Quite Quiet

…and quite content with that, though not at all about the sad state of the outside world, particularly in light of the recent shootings. Children. Teachers. There are no words, or rather, there are far too many words, and never enough actual dialogue, never enough change.

On the personal front, I’m now deeply into re-thinking Just About Everything; beginning to formulate a new paradigm. The world may not change, but we can, individually. Hence: some silence. Which may continue for awhile.

In the realm of trivial blogthings: I decided to clean, dry and weigh the kozo. Scraping has been accomplished in little spare-time bits; one more session (today or tomorrow) will finish it.  Cleaning is tedious, but is teaching me things about growing and harvesting the next batch. During our yard sale, I sold most of the extra paper-slitting knives I kept for years for my classes, but saved two of these shoe knives. One of them is now a dedicated scraper; it works great for quickly lopping off the nodes left by tiny branches and for leaving most of the green bark. If I were going for the traditional clean white inner bark, I would need something slightly sharper.

There’s still a wee bit of lingering end-of-year paperwork, though most is now done and out. After last week’s series of sunny, relatively mild days, my gardens and outdoor work spaces are more cleaned-up and ready for winter than they’ve ever been …but I also wonder: will there be a winter this year? (No, not because of the Mayan calendar, but climate change).

Judging from the parent Morgan kozo, I expected the bark to stay green when dried and some of it has; the rest has dried to an almost-black, and then there are some pieces with tonal variation between the two. Interesting.

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