Kana's Chronicles

Flip the Switch

August 28, 2026

I didn’t intend to stop writing so abruptly, back in January.

I have a pattern, though, of “serial obsessions.” I don’t seem to be constructed for BALANCE, or even for a varied blend of activities or areas of focus… I’ll jump into the deep end of a thing (“All in!!”–That’s me. Whatever “it” may be, “it” will not be handled half-assedly!), I’ll set myself up with study and supplies and a work-space, and I’ll put forth a shit-ton of whatever “it” is that’s currently obsessing me.

Some of my past areas of hyper-focus have been greenhouse-gardening, quilting, “antiquing” furniture pieces I picked up at Goodwill, crocheting afghans, creating and testing herbal remedies, making jewelry, screen-printing shirts, painting in watercolors and drawing with charcoal, writing fiction…

And READING, always reading. Some times it’s even heavier than others (like this year: I’m “96 books ahead of schedule” in my GoodReads 2026 Reading Challenge), but whatever the rate, I’m always reading. It seems to be the one obsession that doesn’t involve creating something. (Well, as I think about it… Sudoku and the NYT crossword have had their turns as well—so I guess there have been a few subjects without actual products…)

For most of the winter of 2025 my fixation was cross-stitching while listening to audiobooks. Then in the summer I suddenly put down the embroidery hoop and jumped to creating and publishing several books that had been half-formed for a long time in the back of my mind (and the backs of some notebooks). And in September—stalled out on my exegesis of the book of Deuteronomy (sadly ironic, since I did get through the books of Numbers and Leviticus, which are, shall we say, rather less riveting)—I opened a new tab on my turquoise and whale-stickered laptop, and began, again, to post here.

The laptop, with its “Moby-Dick”-influenced decor… Excess, anyone?

Never mind Deuteronomy—the energy and attention had shifted! All of my free time went to blogging. There’s enough going on in the life of a mind to furnish near-daily posts, and I was loving writing them. Until… the “switch” flipped and suddenly (in an obsession that is utterly UNcharacteristic for me) I wanted to spend all my free time working out. I was bygod gonna offload the last fifteen pounds of the goal I’d set for myself. (Did it, too. Thirty pounds last winter, sixty altogether.)

I actually used up two treadmills. Granted, these weren’t “gym quality” machines—but that might still an indicator of EXCESS. (Excessable, that’s me!)

Treadmill #3.0

When I ran out of steam on the treadmill, the next activity waiting in line for ALL of my attention turned out to be reading. As in, more-than-usual-even-for-ME reading (hence the 96 books “extra”).

From a purely intellectual or logical standpoint, it would make a great deal more sense to mix things up a little, to spread out my time among several of the many things that I (at some point) have enjoyed doing… From a purely rational or practical standpoint, it would make perfect sense to read (or work out, or paint, or sew, or…) just a tiny bit less—spending “a lot” of the time instead of “ALL” of it—and wouldn’t it be nice to put that tiny bit of time-and-energy toward an occasional blog post? My logical-brain quite likes the idea.

I’ve even tried, a number of times, to push-and-bribe myself into doing just that. I DO love checking things off a good checklist, and I’ve faffed around with any number of to-do-list apps—trying to broaden my own focus a little by including an array of items in the week’s to-do’s. Write something. Clean something. Read something. Do something. Make something. It seems entirely reasonable to sprinkle in a handful of to-do’s that would broaden the experiences of a given week. Reasonable, yes. It’s just… I’m just not built for it. I don’t function that way.

You would think—wouldn’t you?—that a change of pace would even be welcome, especially when I’ve just completed something intensive. When I finally signed my name to a portrait that had taken dozens of hours, you’d think it would have been a pleasure—maybe even a relief—to straighten and stretch out my back after hunching it over a sketch pad for so long, to unclench my grip on the charcoal pencil, to take off my reading glasses and look around at some parts of the world that were more than eight inches away from my face… But can you guess my mind’s answer to that reasonable idea? My mind replied: “Draw!Draw!Draw!Draw!Draw!Draw!Draw!Dr”… There will be no negotiations. No deals brokered, no accommodations reached, no plans changed, no convincing or persuading or bribing, no quarter given. Get out of my way: we are going to DRAW now.

Until we’re not.

Living in this brain of mine, it’s an all-or-nothing world.

So I didn’t intend to stop writing so abruptly in January—but that dang switch got flipped. Daily Blogging: OFF. Excessive Reading: ON.

My mind needs the equivalent of a dimmer switch.

Well, here goes an attempt. I’ve set down a half-finished (reading-)book, and I’m picking up my nearing-finished (writing-)book. We’re into the home stretch of our busy summer-season at the RV park, heading toward the season where there’s a little more time, and I’m determined to spend it at the keyboard. And hey, if I’m already sitting down at the computer… well, then, I’m thinking it won’t be such a struggle to get myself to write HERE as well. We shall see.

What a strange brain it is, when I have to convince myself to do something that I enjoy so much when I’m doing it.

We’re about to find out some stuff: (1) Can I END the current obsess/excess activity (of reading) before it is actually done with me? (2) Can I CHOOSE the next obsess/excess activity (because I want it to be writing)? And (3) Can I TRICK my brain into believing that “writing” encompasses blogging as well as fictioning, when my brain tends to treat them as entirely separate pursuits?

If my brain doesn’t hold me hostage doing something else, I’ll let you know!

In the meantime… My nightgown says, “I read past my bedtime.”
In Which We Don’t Sail Into the Sunset

January 21, 2026

Last weekend we drove one last time to our boat, to finish cleaning it out.

My mom and I had gotten the bulk of things moved out, a couple months back. She and I were there for a “girls’ weekend” when I arrived at the realization that we should probably sell it—an epiphany that had probably been building in my subconscious for a while. One thing after another had surfaced as things we wished were different, or things we needed to fix or change—and on top of that, we’d come to realize that we couldn’t even get to the boat half as often as we’d hoped or planned to. Even when we were able to get away and make the five-hour drive to get there, we spent our time working on the boat rather than sailing it anywhere. A boat needs a lot of upkeep, and we weren’t even getting that done, let alone the many bigger projects.

For a couple years that boat had been my “Happy Place,” but it was becoming less and less so—and I finally admitted that to myself while I was there with my mom. So we turned our visit into a packing-up project, and we spent the weekend hauling things up to the dock and packing them into her car. (You’d be amazed how much stuff can be fitted into a Honda Pilot.) But there was still a carload-worth of stuff that needed to be cleared out—and we needed to “clean house” and swab the deck and get it ready to show.

I’d been dreading the prospect. Dreading the time in what had been my Happy Place for two years.

I find I have a deep sense of embarrassment—almost shame—-about having fallen for the “wrong” boat. It goes deeper than embarrassment about being wrong (and jumping in with both feet and buying the boat), although that’s a part of it. I know these things about myself: I jump into things with both feet, and I hate being wrong. I did that with a marriage once, though in that case I’ll plead being “under the influence” of a severe Manic swing of Bipolar. He was a pathological liar and a con man, and turned out to be already married to someone else, so you see how well that turned out. Loving the wrong boat was at least not damaging in the way that falling for the wrong man was. He damaged my FAMILY, and he’s a contributing factor to why my kids still don’t talk to me, more than a decade later. Loving the boat wasn’t damaging—it was just a dead end. Or a detour, maybe. And while I loved it, it contributed a great deal of Joy, so it wasn’t a waste. It just didn’t turn into “sailing into the sunset” the way we’d originally planned with it.

Far Reach under sail. Definitely my Happy Place.

Selling the boat changes the shape of our future. The Plan was to finish paying it off and to leave our job, managing an Oregon RV Park, within a couple more years to move aboard the boat. We’d equip it with satellite internet and I’d look for work freelance writing to keep the “sailing kitty” healthy, and we’d Travel. To warm places. We figured we’d start with a winter in Mexico—in part because that “shakedown cruise” would keep us within reach of a continent while we got into our groove. And then we’d sail into the Pacific, where there are hundreds of places I’d like to see, and we’d get to see them while taking our “home base” and comfort zone with us, and we could visit them in as leisurely a fashion as we’d like, with no need to rush around and get back on a plane home. Home would be with us.

So selling the boat changes the shape of the future. We’re still at our RV-Park job, and there’s not an “end date” anymore. Or rather, we don’t know what it is. The future doesn’t have a road-map (or a sailing chart) at the moment, and that’s not my comfort zone. I’m accustomed to having a Plan—even though I know that God usually tops my Plans with something better. I suppose at this point we’re waiting to see what the “something better” is going to be.
What is WRONG With People?

January 11, 2026

I feel like our RV park’s housekeeper deserves hazard pay.

I continue to be astonished by some people, and the things that they do. Or in this case, what someone did NOT do.

Someone had an unfortunate case of explosive diarrhea yesterday… In the shower. And got out of the shower, still “leaking,” to reach the toilet. The result was poop all over the shower, poop on the floor, poop all around the toilet. The thing that astounds me is that this person just strolled out, leaving it there. I watched him do it.

We have a camera in the hallway leading to the bathrooms, so I know exactly who it was, and he’s getting a nastygram from me, and maybe a fine. If he had made any attempt, or even called to ask for cleaning-tools ,or help (he has my number), I would feel differently. But he just walked away.

I don’t know why it still astonishes me when someone does that, because (unfortunately, astoundingly) this is far from the first time there has been this sort of mess to deal with. All too often we can’t identify the culprit—the multiple-stalls setup of our other bathrooms means that even a camera outside wouldn’t tell us who went where…

Sometimes we have “serial offenders,” the worst of which was someone who was regularly smearing poop on the stall walls. (In addition to my outrage, I admit to curiosity. I can’t quite picture the logistics, if you will. Did he scoop poop out of the toilet to do this? Catch it in his hand? Did he have gloves for this project, or does someone who decorates with poop not worry about such things?) And above all else, resoundingly: WHY??? What the ever-living fuck makes a person do something like this? Repeatedly!

We had a hypothesis, about the identity of our malefactor, and the incidents did, in fact, stop when that teen’s family moved out of the park. We had better luck with ID-ing a serial offender on the ladies’ side—someone who, on a daily basis, left a clogged toilet full of poop and massively excessive amounts of toilet paper. Ultimately we had a good guess because she did the same at our house, when she was there. So when our housekeeper came upon the daily offering, I texted the offender (what better way to reach a teen!) and told her she was no longer allowed to leave her poop-mess behind. She needed to use less toilet paper, and I would show her how to use a plunger in the event that it happened again. I told her, “It’s not Chrystal’s job to clean up your poop!”

(If only that were true! It shouldn’t have to be Chrystal’s job!)

She apologized, embarrassed to be caught out—but the very next day, there it was again. I came down on her like a ton of bricks (apparently I am “scary”), and it hasn’t happened since.

Lower on the “ick” scale—but as high on our frustration scale—was the mess Jon found in the clubhouse kitchen yesterday. Dishes and pans unwashed, food left in the microwave, trash filled up and not emptied, general mess in the kitchen…

It’s a nice little clubhouse, with couches & a TV, long tables for group eating, and—the big draw for people living and cooking in RVs—a full kitchen. A number of people use it regularly, and lately it has become the hang-out for the whole “gang” of kids living in the park. Some of these kids (in my curmudgeonly opinion) are far too young to be running around without adult supervision (I’ve found two of them, for example, crawling and rolling around in a pile of leaves… in the middle of the road!) and a couple of them are, shall we say, behaviorally challenged even with their adults—so I have been uneasy. (None of them are “bad” kids, and most of them belong to our staff, so I know them… But I’m not confident in their judgment and behavior.)

In any case—and this one is probably not on the kids—the mess in the kitchen is far from the first time. Chrystal has cleaned up far too much of other people’s kitchen-use, and yesterday Jon decided “Enough.” The clubhouse has had a keypad-doorknob, with the same number-code as the bathrooms—but yesterday Jon changed it out for a doorknob with a key, and we made a sign-out sheet for the office. There’s still no charge to use the clubhouse, but we’ll have a registry of who has used it. If there’s a mess, now, we’ll know whom to go to. If there should be any “repeat offenders,” we can decline to let them continue using it. And that key is only going to adults.

It frustrates me that we should have to do this.

And I don’t understand it. Never mind the extremes like poop-smearing—I don’t understand the mind of someone who uses a communal kitchen and walks away from their dirty pans.

What are they thinking? I literally want to know what they’re thinking. Do they think it’s someone’s job to clean the kitchen after them? Do they think … What else? I’m trying to think what else they might think, that would explain walking away from their mess.

I guess it really doesn’t matter what they’re thinking—the point is what they’re doing. The point is what some people will do when there’s no one there to make them behave properly. Every few days, in the summer, for example, Jon has to repair something damaged by poor RV-driving, and it’s a rarity for anyone to stop and admit they’ve hit and damaged property. So I suppose my real question is: what on earth is WRONG with people?
A Pain in the Neck

January 8, 2026

Yesterday we drove an hour and a half to Washington’s Tri-Cities, Richland, to the Apex Spine Institute, for a test procedure to see about addressing Jon’s neck pain. His x-rays show the discs between his vertebrae entirely corroded, and the bones are rubbing against each other without any “cushion”…

It’s been a long road—especially because things don’t move quickly with the VA. (We’re immensely grateful that the VA takes care of all his medical—but nothing there is an efficient process.) First he went through a year of physical therapy, to see if that could address the issue—and although he did improve his range of motion, it didn’t affect his daily pain. Then he got passed to the spine institute to talk about surgery, and their process of tests and appointments took another year before they tried to schedule him—right in the middle of our busy season. We simply can’t afford to have him out of commission for a month or two of summer, so he had to start all over and try to time it so the surgery-schedule could happen in winter.

At the end of the day, though, when we got closer to it, the idea of having them go through the front of his neck to mess with his spine… Well, it was just too much. That’s scary stuff, truly. And when he had a panic attack in the doctor’s office (this is NOT a man who has panic attacks!) he took a step back to re-evaluate. When he decided, after all, that he didn’t want to risk the surgery, I felt an overwhelming rush of relief. I was going to support him when he planned to do it, but it had scared me too!

At that point they began to talk to him about ways to address the pain—and we wondered why these options had never been mentioned in the first place! We could have saved almost two years of messing-around and gone straight to pain-solutions.

Yesterday was a “test run,” where they injected an anesthetic at the medial branch nerves that relay pain signals to the brain. They’ll assess the effectiveness, and apparently do at least one more test—and if it seems to work, there’s a more permanent pain block they can do at that site.

We fervently wish they had mentioned this option two years ago! We understand that this procedure is a matter of addressing the effects rather than the root cause of his pain, but it’s the effects (the pain itself) that are the problem for him. And this solution is orders-of-magnitude less drastic than the surgery to replace the discs with artificial material—a major surgery that messes with spinal column and has a recovery time of several months. Jon has been living with daily pain for years. He’s the ultimate in Tough Human Beings, and he never complains, beyond an “Ow” when the spinous processes (the sticking-out extensions of bone) from two vertebrae catch against each other and lock up his neck.

But I know a thing or two about chronic pain, living with Crohn’s Disease. I’ve been largely in remission for more than twenty years (a circumstance that has stumped every doctor and specialist with whom I’ve come into contact over the last two decades), but the memory of PAIN is emblazoned on my brain. So I know that just because it’s there all the time and you might be “accustomed” to it… doesn’t mean it hurts less! I remember, when I turned the corner after a flare-up of half a year, how the unaccustomed absence of pain would be like a new sensation in itself. A glorious one. We have hopes that this nerve-block procedure will bring Jon some of that! And he has already started the slow wheels of the VA to see about similar treatment for his lower back, in case this works.

At least this time we know what to ask for!—pain relief, not rebuilding-the-spine surgery.
Avatar 3: Inadequately Imaginative

January 7, 2026

We went to the movies last night, to see “Avatar: Fire & Ash.” It’s the second time in a month that we’ve been to the movies, which is mostly noteworthy because we usually don’t see the inside of a theater above twice a year. For the most part we prefer the comforts of our own home for our various viewing—not to mention being able to pause for potty-breaks. Occasionally, though, it’s fun to indulge in movie popcorn, and the big screen that goes with it.

We usually don’t know a thing about the titles that are playing, because we don’t have TV channels, so we don’t see ads and previews—so a movie-date usually begins by looking up previews for whatever’s playing at the local theater. This time, though, there was something we recognized, in the new “Avatar” movie. We hadn’t seen the second one, but the first one was great, so this seemed promising.

As it turns out, though, this is not one of those movies where you can easily step into #3 without having seen #2. And I feel that that’s badly done on the storytellers’ part. Sure, It’s one of the challenges of a sequel, that writers don’t want to drag the pace or bore their audience with extensive over-explaining of what has gone before… But at the same time, it’s important that at least the plot fundamentals should make sense, and that can be accomplished with a light touch—for example, by clever references to the past, slipped into dialogue without dragging down the pace of the current story. There was absolutely no attempt made, here, so there are a number of major plot-points in this story that go entirely unexplained. Even after watching the whole three hours, I don’t know why there’s a U.S. colonel in a Na’vi body, or how he got that way. Or why there’s a human kid in the middle of a Jake Sully’s Na’vi family, or how he ended up there. Or why Jake Sully is “wanted” by the human military. Those aren’t side issues; they’re the main “drivers” of the plot. There are plenty of other questions—like what’s up with Sully’s daughter and her inability to commune with the “allmother” Eywa—but at the very least the big plot-items should get that little bit of explanation for folks who didn’t see #2. Skipping the attempt altogether is purely lazy storytelling.

My greater disappointment with this movie is its overall lack of imaginative vision. The first movie was so stunning in its creativity that it must be a high bar to aim for… But I feel like they didn’t even aim. Where the first movie was remarkable for imagining things entirely un-earth-like in nature, this movie relies on thinly veiled earth-analogues. There’s a subplot involving whale hunting, and the whales are very whale-like. Their mouths open side-to-side and they have extra eyes, but they’re whales.

All that said, it’s not a bad movie—especially, I imagine, if you’ve seen the second one ahead of this one. It just doesn’t live up to the first movie, by any stretch of imagination.

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? They didn’t stretch their imaginations in making this one.
If the Present is a Gift, so is the Past

January 6, 2026

Writing Prompt: “Do you spend more time thinking about the past or the future? Why?”

Truth be told, I tend to shy away from the future. I’m uncomfortable with unknowns, and the future is nothing-but. Oh sure, I always seem to have A Plan—but I’ve also come to realize how seldom my “Plan” is what actually comes to pass. (As my Sponsor says, “If you want to hear God laugh… Make plans!”) Fortunately for me, God is a better planner than Kana, so the insufficiency of my own planning is ultimately immaterial. It goes against my Planner-nature, but I practice it: Putting the future in God’s hands and dusting off my own. Stepping back and not keeping a death-grip on my own Plans.

Right now I’m in the unusual position of not having a Plan of my own for the long-term future. Until recently, the Plan was to finish paying off our sailboat and set sail into the sunset. But we’ve just decided to sell this boat, and we’ve withdrawn the “three-to-five-years’ notice” we’d given our boss a couple years ago—so now there’s not an “end-date” to the job and home we’re living in, and there’s not a Plan in place. I’m not sure the lack-of-Plan has made it any easier to put things in God’s hands, but the future is a big old blank now, and that is not easier for my mind to handle. Relying on prayer may not be easier, but it’s surely more necessary, if that makes sense.

The past, by contrast, is fixed and known and comfortable. My mind frolics there all the time. The past is my most important asset: all the memories and experiences and learning and thinking that has made me Me. It’s why dementia is the scariest ailment I can think of.

As I wrote during our Hawai’i trip, a great value of Travel is the fact that all your experiences get added to your permanent memory bank. It’s like adding DVDs to a shelf in my brain. And because my brain is fallible and funky, I like to write about life, to sort of “fix” those thoughts and memories in place. Writing about something helps solidify my memory—and of course it creates a record to which I can return and revive that memory if it gets fuzzy. It’s why I’ve journaled since I was six years old, and it’s why I blog. It’s why I’m a camera nut, and it’s why my digital “Frameo” shuffles through hundreds of photos every day, sitting right beneath our TV where we can watch it from the couch. Not a day goes by that we don’t comment on a memory sparked by those pictures.

We tend to forget the word’s origin, but the term blog is actually a shortened rendering of web log. A captain’s log on a ship records where she has been, as well as noteworthy occurrences along the way.

I like to log where I’ve been, and record what seems noteworthy, so my mind can continue to play in the past.
Cow Physiology 101

January 4, 2026

Like every parent, I have a favorite “funny thing” spouted by my child when he was young. Well, I fondly remember a lot of things Christian said, but this one stood out.

He was about a year and a half, and our grocery store had a giant inflatable cow hanging above the dairy aisle.

Sitting in the child seat of the grocery cart, Christian looked up at its underside and udders, and in that carrying voice that toddlers have, he uttered his observation:

“COW! PENIS! ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!”

The entire dairy section froze… and busted up laughing.

what an apt description–I know that feeling too! Like thumbing the wheel of a lighter when there’s not enough fuel…

Thanks for sharing this post. I can relate, for sure!

I’m with you with reading but I don’t read as mum as my sister Sue My brain spends a lot…

I do enjoy each obsession as it’s upon me… But I will say that some of them are more USEFUL…

Ahhh the mind of a creative. Nice to have you back! My husband and I both do the same thing…