A Sad, Unexpected Use for Ye Olde Rock Hammer

Content note: pet death

 

This isn’t the way I expected to introduce you to Lillie Hammer Hamster. I’d hoped she’d be a part of this blog for a while, but alas, dwarf hamsters don’t live long, and her time with us came to an end this afternoon after just over two years together.

She was an extraordinary cutie, and we’ll miss her so much.

Image shows a small brown Winter White dwarf hamster eating a strawberry
Lillie loved strawberries. She loved peas more, but she’d eat pretty much any fresh fruit set in front of her.

I buried her behind our apartment, just off our patio. This is not a task I expected to use my rock hammer for, but when clay-rich glacial outwash is packed down tight by construction, well, the pick end of a rock hammer is exactly what is required to excavate an appropriate hole. I’ve never been more grateful for my Estwing!

I put our Lillie Hammer Hamster to rest with her favorite hutch and her loofahs, which she also loved (and sometimes turned into art when she wasn’t using them for blankets).

A view inside the hamster cage: a yellow and a red slice of loofah are in a corner, stacked together in an A shape; a blue loofah slice sits in front and to the side propped up like a decorative wagon wheel.
Lillie’s art installation
Lillie is visible only in little brown patches under a slice of yellow loofah
Bedtime for hamster

Teeny tiny hamsters don’t have enormous personalities, but she definitely had her adorable little quirks and foibles. She was a joy to have around.

Now she’ll be part of my patio garden. Right now, I’ve just got rocks over her grave, but I’m going to buy a big pot and plant some nice flowers in it, mostly to keep the squirrels out. For now, I’m using coffee.

The edge of our porch, with Lillie's fresh grave covered in granitic stones from the North Cascades. A line of plants in pots overlooks it. Our black and white cat Gabby is staring at Lillie's grave through the yellow snapdragon.
Gabby watching over Lillie’s grave, probably wondering WTAF the humans have been doing

Rest in peace, little Lils. You gave us much joy, and you’ll always be a part of our little family.

Lillie half-buried in white paper litter, asleep in the mouth of her little hamster igloo, on her side. There's a tiny nub of a tail, and lots of feet, and a darling nose, all smooshed up.
Lillie asleep in her hutch
A Sad, Unexpected Use for Ye Olde Rock Hammer
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Welcome to the Unconformity

Kicks construction debris behind the boxes holding nine million rock samples that haven’t been put away

Drags a comfy chair over; dusts it off, sits down

Waves you all closer

Right. Well. Welcome to the new place! I’m Dana Hunter, and this is my Unconformity. At bloody last. Let’s get to it, then, shall we?

I’m sure you all know: this is no time for conformity. Hence, the new place. It’s rough around the edges. It’s something we’ll finish building together. It may change a lot over the years. But the basics will probably remain about the same: nice room, interesting rocks, comfy chairs, books, geology, resistance.

There’s many kinds of unconformity, and we’ll be exploring quite a few of them.

In geology, an unconformity is a break in the rock record. It may come about because deposition paused for a considerable time, or because strata eroded away before new sedimentary layers were laid down. We’ll see more than a few unconformities in our time here. Some of them are pretty great.

In human relations, unconformity* is an inability or a refusal to conform with the prevailing religion, politics, or social mores of the societies we inhabit. And in times when fascists have a strangleshold on our political institutions and religions drive bigotry, racism, sexism, and egregious human rights violations, it’s vital that we refuse to conform.

So that’s the Unconformity in a nutshell: we’re going to talk geology, and we’re going to talk resistance, and sometimes we’ll be combining the two. We are also most definitely going to be talking about a lot of books that relate to both, so I apologize in advance for the additional burden your bookshelves are about to endure.

There’s going to be so much to see here, and so much to do.

I’ll still be blogging at Rosetta Stones, but here, I’ll be able to get a lot more parochial. I’ll be taking you on all sorts of adventures in Pacific Northwest geology, with occasional forays into my origins in the desert Southwest, and we’ll troop over to your local parts of the world sometimes. We’ll have volcanoes, and floods, and flood basalts. We’ll explore the best and worst of what a subduction zone has to offer. And we’ll go places that will leave us speechless with their beauty.

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

E. B. White

Oh, yes, we’ll definitely do both. I’ll be finding all sorts of ways for people of all ages and abilities to save and savor the world.

We’ll have book reviews galore. We’ll deconstruct the really terrible ones, and do chapter-by-chapter reviews of really good ones. For those who were enjoying the Escape reviews and fascinated by the horror show that is creationist Christian earth science, I’ll be bringing those over from ETEV and continuing them here. You’ll also get clean versions suitable for presenting to people who faint at four-letter words.

We’re going to have loads of fun (for certain values of fun) debunking all kinds of creationist crap. And we’ll explore how the same people who cling to young earth creationism and the fundagelical Christianity that typically espouses it also became the people shilling for a serial adulterer with a passion for dictators. We’ll even see how some of their top organizations jumped into bed with the Russians, and explore their white supremacist origins.

Fascism did indeed come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. It also uses school vouchers and homeschooling to indoctrinate kids with racism, bigotry, and misogyny, and is happy to jump in bed with anyone, even mortal enemies, who joins them in pissing on groups they despise, and helps them go from fringe to the highest offices in the land. There’s a hell of a lot to expose, and we have a lot of work to do opposing them.

We’re also going to be exploring a lot of other woo and religious bunkum, especially the bits that involve the earth sciences. Science denial hurts us all. It kills people, and it’s killing this planet.

Handling religion with kid gloves does tremendous harm. We’re going to explore how religion is used to cover up outrageous abuses, and how we can curb the excesses of religious groups and help people escape their clutches. But we’re not going to forget that religion doesn’t have a monopoly on evil doings, either.

I am, of course, an intersectional feminist and a social justice warrior. So you can bet we’ll be taking on sexism, racism, homophobia, and all sorts of other bigotries. We’ll be tackling a wide variety of inequalities, and exploding lies that tell us that inequality is sadly inevitable and intractable. We’ll see that women, people of color, and queer and trans folks have always been leaders and fighters, innovators and scientists, despite white straight cis men’s determined efforts to pretend otherwise.

We no longer need to conform to the myths that harm us.

Part of being an Unconformist is knowing that trans women are women (ditto for trans men being men, and nonbinary or gender fluid being totally valid choices), black lives matter, autism doesn’t need to be cured, disability is too often caused by failure to accommodate difference, inequality isn’t innate, religion doesn’t have the monopoly on morality or truth, and resistance isn’t futile, among many other things. We’ll be touching on all of it in time. Even if some of these notions don’t presently strike a chord with you, I hope you’ll listen. It’s important, especially in a time when so many vulnerable people are harmed by toxic beliefs we may not even be aware we’re harboring.

And because it’s important to take a breather from the heavy stuff from time to time, we’ll be doing plenty of fun things, too. We’ll take a look at pretty things. We’ll indulge in cooking and crafts. We’ll even have lots of Geocritters, because using animals to illustrate earth science concepts is a blast.

I know everything’s been rather hard on us lately. But we have each other, and we have the wisdom and knowledge of a lot of good people to draw on, and we have a world worth both saving and savoring.

Let’s start something great.

While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.

Dorothy L. Sayers

*Technically, nonconformity, but this is my blog and we can call it what we want

Welcome to the Unconformity