I’m bushwhacking. Cutting my way through, chopping at the giant weeds that have sprung up, shaking off the moss, getting an encouraging glimpse at the sky now and then, even if it is balanced by the occasional boot full of mud. Sucking swamp mud. Lo and behold, a clear space ahead…why, it’s my blog! Poor old abandoned ruin. The blog, or maybe even me. Take your pick.

It happens over and over in my life: a kind of paralysis, anxiety run amok, a demand to know how it will all turn out before I even start. This is not conducive to anything, really, so instead I do nothing. For a long time. Sinking under the pressure. That swamp mud is vile, sticky stuff.

I escape the same way every time: one project, no thinking, just doing. Then another. Then another. I know I’m on the way back today. I’ve sewed the first approximation of some Christmas gifts. Mopped the kitchen floor. Went to the craft store. And then I cut glass. (It cut me back, but that’s only fair.) Played with all my new supplies, some fiber paper, Thinfire paper, circle cutter. Got some kiln-carving experiments in the kiln ramping down as I type. So surely the worst is over.

Thinking is still causing me some trouble. I believe I need more color and design, less verbal expression. Which is odd, because my talents have always been the other way around. But I was curiously happy just resting my eyes on a pile of bright transparent turquoise shards today. If they weren’t so sharp, I’d carry them around with me.

Hmm. Well, there’s beads. Duh. Bright transparent turquoise beads might do the trick. And I need more projects.

I ain’t dead. Yet. Haven’t even had the flu. Yet. And gosh I’ve missed me.

In the interim, fall has befallen. Befell? That’s a big deal here in Texas. Also, it’s raining again. Not right now, I mean, but in general. That’s another big deal.

In blog news, I’m thrilled to have been cited as an authority on the Finnish bathroom. Also I’ve attracted surprisingly high traffic searching on rubber boots, via the Nokia shot a few posts back. Must have strayed into fetish territory accidentally. Who knew?

Been to Arizona, yay, and not incidentally my 30-year high school reunion, wtf! Least said soonest mended, but I suppose I’ll have more to say about that. Fodder for several posts, really, though I’ll try to repress all the memories as soon as possible. There was one friend I wanted to reconnect with, and that part was delightful.

And then this: glass class. Fusing this time. These are kindergarten projects…more to come:

Now I’m scared. I’m just home from a buying binge in Austin…daughter Shan’s wedding reception/party is coming up and I need a dress, so I headed for Silk Road in Austin, which is the only fabric store truly worth its pins around here, and now I have six, lord help me, six yards of dupioni to cut into. I actually invented this fabric for a fictional character a while back, a peacock blue silk shimmering with purple overtones–or undertones, or whatever you call that shimmery thing dupioni does–and there it was in the store, fated to be my dress. If I don’t blow it. And I cannot afford to blow it. Shan keeps reminding me it’s a casual event, and the dress pattern itself is casual. The celebration is in the fabric.

Then on to Blue Moon to buy glass for our next fusing class project and it was all the same scheme, peacock dichro and irid on black, shimmery and shiny and food enough for my glass hunger for one week. No, never enough. But sufficient unto the day is the credit card damage thereof.

It’s a thing we want to know about when we travel: the toilets. Tell us about the facilities. We’ll be visiting several times a day, and we don’t want to make embarrassing mistakes.

The Finnish bathroom is entirely familiar, only better in some respects. The toilet fixture itself is likely to be low-flow, but not those awful sluggish low-flow things we find in the States. I exposed myself as an American chauvinist right there, privately, in the john. I mean, didn’t you always just assume we ‘mericans would have all the best stuff? We’re such good little greedy consumers. So why don’t we have these toilets that work?And then there is often a little hand-held thingy hooked to a sink bowl crowding you in the public stall…a bidet attachment! It took me two visits to figure that one out. How civilized. I want one in my home bath.

In public, the WC is available at cafes, gas stations, indoor markets, and for cash at fully automated pods situated in high-touristed areas. It was a news story widely picked up, for some reason, when the Finnish Roadside Authority started requiring users to text-message the toilet to open the door at rest stops–supposed to reduce vandalism. Finns say it was pretty much a non-issue, as they are all on the phone all the time and already do all sorts of things by mobile phone, including paying for parking, metro tickets, various entertainment…why not for relief?

As an aside…Finns are on the phone all the time. Maybe that’s why they’re so reserved…they’re too busy on the phone to notice the people out there. When we arrived at the Helsinki airport, we were greeted with hugs and a phone–and very handy it was in a family group of six or eight highly impulsive people all headed out in whatever direction looked good at the moment, rarely in synchrony.

As another aside, Nokia made rubber boots long before they made phones. Guess where the higher profit margin resides.

As for the private bathrooms, my experience all comes from relatively new construction, from the 1980s or later. The Finnish bathroom first of all has a handy feature in the door, a “bolt indicator” as I learned while trying to shop for some…I’m looking to adopt the custom here, although all the (expensive) choices I find are sold from the UK. It’s a deadbolt that shows a tiny “occupied” or red dot marker on the outside when locked, just like in an airplane…makes sense to me, a lot more than the dumb doorknob locks we have in this house that don’t actually work anymore. Very subtle sign that I missed until it was pointed out to me, but it saves rattling doorknobs and walking in on your visitors.

The bathroom is divided roughly into four quadrants. There’s a drain towards one side and the floor slopes there…no shower stall or bathtub but a showerhead, maybe with a ring from the ceiling with a shower curtain that can close around. A sink near that, sometimes using a single diverter for the shower and the sink. There’s a big floor squeegee nearby, perhaps, and in that case you squick off the floor after your shower. The other two quadrants hold the toilet throne and a smallish washer and dryer. There might be a towel rack or there might not, and that door over there is not the master closet you’re accustomed to in your American master bath. Clothes and storage are elsewhere. This door leads inward to the electric sauna.

The sauna I love, though, is the one at the summerplace or lake cottage out in the country, a separate little building with a wood stove, the place that’s warm when you’re cold, the place that’s clean when you’re dirty and there’s no running water to be had. The place that smells heavenly, of heated cedar and birch smoke and steam…at least until your husband decides to try throwing beer on the stove. Honestly. He said he saw it on the Simpsons. I said, “and if Homer threw a pig off a bridge, does that mean YOU would–” and then realized that Homer has thrown a pig off a bridge, and it’s better not to give the man ideas. Scorched beer fumes, gah. Pretty much any bad idea you can have, Homer has done it. Although come to think of it, it was Marge who poured the beer on the stove. Hmm.

I guess Marge knew her man. And this topic has been derailed. Oh well. It was time to stop, anyway.

A book upon which I am about to embarK: Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions, by Zachary Shore.

Funny, I don’t remember being interviewed for this book. Perhaps a blunder on the part of the author. I could have provided so many illustrative examples.

So, Finland, for those of you who asked. And may my in-laws forgive me my facile impressions.

Calm, polite, reserved Finns. These are the people we shared airplane space with going over. It was a later afternoon flight from JFK, and everybody knew it would be tomorrow morning by the time we landed and we’d better be ready to function for a full day…so it was dinner and a movie and try to sleep. Quietly. Finns aren’t really interested in talking to a bunch of strangers, even sitting next to them for eight hours on a plane. Or in line at the grocery store. Or waiting for a bus. Which struck me as quite the cultural difference now that I’ve lived in the southern US for 15 years. And on the way home: Finns headed to New York on holiday. Drunken, calm, polite Finns. Still fairly reserved. Soooo not Texans. And that’s a fine thing, when you’re stuck flying on a plane together.

Flying Finnair, all announcements are made in three languages. Finns know a lot more languages than you do. And especially English. Any time anybody heard T start translating for me, they just switched without question to English. I felt like a big dumb backwards oaf, for the most part. The only people I met who didn’t speak English were an 8-year-old neighbor and T’s 2-year-old niece and 91-year-old grandmother. The city of Helsinki itself runs on Finnish or Swedish, the official languages, or English.

The cities of Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa run together, at least in my mind, into one big metro area, and along with Tampere further inland are the areas of greatest population. And public transportation works there. It’s really impressive to an American who feels mortally threatened walking beside the road around here. Bike paths are built in with sidewalks and all connect with bus and train stations, with routes seemingly everywhere. There are plenty of private cars being driven around, but much more defensively than in, say, Austin. I am assured that tailgating, lane weaving and speeding happen but it’s not every third driver like I’m used to here. If you do drive your car into the city, you park and then you walk. And walk. It was so lovely to be out and moving instead of shriveled by heat just cracking the door open…although there was quite the heat wave in Helsinki while we were there, temps in the low 80s. About as warm as summer gets.

Summer is short, but the days are long: in early August about three hours longer in Helsinki than in Austin. Even longer at the solstice, of course, although you have to travel north some hours before you reach the midnight sun. The growing season is quite short so everything is hugely green and flowering and ripening by August; spectacularly so when you come from the burned dusty brown country that central Texas is this year. There are flowers everywhere. Massive rose bushes covered in flowers and rose hips, both. Cherries ripe, and apples ripening. And berries everywhere. Wild strawberries just finishing, and currants and gooseberries just ripe, lingonberries and cloudberries and bilberries, oh my.

Berries, rye bread, cheese. Coffee. I forget to eat reindeer but that’s quite alright. We had the traditional sausages over the fire at the summerplace. Gluten-free eating was easier than it is when I travel in the States–the cafes generally had a gluten-free cake available, and salad bars everywhere in the city for lunch, and the grocery store had many more choices for g/f breads and desserts than I find here. Before we left, T stocked up on the things he usually stocks up on: chocolate, salt licorice, coffee, mustard, all different in Finland from what we can get here.

Finn style, Finnish homes, topics for another day. For now, I’ve been inspired by our trip to go out and get myself a bicycle, partly because of all the physical activity over there, and partly because of looking at hundreds of unedited photos…that little round person has got to get moving!

It’s a cantaloupe. In case you were wondering.

Back from Finland and I’m wishing we weren’t. This country is crazy. More than ever before in my life I avert my gaze and shut down when people start talking politics. I absolutely don’t want to hear that people I otherwise think well of are rabidly opposed to single-payer health insurance, enamored of Sarah Palin, or disgusted with Obama because he didn’t repair our entire FSCKING nation of greedy IDIOTS in eight months. And that’s not to mention the birthers. It’s worse than finding out your neighbors behead babies on Saturday nights as a religious practice.

Never mind. Finland seems to be a country of polite, reserved, clean, educated, perhaps occasionally passive-aggressive people. I was welcomed and accommodated in every way you could possibly imagine. And after all, who needs health insurance. Sauna cures everything.

Back in Texas, it’s dog days. Definitely not chicken days. One of our chickens died yesterday, probably just from the heat. I feel terrible about it. I think she got trapped in the shade island out there and didn’t want to go out in the sun even for the short time it would take to get to the water supply.

She’s in the freezer now, poor thing. Not to be eaten, but we can’t bury her in our rocky yard, and interment in the trashcan on a Monday is not going to happen when trash pickup is Friday and it’s hotter than fsck outside.

This is a dishonorable end for our Frieda. I think I need to move somewhere with dirt and a family graveyard.

The only thing thriving around here is the unknown cucurbit taking over one of the garden beds. It won’t set fruit in this heat so we don’t know what it is.

Good motel room coffee. Ever hear of such a thing? It’s not fabulous coffee, but it’s fine. That’s because, or so I presume, I’m in Oregon.

I stayed overnight in Yachats, on the coast. I love this place. It’s a motel opening up right on the rocks and the surf. Not luxury accommodations, but, as it turns out, sharing the beach and many of the amenities of the luxury spa place next door, thus adding the satisfaction of a good bargain to all its natural blandishments. There’s a trail running along the shore that goes on for miles and has been used for at least 1000 years, so they say. I left the window open last night and woke up a few times, kept thinking I was hearing the “natural surf” sound from my gradual alarm clock at home…but it’s the real thing: ceaseless respiration of the planet, against which my cares are grains of sand.

And even better, I am blessed to have family homes open to me, so this solo piece of my trip is only for one night. Just about enough to be therapeutic instead of lonely.

I’ve dropped most of my original plans to see a lot while I’m out here. Instead, just soaking up wherever I am. I did the three capes loop yesterday, driving down the coast from Portland, and then pretty much ran out of steam, slept forever, will walk here and take pictures until they kick me out at 11.

It’s glass heaven up here in the northwest. Yesterday I drove past two blow-your-own studios. There’s actually a lampwork store here in this tiny town, and an art gallery heavy on glass. I’ll check them out, then move on to Cape Perpetua, then down to Coos Bay. And then I’ll turn back into a social animal again. Right now, I’m a silent creature on the beach. Let’s be honest: a crab. I like it that way. As long as there’s good coffee.