That old yarn

I haven't been to an agricultural show for at least a decade, and last time I did I was too old to get excited about showbags, rides on the whizzamagig and foodlike substances on sticks, but, on the other hand, I hadn't yet settled into my early-onset nanna-esque enthusiasm for produce displays and vintage machinery. Thirty-six, it turns out, is the perfect age for enjoying agricultural shows, and the Whittlesea Show today was a delight. I got to witness from afar the latest fairground cuisine (variations on deep-fried fairy-floss). The arts & crafts competition displays were glorious, esp. in the Best Decorated Orange or Potato category, the Fair Isle sock display, the carrot cake competition, and the great Orstrayan backyard dunny division. There were fewer exhibits of baby animals being terrorised by kids than I'd feared, and the weather was on the chilly side of 15ºC (thank you v. much, southerly change), which meant that the handsome, hand-brushed Poll Herefords standing around with no shade or water weren't suffering unduly. And - finally - there was an alpaca display, including a coven of spinsters transforming alpaca fluff into a very respectable yarn.

Which was just what I needed, being myself a struggling novice in the alpaca-yarn spinning department. I made some inroads about a week ago, after watching several bajillion instructional youtube videos on setting up my spinning wheel, carding fleece, making rolags (rolags!), and spinning itself. But even so, this meagre length of yarn -

- was all I could make before I stopped in frustration. The yarn kept breaking, and, uncoordinated at the best of times, I was finding it nigh impossible to pedal with one foot, use both hands to pinch the rolag into something finer and threadlike, not slow my pedalling down so that the wheel started going backwards, deploy my third hand to grab the next rolag and introduce it, scratch behind my ear etc, and remain upright. Hand-foot-eye-machine synchronisation, never my strong suit.

At some point in this dogforsaken initiation into spinning I gave up, grabbed an old ball of  Patons 5-ply and started knitting this bedsock, on which I made tremendous progress at last week's poetry-at-the-pub, with the aid of my trusty book of sock patterns, I Can't Believe I'm Knitting Socks.

If only there were a companion volume, I Can't Believe I'm Spinning Alpaca Fleece.

So, anyway, it was very comforting to speak to the alpaca spinners today and discover a few things: (1) everyone finds spinning hard at first; (2) noone learns to spin from youtube; (3) alpaca wool isn't your optimal beginner's fibre, given its tendency to break, whereas sheep's wool consists of cells that make the wool stick together (or something); and (4) there is such an institution as the Hand Weavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria, headquartered in Melbun, and I could take lessons or join a local group and bludge lessons for free. So I think that's now my plan: I will put the gigantic sack of alpaca fleece back in the cupboard, wait until the new year when the next term of Wednesday evening spinning lessons start, and in the meantime, if I'm stricken down with yarn nerdery, I'll use up some of the commercial wool I've been accumulating over the decades in a flurry of sock manufacturing. I might try treadling my spinning wheel at the same time, just to get my foot in.

Meanwhile, in other news: Spring! The season of empinkification in the front yard.

The season of bees in apple-blossom (except for the apple-blossom that didn't eventuate because the earwigs of doom climbed up the trunks in the night and ate the unopened flower buds ... bloody earwigs).

And t'is the season of Esme Australorp deciding to incubate the next generation of chooklings with her whole soul and self. Esme can't be photographed, because she has planted herself in the darkest farthest corner of the coop and will be enormously disaffected if I open the portal that lets light in on her (whirr, fluff, dinosaur impersonation). We procured for her eight fertilised eggs last Sunday, so that the sitting could produce something other than rotten eggs; she broke two by accident on her first day, settling in, but all's gone well ever since, and she's almost a third of the way through the incubation now with six eggs still intact. She is a model of endurance. The whole incubation involves 21 days of sitting, turning the eggs over now and then so the embryos don't stick to the shell, holding in her poos, her thirst, her hunger, her need to stretch, her desperate need for a dustbath, until that brief moment in the afternoon when it's warm enough to leave the eggs and she can dash out and get a day's worth of living compressed into twenty minutes. Puts my frustrations with the alpaca fleece and the spinning wheel of contrariety right in their place.

A month

Good Dog, a whole month seems to have slipped by with nary an official despatch to HQ. It's been a month, this month.

1. We lost two dear hens. The first to go was Pamela, the sweet housechook who came into our lives earlier this year. She disappeared one early morning from the front garden, having spent the night safely tucked up on her perch in the laundry. We knocked on neighbours' doors, and phoned the local pound and the vets, searched for feathers, kept hoping that she'd turn up. Pamela was our survivor. She'd lived in the battery cage, survived (we think) a culling, got brought to our frontdoor by a neighbour who thought the best way to carry her was upsidedown, with his hand round her legs. Her first week at our place she barely left the patch of newspaper in our living room where we'd stationed her food and water, but within the month, she'd perfected her digging skills by turned our metre high frontyard compost hill into a minor valley. She'd sit next to Tim while he typed at his desk. She laid an egg, in the soft centre of an armchair. She liked to perch on an arm and fall asleep with her body pressed against a human torso. So, you can imagine, we've been missing her and furious with ourselves for not keeping her safe.

Pamela, learning the art of chook 

 Pamela in a sunpuddle on local newspaper

Pamela being lovely 

Pamela laying an egg on Harriet the Cat's blanket

A few days later, we called the remaining flock out to the green-patch behind our back fence for some supervised grazing. The green-patch behind our back fence is every chicken's favourite place, and when we open the back gate and call, everyone leaps from wherever she happens to be and gallops to the gate. And so it was, only halfway through her sprint across the backyard, Griselda fell over dead. Just like that. Gris was one of our first two chooks, sister to Daisy, and only three and a half years old. We didn't have the stomach for an autopsy, so have buried her and her mysterious cause-of-death in the front yard, plonking a just arrived barerooted peche de vigne on top of her.

 Daisy and Griselda ascending the potato patch protector in hopes of sneaking into the raised veg bed of temptation.

 Griselda, supermodel.

Griselda, in younger days, giving the poorly citrus an encouraging word. 

Griselda, upstaging the pea teepee.

2. And then I found out I was pregnant, only to find out a week later that I wasn't pregnant anymore. So that was a thing. In the intervening week, I had alerted half the town, so I had to unalert everyone (and so that's why people wait a month or three before disclosing up-the-duffitude ... not that I have learnt the error of my ways, being a serial overdiscloser on matters uterine). I was leaking half a ton of blood when I got home to a letter from the IVF people congratulating us on our pregnancy and advising the delivery date: 7th April, 2015 (W. Wordsworth's birthday, give or take a couple of centuries). This was splendid timing from the IVF people, who I have to say are pretty weird, what with their muzak-accompanied embryo transfers and their hey-here's-a-photo-of-your-blastocyst-to-help-you-get-even-more-emotionally-invested-in-this-highly-likely-to-fail-procedure.

3. Tim's ma visited from Newcastle. Somehow her presence caused us to be driving up the damp ferny foresty side of the lovely Mount Donna Buang. Halfway up, we slurped 40 litres of Donna Buang spring water into our jerry cans. Locals allege this water has travelled over a thousand years and many thousands of kilometres from central Australia. Hard to say whether this is so or not, but this water tastes sweet and clean and (I let myself imagine) sort of sacred, and beats our normal options: i.e., (a) scungy bird-poo-ridden roof-water stored in our watertank and not entirely recommended for human consumption and (b) chlorinated eau de tap, the anti-bacterial properties of which are not excellent for some of our projects, like seed soaking and sourdough propagating. (Oh, and, snow! It was snowing! There was snow!)

Mount Donna Buang in her least photogenic moment of all time, with dag in fluoro jacket, muddy road snow and 4WD hatchbacks.

4. Yesterday we set out along the outer northern suburbs' most poetically named gutter, Henderson's Drainage Trail, in search of tasty weeds for a tasty weed pie. It turns out that if you get carried away walking up Henderson's Drainage Trail, you end up at Henderson's Lakes, walking along a contrived water-front promenade thingo in South Morang, where your presence will only serve to taunt moor-hens and wood-ducks and swans with the false promise of tasty bread-crumby stuff you don't happen to have with you. If you veer off to the West, though, you find yourself in Wuthering Heights. There's this brisk, windswept hill that carries you up to a peak from which you can look down on all of Melbun. On the way down the other side, we interrupted three reddish roos, who hopped down to a fence line and then - bound - over the fence (the biggest one, anyway, cleared the fence like is was no higher than a toothpick, though the littlest sniffed along it looking for a way through rather than over). Further along I spied three seconds of fox, making a dash across the path and into a copse of gum trees. We ambled through paddocks, possibly illegally, until we got to Darebin Creek, and made our way home - with a bagful of plantain leaves, nettles, cardoon stalks, wild brassicas, chickweed and mallow for our pie.

Henderson's Drainage Trail, with Free-range Shopping Trolley

5. The almonds started blossoming. Springy!

Swallow Impersonators and almond blossom. 

Wherein I share quite a lot of information about my body (word to the squeamish)

Hello blog. Things round here have been a bit unbloggable. I had a super-dooper writing deadlion mid-month, and almost as soon as that was over we began Operation Make an Embryo. Y'see, despite the fact that we're all about the self-replicating organic systems round here (the tamarillo and artichoke forest, the free-range beehive, the heirloom yoghurt culture, the sourdough culture, the weeing into a watering can, the compost heap of singular joy), it turns out we're not very good at getting our own personal gametes into anything resembling a baby. Not for want of trying, I might add. For three and a half increasingly pessimistic years.

Some of my dearest peops have lived with (and in some happy cases, overcome) infertility, so I always knew it was a thing. I always knew it could be our thing, too. But so what, I'd thought. What the world doesn't need is more human reproduction, and if I had love to spend, surely I could spend it on already existing people, or on Harriet and Bea Cat, or, in moments of desperation, on broccoli seedlings. Then two years passed, and still no foetus, and we decided we'd see a doctor, and do what we could, but we wouldn't try IVF. Not for us. If we claimed to love children so much, after all, then why spend thousands and thousands of dollars on trying for a sprog who might never come into being when there are whole communities of kids in this country who get recurrent ear infections, and all that means, for want of decent medicine.

I'm not quite sure what happened, but some kind of beyond-rational, beyond-ethical yearning kicked in, and so I'm currently typing this in bed, lying down for an hour to stop this morning's progesterone pessary from falling out of my birth canal. Fifteen days ago I started nightly injections with a truly foul follicle stimulating hormone called Gonal (sounds like "gonad", gettit?).  Gonal makes the ovaries ripen lots of eggs simultaneously, rather than your usual monthly egg or two. Six days later, I began supplementing the Gonal injections with Cetrotide injections, to stop the ovarian follicles from releasing the eggs too early. Last week, I hauled myself, my thoroughly punctured lower abdomen, and my tender ovaries to the radiographer and got my innards frisked with a trans-vaginal ultrasound wand (twice) and had blood taken (twice) to determine how the follicles were going. Then on Thursday night I plunged another syringe into my tummy, with Ovidrel, which encourages the follicles to begin the great egg release.

They retrieved the eggs on Saturday. Only eight, mostly from Lefty, which is apparently quite a modest clutch as Gonal-induced egg-making goes. As far as I know, the eggs have spent the rest of the weekend getting to know Tim's sperm, living it up in a serum extracted from the blood of US citizens and sold by the US Red Cross. Romantic, eh? I'll find out later today how many embryos have made it, and then we'll look into implanting one of them into my comfy uterus sometime this week. Meanwhile, I'm feeling pretty poked about. I did my first serious poo since the egg retrieval surgery last night, had to strain just a little bit, and for the next half hour felt like my ovaries would explode. In my moments of more self-pitying wimpiness, I've had to remember that the experience of having the back of one's vagina slightly nicked and one's ovaries rummaged ain't nothing compared to the experience of having a galumphing great baby exiting through an unsuitably small aperture.

So, in short, there's been quite a bit of hoping round here, and trying not to hope too hard, and preparing emotionally for the very likely event that this round won't work, and counting blessings, and contemplating our finances (we've spent around $9000 so far, $1000 of which was donated by my gorgeous sister K, and Medicare will give us a few thousand back (thank you so much, taxpayers), but good golly, that is a lot of money), and trying to be healthy, and remembering that other aspects of one's life, of necessity, go on. And I keep thinking about those little embryos (how many?) in their dishes and hoping one of them gets to become a person.