Techne

Transferring to the new hard drive. It started out saying 17 days.

Well, the good news is that I am beginning the work of finishing my thesis film. In the next post I’ll tell the story of how this came about, how I began and things radically changed when my friend suicided and my dad was diagnosed with dementia.  I dove into another world and when I returned, after my dad died, I was a mental health counselor (creative arts therapist), a practitioner (and now a teacher) of narrative work, and married. A long slow road brings me back here.

But here I am. Starting with technological changes. We are embarking on a two-week trip and I need to take my hard drives with me. I have 2 tb hard drives, one 500 gb and a 250.  Now, I have a new 4tb drive with thunderbolt so I can put everything on it. It ways about a third of what the old tb hard drives do and it takes up a lot less space. Today is spent packing and transferring. We leave on Friday for two very different places. First, psychosis camp, in the Mithrah of Mabie, a forest south of Glasgow. A retreat for those who experience psychosis from time to time and those who work with them. Weather there is chillier and rainier than here. After that, North and South Dakota. Bismark for language school and Eagle Butte for some dancing.

We moved out of our beautiful lake house on Monday, and into our temporary location, the Senator Inn, which is our staging ground for all the projects we have going on and the packing we have to do for the next two weeks. We leave on Friday, so we have to have everything in storage or packed by Thursday night. Most of our things are in storage, as our new place is not ready until July 1. The room is crammed full of things for the journey and the miscellany of last minute, impulsive, ideas about what material goods we couldn’t possibly live without.  Now we have to sort through this pile with sober second thought. How will we realistically make plaster masks in the middle of a forest in Scotland?  We won’t. We can make masks from found objects in nature.  How many books of stories will I really reference?  (Kindle editions). Could I get prayer tie cloth when we get there? (very expensive).  How many outfits is minimum for a week?  My suitcase is taken up with warm clothing, stout boots, a hat and gloves. In June. You never know in the Dakotas. There is also life. We want to get Lewis’s mum an exercise bicycle (recumbent, easy to use, with a nice variety of settings including an easy one), plus get her some reflexology on her feet. We still need to get some paper to the mortgage broker and we had to make last minute changes to the book that we only got finished last night. Etc.  We were hoping to get to the Great Mother Conference (http://greatmotherconference.org/) which is down the road in Portland, to do lodge with our friend Miguel Rivera, but the conspiracy of time and weather is making that look increasingly unlikely.  Miguel is from California and he had no idea it could rain this hard.

Plus, this morning is staccato. It wasn’t meant to be. We woke up, had a leisurely coffee and intended to go to our favourite gym down the road, except we got outside to discover that we have a flat tire. AAA came and inflated it, but now a trip to the auto shop is part of our day so we are ramped up in a different way, trying to reroute schedules, cancel appointments that can no longer be accommodated. Everything gets pushed. So, I’m up here, transferring footage to the new hard drive. Lewis is downstairs, trying to get a fast workout in (I’ll go down the road later today), and I am planning luggage, imagining myself in the prairie, watching birds, and realizing that we could just leave it all here and everything would work out just fine.