peace

A quiet evening at home. I walked the dogs, and am making a salad and then curling up and knitting on Rosedale the rest of the evening. I decided to go with snap traps for the rats. Initially, I didn't want to deal with dead or maimed rats, but when I was talking with Lia, she stressed to me that the rats dehydrate easily and it was important to relocate them quickly once caught, and I realized that I didn't want to set them free in the forest, because of their link to leptosporosis, which I'm neurotic about my dogs picking up anyway, and I didn't want to release them in an urban area. Hawaii is overpopulated with rats, not the rats' fault, but mine are being battled with the same cold resolve I use for fleas and cockroaches.

City Mill, the local-style hardware store I went to had all the answers. An airtight pet food bin, orchid bark, diatomaceous earth for my roach n' flea war, little baskets for the classroom and a juice bar for my wait in line. I love it when it all works out.

Today, I didn't teach. I had a kindergarten teacher meeting in Waikiki. The best lunch I have ever had at a training was served there. It wasn't anything unusual, local style food, but everything was so very fresh. The best poke, (that's raw fish marinated in shoyu and sesame w/ seaweed for you mainlanders) macaroni salad, rice, tofu, incredible steamed green beans, lomi salmon, and amazingly sweet, thin-sliced pineapple. It was just really good, clean-tasting food, and the dessert afterwards just paled in comparison. Sometimes, a meal can be so satisfying that dessert is just overkill.

Home this evening, I walked both dogs, about 2 miles, on leash. Lots of barking, which I'm trying to approach differently, with Cricket. See, Cricket riles himself up when we meet other dogs on the trail. And I'm thinking about Cesar Millan, and his emphasis that dogs feed on our anxiety and on what we put out. And I think when I see another dog coming, I start to think "oh, here he comes, now Cricket's gonna go off" and I communicate this through the leash to him. And Cricket has his little tantrum, and we go on til we see the next dog. So today, I just tried to breathe through the walk, and yes, Cricket threw a little fit, but I just gave him a leash pop and kept walking, not trying to get him settled down before we moved on. I don't know if it made a difference. It made the walk go a hell of a lot faster. Which was good.

I wrote a long email to my friend, the one with whom I've been having the rather messed up relationship, the past few years. We will see how he responds. Or if he responds. Mostly, I said that if we are to continue to say we are friends, then we need to maintain the friendship, and that takes effort and honesty. Otherwise, maybe we shouldn't keep insisting that we feel so much guilt and conflict at not being friends. So. We'll see.

I direct you now over to Lady Kim's blog, to read the most wonderful gift of a poem today. So even if I'm waging war against vermin, and trying to hash out old friendships, and trying to run the barking dog gauntlet, it's a call to put out a more peaceful vibe, wherever we go.