Mr Scruffy has a tawny mottled coat. His bony spine shows clearly as he trots around kitty town. Sometimes he comes to my sliding glass door and looks in, meowing.

Mr Scruffy is one the neediest cats I've ever met. He follows you around constantly, practically howling. "Love me! Somebody left me once! Please, somebody want me!"

But nobody wants Mr Scruffy. Even when indoors and fully fed, he still follows you around like a shell-shocked child, meowing. It's as if he's listening for your response, to assure himself you're still there. You can't take a cat like that. Not in this economy. He looks old and sick. And he shits outside the catbox.

Mr Scruffy breaks my heart. I wish I could take him in; that I could be the one to want him. I wish I could be Miranda July to Scruffy's Future. But I can't. I've got my own cat to care for, and an unsteady income.

I see my neighbors interacting with Mr Scruffy, leading him to bowls of food. But no one wants to take him into their home. Even the other cats stay away from him. As if he's bad luck. Poor Bad Luck Scruff. What do we do? Where will he go? Who will love him?

My 2012

Chugging Gone Wrong

I'm very excited to share my latest short with you:  Chugging Gone Wrong!

Thank you for watching, and please share it if you enjoyed it!

Now that I brewed this weird drink what the heck do I do with it?

My homebrewed kombucha has been fermenting on my counter for just over a week.  Now it's ready to be decanted into smaller bottles for flavoring and additional fermentation.

Most people would use a gallon jar, but I had a vase, so there it is.
You can see the mother floating sideways there - gnarly, right?

Each time you brew your kombucha a new baby SCOBY will form on top.

Tasty, right?  (As if a bacterial process could really look tasty...)
I need to remove the baby in order to pour off my brew.

If you needed any confirmation of my weirdness, just check out that manic gleam in my eyes (and ignore the circles underneath them).  That's what excitement looks like.

  Yeah, that's SpaceCat on my shirt.  Jealous?

But wait!

Every experience is improved with the proper wardrobe!

Mad scientist at work:

I'm adding blueberry juice to my glass jars before I add the tea.

You just don't mess with a mad scientist.

Recipes online suggested adding fruit juice and/or cut up pieces of dried fruit.
  Ever one to use what's on hand, I decided to add fresh pomegranate seeds in addition to blueberry juice.

Pomegranates are a sign of new beginnings.

Fitting that I should include it in my new endeavor, then, right?

They also play a prominent role in mythology...

Oh Hades!  I'll stay here in the underworld forever!  Swoon

Now that I've added my flavorings I can actually pour the tea....

How on earth am I supposed to pour that tea into those jars?
How do I get around the baby?!?!

Before touching the SCOBY, be sure to wipe your clean hands with vinegar to remove any oils or soap residue that might contaminate it.

I'm not sure if the blue nail polish is truly sanitary, but it greatly enhanced my mental preparedness

All the containers used in kombucha preparation should be glass (ideally) or hard plastic.  Metal interferes with the SCOBY and will keep it from doing it's thing

 (that's a scientific term).

That ceramic bowl is waiting to cradle my little baby.
  If I can ever get it out....

Sometimes you have to overcome your fear of the slimy and gross and just go for it.

Remember the haunted houses of your childhood?
  Sticking your hands in dishes of strange substances while blindfolded...
  The texture of SCOBY is something like that.

Eeeeew!

I grew this under a towel on my counter!

Meet: SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria & Yeast)

I currently have this baby in a tupperware at the back of my fridge, in case my original mother becomes compromised.
If I want to use it I'll have to bring it back to room temperature, because they go dormant when regfrigerated.

That's pomegranate juice on my face...  And scoby juice on my fingers.

New headshot?

Now I'm finally ready to pour my kombucha tea into my jars:

Pourin' the brew.

Ready for its airtight lid

Looks... frothy.

Pouring in action

The kombucha mother lurks just below the surface of the tea, unable to escape.
Like a crocodile lying in wait for a sweet baby elephant.

 Now I'll let them ferment for a few more days before I refrigerate them.

I varied the amounts of juice added to see what tastes best.

A veritable rainbow of digestive health.
  Yummmm.

Have you ever experienced that feeling of rightness?  The absolute certainty of knowing you are on the correct path?  In the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, the gunslinger Roland and his companions often speak about being on the path of the beam.  In that world it's something they can actually see reflected in the movement of the clouds and the way the grass lays in their path; nevertheless I think it's an apt analogy.  More than ever before in my life I feel attuned to minute signs; tiny details that confirm and illuminate the road I'm traveling.  I suppose this is a product of my quest to be present, to really get to know myself.  Certainly I have been working to remove those things that are detrimental to my mental/physical/emotional health, and to give myself those things that feed my imagination/drive/sense of purpose.

I recently quit my job of five years.  As far as restaurant jobs go it was a good gig.  The shifts were rarely more than five or six hours and the money was good.  I had coworkers who had been there for twelve, fifteen, even twenty years in some cases.  And I see why.  Under the right circumstances it can provide a very comfortable living.  I wasn't happy though.  It used to be that I felt really secure and competent and grateful to be there, but that hasn't been the case in a while.  And that attitude was noticed.  I was faced with a glass ceiling, and I didn't feel like my voice would be heard.  So I didn't say anything.  So now I had these awful feelings festering inside me, and it was noticed.  Who wants someone working for them like that?  No one.

It's really difficult to try to tell this part of the story in a concise way, and also without offending people I care about.  I want to talk about how frustrating my work situation was.  How I felt completely unappreciated, so I stopped doing my best.  Not consciously, but nevertheless I got reprimanded.  It was a big eye-opener.  Because I'm a really smart, capable person.  And there's no reason why I shouldn't excel at whatever I set my mind to.  And at the same time, I realized that I'm not going to let some asshole hold me hostage.  I don't owe them anything.  I gave them four Christmases.  I gave them every Friday and Saturday night for five years.  And I deserve to have my good work acknowledged.

It was psychically draining.  It was leeching all the joy and creativity out of me.  At this time in my life when I am harboring a new and delicate thing (myself, as an artist) I need to protect myself.  The world is changing faster than I can possibly process.  MY world is changing, I mean.  Turning thirty was standing out as a giant billboard in my head.  It felt imperative that my thirtieth birthday not coincide with the start of my sixth year at a snobby corporate restaurant.

So I quit.  I'm not proud of the manner of my quitting.  I know that the prudent thing to do would have been to give two weeks notice and leave on good terms with a reference.  But something came up-something big.  And then this voice in my gut spoke up clearly and said, "What are you waiting for?  There's no other time than now.  You'll never have this decision to make over, on the cusp of your thirtieth birthday.  Stop putting life off and instead live it now.  Thus it was that on the day I had intended to give my two weeks notice I instead told them I wasn't coming in that night, and that I wasn't coming back.

It was terrifying.  And exhilarating.  I truly cannot go back.  And I have no regrets.  I experienced this sense of certainty as though I were driving down the road, with the highway unfolding steadily before me.  To either side the landscape is barren, marked only by outcroppings of boulders and sagebrush and dull, dusty desert.  But the sky where I'm heading is so so clear.  Clearer than I can ever remember.  I drive down that highway watching tiny mirages resolve themselves from shimmering water into asphalt in front of me, and I'm driving straight towards a mountain.  Towards my destiny.  Climbing in elevation and the air gets crisp and cold and before I know it I'm standing at the edge of a vast canyon that seems to continue for ever.  And something inside me just lets go.