for the overhang.

Wavy metal roofing panels:
2 8-foot panels $28.50
6 6-foot panels $64.08

To attach the panels to the roof you also need wavy styrofoam filler strips that go between the panels and the purlins, and special sheet metal screws with rubber washers on them.

Filler Strips: $20.74
Screws (3 boxes): $13.29

And now, we roof. I roofed by flinging the panels up from the low side of the shed onto the rafters, and then by standing on a step ladder from the inside of the shed, arranging the panels into the right configuration and then screwing them into place onto the purlins. The last thing I wanted to do was actually climb on top of the roof, for two very important reasons:

• Metal roof panels are slippery, and that roof is frickin high off the ground. Also, I have neglected to mention that the shed is built on top of the side of a hill, so if I slide off the roof I am not only going to fall eight feet off the shed itself, but down another ten feet into a thicket of poison oak and blackberries. Also, there are spiders there.
• Framing without siding is NOT STABLE. It wiggles. You may remember from Part Two that I had trouble removing the roof from this shed because it listed queasily around from side to side. It did this a lot putting the roof back on, too, only this time I was up there with an electric drill, standing at the top of an unstable ladder, leaning out over the roof and trying not to be sick. Short of confronting a pack of angry bobcats on the top of a seven foot electric fence with a garden hose and I’ll get to that part in a bit, this was the most terrifying thing I have done all year.

I also occasionally had trouble lining up the screws with the purlins. Whoops.

Do-Over

When the roof was two-thirds done I was arranging the next set of panels on top of the rafters when I noticed something funny. I was going to be about eight inches short. I thought, well, I think I must have done the math wrong. And then I stared at the panels I had already put on for a while and realized that I had overlapped them all by three waves instead of two like I was supposed to.

Oh, crap.

So. I had one of two solutions:

• Buy another row of roof panels to cover the eight-inch deficit.
• Remove three rows of roof panels and overlap them correctly.

I went with Plan B, because emotional trauma is always better than spending more money, especially for a shed/chicken coop that was originally supposed to be free. The good news is that putting the panels down for the second time took much less effort, because at that point I was getting used to being terrified on top of a ladder. The bad news is that it took twice as many screws, because I had to cover all the holes I had drilled for the previous overlaps. This roof is very firmly attached to the shed. Very. Firmly. Attached.

The final roof: it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn good. Mostly I’m happy that its over.

(continued…)

Update: Squeaker has been adopted! Thank you for all the interest!

Regular readers: forgive the slight blog misuse. I was going to do a plain old HTML page for this, but blogs just make things easier these days, and I am lazy.

We rescued two tiny abandoned kittens from a feral cat colony living outside Eric’s mom’s house in Livermore, CA. We’re keeping one of them (much to the chagrin of our older cats), but we can’t keep this one, the younger and more active kitten. If you are in the California Bay Area, please pass the word around! Adopt this kitten! He is adorable!

This is Squeaker, a male 10-week-old orange tabby kitten. His fur pattern is called “classic” tabby, a more unusual pattern where his stripes are wider and more circular than the standard tiger-stripe tabby pattern. He is also very fuzzy, which leads me to believe he will be more medium-haired than strictly short-haired. As he gets older he will be a beautiful and unique cat.

He is an extremely friendly and active kitten, gets along very well with his “brother” (another kitten from the same colony) and with the older cats in the household. He is also extremely talkative and not shy about letting you know when he’d like more (or less) attention. We named him Squeaker for a reason. He does have all the energy and exuberance of a kitten his age and will need ongoing attention and training to set limits. He is significantly calmer now than he was even a few weeks ago.

He is flea and parasite free, and litter box trained. He enthusiastically eats both wet and dry food for kittens. He has tested both FIV and FELV negative, and has had his first set of FVRCP (distemper) vaccinations. He has not yet been fixed (kittens are usually fixed at 16-20 weeks).

You can see more pictures and video of Squeaker in my Adopt this Kitten flickr set.

(Part One, Part Two)

A number of years back the roller on a drawer broke in our old refrigerator. This wasn’t that big a deal; the fridge still worked, but it was kind of a pain that the drawer didn’t open easily. But since the fridge was old, and cranky, and used a lot of electricity, we decided to just go ahead and buy a new one. There was this one small problem: the space around our kitchen cabinets for the refrigerator was designed to fit the original fridge. Newer refrigerators were all going to be too tall.

Our next plan was to take out the cabinet above the refrigerator and replace it with a smaller cabinet, thus making the height of the space for the fridge bigger. This would be a huge pain in the ass but workable. I found the manufacturer of the cabinets, found a dealer, and discovered that manufacturer not only did not make cabinets in the same style as the ones we had, but they didn’t even come in the same color. So then the thought was well, we could remodel the kitchen and replace ALL the cabinets, and get new appliances and a new floor and hey! maybe we could bump out the wall a few feet and make the whole thing bigger!

And thus a $10 refrigerator drawer part dangerously came very close to spiraling into an unbelievably expensive construction project. This story is not unique. I often wonder how often large remodeling projects start from very minor fixes to existing problems. (For the record, we bought the smaller non-matching cabinet and a new fridge and put off the kitchen remodel to another time.)

I bring up this story because this is where my free shed turned not so free. Now that I had the shed in various parts on the ground I knew the extent of the rot and what I could use and what I had to throw out, and it was worse than I had originally thought. There was a lot of rot. There was a lot of building to be done. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a chicken coop, not a cottage, and the chickens really were not going to complain about my construction skills.

Foundation and Empire

The original base of the shed was made from 2×6 dimensional redwood (actually 2 inches by six inches planks, as opposed to the 1 1/2″ x 5 1/2″ trim we use today). The joists were held together by short chunks of wood on the long side toenailed in, like this:

This made the base less than sturdy. A number of the shorter chunks of wood had gone missing, and one joist had broken off on the end of the foundation altogether. So my first plan was to replace all those shorter boards with long end-boards, nailed straight to the ends of the joists in the way all foundations are made today, like this:

Cost of 2×6 x 10 foot pressure-treated end boards: $21.94

Cost of framing nails: $2.54

But before I built the foundation I had to come up with a plan for how to put the shed onto the ground. There are a variety of ways of doing this, from a full concrete pad to skids (6×6 or larger posts, laid on the ground), to just putting it down flat on the dirt (which I didn’t want to do). I settled on a compromise with these concrete blocks, called bond beam blocks. They have slots in them to fit (conveniently) 2-by lumber.

I dug small foundation holes, filled and tamped them with gravel, and set the blocks on top of that, levelling the blocks across the high and low points in the spot where I was going to put the coop (fortunately, it was already mostly level). The chickens helped by making sure that every hole I dug was rapidly filled in again, often before I could put a block into it, and by eating the gravel.

Cost of 8 blocks, and 6 bags of gravel: $28.36

Cost to replace stupid chickens that died from eating rocks: $0 (luckily, so far)

Then I built the foundation right on top of the blocks. A few of the joists were rotted on the ends, so I had to cut them a little short and nail on incredibly ugly but stable extensions I cut from the discarded long ends of the shed. “It’s a chicken coop,” I kept reminding myself.

I was rewarded for all my hard work with a torrential rainstorm that lasted more than a week. But despite the rain and the mud, it all remained level. I was pleased.

You may note from this picture my apparent inability to evenly space the joists across the width of the shed. There’s a reason for that; I was planning on reusing the original redwood planks for the shed floor, which were in good condition (and I had been careful when I pulled them up). The planks were all of specific lengths, so I spaced the joists to fit the planks. Setting the floor went quickly, and the foundation was done.

The Frame-Up

Next up was framing. I was planning on using most of the original frame, which was lying in chunks in my driveway, although I did have to replace some parts that were rotten, and I wanted to make the front door wider. I reused as much as I could, but I did buy more 2x4s to make the repairs.

Cost of many 2x4s: $22.36

Cost of more framing nails: $2.65

The astute reader will have already noted a problem I ran into at this point because of lack of foresight. The original shed was 10 feet by 7 ft 3 inches. That was with the shed foundation built with the short lengths of wood inside the joists. By replacing those short lengths with long boards on the ends of the joists I had widened the short side of the shed to 7 ft 6 inches. The frames of two sides of my shed were three inches too short.

The solution? I replaced the sole plates (bottom board) of all the framing with new 2x4s at the right length. For the tops, I added more unbelievably ugly nailed-in frame extensions.

I win no awards for construction talent, but I get a gold medal for kludgy hacks.

Engineering Technique, circa 3000BC

I put together all the framing in the driveway, on level pavement, on the other side of the house and the other side of the property from the chicken coop. My next problem was getting the completed framing sections up the driveway, past the house and the garage, around the corner, through a four-foot gate into the garden, and into the chicken pen.

Here’s where if I were smart I would have asked for help. Even the long sections of the shed would not have been that heavy to carry with two or three people, maneuvering them through the more complicated narrow parts of the path would have been much easier with help, and setting them upright and plumb would have been a piece of cake with someone to hold the walls in place.

But I got a notion into my head that this was going to be my chicken coop project, and I was going to do the entire thing myself, with my own two hands, and absolutely no one was going to help me. So why bother asking for help from one’s husband, or one’s neighbors, when I could pick up a wall and physically drag it the long way around the house over the lawn (once you get it moving it’s not too bad…) I could set it upright, carefully balanced on edge, and then painstakingly wiggle it through the narrow gate, a few inches at a time. And then through the garden I could just rotate it end to end to corner to corner over the raised beds and paths until it was in place on top of the foundation. Then I could tip it up and brace it mostly plumb with random bits of wood and bungie cords tied to the fence, and if I was really lucky I could manage to get it nailed securely down before it fell over on top of me.

I only really hurt myself twice doing this. But bull-headedness is its own reward.

(Continued in Part Four)

(read Part One here)

After Greg delivered the old shed onto my driveway it sat there for close to nine months. I was too busy to clear the road to the chicken yard, and Greg apparently didn’t need his trailer back, because he never called me to demand that we finish moving it.

Even braced and tied to a tree, the shed was not stable on top of the trailer. When Greg and Jesus had been cleaning up after delivering the shed I had gone to look inside to get a closer look. I put my hands on the door sill, and the shed leaned over toward me with a loud creak. I started backward like I had been burned and darted well away from the crush zone. The shed rocked back to level. “Whatever you do,” Greg warned me, ” do not get into the shed!”

I was too frightened to get into the shed. But once in a while I would go out onto the driveway and look into the shed. Greg had emptied the shelves of everything but the dirt, of which there was a lot, and the kerosene smell inside was quite strong. But I had been right in my initial assessment; the shed was sturdily built, entirely of redwood, whitewashed on the inside, and huge. The door was a pretty light blue and although it didn’t open very well it did open. The shed was sound. It would make an awesome chicken coop when it was done. If I ever managed to get it down off of the trailer.

I started thinking. Even if I cleared the road to the chicken yard it was going to be tough to get the shed up into the right spot; the road was narrow, and uneven, and to even get to the road would require maneuvering the shed past the garage and through a carport that was, unfortunately, shorter than the shed. The magic 8 ball in my head was blinking FAIL. I was going to have to dismantle the shed, and take it up to the chicken yard in pieces.

In December I got up on a ladder with a crowbar and a hammer. On top of the roof I found four layers of rotting asphalt shingles and redwood 1x6s as underlayment. Slowly I started building a messy pile of asphalt and roofing nails and lumber on the ground next to the shed. Once I had a few rows of roofing materials off, I moved the ladder inside the shed itself.

“Do not get into the shed!” Greg had warned me nine months before. It’s usually good advice that if some activity scares Greg then that activity is probably way, way too dangerous for anyone other than Greg to attempt. But I was confident at this point that the shed was not going to tip over. I had been testing the shed by going out and wiggling it once in a while (and then running away). Like a Weeble, it wobbled, but it didn’t fall down. I could tip it several degrees off center on the trailer, but it seemed to want to come back to vertical every time. Leaning the ladder against it had proved stable. I was feeling more confident.

Lack of imminent death didn’t mean it was at all easy to stand on a ladder inside of it, or that I had any fun at all standing on that ladder. The shed still listed from side to side as I worked, like a small boat in a very big storm. If I didn’t move very slowly as I worked, or have the ladder oriented in the right direction, the shed could lurch, leaving me hanging on a rafter with my feet dangling in the air. There were a number of times I finished working on the shed for the day and staggered queasily inside to take a dramamine and lie down for a while.

It took me a week of afternoons and a weekend to get the roof fully off.

I could stand on the ground to pull off most of the siding. As it fell around me a lot of it splintered from rot. The light blue panel door came right off its hinges, and then came apart. Underneath the siding I found more rot, rot in the framing, and rot in the foundation. My free shed was looking like less of a good deal. Every time I stuck my crowbar deep into a chunk of wood that peeled away in shreds I became slightly more uneasy. What, exactly, had I signed up for?

Taking down the rafters took me another two weeks, because they had no rot whatsoever and were nailed down with giant eight-inch spikes. Whoever had built my shed years before had planned for those rafters to stay put, maybe forever. I got most of them off with persistent prying and cursing, and a few by cutting through the spikes with the Sawz-All that Eric got me for my birthday a few years back. Some girls get jewelry. I get power tools.

The next step was to take apart the frame of the shed, and I wasn’t altogether sure how to do that, given that each wall was nailed tightly to the floor and to each other, and I didn’t want to destroy them to take them down. I was still puzzling over the problem when Greg came back up to the house to do some tree trimming.

“Wow!” He said when he saw the skeleton of the shed up on his trailer. “You’ve done so much work!”

I explained what I was up to, and my plans for the rest of the shed demolition. I told him that when I finished taking it apart that he could have his trailer back, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take me. Greg looked at the shed. He looked at me. He got that look on his face that usually makes me back away in alarm. “Let’s just take it down now!” he exclaimed.

“Now?” I asked, backing away in alarm. “Right now?”

“Yeah! It’ll take like fifteen minutes!”

I watched as Greg snatched a hammer out of the back of his truck, jumped up into the shed, muttered “whoa!” once as it heaved underneath him like a bull, and then fearlessly began to pry at the corners of the framing. Within minutes all four corners were loose, and then with the help of a rope and some further prying we had lowered all four walls outward down to the ground. The shed looked like it had been exploded outward.

With some heaving and 2x4s as levers we managed to push the shed foundation off to one side of the shed, and flip it upside down on the ground. Greg hooked up his truck to the trailer and moved it out of the way, and then we picked up the foundation and turned it back right side up onto the ground.

He was right. In less than half an hour the shed was in parts on the ground. We had made more progress together than I had in weeks. Greg trimmed his trees and left with his trailer, leaving me with a stack of wood on the ground. Shed demo was done. Now it was time to rebuild.

(Continued…in Part Three)

About a year ago we went down the hill one afternoon to visit with our neighbor Greg. While we were there, Greg pointed out the improvements he had made to his house, taught us how to douse for water with two bits of coat hanger held in the hands, showed us the decrepit 5000-gallon redwood water tank he had been restoring, took us out in the woods to see the really awesome skeleton of a deer he had found, and noted offhandedly as we walked back that just the week before he had accidentally rolled his Jeep over the sharp edge of the trail and it had taken him a couple hours to get it hauled back up again.

We can never visit with Greg for less than half a day. Greg always has so many interesting stories to tell and so many things to show us, although a large portion of them scare the living daylights out of me. In past lives, I imagine Greg has been a pirate, a gunslinger, a flying ace, or a lion tamer. Greg operates at a very high RPM. Everything Greg says is emphatic. Greg is the number one living example of the power of positive thinking. “Did you get hurt rolling the Jeep?” I asked. “Oh no!” said Greg, cheerfully. “A little shook up, but it was fine! I just crawled out and went to get the winch!”

“Did the Jeep get badly damaged?”

“No more than any other time I’ve rolled it!”

Toward the end of the visit Greg pointed out a huge old shed he had down on the side of his driveway below the house. The shed was ugly and crammed full of boxes and paint cans and bits of metal. It smelled like kerosene. It looked like it was rotting away one side and not entirely water tight. The door was crooked and it didn’t shut all the way. “That shed has been here since I moved in!” Greg exclaimed as we passed by. “Someday I need to get rid of it! I could use the space!”

I looked back at the shed. Although the siding was rotting it was still standing upright. Behind all the junk, it looked like redwood. “You know,” I said. “If you could find a way to get the shed up to our house, I’d take it.”

“Really!” Greg exclaimed.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I need a bigger chicken coop.”

“Really!” Greg repeated. “That would be awesome! I’ll clean it out and see if I can get it up on a trailer!”

“Oh, no rush,” I said. “The chickens aren’t going anywhere.”

There’s kind of a a rule amongst chicken people that says once you get a couple of chickens you’re always going to want more chickens. If you’re not careful you end up collecting them, like seashells or interesting rocks or t-shirts with embarrassingly nerdy slogans on them (“Roses are red, violets are blue, all my base are belong to you“). I started five years ago with three chickens, which grew to five, and then suddenly like that I had ten hens that laid eight eggs a day and ate all the weeds in the vegetable garden (as well as many of the vegetables). By the time I found Greg’s shed I had built a second chicken pen in the barn, in which there were 45 fat and happy meat chickens I was raising to eat.

I had long ago crossed the line from just keeping chickens into being an actual chicken farmer. (It could be argued that I had not only crossed it, I had charged it with my vast army of undead warrior bears and scattered the enemy in terror before me.) But because I was insane, I really needed more space so that I could get more chickens. I figured it would take Greg a few months to get the shed together, which would give me time to get ready.

And then the very next morning I got a call from Neighbor Greg. “Hi!” said Greg. “I cleaned out the shed and put it on a trailer! I thought maybe I could bring it up to your place sometime this morning!”

Uhhhhh I thought. That was way faster than I expected. “Uhhh, well, you can bring the shed up,” I replied, “But I’m not really ready — ”

“OK! Open the gate and I’ll be there in an hour!”

I anxiously walked down the hill some time later and there was Greg, slowly climbing the driveway in his big truck and with the shed swaying way, way, up on top of a narrow trailer. Jesus, Greg’s Mexican friend who helps him out with odd jobs, was down on the ground on the windward side, holding onto the shed with a rope tied to the roof to keep it from tipping right off the trailer and crashing onto the ground. When they turned a corner the other way, Jesus ran over to the other side of the shed and picked up another rope.

Oh my God, I thought, backing away back up the hill, this is so totally not OSHA compliant.

The shed on top of the unstable trailer was ten feet off the ground, which was taller than a number of the low-hanging branches on my driveway, so progress up the road was slow and Greg had to climb on top of the roof shed to do some guerilla tree trimming. Sure! Climb up ten feet in the air on an unstable platform with a chainsaw in one hand! What could go wrong!

But Greg’s astonishing and apparently bottomless pool of good luck served him just fine, and no one lost a limb or was crushed into pulp on the shed’s trip up to my house, most of which I spent standing well off to one side peeking through my fingers and making worried squeaking noises. “So!” Greg proclaimed triumphantly. “Where do you want us to put it!”

“I’m not ready,” I insisted. “The road to the chicken yard isn’t clear, and I have to take down the fence to make a space large enough to get the shed into the yard. You’ll have to leave it here and come back.”

Greg was crestfallen, but he agreed to tuck the shed into a corner of the driveway, still on top of the trailer, and come back later when I was better prepared. With Jesus’s help, he tied the shed to a tree and braced it with random bits of wood he had in his truck. Braced and tied the shed looked stable, but if you were brave you could still put one hand out and rock it on the trailer tires. In a strong wind you could see it shivering in place, as if the holes in its decaying siding weren’t keeping it warm enough.

And there the shed would sit for more than nine months.

(Continued…in Part Two)

I had a bad day at work yesterday, a day in which I sat in my cubicle under a dark storm cloud and made no forward progress on any project at all. After eight hours stewing in hate I drove home in bad traffic and went to bed, completely exhausted.

I dreamed I was at work, and it was a really bad day, but an entirely different bad day from the one I had already actually had. In my dream I went out to have a nice long run, which usually helps to cheer me up. And in my dream the run just utterly sucked because I was still so angry from having such a bad day at work. I woke up completely exhausted.

So I got up and had breakfast and went into town for a real run. When I got there I discovered that I had brought two left running shoes. I went running in my street shoes instead, which felt kind of like running on rocks with my hamstrings tightened up to 11. I lasted a little over three miles before the sparks of pain in my hips forced me to stop, and some kind of bug stung me on the neck. I walked back to the gym in a dark storm cloud and drove home again.

Now I’m here working at home and I’m having a really bad day, making no forward progress on any project at all. I feel completely exhausted.

I would take a nap but I’m afraid I would dream about writing a blog post about having a bad day and then dream about having a bad day and going for a run and then dream about going for a run and writing about it.

What day is it anyway?

(warning, long)

The war has gone on for so long that we almost cannot remember a time in which we were at peace. We start awake at night at the slightest noise, ready to charge outside shouting with guns drawn, only to find we are hurling our fury at shadows, and there is nothing there. Sometimes we awaken in the morning to find they have silently raided us in the night and left nothing but rubble and torn ground in their wake.

We have greater resources, but they have more numbers, and they are relentless. They have worn us down over the years, our rampaging enemy with the floppy ears and the big, round, soft eyes.

* * *

At first I thought the mule deer in the yard were harmless, charming, even. For the first winter after we moved in I watched them from the window as they grazed, pastorally, at the edge of the lawn. With big eyes and ears and huge soft black noses they looked adorable, and when startled they leaped gracefully away into the brush, tails raised in the air like flags. I had a Disney cartoon running 24 hours a day in my backyard, and I couldn’t be happier.

One of the group of deer that lingered around the house was smaller than the others, probably a fawn from that year, and I named him Edward. Edward was frequently in a group with a larger doe, and she became Eleanor. In truth, since it was winter, none of the deer had antlers so I couldn’t tell whether Eleanor was Edward or vice versa, and since all deer look essentially alike eventually all big deer became Eleanor and all small deer became Edward. Eric thought this was very funny. “Look!” he’d say, calling me over to laugh at me. “There’s another Edward on the lawn!”

Eric didn’t think much of my ungulate fan club. He had studied wildlife biology in college, and had been a hunter for a few years before becoming a vegetarian. Deer, he explained to me, were stupider than dirt, and they were completely infested with fleas and ticks. The ticks carry lyme disease, and the fleas carry plague. Deer are prone to “mad deer disease.” (“You’re making that up,” I said. “I AM NOT,” he insisted. “Google it.” I did, and he’s right. Deer get a wasting disease caused by the same sort of prions that cause Mad Cow.) Even having the deer in the yard probably meant that we were all going to die a horrible death of some kind of painful hemorrhagic fever. On the other hand, Eric admitted, if all of modern civilization were to collapse in the Y2K armageddon and zombie masses roamed the earth, we would be OK at least for a little while because we could shoot and eat the deer.

Eric’s cheery optimism did not change my mind; I still thought the deer were awesome. All that first winter I watched them stroll pastorally through the yard. And then that spring I planted some roses in the garden beds next to the house and Edward or Eleanor strolled pastorally up to the house and ate them. Gobbled them right down to the hard bare branches. And suddenly I wasn’t quite so in love with the deer.

For years when I lived in apartments I had been cutting out pictures from magazines of sprawling cottage gardens, of big lush messy beds of old-fashioned flowers in white and pink and lavender and blue. Cottage gardens reminded me of my grandmother’s house on Cape Cod, of lazy summer afternoons, of watching honeybees wander lazily over the flowers, of brushing sand off of my feet after a day on the beach. I had been daydreaming of a cottage garden for years, and now that I had my big country house I wanted my garden. I wanted roses and lilacs and lavender; I wanted bees and hummingbirds and summer. But Edward and Eleanor were thwarting all my plans. It seemed like no matter what I planted Edward and Eleanor swept in, usually at night, and ate the new plants right down to the ground. If they didn’t eat the whole plant they just nibbled it really well to make sure it wasn’t good to eat, or they pulled it up and left it to die on the dirt. If I wanted my cottage garden, I needed solutions, and I needed them fast.

* * *

“I have deer eating my garden,” I said to the thin, bespectacled man with the ponytail who worked at the garden center. He reached out and touched my arm. “I’m so sorry,” he said, as if I had just told him I had cervical cancer. He led me to the section of the store labelled “Pests.” They did not sell pests in Pests. Along the wall were stacked an enormously impressive variety of commercial deer repellants with descriptive and similar names (“Deer-Out,” “Deer-Go,” “Deer-X,” “Deer-Rid,” “Deer-Be-Gone,”). My garden guy, however, suggested a small bottle of coyote pee, which cost $15. “Works like a charm,” he said.

“How do they get the coyote to pee in the bottle?” I asked.

My garden guy gave me a tired look. “Everyone makes that joke,” he said.

I applied the coyote pee as directed, and I could hear Edward and Eleanor laughing at me, just before they ate my plants. Coyotes, on the other hand, started coming by and wondering what the hell was going on. Was there a party, and they hadn’t been invited?

I went back to the garden center and asked for something stronger. My garden guy offered me a $25 deer repellant that was absolutely a sure thing. “Works like a charm,” my garden guy said. “Make sure you dilute it.” Confident, I mixed up the brown smelly goo per the instructions and sprayed an entire garden bed with it. Every leaf on every plant in the bed shrivelled up and died within two days. I suppose killing all the plants could be considered a form of deer repellant, but that wasn’t precisely the result I was looking for.

It took some time for my beds to recover from that experience, but after the garden and the deer came back this time I decided to resort to less commercial and less expensive solutions. A Google search for “deer repellant” gave me a variety of things to try to keep the deer away from my plants, many of them disgusting, but none of them cost me more than a buck or two (pun not intended). I tried Irish Spring soap, human hair, garlic, mustard, lemons, blood meal, dried milk, and hot pepper. I put dishes of used kitty litter all over the garden. I had Eric pee on my plants (“What? You want me to do what?”). Nothing. I considered growing rocks in the garden instead of plants.

And then I discovered rotten eggs. Based on an suggestion in an internet forum I put two eggs in a blender with a little dish soap and some water, filled up a spray bottle and left it out in the sun for a few days. This was a terrifically effective repellant, not just for deer, but also for everything else. I made the mistake of spraying it on the garden on a windy day, and Eric made me sleep on the couch for two days until the smell wore off. But it worked. It absolutely worked. With rotten egg all over the plants the deer left them alone. For almost a whole season the garden was perfect.

Rotten eggs are a perfect solution for overcoming deer hunger and curiosity, but they suffer from one major flaw: they do not cure laziness in the gardener. The egg repellant would work for a week or so, and then the effect would wear off, randomly. After a few days I couldn’t tell whether it was still working — I couldn’t smell it, even though the deer still could. It would also wash off if there was the slightest bit of rain or fog, and once it was gone, the marauding deer would take all my plants again. To keep the repellant effect going I had to mix up a new batch and have it ready to go every week.

I would like to claim that my gardening habits allow for that kind of strict attention to detail, but they don’t. As much as I like having a garden, and as much as I like puttering around in the garden, there are whole weeks where I forget that plants need things like water. A deer solution that requires constant maintenance is too complicated for me.

* * *

The most obvious solution to the deer problem was to shoot the deer. But despite the damage they were doing to my flowers I still did actually like the deer. I liked having the deer around, and I liked watching them graze in groups at the edges of the yard. I didn’t want the deer to die, or even to suffer serious injury. I just wanted to keep them out of the garden.

Our neighbor Roberta next door told us that she kept the deer out of her fruit trees by paying her son to shoot rocks at them with a slingshot. This mostly taught the deer to be afraid of her son, which only worked when he was actually around, and became entirely ineffective when her son went away to college. But the slingshot gave Eric the idea to buy a paintball gun. Paintballs, the theory went, wouldn’t hurt the deer like a real gun or even an air rifle would, but they would sting a lot. And we could shoot the deer from a far enough distance away that they might not associate the sting with us.

Paintball guns, it turns out, are really expensive, if you care about things like accuracy, firing speed and muzzle velocity. The best paintball guns operate with C02 cartridges, can shoot a paint ball at 200 miles per hour and are fully automatic — pull the trigger and get a continuous stream of paintpball pellets, as many as 60 balls a second. Since we were not interested in re-enacting Saving Private Ryan in the backyard with deer and paint, we aimed for something that was simpler and cheaper. One simple gun that would fire one simple paintball.

“Let’s get this one,” Eric said, showing me his computer. On the screen was an online store selling the SplatMatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun. I was momentarily speechless.

“Is that real?” I asked. “Is it really called that?”

The SplatMatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun was a simple spring-loaded paint ball gun. You cocked it like a pump action shotgun, and it fired one paintball at a time. It was just what we wanted. We ordered one and a big jar of multicolored paintballs.

When Eric got the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun he went out on the porch to try it out. I went out to watch. There were no deer in sight. Boof, he shot a paintball at a tree, which sailed at very slow speed some feet off to the right of the tree. “Hmmm,” said Eric.

It took some practice to get the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun to shoot where it was aimed. The paintballs had a habit of wandering off slowly in all directions, anywhere except where they had actually been aimed. After a few more experiments shooting at trees Eric got good enough to where the margin of error was only a few feet to either side. “Well, maybe I can hit a deer if they’re the size of a barn,” he commented, grumbling.

A few days later we had opportunity to try. “There’s a deer on the lawn,” I announced one weekend afternoon, and Eric leapt up from the couch and grabbed the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun from its spot behind the kitchen table. I watched from the window as he carefully crept outside onto the porch, crouched down on his haunches, and cocked the gun. Boof, a blue paintball sailed out from the shotgun, arced slowly through the air, and fell in the grass about two feet short of the deer. The deer watched it coming, looked curiously at the spot where it had landed, and then moved over and sniffed it.

Eric moved over a bit, cocked the gun again, and aimed more carefully. Boof, the paintball smacked the deer right on the butt, and bounced off into the grass right near the previous paintball. The deer twitched one ear and looked mildly startled. Perhaps it was coming down with mad deer disease.

Eric stood up and brandished the shotgun and stuck his arms in the air with a yell that sounded like “BLEAAGH!” That worked — the deer turned and darted off down the hill. Eric came back inside. “Maybe we should get a slingshot,” I said. “Maybe,” Eric replied.

* * *

The second most obvious solution to the deer in the garden problem is to put up a fence. Fence out the deer, and the problem immediately goes away. And, in fact, this is the solution I used for my vegetable garden, which is enclosed in a high fence at one side of the yard. Deer have never touched that garden. But the big yard around the house with my flowers in it is open to the lawn and to the woods and to the fields.

Fencing the entire yard and the flower garden would require not only a lot of fence, but it would also block out all the rest of the wildlife I liked to watch from the kitchen windows. Part of living in the mountains was letting the mountains in. I liked having the deer around; I just didn’t want them in the garden beds. A big fence was out.

I did try putting lightweight netting over the entire garden bed, which is a fine solution if you want your garden to look like it is into light bondage. The netting made the garden difficult to work in, but it did keep Edward and Eleanor out, at least until they figured out that they could grab the netting in their teeth and drag it right off the plants, leaving a vomit-like pile of black shaggy plastic on the lawn, tangled up with twigs and leaves and bits of plant. “I thought you said deer were stupid.” I asked Eric. “Maybe our deer went to college,” Eric replied.

* * *

Utimately, I resorted to the solution of “deer-proof gardening.” Rather than stubbornly planting all the beautiful old fashioned cottage garden plants from my books and articles, plants which the deer all seemed to love to eat, I would plant things the deer didn’t want to eat at all. Poisonous plants, stinky plants, hairy plants, and plants that simply didn’t taste good. I felt some despair at this solution because it meant having to give in to the deer, to admit that I couldn’t grow exactly what I wanted to grow in my own garden. It felt like admitting defeat. But if I couldn’t have my cottage garden, at least I could have some garden, and that was better than no garden at all.

I found a list of “deer-resistant plants” on the internet and worked from that. Gone were the roses and hollyhocks, hostas, tulips and daylilies. In were lavender, iris, lots of sages, foxglove, herbs of all kinds. Sometimes plants on the list didn’t work at all. I planted a penstemon on the list and the deer ate it the first night. “Maybe the deer didn’t read the list,” Eric said. I planted shasta diasies — my neighbor Roberta had a whole bed of them in her front yard — and the deer ate them. I planted a hydrangea which grew for four years and gave me glorious huge blue puffy flowers every year. And then in the fifth year the deer ate it right down to the ground. (I reconsidered my “no shooting” rule after that incident.)

But slowly, over time, and with experimentation, my garden started to become bigger and less appealing to the deer. Slowly, over time, I learned the plants the deer would and would not eat. Slowly, over time, I built a garden that wasn’t a cottage garden, not like the ones I had always dreamed of, but it was my garden, and it worked with my house and my yard and my schedule and my wildlife.

* * *

Even after I figured out deer-proof gardening, and we had convinced the deer that the paintball gun was at least a marginal threat, the deer still came around, as if to taunt us. One summer they took to sleeping under the porch. In the front yard, due to a quirk of landscaping, we have a small bridge that extends from the porch onto a hill with trees on it. Under the bridge it is dark and cool and on hot afternoons especially the deer took to creeping underneath it and going to sleep. Having deer nesting under the house was a continual surprise to everyone involved. We would unsuspectingly open the front door and step onto the bridge and suddenly with a huge banging and clattering deer would shoot out in all directions. Go outside, and have an instant heart attack, each and every time.

Eric was especially affronted by the deer sleeping under the porch. “Deer are WILD ANIMALS,” he said. “They are not supposed to be this tame.” For him, the deer sleeping under the porch not only represented the utter failure of the paintballs in frightening the deer away from the house, but also an escalation in the war. Now the deer were not only hanging out nearby. Now they were setting up camp. It was like fighting an infestation of very large adorable cockroaches. If we didn’t put a stop to it right away, soon we might be finding deer under the couch or peering back at us from inside the refrigerator. We would turn on the lights in the middle of the night and surprise huge herds of deer, which would scurry away and hide under the bed. Something had to be done.

One day we came home from town and Eric suddenly stopped midway up the road, short of the house, and got out of the truck. “What?” I asked.

“There’s a deer sleeping under the bridge,” he said. “I’m going to teach it a lesson so it doesn’t come back.”

I watched from inside the truck as Eric crept up the driveway, crouched down so the deer wouldn’t see him. He slunk as quietly as he could around the rock wall at the side of the hill, over to within yards of the bridge, and then jumped up, stuck his arms in the air with a yell that sounded like “BLEAAGH!” There was a BANG as the deer came to its feet and knocked up against the low ceiling, and then squirted out from under the bridge and took off up the hill toward the garage. Eric leapt up onto the wall to chase after it, and then stopped. Then he walked up through the trees in the direction the deer had run. Then he stopped walking and put his hands over his mouth.

Something bad had just happened. I turned off the truck, pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out and ran up the driveway toward Eric. He put out his arm to keep me away. “What?” I asked. “What happened?”

“I think I killed it,” he said. “It ran up the bank and fell back down again. I think it broke its neck.”

I walked further up to where I could see the deer, lying there in the road just short of the steep bank next to the garage. It was still twitching a little, its eyes rolled up, its neck twisted. I got kind of a sick feeling. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were just supposed to scare the deer away, not kill it.

If we were better country people we would have taken this as a blessing: free food, dropped right into our lap, and we didn’t even have to waste any ammunition to get it. We would have hung up the deer and skinned it and cleaned it and popped it into the freezer and eaten well for months. But Eric is a vegetarian and I wouldn’t know how to clean a deer if it had instructions painted on it (“cut at dotted lines”). As angry as I was about my hydrangeas, and as much as Eric had joked about his Y2K food source, this wasn’t supposed to be a war with actual casualties.

“What do you want to do?” I asked Eric.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll call fish and game and try to explain to them that I scared a deer to death.”

But then the deer on the ground beside us thrashed, once, and its whole body shuddered. Alive! It’s alive! I thought. The deer untwisted itself, raised its head and looked around. Eric and I backed away to give it space, and as we watched from some distance the deer eventually got up, looked around for a while, and then trotted off into the woods. Other than a slightly unsteady list, it seemed to be just fine. After some conferring we decided that after falling on the bank it must have just been stunned. We didn’t kill it after all. We just harassed it badly.

That particular deer never darkened the space under the bridge again, and he apparently told all his friends, because no other deer ever showed up under the porch, either. All the deer kept their distance from the house and from the porch for at least a week, before returning to the usual habit of grazing through the yard and nibbling on all my plants that were not hairy, stinky, or poisonous. Eric reloaded his paintball gun, and the war resumed as usual.

In recent years, however, we have found a new weapon in our war against the deer, although it would be more accurate to say that the weapon has found us. Our new weapon is a newly resident mountain lion. We haven’t seen the mountain lion, but we’ve see paw prints on the driveway, six inches wide. Since the mountain lion moseyed into town there are many fewer Edwards and Eleanors in the yard, and those that remain are much more skittish. There are no deer sleeping under the porch. There are no deer nibbling on my garden. The paintball gun is gathering dust. The weapon is so effective that recently I’ve even been considering planting roses again. I’ve been thinking that maybe I can have my cottage garden after all. The tide of the war has been turned. Now we have to cross our fingers and hope that the cure isn’t worse than the disease, and that we don’t come out of the house some day to find a mountain lion under the porch waiting for us.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, where we honor women in technology. Research has shown that women need mentors and role models, more than men do, to succeed. But because there are so few women in tech to start with, it can be exceptionally hard for women to find the role models that they need. Suw Charman-Anderson created Ada Lovelace Day as an international day of blogging where we talk about our role models, the women in science and technology who have inspired us. (you don’t have to be female to contribute)

I hadn’t been planning to contribute to ALD, just because my blogging has been totally moribund over the last year (twitter: addicting). But I woke up today and read a few posts was so inspired that I suddenly felt compelled to write anyhow. I’m not precisely following the theme, but I hope that can be forgiven.

My first job right out of college in the late 80′s was at Sun Microsystems. It’s hard to imagine it now, but at the time Sun was one of the top companies in Silicon Valley, one of the best places to work, and where there was huge amounts of innovation in both hardware and software. When I mentioned to my friends that I worked at Sun, they all said “oh, that’s so cool.” I felt very lucky to have ended up there.

After drifting through a few projects and after a few reorgs at Sun, I settled into a small division called SunPICS, which stood for Printing and Imaging and two other things that I’ve forgotten. We wrote the software for Sun’s printer, which was actually harder than it sounds, because with Sun’s printers the PostScript rendering engine was on the computer and not in the printer (there were advantages to this at the time). We also did fonts, color management, printer device drivers, multi-user and multi-system printer queue management — all kinds of things are are boring now because they’re built into any computer or printer in the world and completely hidden from view, but at the time they were all new.

SunPICS was not a sexy group at Sun. We were not developing SPARC processors, creating high-end UNIX workstations, working on the guts of UNIX itself or writing an X11 windows server. We didn’t get much attention in the news, or make zillions of dollars for the company. We did printers. But we were kind of unique within the company because we had lots of women engineers. Even within Sun, which was known for being a good place for women to work, we were special. We were a magnet for women. In the group I worked directly with there were five women and just one guy. In the larger division we were more than half women. We were an extremely close group; we were smart and technical and we got stuff done. We shipped product. We did good work. Even ten years after the group disbanded we were still getting together for reunion lunches.

Because I was young, and so inexperienced, I didn’t realize how special this was at the time. I thought it was totally normal to be working right in the epicenter of the high tech universe, and to be surrounded by outstanding women of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds.

I’ve often wondered if the experience of working in this group was one of the reasons I had the confidence, after I left Sun, to strike out on my own, to write books, to do consulting, to teach web tech to others. Because of Sun, because of the SunPICS group, being a woman in technology, being a smart geek woman just wasn’t all that unusual. For a long time I simply couldn’t comprehend questions people asked me about how I overcame the barriers or discrimination of being a woman in tech. Barriers? There are barriers?

It was only later, after I moved onto other companies, that I realized how unique this situation was. Most of the time today I am the *only* woman in the engineering groups I work with. I see the barriers for women in tech now, and I think there are more barriers — if only the barrier of being so much more alone. There are fewer women in tech now to begin with, and fewer big tech company environments where a group of women can comfortably organically build the way it did for me at Sun. I feel tremendously honored to have had that opportunity.

So for Ada Lovelace Day, I salute my SunPICS co-workers, for helping make me into the woman I am today. To Liane, Frances, Lorraine, Penny, Leila, Pan, Margaret, Brenda, Deborah, and any of you I may have forgotten. Thank you.

It is apparently root canal season. I had one a few weeks back, and two co-workers have either had one or are just about to have one. This coincidence sparked a conversation yesterday over (yes) coffee.

First Co-Worker: You’d think with medical technology the way it is that they’d be able to just grow new teeth by now. Just pull the bad tooth and put in a new one. None of this painful root canal stuff.

Second Co-Worker: Yeah but teeth have nerves and stuff. You’d have to like grow it inside your mouth and that’s a lot harder. I don’t think we have the technology to regenerate body parts yet.

Laura: Its the side effects that are a problem. You know, the part where the new tooth grows its own brain and tells you to kill your family with an axe.

(long silence)

Laura: what? you didn’t see that movie?

Yeah, all my stories always involve coffee. I’m not sure what that means. (time for more coffee.)

You may have heard we had some rain last week out here in California. At our house, it was ten inches of rain and 50MPH sustained winds. On hummingbird mountain nearby they had wind gusts at 127MPH before the meter apparently blew down. Big storm. Big one.

When Eric and I got up on Friday morning last week the rain wasn’t so bad but our internet connection was out. So we made the incredibly stupid decision to leave the house and go to work. Because, you know, having access to your email is so much more important than knowing that your house and your pets are safe and dry or having a familiar place to sleep that night.

The day turned out to be full of incredibly stupid decisions. My second stupidest decision was choosing to wear a long wool coat to work, rather than a nylon waterproof rain jacket. My logic at the time went thusly: the wool coat is just so much more attractive than the nylon rain jacket; I only have to go from my car to get coffee and back, and then from my car into my building at work; and I have an umbrella. How wet could I possibly get?

I contemplated that question for a good long while as I sat in my car in the parking lot outside the coffee shop near work, as my car rocked back and forth on its suspension while the wind tried to blow it right over. I was parked four cars away from the door but the rain was coming down so hard I couldn’t actually tell if the coffeeshop was still there. I bravely picked up my umbrella, pushed the car door open and the wind forced it closed again, nearly taking off my fingers. I put down my umbrella, which was now quailing in fear, and had another long contemplative moment. While I contemplated the wind pushed my car another parking space away from the coffeeshop, leaving grooves in the pavement like the rocks in Death Valley. Did I really need coffee that bad? I took a deep breath and kicked my way out into the storm.

So the answer to how wet can one possibly get in a wool coat in a rainstorm is quite wet indeed, and the third stupidest thing I did on friday was wear tennis shoes. When you are dashing across the parking lot in a storm with your wool coat up over your head it is hard to tell that the wide puddle you are about to splash across is actually eight inches deep. And cold. Very cold. Did I mention the cold?

No, actually, I did not need coffee that bad. That was definitely the line right there.

But I got my coffee. And I got to work. Later on, my group went out to lunch. The wool coat was well and thoroughly soaked through after still more trips running to and from the car, and here’s something I never realized: a soaking wet wool coat smells kind of like a big wet dog.

It was such a peachy day.

I have a clean office, a new computer, and a big pot of coffee. It’s the new year, a bright new day and it’s time to get back to work.

First of all, thanks to everyone who sent me mail (and mail to my sister!) wondering where I was and if everything was OK. All this time I was thinking my readers (both of you) might be disappointed that I had stopped writing but that there were five trillion other blogs that could take my place. Little did I know that I had FOUR readers and that they did indeed miss me. Wow! :)

What I’ve Been Up To, the Short Version

I am fine. My health is fine. My head is fine. It’s all good.

I have been running, and swimming. If I start bicycling again I will end up accidentally training for a triathalon. I have acquired a small flock of chickens, and a piano. I cleaned my office (this is is a big deal). I lost eight pounds (this is not a big deal; I have lost them before but they keep coming back). I have read something like three dozen books in the last six months. I got my hair cut short. I gave up caffeine again, three times. I sleep ten hours or more a night, but I have strange dreams where tiny espresso shots cruelly laugh at me.

Most importantly, I successfully survived turning 40.

Unplugging…Sort of

I did get a big ugly case of Deep Thoughts at 40, and a whole series of those Deep Thoughts concerned the amount of time I spend on the internet every day. I really did not want to have “successfully maintained her social network” carved on my gravestone. I still don’t.

In August I was reading hundreds of blogs a day, keeping up on dozens of mailing lists, web forums and old-style BBSes, reading and (um, sometimes) replying to personal email, and regularly posting to this blog as well. All of this in my spare time, on top of my normal daily workload. I didn’t have to get this involved in the internet, but I had built it up over time, slowly abandoning my own writing and my other interests and feeling like I was behind if I didn’t keep up on my email and my feeds. Even when I did sit down and write or draw or play music on my own I felt lost and blocked, as if there was nothing there in my head to draw on.

This was also a time when twitter and facebook were very popular amongst many of my friends. I was having a hard time imagining signing up for more internet time-sucks when I already felt so stretched for time and attention, and so creatively empty.

I’d like to say I unplugged from the net in August and that I feel much better, but I’m not that virtuous. I have cut tremendously back on the amount of net reading I do, I turn off my IM most of the time, and I am not on either twitter nor facebook if you’ve been looking for me there. I feel like I’m wasting less of my life on the net, but I still don’t feel good. I still feel like I have a lot of work to do to pull away.

A Bad Case of Why

Another Deep Thought I had this fall I did was wondering why I blog at all. I suspect this is a phase that every blogger goes through, a nobody-cares-why-bother-its-all-pointless phase. It just took me a while to get here and probably lasted for far longer than it should have, given that I’ve been a writer my entire life and writing a blog should come easily to me.

I think I have been unconsciously influenced by the so-called A-list bloggers, who are blogging as a business and who have a single-minded focus on attracting readers so that they can pull in advertising dollars and thus get rich and famous and quit their jobs. I’ve never really viewed this blog as anything more than a hobby and a place to write once in a while, but I still find myself feeling guilty that I violate every major business blogging rule. Thou Shalt Not Write a Journal Blog. Thou Shalt Write About What Everyone Else is Writing About and Cultivate Pagerank. Thou Shalt Not Post Cat Pictures. I’ve been guilty that I can’t seem to follow the rules and thus I’m not rich and famous like the business bloggers. Never mind that not even the business bloggers seem to be doing all that well at the rich-and-famous-quitting-the-job strategy. I can find a whole lot to be guilty about if I try.

But looking over my archives it does seem like I’ve been trying to do too many things and imitate too many other sites. I have a focus problem. I’m not kottke or boingboing or engadget but it is like I’m trying to be all these sites and a half dozen others, in addition to posting my own stuff. What I do notice from my stats is that the most popular posts on this blog, the ones that are linked the most and commented on the most, are consistently the longer posts, the more personal posts, the opinions or essays or reviews or stories about cooking or gardening or tech. The funny posts are usually a big hit.

What a surprise: my best posts are the ones where I actually write like me.

2008 Blog Resolutions

It’s time for a blog reboot. (for the content, at least. I want to do a new design and move the blog to wordpress, too, but that will have to wait for when I have more time.)

In 2008 I want to stop trying to be other people’s blogs, and be more creative on this one. What this means, I hope, is longer posts and more personal stuff. Fewer link-log posts and more funny essays (or at least attempts at being funny). I’m probably going to talk more about gardening and cooking. I’m going to post about work (not so much “my co-worker is an asshole and the coffee here sucks” type of things but more about technology and teaching and writing and publishing, which is what I do). I would really like to post more fiction. There will be cat pictures.

What I’m aiming for is an unpopular blog that is nonetheless richer for me to write. And, I hope, if all four of you stick around, richer for you too.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. – Dante, Inferno (Ciardi, trans.)

Ten years ago I wrote an essay called Thoughts on Turning 30. It was a very personal essay, for me. One of the big reasons I wrote it was because I don’t keep a journal (kind of unusual, for a writer). I had talked in that essay about how I had spent time at every significant birthday up to that point moping about my life and about what I had learned. But I had never written any of it down. Part of my intent in that essay was to capture a moment in time, to explain how I was feeling at that moment so that Future Me would know.

I am Future Me now. Today is my 40th birthday. I joked in that essay that Future Me would look back on 30 me and laugh about how naive I was. I read that essay now and I don’t think that I was all that naive. I’m not laughing. I am, however, struck at how self-confident 30 me was. Self-confident, and optimistic. I was a bright young woman with a big attitude, at the top of my game, with big ideas and a whole lot of years to accomplish them stretching ahead of me. 30 me had so much to look forward to. 30 me was, frankly, really cool.

30 me, unfortunately, didn’t know how quickly things could unravel, didn’t know how dark the next ten years would actually be. How easily things could change with a few health problems and a lot of worry. Life sometimes jumps up and stands in the way of one’s big fabulous plans.

I’m not here to write thoughts on turning 40 and moan about how terrible things have turned out for me. They’re not terrible. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, I have a good career, a terrific marriage, and a very comfortable life. But things are much different now than they were for 30 me — quieter, more settled, more introspective, more routine, more boring. Which would be fine, if I was happy. But there’s a lingering, nagging doubt in the back of my mind, and sometimes the front, that I could be, should be, more than I am. There’s a doubt that is only underlined when I read 30 me excitedly talking about what she has learned and how much more she’s looking forward to. I find myself at 40 envying the overwhelming energy of 30 me, and wondering when it was I lost the drive to change the world. Is this just what happens when you get older, or did I make a wrong turn somewhere? Am I, like Dante, lost in the dark wood? And if I am, what I do I need to do to get out again?