Heavy Duty Power

Deja vu

2010-02-04T22:51:00.000-08:00

Hey, remember when this happened? Exactly two years later--literally within one week of the precise date--Chloe the codependent German Shepherd, age almost 6, tore the ACL in her other back knee.

Chloe's second staggeringly expensive ACL surgery, this time on her left leg, was a week ago. It means we'll be eating rice and beans for the 8 months it will take us to pay the animal hospital back, of course. They were very strict about the repayment period--they made us leave monthly postdated checks! I didn't know anyone still did that!

Looking on the bright side: um, at least we already had the crate and a toddler-gate to keep her downstairs!

I do try to keep my chin up, anyway, so that I don't obsess about the budget. I try not to feel incredibly guilty for spending literally my last dimes on my dog's bionic knee instead of, you know, donations to Haiti relief or something more imperative. The thought does cross my mind--isn't this an awfully selfish, first-world kind of thing to do, rack up debt and pinch pennies for a pet? A pet that doesn't even lay eggs or give milk, the lazy thing.

It is selfish, really. But then Chloe, lying on the floor next to my feet, rests her head on the arch of my foot and heaves a big sigh as her big brown eyes start to droop closed. And it turns out I'm not sorry to have made that choice, after all.

Elliott Bay Book Company

2009-12-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, on a cloudy Saturday, I was bored and broke and cranky at home. I knew I had only a few hours that afternoon to pull myself out of this funk before the Sunday night blues set in, but I was restless and listless at the same time. "Self," I said, "we need a vacation. We can't afford a vacation, but surely we can do better than this." So I put on a hat and the suede jacket I'd just picked up at the thrift store, a jacket that makes me feel like pretending to be an English professor (I swear I even stand up straighter when I wear it), and headed out like a homing pigeon to a place I could find books.

Back in July, the first leg of Seattle's light rail system started service between downtown and the airport. The Spouse and I had been looking forward to this for years: in 2007 we bought our first house just blocks from one of the light rail stations in south Seattle. For almost 3 years we watched the construction progress, literally right out our front window: the road widened, the lights improved, the tracks laid, the stations built. And now we are lucky enough to be able to stroll to the station and zip away on a light rail train.

I love it because I am fond of trains, of course--but I also love the way it's opened up the city to me a little more. Yes, I could always have chosen to take a bus downtown. But the bus only ran every half an hour, and was notoriously unreliable, and took much longer to run the same distance. Now that the trains are running, I've started making more trips downtown for fun. In particular, when I discovered that Elliott Bay Book Company was only a few blocks from the Pioneer Square station, I started revisiting that grandly cozy bookstore again after years of neglecting it.

So that's where I pointed myself, that gloomy Saturday. I watched Seattle glide by out the enormous window of the light rail car, daydreaming about longer trips and feeling my mood lighten at the thought. When the train plunged into the tunnel below Beacon Hill, I craned my neck to gawk again at the lovely, luminous glass sea creatures suspended above the station platform. I tried to spot new details on the murals along the warehouses along the tracks in the SoDo area. And even the wet walk uphill to the Central library was suddenly just part of the fun, a damp interlude in my miniature getaway.

The library seduced me, as always, to stay longer than I'd intended. I had one book to pick up, but of course I found myself wandering up the book spiral, a scribbled list of Dewey Decimal numbers in hand. John Barry's The Great Influenza was checked in, and I pounced on it. One of Cherie Priest's earlier books was available, too. And I made a side trip to the children's section for a book by Sylvia Cassedy, having just re-read my copy of her book Behind the Attic Wall for the first time since probably 1988. (It's a strangely bizarre, otherwordly, sad story; I had forgotten everything except the sadness, which is what vaguely kept me from picking it up again, I think. I'm glad I held onto it all these years, anyway.)

Books safely in backpack, I strode back down the hill toward Pioneer Square, where I ducked into the Cherry Street Coffee House to use up the balance on a gift card. It was my first time at that location, and the cozy basement sitting room proved to be the perfect accompaniment to my rainy day excursion. I ordered my coffee and sat in the dim, quiet downstairs across from the fireplace, reading about influenza, with only a few people scattered at other tables.

When my coffee was gone, it was time to visit my final destination before I took a train back south. Elliott Bay Book Company's warmth welcomed me in from the drizzle, and I browsed happily there for awhile, heedless of the time--the true mark of a vacation. I ended up with an updated day planner for 2010, a postcard for a friend who moved away a few years ago, and a far more contented outlook than I'd started the day with.

I learned today that the bookstore is moving from their Pioneer Square location to Capitol Hill early next year, citing their declining business in the last few years. Though I'm glad they're only moving and not closing, I have to admit to a twinge of disappointment at losing such a convenient and delightful "vacation" destination of the last few months. I'm sure I'll still make the trip to their new location whenever I can--and I hope lots more people can spend lots more money there than I can afford to. But I'll always harbor the fond memory of my desperate in-town Saturday excursions to EBBC these last few months, and the way my visits there always seemed to put my head back on correctly again. Here's to a few more of those before the move--and to many, many more years of EBBC, wherever in Seattle they may go.

Day: late. Dollar: short.

2009-12-08T21:10:00.000-08:00

Yes, a day late and (always) a dollar short, as me auld dad always says.

Nevertheless, here I am for another Holidailies!

It's been bitterly cold in Seattle this week. Didn't get above freezing today, nor (I think) yesterday, and they say it'll be down to 16 degrees tonight. Even on nights like these in our old house, the single overworked gas furnace in the hallway is turned down low, because otherwise I feel like we're burning cash all through the night. We have a down comforter and two warm bodies, and the Scrooge McDuck in my brain says that's all we should need to survive the night. To be fair, it is generally more than warm enough that way. It does make getting out of the cozy bed and stepping out onto the cold hardwood the next morning an exercise in gumption, though.

The Spouse and I try to be firm about keeping the dog off the bed, but let me tell you, on these cold nights when we first slip into bed, the sheets still cold, we urge her up onto the bed to help warm us up. That's right: she's our own personal furnace.

Recent Fantasies

2009-05-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

1. Deserts.
2. Disappearance.
3. Defection.
4. Disengagement.
5. Debuts.
6. Deliverance.

Grace in small things: ten

2009-02-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

1. Two-stamp Tuesdays at Fuel Coffee.
2. Co-workers who treat me like a competent, knowledgeable professional.
3. Sleet pellets bouncing off the ground in a quiet susurration.
4. Tight-clenched prickly pine cones which, when brought into a warm office, unfurl and collapse to spill into individual seeds across a windowsill.
5. Wool yarn that allows itself to be spit-felt together, eliminating all but two loose ends to be woven in at the end of a large project.

Grace in small things: nine

2009-02-04T20:44:00.000-08:00

1. Eating beef tacos with onions and cilantro from the neighborhood taco bus.
2. Uprooting ridiculously long ivy vines at a neglected edge of the house.
3. Finding, beneath the ivy, an ancient rotting wooden planter in which a rose bush is still stubbornly growing.
4. Learning (slowly, slowly learning) how to knit an entrelac headband.
5. Having paid sick leave available so I could give in to my sore throat, call in sick, and sleep an extra three hours this morning.
6. (Bonus grace!) Remembering how to code the break at the end of each list item so the list looks right!

Grace in Small Things: eight

2009-01-26T22:01:00.000-08:00

1. Tealights burning inside large vases.
2. The hollow echo that the heels of my brand-new thrift store shoes made as I passed an open garage on my walk at lunchtime today.
3. A wild romp outside on the hill with Chloe the codependent German Shepherd as the sun set on this cold day.
4. The hearty scent of cooked garlic and onions and spices that was drifting out of a neighbor's house as Chloe and I walked home from our romp.
5. Stovetop stuffing.

Grace in Small Things: seven

2009-01-21T14:45:00.001-08:00

1. Sasha Obama's playful thumbs-up to Barack Obama after he was sworn in as the President of the United States yesterday.*
2. The Q-size crochet hook that is allowing me to crochet a blanket within a week's time, using yarn I've had on hand for about 5 years.
3. The sensation of flying while looking out from the I-5 bridge over the thick fog that blanketed Seattle on Sunday.
4. Tiny grey-green crabs scattering for cover on a rocky beach when their sheltering boulder was turned over.
5. A productive trip to Value Village on Saturday which resulted in new shoes, a beautiful handbag, small decorative shelves, and ten brand-new picture frames.

*I wanted to list "President Barack Obama," but let's be honest: that's no small thing. It's the most incredible moment of grace in politics in my adult life, if not my lifetime. Let all those who do justice and love mercy say "Amen!"

If those two can do it...

2009-01-07T22:19:00.001-08:00

Oh, this is adorable. I am shamelessly going to post it here for my own future reference.

2008 Books

2009-01-07T20:38:00.000-08:00

I seem to have fallen dismayingly short of reading 50 books in 2008, although I have the nagging feeling that I read a book or two during the summer that I forgot to document. (This always seems to happen...ah well.) Plus, not everything that I re-read is on this list--just Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, because it took me so long to get through it again. Still, I read (and re-read) some excellent books last year.

Favorites: Neverwhere, Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders series, Whipping Girl, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Un Lun Dun (which I loved utterly, and which made me want to get back into good young adult fiction--and then the excellent The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian redoubled that desire), and Empire Falls, which technically bridged the gap into 2009. The Other Boleyn Girl was on my grandma's bookshelf; I read it over a couple of days while I was staying with her before Christmas, and liked it more than I expected to, enough that I would check out Philippa Gregory's other books too.

1. Neverwhere
2. The Subtle Knife [re-read]
3. The Ladies of Grace Adieu
4. Shade's Children
5. Harpy's Flight
6. Shaman's Crossing
7. Forest Mage
8. Pride and Prejudice
9. Ship of Magic
10. Solstice Wood
11. Onion Girl
12. Mad Ship
13. Ship of Destiny
14. Renegade's Magic
15. The Dragonbone Chair
16. The Stone of Farewell
17. To Green Angel Tower
18. The Gypsy
19. Shapechangers
20. The Song of Homana
21. Shadowmarch
22. A Game of Thrones
23. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
24. Sophie's World
25. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
26. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell [re-read]
27. Un Lun Dun
28. What is the What
29. She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders
30. Small Wonder
31. Magic Hour
32. The Other Boleyn Girl
33. Empire Falls
34. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Grace in small and big things

2009-01-06T19:18:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday morning was a bummer. I had something that needed to be sent overnight to Olympia. After some minor adventures getting the thing prepared in the first place, I went up to the postal shop near work. Their sign said they open at 9, but their door was still locked at 9:10, so I gave up and drove to the post office.

Halfway through my wait in line, it occurred to me that I needed a copy of the document before I sent it. I crossed my fingers that the post office would make a copy for me, and stayed in line. When after a long wait I reached the counter, I asked hopefully. Would the post office make a copy for me? No, most certainly not.

I trekked out and retraced my drive back to the postal shop. No parking, though. I drove in an ever-wider circle around nearby blocks, finally finding an open spot several blocks away. The slush still frozen on the sidewalks made for a tedious struggle back to the postal shop.

Now open (and with a copy machine too), the shop took care of my petty mailing needs at last, an hour after I'd set out on what I supposed would be a quick errand.

Photocopy in hand, I tucked my wallet into the pocket of my jacket and headed back toward the car. About halfway back, I stuck my hand in my coat pocket to get my keys. There were the keys, but wait--where was the wallet?

I swore in a whisper for some reason and turned to retrace my steps at a run, scanning the ground for my wallet. It had just been in my hand mere moments before; it must have fallen out of my pocket when I shoved it in. Surely there hadn't been time for anyone to snatch it--

"Wait!" a woman's voice jerked my attention up. She stooped over at the intersection half a block ahead of me, where I had just been. "You dropped this!" Straightening up, she held up her coffee cup in one hand, my wallet in the other.

I thanked her with passionate relief. "I saw you through the window of the coffee shop," she said, "and I thought, 'What's that she just dropped?' So I just came running out after you."

After thanking her again, I started back for the car, wallet securely in hand. When I got there, while I was I unlocked the door a car horn beeped nearby. "Ma'am! Ma'am!" a woman passenger called from a passing vehicle, the driver slowing to a stop just behind me. "Did you get the thing you dropped back there?" she asked with great concern. I assured her that I had, and thanked her for checking.

She waved, satisfied, and her car pulled away.

I can be a little cynical about people. To have two separate folks running after me to reunite me with my dropped wallet, on a day otherwise full of frustration, was a nice bit of evidence for the way it's also possible for us to all look out for each other.

Grace in small things: six

2009-01-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

1. The sleek cleanliness of a wooden floor in the ten minutes between the time it's cleaned and the time someone tracks in a new smattering of fir needles.

2. The single snowflake that fell on my cheek last night, which made me catch my breath and hold very still as if it might flit away like a butterfly.

3. The Mae Ploy yellow curry paste I used for the first time last night to make a perfect, delicious meal of vegetables in yellow curry coconut sauce over rice.

4. The seemingly everlasting nature of the enormous tin of cocoa I bought at Costco last year.

5. The silkiness of the cowl (my first) I finished knitting on Saturday. I am still unconvinced of the utility of a cowl / neckwarmer, but this particular garment is certainly delicious against my skin.

Brackets

2009-01-04T22:05:00.000-08:00

This is weird: for two years in a row, now, I have both put up Christmas decorations and taken them back down again on snowy days. I've only lived here for a dozen years, but I feel like this is unusual. OR! Maybe it's like I always suspected, and Ballard's geography was cheating me out of snow all those winters.

This evening I packed away the ornaments and the lights as the snow began to fall again. This snowfall isn't expected to last like the last one--it's supposed to turn to rain by midnight or so--but we have a solid 2 inches on the ground now at 10:00. I'm just happy to see it, however short-lived it may be. I love watching the layer of white slowly sift in over the mud. The three of us took a little family walk down the block, Chloe snorfling about at the end of her leash. Then I took her alone up Chief Sealth Trail a ways, enjoying the way the snow-covered fields reflect so much light that the whole trail is visible, dusk-like.

Welcome 2009

2009-01-01T22:32:00.000-08:00

I have a good feeling about this year. There's nothing concrete to substantiate this optimism, really (aside from the enormous relief and excitement I feel about the new President taking office on January 20th). In fact I'll be celebrating my thirtieth birthday this spring, and that's stereotypically one of those somewhat dreaded benchmarks--crossing over from the footloose and carefree twenties, right?

But everyone I know who is older than 30, without exception, has assured me that they enjoy their 30's more than their 20's. And those that are older than 40 are adamant that their 40's are better than either. And those above 50 say something similar about that decade, so...well. Apparently my friends and loved ones are all either sunny optimists, or chronic liars.

Anyway, I'm not dreading it. And I'm looking forward to 2009. I kicked it off by celebrating with some folks who were once new acquaintances, and are more and more becoming old friends. 2009 rang in with dancing and hugging, fireworks and champagne in the rain. May new old friends, and old new friends, never be forgotten; may the good cheer that began 2009 seep down through all the months ahead.

Really, I have a good feeling about this year.

Grace in small things: five

2008-12-29T22:31:00.000-08:00

1. Being grown-up enough to initiate an amicable parting from the four noisy employees of [nameless-large-environmental-organization] who sat behind me for the 9 hours it took my Amtrak train to get from Seattle to Portland on December 20th.

2. Finding a box full of free cheese-and-cracker packets in the bistro car of my Amtrak train to stave off hunger during the 9 hours my train sat motionless, locked, and apparently abandoned at the Portland station on the night of December 20th.

3. Encountering a sympathetic Amtrak bistro car steward who gave passengers free hot cocoa on the morning of December 21st (since I had only brought enough cash to pay for meals during a 7-hour trip, not one three times that long).

4. Snickering at the snarky commentary made by the two teenaged girls across the aisle from me during our epic 21-hour train ride from Seattle to Eugene.

5. Realizing that even having an Amtrak train delayed by 14 hours and abandoned by all Amtrak staff overnight is preferable to being stuck in an airport for several days.

O Tannenbaum

2008-12-20T09:18:00.000-08:00

Thursday I mentioned that I had a chance to put up the Christmas "tree" I created last year.

When I was growing up, one of our holiday traditions was a growing collection of ornaments for each of us kids. Every Christmas we would get an ornament or two from our parents and grandparents. Usually our name and the year got written or taped somewhere hidden on each ornament. Our ornaments were stored with all of the other Christmas decorations in a grand old wooden chest, painted green, which had been in the family for two or three generations. The chest was stored away in my parents' bedroom through the rest of the year, only brought out when it was time to decorate the Christmas tree.

This ornament always makes me think of my sister. Oddly, the smaller girl's smile reminds me of my mom's.

I can still recall the exact piney scent that wafted out when the chest was opened each December, the slightly musty smell of old tinsel and holiday candles and garlands. My mom and dad would untangle the knotted strands of Christmas lights and wind them carefully around the tree. Mom always made sure the last light on the strand got tucked into the hand of the angel that topped the tree, so that light had to be yellow or white for extra realism.

This is one of my oldest ornaments, a figurine from the Nutcracker from long before I ever saw the Nutcracker ballet.

Finally, when the lights were arranged evenly, the ornamentation could begin. Mom would open tiny boxes and unwind tissue paper to reveal the little treasures we only saw this one month per year. We oohed as each familiar ornament was presented, as delighted as if they were brand new.

The three of us had to take turns hanging our ornaments, although as the eldest I had the advantage of a slightly larger collection. A lot of thought had to go into tree placement: the sturdiest twigs should be saved for the heaviest ornaments, but who could remember whether there were more heavy ornaments to come? My sister and I had several nearly identical ornaments, and those had to be spaced far apart on the tree for visual variety. And although nobody could really see the back of the tree, some things still had to be hung there so the tree didn't look lopsided.

A middle-school favorite, this elaborate tiny clock was a gift from my Gran.

When I graduated from high school, my ornaments remained at my parents' house, and the same ritual was repeated every year when I went home for Christmas. When I finished college, though, it was deemed time that I take my ornaments for my own house. My sister took hers shortly thereafter when she got married, and my brother followed suit a few years later.

This is another of the oldest ornaments in my collection. I love these older wooden ones.

Now each winter when I take them out and hang my ornaments, alone, I am a little overwhelmed with the sense of glad nostalgia that wafts out of the box with them. These are some of the few things that I have known my entire life. Bringing them out of their tissue-paper wrappings and boxes is like greeting old friends. I can't decorate my own "tree" without hearing echoes of small squabbles with my sister and brother, seeing little ghosts reverently placing their pretties on a tree, and smelling that musty, piney old chest. It's honestly the only time that I ever miss being a kid, lost in the annual excitement of decorating for Christmas.

Christmas lights on the windowsill with an unusual Seattle snowfall in the background outside.

Open Letter Without Apology

2008-12-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

To the woman I bumped into downtown this evening around 7:15, who gasped in audible terror at my touch:

I had been running for two blocks when my path crossed yours, my friend. You couldn't have known, but I had stood outside waiting for a bus for an hour and a half earlier in the afternoon. My toes had gone numb, my fingers were cold even inside their mittens, and my nose had nearly developed its own tiny icicle. When I left work this evening I was dreading the chance of repeating the experience to get back home, so when I saw my bus pulling away just as I turned the corner to the bus stop, I could not allow it to escape me.

I trotted awkwardly down the iced-over sidewalk after the departing bus. The right combination of traffic lights would let me catch the bus at its next stop in three blocks. The bus was still in view, so I ran across the first cross street as my pedestrian signal changed. Clumsily, I galloped on down 3rd. Most people kept to the ice-free sidewalk next to the buildings, so I veered precariously onto the icy outer walkway several times to pass other pedestrians. Wheezing in the cold air, I crossed the second cross street with time to spare. My bus was stopped at the end of the block, and I did my best to speed up.

It was at that moment, my friend, that you and your male companion ambled out onto the sidewalk. You were strolling slowly, your well-layered arms sticking out at angles, much like those of the little brother in the movie A Christmas Story. My bus was still stopped, but its line of boarders was shrinking. You and your companion spread out to meander past other folks. A small gap between you and another walker presented itself. I darted through, and I bumped your elbow as I did so.

You sucked in air like a drowning person, like somebody in a bus about to crash through a guardrail onto a freeway below, like a seer of ghosts and demons and woe. Your enormous lungs seemed capable of inhaling more air than the cold city contained in all its core. Perhaps you were terrified, dear lady, of the clear threat I presented in my slacks and wool jacket. I do stand an imposing five-foot-six, while you were but a diminutive five-foot-five, so I understand your fright at my looming height. Or maybe you saw only the paper bag in my hand, full of leftover snacks, and panicked at the thought that I might bludgeon you to death with a Wheat Thin and a cookie.

In any case, your desperate gasp lasted so long you may not have heard me cry, "Excuse me!" as I passed. But in case you missed what followed, I want you to know this: with barely a second to spare, I caught up to my bus. I boarded and sat wheezing, my lungs aching from the cold. Oh, my voluminously-lunged friend, my haste in our encounter had rewarded my joints with a blessed reprieve from another long wait in the cold.

And so you see why I am not even slightly sorry for bumping into your own elbow joint in order to do so. Your overly dramatic inhalation was wholly without result. I am free of remorse, my friend. Free of remorse--and warm.

Ta, and happy holidays,

Thel

Snow day

2008-12-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

I went to bed last night cynical. Seattle had sat in the hole of the "snow doughnut" all day yesterday, and I tried not to believe the forecasters' insistence that snow would arrive in town overnight.

This morning I woke up before the alarm when Chloe the timid German Shepherd started pacing in agitation, perhaps because of the brief loud thunder that hadn't awakened me. As we woke up, Mr. Thel looked out the window and gasped. "Oh wow!"

I squinted suspiciously. "You're full of it." I peeked through the blinds and hey, look at that white stuff!

My supervisor called at 6:15 to notify me that our office would be closed today, so I had a lovely unexpected day off to finally put up my "tree." It was the perfect gift.

Chloe hates thunder, but loves the snow.

Grace in small things: four

2008-12-17T22:25:00.001-08:00

1. Chapstick.

2. Conversations with unexpectedly kind people on the phone.

3. A delicious free lunch at work.

4. Free delicious leftovers from a lunch at work.

5. A fresh haircut.

Grace in small things: three

2008-12-15T15:10:00.000-08:00

1. Being able to breathe through my nose.

2. The man with white hair who set up his battered upright piano at a corner outside Pike Place Market and plunked merrily away in the cold on Saturday afternoon.

3. The puppylike glee which led Chloe to sprint and roll around in the field next to Chief Sealth Trail yesterday morning, a manic black blur against the bright white snow.

4. Sky-blue hand-knitted mittens.

5. Anticipating the train trip to Oregon on Saturday. Hooray for trains!

Seattle snow adventures

2008-12-14T22:22:00.000-08:00

We went to bed last night while the snow was still falling thick outside--huge snowflakes illuminated in the glow of the streetlight, so many of them blowing sideways in the wind that we could hardly see the houses across MLK. When we awoke this morning, we had an inch or so of snow on our block, and the sheet of ice coating our street gleamed.

It's not much by the standards of many wintry locales, but for Seattle it was stupendous. Any little thing seems more glorious, in this Pacific Northwest native's experience, when it takes place against an icy, snowy backdrop. So today I had two "adventures" in the snow:

1. Having run out of time during our busy day yesterday, this morning my best-beloved and I still had some basic grocery needs. Eyeing the slick little hill of our street, we opted to walk to the grocery store, about a mile and a half round trip. We each wore a little backpack for hauling home our supplies. Sidewalks proved treacherous for most of the way, so we tramped along their margins in the snow where footing was more secure. Mittens and scarves proved useful, and wearing my bicycling headband under my knit cap helped keep my ears safe from the bitter wind that was blowing. We were out for about an hour in the cold, and although it was just a little jaunt, the setting made it feel like a true expedition.

2. Coming home from work tonight I had two bus routes to choose from. I hopped on the first one that came along, forgetting that it was probably rerouted at the hill behind my house. Sure enough, the bus stopped short of its descent back into the valley. "This is it," the driver said; "they aren't sending us down that hill."

We last three passengers disembarked and began trudging down the steep-ish hill. The roadway was clear and dry, while the sidewalk was frozen over; keeping an eye out for cars, I opted to walk in the street instead of skidding down the sidewalk. The newly waning moon loomed in the clear sky above us. We paused to let a couple of police cars go wailing and blazing up the hill past us to calls unknown.

We all had made it about two blocks down the hill when we saw a different bus heading up our very hill. I grumbled under my breath about the apparent contradiction between drivers' attitudes, but I should have had more faith. The next thing I knew, the bus we had just left made the turn and headed downhill after us.

When she caught up to us, she stopped and opened the door to let us back on. "I guess we can make it down after all!" she said. "They told me before just to stop at Cloverdale, but I saw that other bus coming up and I went, 'All right, I'm going to go get my people.'" Chains rattling all the way, the bus inched down the hill. The lovely driver let me off just a block from home, and I walked back to coziness and warm food waiting.

Grace

2008-12-13T23:30:00.000-08:00

Tonight we went to a friend's dinner party in Tacoma. There was much laughter and easy conversation with friends and brand-new acquaintances. As the twelve of us sat around the dinner table eating dessert, I looked at the faces around me, at these women whose decisions to live their lives with authenticity have taken more courage and grace than I can imagine or summon. These are some of my heroines, I realized: women who have been through the wringer and faced uncountable experiences of ugliness and discrimination, and who yet are able to be present with grace and joy, laughing and telling stories over an apple tart.

After dinner we drove home through the falling snow that was just beginning to accumulate on the grass and trees, and I hoped I could look back someday and be satisfied that I had lived my life with that kind of grace and bravery--to be ready to name hatred for what it is when I see it; to be able to know and manifest my true, core self; to be willing to laugh as heartily as ever at the end of any day.

Later we let Chloe out to snuffle, surprised, in the skiff of snow that had gathered in the yard. We watched the snow fall fast and heavy outside. The arctic chill was beginning to deepen, but we turned up the furnace and put an extra blanket on the bed. Maybe if I practice meeting this prosaic challenge with grace and good cheer, it will become easier to do the same with more serious challenges.

Grace in small things: Two

2008-12-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

1. Once again being able to toss my heaviest hand-knit scarf around my neck.

2. Lightly scented candles.

3. Reconnecting with long-estranged friends over birthday drinks.

4. Cilantro chive yogurt dip.

5. Finding, deep in a pocket of my backpack, the tiny Obama flag that adorned one of the celebratory mini-muffins I ate on election night.

Grace in small things: One

2008-12-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

Because I have been excreting truly impressive quantities of snot from my nose, and working two jobs, and only being at home between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., I haven't been a consistent Holidailies contributor this year. Still, I remain determined to participate!

Perhaps, if nothing else, I can join Schmutzie in recognizing the grace in small things in my life during a season of challenges.

1. Coming home late from a long day working two jobs to find fresh, hot, homemade chicken noodle soup ready.

2. A large German Shepherd resting her triangle head on my foot.

3. The bright red pocket-sized Moleskine 2009 weekly calendar that I bought last month is already improving my organizational skills.

4. The plastic Avon figurines--Scamper Lily, Blossom, and Daisy Dreamer--that my siblings and I received for presents long ago. They each stood on a leaf-shaped base, which was perfect for tucking between your index and middle finger while you grasped a My Little Pony in the rest of your hand, so the doll could stand gracefully atop the horse while you galloped them through the wilderness of the back hallway.

5. The childlike quiver of anticipation I get at the merest possibility of lowland snow.

Day 2

2008-12-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

I was looking forward to Holidailies. I'm working two jobs right now and only home for an hour in the evenings, but I figured that would just hone my speedy stream-of-consciousness writing. Everybody likes poorly constructed navel-gazing at the holidays, right? Plus, I rationalized, at least on the weekends I could construct nice long posts.

Then I woke up yesterday morning with what felt like a tennis ball in my throat. A tennis ball covered in velcro. And phlegm. I managed, barely, to get out of the house for a little bit of gift shopping, and then I came home and pretty much collapsed for the day. I did a bit of knitting, but after an hour or so even that took too much effort.

Today was pretty much the same way: all couch and blanket and whimpering. Man, I hate cold season. I'd had grand plans of putting up the Christmas "tree" and hanging ornaments this weekend. I suppose they can wait until next weekend.

Since this is such a lame non-entry, here, have a picture from happier, healthier times. This was taken on one of our recent Port Angeles trips.

Reflections

2008-12-05T22:35:00.000-08:00

Today at work I was putting together a project using artwork made by children. Children who had used a lot of glitter. I'd been working on it for half an hour or so when my co-worker stopped by with a question about a different task. I stepped away from the project to answer her, pontificating on the topic for a few moments. "So I think it should work out fairly well," I concluded.

She nodded gravely and said, "Yes, I think you're right, Glitter Bear."

So I guessed a lot of glitter had transferred from the artwork to, well, all over myself. This was confirmed later when another friend asked to use my cheek as a mirror so she could touch up her lipstick. I don't know, is that better or worse than surreptitiously checking yourself out in somebody's glasses while they talk to you about TPS reports?

When I was a kid there was this area in our house, right off the living room, which served as my dad's den. He had his comfy chair in there, and the record player and stereo and speakers, and cupboards full of tools and things. The wall with the cupboards had this huge mirror that ran all along the wall between the lower and upper cabinets. For some reason my sister and I had the bad habit of focusing on the reflection of my dad in that mirror when we were talking to him, instead of looking directly at him. Looking back, this seems odd (and also, ooo, kind of foreshadowing of my later tendency to prefer email and internet interaction over face-to-face relationships!), but at the time we seemed unable to break ourselves of the habit, no matter how much it irritated my dad.

And it irritated him endlessly. I'd go in to ask him a question about homework, and as he started to explain the difference between the distributive property and the commutative property of numbers I'd watch him and pay close attention at first. But then, irresistibly, my gaze would drift over to watch the reflection of my dad explaining the math properties instead. As soon as he noticed, he'd launch into his frustrated rant. "You look people in the eye when they're talking to you! I swear I'm gonna get a hammer and smash that goddam mirror if you kids don't stop staring at it all the time!"

You know, that rant was always much more interesting the way it was delivered by my dad's reflection in the mirror. I could have watched that distant red-faced image wave its arms for hours.

Thoughts for my skeptical friends

2008-11-10T21:22:00.000-08:00

The only reason to be disappointed that a president is not a perfectly flawless messianic figure is if you originally held the mistaken belief that any president could ever be a perfectly flawless messianic figure.

The only reason to remind me that a president will not be a perfectly flawless messianic figure is if you think I originally held the mistaken belief that any president could ever be a perfectly flawless messianic figure. You needn't, for I didn't.

If we both accept the fact that no president ever could be a perfectly flawless messianic figure, it makes little sense to express disappointment or to "temper your enthusiasm" based on the insufficiently leftist leanings of, say, a particular president-elect. Knowing that no real president can fully embody your platonic ideal, you know that yours will always be the task of an activist. You will always be working to push and pull and insist and cajole the powers-that-be into making the decisions and taking the actions that bring the world closer to your vision. This is the case whether the president were a moderate Democrat or a radical Socialist.

This is not a bad thing! This is forever our task and our fight and our very mission in life. Why look so disappointed when you say, "We'll just have to keep holding his feet to the fire?" If that's our task in any case, why not take a moment to rejoice that the feet will now belong to someone more thoughtful, gracious, and sincere than his predecessor? If our task will never be done, we rejoice that for a moment that parts of it may become a bit less arduous. We rejoice that the feet belong to someone who at least speaks to ideals of oneness and equality. We rejoice that the feet belong to someone who finds it important to make his core message the notion that there is now no male nor female, slave nor free, gay nor straight, red nor blue...

Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe, like you said, you've just had your heart broken too many times. You've watched too many charismatic leaders killed or co-opted, and you can't muster up the excitement one more time. From your perspective, after many broken love affairs, we revelers seem foolish and naive, entirely too optimistic and unaware of the hard work that lies ahead of us. But warnings from elders about broken hearts has never stopped young people from falling in love. This is our first real taste of it, and it's glorious. We're excited by these heady beginnings and these wonderful new feelings, true, but we're also energized by the sense of potential ahead of us. We feel like nothing is impossible; we feel willing to pour our lives into the work our love demands. So we have laughed, and cried, and danced, and drawn accusations of messianic fervor when--for almost the first time in our lives--we have refused a sneering cynicism as our first resort.

We're no dummies, really. This love will be hard work. We know. But we want to do the hard work, because love is also beautiful and delicious and crazy and good.

Remember?

Two down

2008-09-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

On August 4th I met with an otolaryngologist to discuss the excision of the melanoma on my ear, and to discuss doing a sentinel lymph node biopsy to find out whether the cancer had yet spread beyond my ear. Dr. H surprised me by saying it didn't matter, clinically speaking, whether we did the SLN biopsy or not. He said if the melanoma had already spread beyond my ear, it wouldn't matter whether they found out immediately by doing the biopsy, or whether they found out in several months when the cancer would have grown enough to enlarge my lymph nodes and be found non-surgically. The survival statistics, he said, are the same.

"Really, it's completely up to you," he said. "Are you a person of faith?"

I may be a person of some faith, but I didn't feel calm about just waiting around for my lymph nodes to start bulging, so I scheduled the surgery anyway. I had it on August 20th. They removed a good chunk of my ear (repairing it to remain ear-shaped, though slightly smaller) and three nodes from my neck.

That was a Wednesday. At Dr. H's suggestion, I had taken the rest of the week off work to recover. Fortunately, this time the recovery was a breeze. They sent me home with codeine, and I faithfully took the recommended dosage all day Wednesday and into Thursday, but by midday Thursday I realized I wasn't feeling any discomfort at all, and stopped taking it. The incisions on my neck were slightly sore, but nothing like last time. So on Friday Mr. Thel and the doggie and I took a little drive down to the Green River Gorge just to get out of the house and see something pretty--and to try to take my mind off the fretting.

After a very long weekend of trying unsuccessfully not to worry, I got a lovely little pathology report emailed to me on Monday, August 25th, with the words "No evidence of malignancy" repeated three times, once for each sample.

There's been a lot of celebrating in the weeks since then.

Dr. H was exuberant in the follow-up appointment I had with him on the 26th. He said there was "virtually no chance" of it being a false negative result, based on their testing technique and the fact that they biopsied three separate lymph nodes. I'll have to go see him every 8 weeks for a year to monitor the site on my ear. He said, "We don't have any way to know whether this was kind of a random event, or whether this is your body's way of telling you that you've reached your limit of sun exposure, so I'd recommend getting a wide-brimmed hat and wearing it." Done. And I now carry a little tube of sunscreen with me everywhere I go, and am much more diligent about wearing it.

But all in all, that was pretty much the best outcome I could have hoped for, once diagnosed. As far as we know, I'm now in remission from melanoma.

Praise be.

Now they tell me!

2008-08-11T07:59:00.001-07:00

Braggy Blogger

2008-08-07T12:40:00.000-07:00

As of today, I've ridden my bicycle over 500 miles in the last 8 weeks. For some cyclists, that wouldn't be much of a milestone. For me, it's pretty darn cool. I've noticed that the same hills whose slopes used to make me want to vomit, fall over, and cry (Beacon Hill, Jackson, MLK, I'm looking at you) aren't the obstacles they used to be.

In fact, these days I tend to prefer riding up over Beacon Hill to travel to and from work: the streets are wider, and the views are enough to make me forget all about my sweat and toil. Every time I cross the Jose Rizal Bridge and see downtown spread out below me, Elliott Bay and the Olympics in the distance, or cruise south down the Chief Sealth Trail and gawk at the panorama of Mount Rainier and Lake Washington, I fall in love with Seattle a little bit more.

(The steep streets behind Interlaken Park, among others, continue to make me want to vomit, fall over, and cry, so I still have plenty of room for improvement.)

Ride Civil

2008-08-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

I like this. Good job, Bike Hugger!

The one that changes everything, in which nothing really changes

2008-07-28T21:04:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in January that 2008 would be my tenth year free of cancer, although I then spectacularly neglected to share here the process of revisiting that ten-years-old experience. Honestly, I didn't even get around to reading all of my journals from that year. As the 10th anniversary of my final radiation treatment rolled around on July 17th, I began to feel a bit remiss for not better celebrating my remission. (That's not strictly true: I didn't know the exact date of my final treatment until I looked it up just now. I just knew it was toward the end of July.)

Now, though, I'm kind of glad I didn't already spend the first half of this year thinking about cancer.

Last Thursday I went in to have a dermatologist examine a suspicious mole on the tip of my right ear. She took a punch biopsy of the mole for testing, leaving me with two stitches. The dermatologist and her nurse both independently assured me that although I'd have a small notch in my ear, they'd do everything they could to minimize scarring. I appreciated their concern, but I think the existing scars at the base of my neck from my 1997 biopsies will sufficiently attract attention from any wee divot on my ear.

This morning the dermatologist called me to pass along the unfortunate news that my mole is a melanoma.

My attempts to talk seriously about this so far feel as awkward as trying to talk around a mouthful of saltines, all dust and garbles. So instead I made jokes about the bandage on my ear last week (I was going to make Mike Tyson jokes until someone brought up Van Gogh, which was much funnier) and poke fun at my own tendency to grin and laugh nervously when I'm given bad news (that dermatologist probably thinks I'm crazy, what with my frequent giggles in our conversation this morning: "I'm sure I'll be looking at your knowledgebase online right away, hee hee!"). A part of me is thoroughly, bitterly amused that I could manage to come down with a totally different kind of cancer after 10 years in remission from the first kind.

I started to write the following sentence: "The truth is, I feel_____." Trouble is, the word to fill in the blank changes at least hourly.

The truth is, I feel confident. Maybe this melanoma hasn't spread beyond the tip of my ear, and a little more surgery can be the end of it.

The truth is, I feel secretive. I don't want to tell anyone at work yet because I don't want people making assumptions about my capabilities.

The truth is, I feel angry. Two different cancers before 30? You're fucking kidding me, right?

The truth is, I feel defective. Nobody else in my immediate family has had cancer. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they haven't, but, you know--I feel like the pimply-faced, crooked-toothed, tumor-ridden, malformed cuckoo in the nest.

The truth is, I feel hopeful. I have good friends, good family, good health (yes, except for the cancer), and a good job with health insurance.

The truth is, I feel balanced.

The truth is, I feel erratic.

My next appointment, to discuss upcoming surgery to remove the rest of the melanoma on my ear and to find and biopsy the sentinel lymph nodes, will be a week from today (sooner if they have a cancellation). Until then, I feel calm.

(Except for when I feel devastated.)

Train Trip 2008, Days 3-5

2008-07-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

Monday, 14 April 2008
I woke up feeling pretty good after my first night on a train. I wouldn’t say I slept well, exactly: between the rocking motion of the train, the cramped quarters that kept making me shift positions, the intermittent snoring of someone nearby, the loud conversation of the elderly gentlemen in front of me (who must also have required a midnight snack or two, as even through my earplugs I kept hearing the brisk crackling of a bag of chips), I don’t think I slept more than an hour or two between interruptions. Still, I did doze off more than I’d feared. I was glad of my extra blanket, too, as the car seemed quite chilly when I woke up during the night. It was good to have a blanket long enough I could tuck my feet beneath it.

I awoke unaided at 6:30 a.m. and watched the snowy pre-dawn outside. We were winding our way among ever-grander snowcapped peaks, along swift rivers with ice still solid along their banks. Spring hadn’t travelled this far north nor this high up yet; between the evergreens, the other branches were bare.

The coach car on the Canadian had two restrooms, one at either end. I pulled clean clothes out of my suitcase and took a few minutes to tiptoe quietly to the larger restroom and freshen up. I was sick of them by the end of three weeks, but moist towelettes were handy and useful in the absence of any shower facilities in coach class.

Back at my seat, I jotted down a few notes and ate some bread and dried peaches for breakfast. As the rest of the car began to stir, I walked to the Dome car, one car back from mine. A popular way to take in the scenery, the Dome car’s seating is up a short flight of stairs to put passengers above the level of the train. The top of the car is enclosed in a long dome of glass; you look out over the tops of the other cars at the passing sights. On the lower level of the same car are several train attendants’ sleeping quarters, the “snack car” (it turned out to be just a tiny cubicle with an attendant inside to dispense candy bars and microwaved food), and, further back, an entertainment area with more tables. At night they showed movies and played Bingo games in that area.

I filled my travel mug with coffee from the snack booth and spent some time in the Dome car watching our progress through the mountains. Late in the morning we wound our way past Mount Robson, the highest point in the Canadian Rockies, and through Yellowhead Pass toward Jasper, Alberta--our first scheduled daytime stop since departing Vancouver over 18 hours before. That was an aspect of Canadian train travel that was totally different from Amtrak travel in the U.S.: the infrequency of scheduled stops. The train schedule marked several dozen smaller towns at which it could stop, but noted that the train would only actually stop there if someone had prearranged to be picked up or dropped off there. Otherwise, there were only about 7 or 8 stops (some of them in the middle of the night) between Vancouver and Toronto. The smokers were undoubtedly miserable.

Our late-morning Jasper stop lasted almost an hour. I think just about veryone piled out of the train to stroll down the main street through town, buying mementos or food. I did a little of both, tossing off a quick postcard to my grandma and visiting a tiny supermarket to supplement my limited food stores with some crackers and sesame snacks. I even had time to walk over to the post office and mail my postcards before our departure.

When we pulled out of Jasper, just past noon, the conductor made an announcement (in English and again in French, of course; I overheard a couple of my new Canadian acquaintances in coach gently poking fun at his French) that we should keep an eye out for wildlife in this area. Sure enough, just a few minutes later he came back on the intercom for a hasty announcement: “Look for the bighorn sheep on the left side of the train!” I stood up and craned my neck in time to glimpse two of them; not five minutes later came another announcement. “Moose on the left!” That one I didn’t see, unfortunately, so I’ve still never seen a moose in the wild. I did spot a beaver on my own later in the trip, though. Plus plenty of Canada geese, which amused me greatly. Something about seeing Canada geese in Canada, after seeing them in Oregon and Washington all my life, struck me as unaccountably funny.

After Jasper the landscape quickly began to change. We traded snowy cliffs and imposing mountains for more boggy marshes and grassy hummocks. Instead of evergreens, we saw mostly barren deciduous trees and red-tinged underbrush. The few evergreens that remained were smaller and scrubbier, too. The terrain kept flattening until we were on the tabletop plains heading toward Edmonton, the horizon level all around. After the evergreens and icy blues of the mountains, the flat plains seemed drab and brown; however, I overheard an Edmontonian passenger remarking to her daughter, "It's certainly gotten a lot more green here while we were gone!"

Edmonton was another smoke stop, and we lingered there half an hour or so while the train took on more water. The station itself is outside of Edmonton proper, alone on the plain away from town. One of the train attendants said the train used to stop right in downtown Edmonton, but that a local university purchased the original station some years ago and the passenger stop had to relocate. It was a fairly drab stop, with not so much as a vending machine or a postcard rack inside the station--a wide opportunity for some local entrepreneur, I'd think. (Train passengers do get tired of the same packaged snack fare after a day or so.)

I splurged on dinner in the dining car that night: halibut baked with wasabi crumb crust, butternut squash soup, vegetables, and a chocolate torte for dessert. It would prove to be the most delicious train meal of the entire trip. The dining car was all snazzy and ornate, too; it really felt a bit like we'd stepped back into the golden era of train travel.

Picture from wikipedia:

Tuesday, 15 April 2008
My second night in coach, I felt like I was starting to get the hang of it. I awoke quite chipper and had another cheerful morning, enlivened by our hour-long stop in Winnipeg that allowed for a stroll over to the Forks Market where I had half a sandwich and a smoothie for lunch. The train conductor announced that Winnipeg is known as the "Chicago of the North;" now, granted, I hadn't yet been to Chicago, but even so, I thought that comparison might be a bit of a stretch.

Once we were on our way again, I decided that afternoons are the hardest part of a 3-day train trip: the scenery gets monotonous, my snacks unappetizing, all my distractions boring. I had anticipated that this leg of the journey would be the least exciting; although it wasn't as bad as I'd feared, the sitting was still starting to wear a bit thin, exacerbated when I started to get an itchy rash on my chest where my underwire rubbed me wrong.

On the other hand, it was nice to have made the acquaintance of a few fellow passengers to chat with during the long afternoons. The gentleman behind me was on his way from Vancouver to Montreal for a job interview that he was deliberately vague about. He talked about the history of Canada to me sometimes as we passed through towns. The woman across from him had done reflexology for a long time and was on her way to see her daughter near Toronto. Of course the two men in the row in front of me kept up their railfan patter, pointing out to each other incomprehensible-to-me data about the train markings and other cars and our own progress. The man across from me never said a word that I could hear, just read and napped.

Tuesday was the day I kept being surprised by the ice and snow in Ontario--especially the ice, floating on rivers and locking up lakes. We passed from flat fields of dark stubbled earth in the morning, to endless icy lakes throughout the afternoon and evening. The pale white branches of the birches (?) clustered among the evergreens really did look ghostly in the flat, cloudy light--more so, somehow, when they were the only thing visible, without hills or anything else visible in the distance to put them into perspective.

Wednesday, 16 April 2008
I awoke at dawn on the final day of my cross-Canada trip (easier to do when you start to nod off at 9 p.m. the night before). later that morning I knew I'd successfully made the transition to a more relaxed, vacationy perception of time when I thought happily to myself, "Wow, only 12 hours to Toronto!"

I treated myself to a second & final dining car meal for breakfast, where I sat with a delightful elderly couple from Virginia who were also in the middle of a North American Rail Pass trip--and bless their hearts, they too were traveling in coach, quite cheerfully. They confessed to being originally from Seattle, and then we discovered that Beverly and I were fellow SPU grads, although she had graduated back when it was still Seattle Pacific College. They were a treat, very interested to hear about my itinerary and happy to share stories from their own journey.

We arrived in Toronto Wednesday night right on time--actually a bit early, just before 8:00 p.m. I marched off confidently on foot to my hostel, the Canadiana Backpackers Inn, and managed to only get slightly lost in the process. The first thing I did after checking in and happily throwing my bags down on a single bed in the 7-woman dorm room I'd selected (for the bargain price of $25) was to rush down the hallway and enjoy a blessed hot shower. I'd suspected that I was starting to smell a bit unpleasant despite my judicious use of wet wipes every day...and it was nice to have clean hair again.

The hostel was shabby but clean and well-run, in the way of the best and most convivial hostels, and 2 of my 3 roommates were already sleeping when I came back in (the 3rd would very quietly and politely slip in around 11). After using up my complimentary 20-minute internet credit to send a quick email out to family and friends, I lay in bed reading for awhile before falling asleep. I still felt the illusion of rocking gently as I lay there, and my second-to-last thought before sleeping was to wonder how long it would take that sensation to wear off after I finished the entire trip.

(My very last thought before sleeping was, "It's so nice to have clean hair again.")

I love the whole world, part 2

2008-07-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of days after I got a little happy-weepy at the Discovery Channel commercial, someone pointed me at the newest "Where The Hell Is Matt" video.

The utterly unprovoked, beautiful goofiness of it builds a little birdhouse in my soul.

The lyrics of the song are based on the Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. Translated into English, the lines from the video, according to someone at Boing Boing and amazon.com, go like this:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

I love the whole world

2008-06-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

We watch the Discovery Channel quite a bit. I'd seen bits of this commercial, and only saw the full thing just this morning. I've never forced a commercial upon you before, but this one is truly lovely. Watch for Stephen Hawking near the end!

I love the mountains
I love the clear blue skies
I love big bridges
I love when great whites fly
I love the whole world
And all its sights and sounds
(Boom De Yada...)

I love the ocean
I love real dirty things
I love to go fast
I love egyptian kings
I love the whole world
and all its craziness
(Boom De Yada...)

I love tornadoes
I love Arachnids
I love hot magma
I love the giant squids
I love the whole world
Its such a brilliant place
(Boom De Yada...)

Train Trip 2008, Day 2: Sunday, 13 April 2008

2008-06-11T21:20:00.001-07:00

Seven years ago, my then-roommate E. and I, being fairly broke after 4 years of college followed by a year of Americorps service, occasionally entertained ourselves by watching free videos she’d check out from the library. I have a vivid memory of the two of us sitting on the floor in her bedroom (the other roommates didn’t want the TV in the living room), watching on her 13-inch TV a documentary program about the cross-Canada rail journey, both of us dreaming of trips we couldn't begin to afford.

When I started planning this train trip in earnest early this year, I wanted to take that cross-Canada journey myself at last--partly out of nostalgia for that post-college year, and partly because it just sounded so epic. I went back and forth about actually doing it, with my limited number of available vacation days: the Canadian train from Vancouver to Toronto only departs three days each week, so getting off the train for sightseeing would require at least a two-night commitment to the place. Still, the North America Rail Pass requires passengers to take at least one trip in Canada and the U.S., so I chose to head eastward on a nonstop trip through Canada. In some ways it felt like my train journey would truly start when that train departed Vancouver at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, beginning my travels into areas of the continent I’d never seen.

I woke up on my own Sunday morning in Vancouver just before 7:00 a.m., thanking my lucky stars for the earplugs that allowed me to sleep soundly despite the pedestrian and vehicle noise outside. (After one night I was already pretty sure those were going to be one of the smartest investments of the trip. Foreshadowing!) I dawdled around and took a leisurely shower before carrying out my plan to breakfast at Granville Island Public Market. It had rained during the night, but the clouds were rolling away as I meandered down the hill.

Browsing through the marketplace was so much fun. I bought this beautiful blueberry scone and a bowl of fresh fruit, and took them outside onto the docklike patio to eat in the sun while savoring the views of the mountains and the water. Every time I visit Vancouver I’m struck anew by how close the mountains seem to the city, how they loom up imposingly just behind the skyscrapers. This scone put those dry bricks from Starbucks to shame. It was crispy on the outside, light and moist on the inside, loaded with plump blueberries that burst sweetly with every nibble. While I sat there lingering over my delicious breakfast, I had the funniest sort of reverse-deja-vu moment. I thought, I am going to look back on this morning--on these very minutes--for the rest of my life. It's going to be one of those experiences I carry joyfully in my heart forever: this perfect scone, these juicy strawberries, the magnificent sensation of freedom and power as I begin a trip I’ve been dreaming of for nearly my entire adult life.

It was good.

Breakfast gone, moment over, I headed back into the market to stock up for the three-day cross-Canada trip ahead of me. Two big apples, a demi-loaf of multi-grain bread still warm from the oven, a small package of creamy Havarti cheese, dried peaches, and small crunchy dried apple bits. I thought it would be nice to have such wholesome treats to munch on for the next few days; I didn’t plan (and couldn't afford) to eat every meal in the dining car, and the “snack car,” at least on the Amtrak trains I was familiar with, were mostly overpriced convenience-store kinds of foods. Believe me, I love me some convenience-store foods, but I didn't want to have nothing else for three days. What can I say: stocking up on bread, cheese, and fruit? Yes, I’m a peasant at heart.

Reluctantly I tore myself away from the market and walked back up to the apartment so I could keep the cheese refrigerated as long as possible before my evening departure. While I walked, I dithered about what to do with the rest of the day. I considered taking a bus out to the Capilano suspension bridge, which I’ve never done; however, I didn’t quite trust my skills and the Vancouver bus system to get me there and back successfully, on a Sunday, in the allotted time. Instead I took the 98 express bus back downtown, figuring I could walk around in Stanley Park at least. Increasingly nervous about the looming fact that I was about to spend three days and nights mostly sitting down during the train trip across the continent, I wanted to try to exhaust myself beforehand as much as possible.

I walked across downtown all the way to Stanley Park before it occurred to me that I could rent a bike and ride the whole loop around the park. Luckily, my handy tourist map led me straight to the Spokes bike rental shop, and for $10 I was soon riding back to the park on a big old hybrid/city bike. It was way heavier and more upright than my bike at home, but its large, springy seat was certainly comfy! I made no effort to hurry, enjoying the views, the stiff ocean breeze, and the warm sun. I also enjoyed the intelligent design of the pathways, with the section for bikes & rollerblades almost always divided by an actual curb or elevation change from the lane for folks on foot. It seemed to flow more smoothly and with less aggravating cross-lane drifting than a place like Greenlake.

Even at my leisurely pace, with a couple of stops for pictures, I was still around the loop in an hour. That was the most enjoyable $10 I spent in Vancouver, for sure. I walked all the way back up to Burrard Street and took the express bus back to my friends' apartment one last time. I showered again, gratefully, well aware that I wouldn’t get another chance until Toronto on Wednesday night at the earliest. I cleaned up, packed up, and trundled myself back out on a different express bus line (bless them!) to connect with the SkyTrain to the train station. As usual, I’d been far more cautious about my timing than necessary, and was an hour and a half early. I wrote some postcards to friends and nieces, used my cheap phone card to check in with Rob, and had a snack.

Still anxious about how unpleasant three nights in coach might be, I asked a ticket agent (a young man whose close-cropped curly hair and toothy smile reminded me of my brother) about the cost to upgrade to a sleeping compartment. With no available discounts (he did try to find me one: “Are you under 25? Are you a student? No? Well, um...are you over 60?”), it would cost $431 to upgrade--significantly lower than the price I’d originally been quoted by phone three months ago, but still too high for my budget. He said it would cost $275 to upgrade for just the final night, which was mightily tempting--all meals are included for the sleeping car passenger. I decided not to do it, though, as he assured me I could always opt to do it later on, if I was having an unbearable time in coach.

By about 4:30 other coach passengers were beginning to line up, so I joined them. I was only about the third person in line; the man in front of me was on his way to Montreal for a job interview, and clued me in that VIA Rail didn’t hand out seat assignments the way Amtrak had-- “It’s just a free-for-all to the train once they start boarding,” he said. This made me twitchy to contemplate, but when they loosed us at 5:00, it ended up being much tamer than his description. They pointed us to different cars, depending on our final destinations, and there were so few of us going all the way to Toronto that the car attendant sorted us out to each have a two-seat row to spread out in. Peter, the man from the line, was sitting behind me; two elderly gentleman had both sides of the row in front of me. They were clearly rail fans who had traveled this route many times; I quickly learned to brazenly eavesdrop on their conversations for tidbits of information about the towns we were passing through.

We began inching our way out of Vancouver at 5:30 p.m., right on time. The train crossed over the Frasier River several times as we headed east, clacking through some lovely little hamlets in flat valleys ringed by mountains. For half an hour or so we took turns passing and being passed by a freight train running on a parallel track, which the two railfans in front of me enjoyed immensely. “Now it’s our turn!” they would crow when our train pulled ahead. "We're winning!"

As the sun set and the light dimmed, I peered out into the gloaming as long as I could at the lovely landscape--small towns tucked at the base of rugged, snowy mountains. Mr. Thel would like this, I kept thinking.

Bedtime wasn’t much of a problem. Our car attendant, Jeanine, came through the car in the evening and distributed not only small airline-style pillows, but also generously-sized blankets, earplugs, and eyeshades. I’d come prepared with all those things, but I still accepted the free supplemental pillow and blanket. The main lights in the car were turned off around 9:00. After visiting the restroom at the end of the car to change into pajamas and brush my teeth, I put my two seats back all the way, pulled up the footrests to make a sort of platform, pulled on my eyeshade and put in the earplugs, and curled up with my blankets in my little nest. Next stop: Jasper, Alberta, tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Mountain Time.

Train Trip 2008, Day 1: Saturday, 12 April 2008

2008-06-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

The day of my departure was Seattle’s sunniest day of the year so far. Mr. Thel drove me to Seattle’s King Street Station (a moody, wintry photo of which had graced the cover of the Amtrak timetable I’d been poring through for the last six months). He sat with me until the train began to board around 7:30 a.m. I found myself getting anxious: not panicky, just suddenly emotional about being apart from my husband for three weeks. We haven’t been apart for that long since we first got together six years ago, after all.

Despite my anxiety, I felt as excited as a little girl on the first day of school as I lined up and shuffled out to the boarding platform. As I exited the station, I looked back to exchange one last cheery wave and blow kisses with Mr. Thel, and set out toward Amtrak’s Cascades train. I had deliberately packed everything into a set of two bags, a suitcase and a backpack which could be combined into one hefty article, so that I would never have to check any baggage and could hop on and off the train without delay. The Cascades is a one-level commuter-type train; I slid my suitcase into a luggage rack at the end of the car and found my assigned window seat on the east side of the train.

We smoothly glided away from the station at 7:40 a.m., exactly on time. As we slid through Seattle and up along the water, I kept wanting to narrate to anyone listening about what we were passing. I was well aware that these would be my last moments of familiarity for three weeks: the Magnolia Bridge, Kiwanis Ravine, the Ballard Locks. Pulling out of the city along the water on that gorgeous morning made me preemptively homesick. Joggers swarmed in Myrtle Edwards Park and Golden Gardens, the Olympic Mountains gleaming brightly across Puget Sound. The hazy gradation of blues westward made me wish I’d postponed the trip a day to enjoy it: the dark, bright water below the hazy blue of the trees on the islands; then the faraway blue of the Olympics and the pale blue of the morning sky. The lovely views of the morning made me speculate a bit smugly to myself that this particular route would be hard to top for beauty.

The train crossed the Canadian border at 10:20, just over two and a half hours from Seattle. The Canadian town of White Rock, barely north of the border, has an adorable waterfront street next to the train tracks, with shops and restaurants and parks, full of people already out picnicking in the sunshine. I spotted a bald eagle just south of town; I’d already seen a blue heron near Everett earlier that morning.

It was about another hour and a half before we arrived in Vancouver, B.C. I got through customs after being asked extensive questions about my itinerary by the female Canadian customs agent. She even wanted to see my reservation for my single night in Toronto later in the week. It was a very short walk from the station across the street to the SkyTrain, which took me into downtown Vancouver for an exchange to a bus to the South Granville neighborhood. A friend’s family keeps an apartment there; they were out of town for the weekend, but they had set me up with a key to stay for Saturday night.

I was truly impressed by the 98 express bus from downtown to their neighborhood. I don’t know if it’s what they’re calling “Bus Rapid Transit” in Seattle, but it was a route with fairly limited stops, and a bus came along at least every 15 minutes throughout the day. It made getting around much less stressful and troublesome. In Vancouver you can also use a credit card to purchase a bus ticket at certain stations, which was very convenient as well.

After finding the apartment and unloading my bags with a sense of accomplishment at having successfully navigated the first of several new-to-me public transportation systems, I went right back downtown to enjoy the afternoon. My friend had given me a pass to the Vancouver Art Gallery, so I went there and spent some time in their exhibit on trees in art. There was one piece, a film loop, displayed alone in a dark room--trees rotating around the viewer with a mix of natural and industrial noise as the soundtrack. I watched it all the way through once or twice. A woman who had just entered turned around and came right back out behind me as I moved on. Unprompted, as we exited she said, “Trees scare me!”

A headache made me head back to the apartment for a nap, after first having some disappointing Chinese food from the restaurant on the corner. There was an extremely inebriated man at the restaurant hassling the waiter. First he was appalled that he was too early to order something for delivery, and tried to convince the waiter that the time was an hour later than it was. Then he got belligerent: “Do you know how to cook?” he demanded. When the waiter affirmed that he could cook, the man persisted, “But do you really know how, or do you just think you do?”

Refreshed and pain-free after a nap at the apartment, I embarked on a walk down to Granville Island and up above the wall along False Creek out to Vanier park. The brisk salt air and the bright setting sun made it a lovely long stroll. Plenty of people were out enjoying the evening along the water on foot and by bicycle, but as I looped back uphill toward the apartment, I was more or less on my own through some quiet neighborhoods. Realizing that sunset was imminent, and not really wanting to end up wandering alone in the dark in unfamiliar areas, I increased my pace, arriving “home” just as the dusk began to deepen, around 8 p.m. I stopped at the corner store just long enough to buy some chocolate milk, went back to the apartment, watched part of a movie on TV, and went to bed.

Happy "June," y'all!

2008-06-10T22:01:00.001-07:00

Contrary to the impression given by this blog for the last two months, I did successfully complete my long-anticipated train trip and survived, without so much as a keychain pepper spray for defense. Three weeks, ten thousand miles, 8 nights in coach, and seven cities later, I still think it was one of the best ideas I've ever had. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

In the meantime, I'm going to do some belated posting of how it all went, expanding on the notes I took throughout the journey. With gas prices climbing daily, I can't help thinking that train travel will begin to seem a more and more appealing alternative to road tripping--and I believe people who do try the train are almost certainly in for a pleasant surprise.

Itinerary

2008-04-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Train: 510 Cascades
Departure: Seattle (Amtrak), Washington
Saturday April 12, 2008 7:40AM
Arrival: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Saturday April 12, 2008 11:35AM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

[I don't have an email confirmation for this leg, since it's on VIA Canada Rail, but the next bit goes like this:
Depart: Vancouver, BC
Sunday April 13, 2008 5:30 PM
Arrive: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday April 16, 2008 (7 PM, I think)]

Train: 7097 Maple Leaf
Departure: Toronto, Ontario
Thursday April 17, 2008 8:30AM
Arrival: Canadian Border New York
Thursday April 17, 2008 11:08AM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 64 Maple Leaf
Departure: Canadian Border New York
Thursday April 17, 2008 11:12AM
Arrival: New York (Penn Station), New York
Thursday April 17, 2008 9:35PM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 160 Regional Service
Departure: New York (Penn Station), New York
Sunday April 20, 2008 9:00AM
Arrival: Boston (South Station), Massachusetts
Sunday April 20, 2008 1:07PM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Bus: 8257 Thruway Bus
Departure: Boston (South Station), Massachusetts
Sunday April 20, 2008 2:15PM
Arrival: Portland, Maine
Sunday April 20, 2008 4:10PM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Thruway Seat

Bus: 8256 Thruway Bus
Departure: Portland, Maine
Tuesday April 22, 2008 5:30PM
Arrival: Boston (South Station), Massachusetts
Tuesday April 22, 2008 7:25PM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Thruway Seat

Train: 67 Regional Service
Departure: Boston (South Station), Massachusetts
Tuesday April 22, 2008 9:45PM
Arrival: New York (Penn Station), New York
Wednesday April 23, 2008 2:01AM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 51 Cardinal
Departure: New York (Penn Station), New York
Wednesday April 23, 2008 6:45AM
Arrival: Chicago (Union Station), Illinois
Thursday April 24, 2008 10:35AM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 59 Cty Of New Orleans
Departure: Chicago (Union Station), Illinois
Thursday April 24, 2008 8:00PM
Arrival: Memphis, Tennessee
Friday April 25, 2008 6:27AM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 58 Cty Of New Orleans
Departure: Memphis, Tennessee
Monday April 28, 2008 10:40PM
Arrival: Chicago (Union Station), Illinois
Tuesday April 29, 2008 9:00AM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 3 Southwest Chief
Departure: Chicago (Union Station), Illinois
Tuesday April 29, 2008 3:15PM
Arrival: Lamy, New Mexico
Wednesday April 30, 2008 2:20PM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 3 Southwest Chief
Departure: Lamy, New Mexico
Thursday May 1, 2008 2:24PM
Arrival: Los Angeles, California
Friday May 2, 2008 8:15AM
Accommodation: 1 Reserved Coach Seat

Train: 14 Coast Starlight
Departure: Los Angeles, California
Friday May 2, 2008 10:15AM
Arrival: Seattle (Amtrak), Washington
Saturday May 3, 2008 8:45PM
Accommodation: Superliner Roomette

Yes, that's a roomette on that last leg, there. It was under $200 to upgrade to a room for that final day and a half--and all meals are included. I know my tendency to start moping at the end of a vacation, so I thought it worthwhile to give myself a little something to be excited about for the final leg of this amazing journey.

I'm only able to take three weeks for this trip instead of the full four weeks, unfortunately. But I still get to see some amazing sights, stay with some of my favorite people, meet some new people, and (I hope) exhaust my facial muscles from grinning with joy at all the random fun I will have.

Ten days to departure!

"Practice Resurrection."

2008-03-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

excerpt from
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry:

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Happy Easter, friends.

Thanks to Slacktivist for pointing to this beautiful poem, and several others, which brought tears to my eyes. Do click at the top of the post to read the whole poem!

Ominous portent, or minor frustration?

2008-02-22T18:53:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I noticed that my tax refund had been deposited into my checking account.

I immediately called Amtrak to start the process of purchasing the rail pass for my long-anticipated month-long trip this spring. The cheerful customer service representative told me I needed to set my itinerary at the time of purchasing the pass. This was not a problem, since I had already spent hours and hours poring over the Amtrak timetables and setting various itineraries; however, my spreadsheet was at home and I was at work. Could I call back later?

"Sure," she said. "We're here 24 hours a day for your convenience."

"That is convenient!" I agreed.

I came home, pulled out my itinerary spreadsheet, tinkered with my dream trip one last time, and called Amtrak back.

The customer service representative told me that the department I needed is only open 8:30-4:30, Monday through Friday.

Sigh.

It's that kind of confusion and misinformation that could really derail (metaphorically, I hope) a train trip like this. On the other hand, if that's the biggest screw-up I encounter, I'll be thanking my lucky stars. Here's hoping.

Two weeks ago

2008-02-22T09:35:00.000-08:00

Mr. Thel is taking Chloe to have the staples removed from her surgery incision today. Two weeks down and six to go until we can start walking her outside on a leash again. I'm not looking forward to another six weeks like the last one; Chloe thinks she's better, and wants to be allowed to run around again. She's tired of being forced to lie down and stay all the time, or of being confined to small parts of the house. I'm tired of keeping her contained.

At least her hair is growing back in again, so she doesn't look quite so much like the victim of a deranged groomer's out-of-control clippers.

2008-02-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

You know, I sympathize with parents' fears for their children's safety, both on- and off-line. But my reaction to this article is...not sympathy.

Ernest and his business partner Jason Thurston put their tech-savvy heads together and created Badscreennames.com, a database parents can use to zero in on suspect screen names children should stay away from.

The site posts reviews on screen names. It's akin to a movie review. Most are posted by other online users who had a bad experience and want to warn others. With each screen name review comes a sample of their online chats.

"It can get really dirty or nasty, if you want it call it that," Ernest said.

Take Fanfest 2004, for example. The name may sound innocuous enough, but a search of the new database reveals a conversation in which Fanfest, a 30 year old, describes what he wants to do sexually with a 7-year-old girl.

Where to begin? I mean, I'm hardly the queen of all geekdom (in fact, I don't think I'd even qualify to be a duchess of geekdom), but I feel like Inigo Montoya--"You keep talking about the internet. I do not think it works the way you think it does."

First of all, let's fix that last sentence:

...in which Fanfest, who claims to be a 30 year old, describes what he wants to do....

See how that works? You don't know anything about "Fanfest 2004" except what he (or she!) tells you. Isn't rule number one of the internet, "Don't believe a word anything says about themselves unless you can independently verify it?" Teaching that principle to your children would do a heck of a lot more to protect them than building a database of "bad screen names." What, you want your kid to think that anyone whose name isn't in your database must therefore be trustworthy? Way to go with the teaching of the critical thinking skills, there.

Second of all, what parallel internet do these "tech-savvy" people play on? They themselves reluctantly admit, "there's nothing stopping the bad-guys [sic] from changing their screen name." Unfortunately, they make no mention of the corollary: dozens or hundreds of different people across the internet can share the same "screen name" in different venues. Nothing prevents someone else from writing a blog under the name of "Thel," having a livejournal account in the name of "Thel," or signing in as "Thel" in chatrooms for people with very specific kinks. Go do a blog search for variants on the name "Arwen" and see how many thousands of different individuals you can find conducting their online activities in the name of Elrond's daughter, for God's sake.

(Third of all, I feel compelled to note that "talking about wanting to do something" is not actually illegal. Plenty of people get their kink on by roleplaying activities that you [and, often, they!] find repellent and rightfully unlawful in real life. Deal.)

I was going to compare this "badscreennames.com" database to the no-fly list--databases that can seriously screw with your plans even if you've done nothing wrong. But this is even worse, in some ways. Who's going to stop the trolls, the disgruntled employees, the unbalanced ex-spouses, and the pranksters from posting people's "screen names" along with a filthy little manufactured snippet of their purported deviancy? What recourse would such a wrongly slandered party have?
Are any measures in place to ensure that folks who share a screen name with one of these "bad guys" don't find all of their own online activities slandered?

I'm pretty sure the answers are "nobody, none, and no," not that anyone gives a damn. Poorly executed vigilantism may be a useless exercise, but (oh, baby) it feels so good.

Caucus Chaos

2008-02-10T15:24:00.000-08:00

Hey, slap a sticker on my jacket, I caucused yesterday!

This was my second caucus; since we moved across town last year, this was my first time caucusing in our current precinct. There were 21 of us in our precinct: 20 for Obama, 1 for Clinton. The lone Clinton supporter was delightfully good-humored about the fact that the percentages, when applied to our allocated number of precinct delegates (7), gave all the delegates to Obama and none to Clinton.

I enjoyed the hands-on feel to the caucus; I liked chatting with neighbors about politics for a few minutes, hearing voices raised passionately in other precinct caucuses smashed into the same elementary-school library. I was impressed by how many people crammed into the building. And when the caucus organizer asked people to raise their hands if this were their first time caucusing, probably about three-quarters of the people present raised their hands, to whoops and applause from the rest of us. It felt very personal, and intimate, and very much like the core root of democracy.

Still, just as in 2004, I was a little taken aback by how chaotic and disorganized the process was. When I showed up at the elementary school where 7 or 8 local precincts were meeting to caucus, I was told we were all gathering in the cafeteria to begin. In the cafeteria, folks were sitting in their precinct groups, but the signs were taped to tables and thus invisible from a distance. It was all but impossible to squeeze through the crowd of hundreds of people in order to find the right precinct. And I was one of the lucky ones who had already registered to vote and had known my precinct number! If you didn't already know it, you had to go scrutinize a single map taped to one wall, and there were reports that the map was incorrect, anyway. I'm still unsure whether I was supposed to have shown my voter registration card to anyone; nobody asked to see it.

And I must admit that as much fun as a caucus can be, I still don't quite think it gives everyone a voice. I think of that lone Clinton supporter in our precinct, whose choice is not represented on a statewide basis. His fraction of a delegate doesn't get to combine with the other fractions of delegates; they all just get rounded down and shunted out. So I guess a statewide vote would be a bit more fair, after all, even if it doesn't cultivate a sense of community the way a caucus can.

Anyway, I caucused and volunteered to be a delegate to the county caucus in April. That will be a new experience! Then I walked back down the hill to sit and cuddle with my Chloe. She had her knee surgery on Thursday, and it went as well as can be expected. Her entire leg is shaved, hip to ankle, with a long line of staples holding her surgery incision closed. It looks bad, but I know she should be getting back to normal just in time for sunny weather and outside play!

And that's how I learned it stands for "Anterior Cruciate Ligament"

2008-02-07T21:35:00.000-08:00

This little dog of mine was loping cheerfully around with me outside last Saturday when she halted with a yelp, holding her right hind leg up from the ground. Turns out she tore her ACL, which is apparently a very common injury for larger dogs. Alas, it is not quite so common as to make it what anyone could reasonably consider "affordable" to repair. As it happens, the surgery will end up costing just about the same amount as my anticipated tax refund this year--the tax refund I was planning to use for my train trip.

She had the surgery today, though, and will come home tomorrow to begin her three months of recovery. One month of severe motion restriction, followed by two months of slow rehabilitation. And I plan to go ahead and take the damn train trip, anyway. Credit cards are pay-off-able (or so I have heard, at least), but travel memories last forever. I'm hoping to stretch my credit as far as it will go by using Couchsurfing for at least a few of my lodging options along the way. I leave in two months, if we can make it that long without having anyone else tear any ligaments, cut any arteries, or break any bones.

Addicts

2008-01-31T22:11:00.000-08:00

By the way, I've baked five more loaves of bread since I reported to you two weeks ago. Six loaves of homemade bread in two weeks...I'd better start riding my bike to work again soon.

2008 Books 4, 5, 6, and 7

2008-01-31T21:40:00.000-08:00

4. Shade's Children, by Garth Nix. I picked this up spontaneously at the library because I enjoyed Nix's Abhorsen series. Shade's Children is so-so science fiction, I thought. It brushes up against questions about free will, human agency, and artificial intelligence; it's interesting, but the characters never seemed fully developed. (Or maybe I've been too spoiled by Robin Hobb lately.)

5. Harpy's Flight, by Megan Lindholm (the author who now writes as Robin Hobb). I enjoyed reading a shorter novel by this author. I dearly loved the two trilogies of hers that I have so far read, but Harpy's Flight provided a nice change of pace. Lindholm's worlds are so vivid and crisp, her characters so fully fleshed, that even a relatively brief story like this one is a delight.

6. Shaman's Crossing, by Robin Hobb. Book one of her newest trilogy. Hobb has created a new world (all 9 of her previous books, as far as I know so far, were set in a different world) and describes it for us as vividly as ever. Obviously I adore her descriptions and characterization skills; even more, I admire her ability to create and use political and military histories in her stories.

7. Forest Mage, by Robin Hobb. Book two of the newest trilogy. I should mention here the way Hobb resolutely pushes her protagonists through trial after trial until they are all but wrecked. Perhaps it's because I spent so many years of my life in a subculture that more or less ignored those kinds of stories in favor of Jeanette Oke-style rainbows and warm fuzzies, but I find this painful, true kind of storytelling absolutely gripping.

**********************************

Shade's Children, by Garth Nix. Published 1997, 345 pages. Fiction.

Harpy's Flight, by Megan Lindholm. Published 1983, 202 pages. Fiction.

Shaman's Crossing, by Robin Hobb. Published 2005, 591 pages. Fiction.

Forest Mage, by Robin Hobb. Published 2006, 718 pages. Fiction.

Knead? No need!

2008-01-15T21:19:00.000-08:00

Several years ago my parents moved into a much smaller home than ever before, forcing them to downsize considerably. They took many loads of stuff to Goodwill, held a yard sale or two...and surreptitiously sneaked things into the trunk of my car whenever I visited them during this period.

I believe that's how I ended up with a rusty ancient 12-inch cast iron Dutch oven--I think I found it in the back seat of the car one weekend when I was unpacking after a trip to Oregon. I was too amused to get rid of it, and I suspected it had been in the family for too long to let it go, anyway. Mr. Thel and I hatched cheerful schemes of taking it camping to cook over a fire.

Since our tiny kitchen had no available space to store the hulking blackened thing, we stored it carefully in a corner of the garage. Naturally it sat there for the next two years. When we moved into this house, it migrated into a corner of the basement. There it sat all year beneath a growing pile of cardboard and camping detritus.

Recently someone (probably Kimberly) reminded me about the No-Knead Bread Recipe from the New York Times over a year ago. Everyone on the internet loved this bread recipe so thoroughly that I wanted to try it for myself...but my crusty, rusty dutch oven deterred me all year.

Yesterday I finally clomped down to the basement and dug it out. I was quite afraid that I'd pull the lid off and find a seething mass of black spiders inside, but was pleasantly surprised to find its sturdy innards completely insect-free. I hauled it upstairs and cleaned it out. Still unsatisfied with the weirdly tacky texture inside, I put it upside-down in the oven at 500 degrees for almost two hours, which seemed to do the trick. Last night I mixed the ingredients for the bread; today I baked the bread.

Now, I already liked baking bread. I don't even mind kneading bread all that much (more of a deterrent for me is the gluey floury mess afterward). But this loaf --this effortless dome of crispy, crusty, chewy goodness--is the best bread I have ever baked. Friends, I'm afraid it may not last until morning in this household.

When I called my mom to boast about my perfect bread, she told me that this particular dutch oven came from my great-grandma Mickey's house. It's probably been in use for over 50 years. Somehow knowing that, and feeling that link to a great-grandmother I hardly had a chance to know before Alzheimer's disease took her away, made my second slice of bread taste even more satisfying.

2008 Books Two and Three

2008-01-14T17:36:00.000-08:00

The second book I finished reading in 2008 was The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman. I'd read it once before, a couple of years ago, but I felt like I'd rushed through it too quickly to give the story and the writing the level of attention they deserved. After a second reading I realize that I missed certain elements the first time around, but that I still don't feel any deep affection for this series.

Don't get me wrong--I like these books quite a lot. The writing is excellent, the storytelling superb, and the details imaginative. Still, too many of the characters feel like puppets--and, even worse, they acknowledge that they're puppets; they seem to know that they're only doing certain things because the author needs them to. Dr. Malone gives Lyra an inexplicable little expository speech in chapter Four, saying even as she does so, "Why am I telling you this? I shouldn't.... I'm a little crazy this afternoon." But she goes right on telling anyway, because that's what the plot requires. At the end of the book, in chapter Fifteen, Will is struggling with a witch and we are informed that "because she was a witch she wouldn't have been afraid of a boy, normally. But she was afraid of Will. This young wounded figure held more force and danger than she'd ever met in a human before, and she quailed." She wouldn't have been afraid of him usually--but she recognized him as the Protagonist, and was therefore terrified. Hm.

On the other hand, I'm always having trouble understanding people's motivations even in real life. So this could very well be a problem with me and not the text.

The third book I finished in 2008 was The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories. I loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (once I finally stopped being so intimidated by its length and popularity that I could undertake reading it at all), and this was a pleasant collection of stories set mostly in the same world, with one story that's set in a sort of hybrid of that world and the world of Neil Gaiman's Stardust. Susanna Clarke's deft use of a writing style straight out of the early 1800's is just as delightful to read in these stories as in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and it's fun to get additional tidbits of the sort that were sprinkled in footnotes and allusions throughout the novel. All in all, The Ladies of Grace Adieu added nicely to my picture of that parallel England. And it was satisfying to get a story about the Raven King in there, as well.

**********

The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman. Published 1997, 288 pages. Fiction.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke. Published 2006, 235 pages. Fiction.

Crisscrossing a continent

2008-01-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

On Friday the mailman brought me the Amtrak book of timetables that I had requested online. I pored through the book greedily, slowly accepting that one month is not long enough to experience every single route that Amtrak offers, even if I never spend any time exploring along the way. And what kind of trip would it be if I didn't spend some time lollygagging and sightseeing along the way?

Yesterday afternoon I sat down with the book and set up a tentative itinerary:

Seattle to Vancouver, B.C.
Vancouver to Toronto (!)
One night in Toronto
Toronto to New York
Three nights in New York (I've never been!)
New York to...somewhere in Vermont. Or Portland, Maine. Somewhere up east.
Two nights in whichever place--including my birthday.
Vermont or Maine to Washington, D.C.
One night in D.C.
D.C. to Chicago via one route
Chicago to Charlottesville, VA via another route
One night in Charlottesville
Charlottesville to New Orleans
Two nights in New Orleans
New Orleans to Memphis
Three nights in or near Memphis
Memphis to Chicago
Chicago to St. Louis
Two nights in St. Louis
St. Louis to Kansas City
Kansas City to Chicago
Two nights in Chicago
Chicago to Seattle

Believe it or not, this itinerary actually leaves a couple of days of wiggle room in case I decide I need more time to explore somewhere, or get sick, or miss a train and have to linger for a day...

This itinerary is bound to change, but putting it together made me feel for the first time like this trip is really going to happen. Here's hoping!

Neverwhere

2008-01-05T12:07:00.000-08:00

My friend asked me if I could spare a few hours to help out the organization she works with. Several nights a week they seek out folks sleeping on the streets of the downtown Seattle area and offer blankets, hats, socks, gloves, scarves, sandwiches, and hot chocolate to whoever wants some. Last night the wind kicked up, slicing up the streets with a chilly malice, so the blankets especially were quite popular.

I took the bus downtown to meet them, and on the way I finished Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. It's a fantasy novel about the hidden Other World that exists in and under London, and what happens when unassumingly mousy Richard Mayhew finds himself inexorably entangled up in a plot and a quest with the people and creatures of London Below. Neil Gaiman has a way with description and plot and OtherWorldly characters (and their plots) that makes for an absorbing read.

It also makes for a bit of a haunting afterward. All night I kept doing these little double-takes--at the bright red light I glimpsed, ten feet beneath my feet, through a sidewalk grating. Or the little plaque at the edge of a pier that memorializes a ship that "sank beneath your very feet on this spot in 1909;" Tim pointed out a padlocked iron door at the edge of the platform and said that when he was a kid the door used to be open. "You could go right down and look at it," he assured me.

Saying that the world is a "magical" place tends to evoke rainbows and unicorns, twee talking animals and harmless, dainty fairies that sip from buttercups. Neil Gaiman remembers that "magic" is deep and dark. He knows that if there are talking puppies with limpid eyes, then there are also slinking creatures, all pointy teeth and rapacious hunger, who prowl in the dark and disembowel the puppies and feast on their eyes. If there are gleaming towers and languorous feasts, there are weird dirty caves hacked out under the freeway concrete, small worlds clustered in the hidden places, and thin, bright-eyed men with curly beards who speak sadly but firmly of others that have been tossed into the dark, cold waves...

So, then, the world is a magical place. Shudder at the thought.

***

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. Published 1996, 352 pages. Fiction.

January 2, 2008 - Minus Ten

2008-01-02T21:56:00.000-08:00

I had my second chemo treatment exactly ten years ago today--Friday, January 2, 1998. My parents had taken me to the first one, back on December 18. A girl named Michelle who'd lived on my floor the year before drove me to this second one. My doctor was extremely upbeat when he found out I'd never been sick after the first treatment.

"That's great! he kept saying, and told me that if one is going to be sick at all, one would be sick the first time. "So," he smiled, "if you didn't get sick at all the first time, I'd say that's a pretty good sign you probably won't get sick."

Two treatments in, I was beginning to be surprised that Having Cancer wasn't a continuously grueling ordeal every moment of every day. I was about to start the second quarter of my sophomore year at SPU, trying to maintain as many of my routines (school, work, campus volunteer activities) as I could and amazed that it looked surprisingly possible. With two down and ten to go, I was 17% done with chemo already.

More than anything, I was beginning to be humbly astounded at how many people were adamant about wanting to do what they could to help me. I've always tended to be a shy kind of person, standing on the sidelines dragging my toe awkwardly through the dust and assuming nobody likes me. So I was taken aback that so many people who were so much cooler, smarter, more popular, prettier, richer, more spiritual, and funnier than me--in my own true opinion--were genuinely enthusiastic about wanting to help me out.

I was also beginning to be flattered (and slightly uneasy) by the number of people who were already telling me I was inspirational, strong, and brave. Some had already started appropriating my cancer fight as a parable for whichever sermon or object lesson they happened to want to tell. At the time I remember being flattered and proud to be so recognized; but I remember a stirring of discomfort with that aspect of it, too.

And meanwhile I was secretly mourning that the boy I had a crush on had started dating someone else.

Looking Back

2008-01-02T20:40:00.000-08:00

On November 26, 1997, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease, a form of lymphoma--cancer originating in the lymph system (I just learned from this article, just this very minute, that Paul Allen was treated for Hodgkin's in early 1983). I was 18 years old, a sophomore in college. After six months of chemo and a month of radiation treatment, it was declared to be in remission. Except for a short period the next fall when my oncologist worried that it was coming back (it wasn't), it's been in remission ever since.

I haven't written much about it here. But next summer it will have been in remission for ten years. More than a third of my life will have been lived post-cancer. I've been thinking about that a lot lately; it's part of the ~~excuse~~ reason for my planned train trip in the spring, and it turns out I've forgotten almost everything but the highlights--the date I was diagnosed, the number of treatments, things like that. I don't really want to wallow in the past, but I find myself wanting to revisit those months, to look back and remember what it was like not just to be diagnosed and to be declared in remission, but also to remember what it was like during my seventh chemo treatment, or at what point it was that I shaved my head, or how much more I worried about the boy I had a crush on in April than I did about my low white blood cell count.

This probably won't interest anyone but me, but I think for the next few months I'd like to post a weekly snippet about what I was doing during that time, ten years ago. I'd commit to posting diary excerpts from those days, except that I was 18 and most of my diary entries really were melodramatic accounts of my most recent interaction with whichever classmate I was swooning over that month. So if anything jumps out at me, I'll share it; otherwise it will just be a summary.

Why not start today, while I'm thinking of it, spending far too long browsing online info about lymphoma (I think some of this information has changed since I was obsessively researching it ten years ago), and flipping through old diaries and such?

All Was Quiet on New Year's Eve

2008-01-01T19:45:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to see Mr. Thel's band play a show not too far from the Space Needle. The organizers planned a break in the middle of the show for folks to go outside, have some champagne, and watch the Space Needle fireworks just a few blocks away. We went outside, counted down, and downed our bubbly, but the Space Needle fireworks seemed a little short-lived. They sputtered and stopped, sputtered briefly and again halted. We waited around for a few minutes, thinking, "Was that it?" I kept thinking there must be more, but it was pretty frigid outside so I went back inside.

Today I found the news that there was a corrupted file that caused the glitch. And then I found a video of the final fireworks show. Friends, I laughed myself silly. It's the funniest fireworks show I've ever, ever seen. I feel for the poor folks in charge of the show, who must have been freaking out... heck, they're probably still freaking out a little. Really, if you have about ten minutes and need a good chortle, I highly recommend the KING5 video of the "event," below. Or, for you busy souls, here's just one little taste of it, found at the Seattle livejournal community:

Wasn't that wonderful? I'm still wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes.

Holidailies has once again been a blast, but I really don't have the stamina or time to do this kind of thing year-round. I may be able to get a post or two on the "best of" list but I can't for the life of me write an interesting post off the cuff. It takes me far too long to write something I'm satisfied with; too long to do it every single day. But I think Holidailies 2006 helped me gear up to post a bit more in 2007 than I had in previous years, mostly by helping me get over myself and my internet version of stage fright. When you have to show up and post every day without fail, or spend days trying to catch up, you soon stop biting your nails over every comma in favor of just writing the paragraphs and hitting "post," for heaven's sake. I hope this trend continues into 2008; it's good practice.

Thank you all for reading! I humbly hope the "gift of my prose," which is what Holidailies is all about, was a gift you enjoyed receiving. I've certainly added a few new bookmarks for 2008.

Happy 2008, everyone.

Unwarranted Pessimism

2007-12-31T15:55:00.000-08:00

I just spoke to the most pleasant, helpful customer service representative at the Seattle Municipal Court. That's blogworthy, right?

A man who bought a truck from us a year and a half ago never transferred the ownership into his name, and instead ran around without motor vehicle insurance, driving negligently and leaving the truck abandoned on the street, according to the helpful online ticket lookup system at the Seattle Municipal Court online lookup page. His tickets unpaid, they were sent to collections--where they were filed in my name.

I didn't find out until a month ago, when I decided to check my credit report online. I had a hunch about the likely source of the tickets, but I dreaded making the phone call. See, the thing is, I didn't file my seller's report within the five days mandated by law. I have spoken before of my inadequacy in the personal paperwork department; this is the very thing I was talking about. Since I filed my report belatedly, I was grimly afraid that somehow I would be legally liable for everything the purchaser did with the truck. When I had originally tried to file the late report, that's what the woman at the Department of Licensing indicated. Then she yelled at me for asking too many questions, and when I burst into frustrated tears (oh internet, do I overshare?) she hung up on me.

So I postponed any further investigation like a champ! Until today, when the little voice inside of my insisted, It's the last day of the year--gird your loins and call. Maybe it's all parking tickets that...all...happened to blow away from my car, anyway. Unlikely, sure, but best find out.

I called. I spoke to the nicest woman, who regretfully informed me that I'd have to pay the ones that the new owner incurred prior to my actually filing the seller's report, but was happy to tell me that all I needed to do was send them a copy of the seller's report to dispute the others.

Internet, this is awesome news. Yes, I'll have to pay $150 for tickets I didn't incur. But better $150 than $1000! And oh, I can't tell you how relieved I am to learn that I won't actually be liable for vehicle violations that villainous man makes in the future. This silly little nightmare of mine can finally be laid to rest.

Happy New Year, indeed!

2007 Books

2007-12-31T10:59:00.000-08:00

Well, let's see here. I sort of got lazy sometime mid-September and quit writing down the titles of the books I read. Oops!

Here's my best reconstruction of the list of books I read in 2007:

1. The Outlaws of Sherwood: Robin McKinley was the first female fantasy author I read. I read this in junior high but remembered almost none of it.
2. Ethan of Athos: Yes, I am still working my way through everything Lois McMaster Bujold has ever written.
3. Riddle-Master of Hed: I thought I read this trilogy in elementary school, but I think I must have understood little of it then. Lyrical and magical; I liked it.
4. Heir of Sea and Fire, 1/20
5. Harpist in the Wind, 1/22
6. Parable of the Sower: I started this last year and stopped because I found it so dark. I found it still dark and disturbing.
7. Buffalo Gals and other Animal Presences, 1/27
8. Agent to the Stars, 2/1
9. Walking Home, 2/3
10. Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, 2/12 : Oh, this was good. And then I googled the author hopefully and found that she died last October. But her comics are true, I can tell you that.
11. Od Magic, 2/14 : The book as a whole did not do much for me, but the initial description of Od took my breath away. Hello, goddess.
12. The Last Unicorn, 2/16
13. Homeland and other Stories, 2/20: One of my perennial faves.
14. Spook, 3/1: The summary at Powells.com calls Roach a consistently funny writer...I got used to her incessant sarcastic little comments eventually, but they were something I expect more from an email from a friend than from a nonfiction book. Ever so astonishingly, this book does not solve the question of what happens to the soul after death, but it was a mildly interesting (and yes, entertaining) look at some of the historical fraud and conjecture about the afterlife.
15. The Face, 3/5: My first Dean Koontz book. I really did not like the writing style... The story was okay but I kept getting distracted and irritated by the endless exposition and description. Plot! Give me Plot! Noematic.org vanishes and this sells millions? One more bit of proof of the basic injustice of life. Hmph.
16. Walking Seattle (Falcon Guide), 3/10
17. Odd Thomas, 3/14
18. The Deserter's Tale, 3/17
19. Passage, 3/29: This book is going to haunt me.
20. Writing Down the Bones, 3/30
21. Doomsday Book, 4/3: Apparently I cannot finish a Connie Willis book without convulsive sobs. This makes two for two. I loved this book so much even as it broke my heart.
22. The Compass Rose
23. The House of the Spirits
24. Grass
25. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
26. Stardust
27. The Foundling and Other Tales
28. Life of Pi
29. The River Why
30. The Sharing Knife: Legacy
31. Tooth and Claw
32. Silver Linings: Travels Around Northern Ireland
33. Freakonomics
34. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
35. The Gift of Fear
36. The Secret Life of Bees
37. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
38. The Postman
39. The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes
40. The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House
41. The Sandman Vol. 3: Dream Country
42. The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
43. The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You
44. The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections
45. The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives
46. The Sandman Vol. 8: Worlds' End
47. The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones
48. The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake
49. Charmed Life
50. The Lives of Christopher Chant
51. The Magicians of Caprona
52. Witch Week
53. The Pinhoe Egg
54. Conrad's Fate
55. Assassin's Apprentice
56. Royal Assassin
57. Assassin's Quest
58. Fool's Errand
59. Golden Fool
60. Fool's Fate
61. The Golden Compass (re-read...)
62. The Family Tree
63. Sideshow
64. The Book of Three (re-read)
65. The Black Cauldron (re-read)
66. The Castle of Llyr (re-read)
67. Taran Wanderer (re-read)
68. The High King (re-read)

That's the list, then. I plan to edit it later with links to all the books in question.

I certainly managed to read a good bit more in 2007 than in 2006. Selling my car had a lot to do with that; all those hours I would have been driving, I was frequently reading on the bus instead. That's one of those intangible benefits to getting rid of a car--sure, we saved money on gas, insurance, and maintenance, but I was also given a lot more reading time. Another big factor would be the fact that in 2006 I spent scores of hours packing, moving, unpacking, looking at houses, signing paperwork for a house, repacking, moving, and unpacking. It's been a year, and still melt with glee whenever I contemplate the fact that I don't have to do that again for as many years as I want to stay here. Ahhh!

Favorites from the year? The six books by Robin Hobb that I stumbled upon in November (55-60, above). She vaulted straight to my list of favorite authors; I am delighted that there are still at least 5 of her books that I haven't yet read. Plus I will track down the ones she wrote under a different name, Megan Lindholm. Neil Gaiman's Sandman series was weird and wonderful, and Stardust was enchanting. Diana Wynne Jones wrote a slew of young adult novels that I somehow missed when I was a young adult. Fortunately, my cousin praised them in August and I was delighted to find that they were just as entertaining to read as an adult.

With five books already on my "to-read" list for 2008, I definitely plan to continue this project. It's been a fun and useful reference. In 2008 I think I'll follow meloukhia's example and try to be more detailed, give at least a perfunctory review of each book that I read. And I'll try to remember to list every book, whether it's a children's book I buy for a niece or something I re-read or a graphic novel or what have you. And I don't think 50 is a very ambitious goal under normal circumstances, but keeping in mind that I'll be traveling the country for an entire month by train, and likely more inclined to stare out the window and visit with friends and see the sights than to read all day, I'll leave it at that anyway and we'll see where I end up.

(edited to add other books I belatedly recalled to the end of the list)

Greyhound, part 2

2007-12-30T22:18:00.000-08:00

When last we checked in with our intrepid passengers, they were heading north from Eugene on the day after Christmas with an irascible driver requesting directions from passengers to each station. I think he must have picked up a route guide in Eugene. At least, I think that's what he had open on the steering wheel, and was flipping through, as the bus barreled up I-5. (We only yawed across our lane a little bit, and I'm sure we didn't sideswipe anyone. Well, I'm pretty sure.)

Passengers guided him to the Salem station without mishap. Our stop was relatively brief, and as we made our way back to the freeway the driver got on the intercom. "Could the Woodburn passengers please come to the front?"

The three travellers who planned to disembark in Woodburn came forward--a young man and woman and a little girl, probably around 2 years old. I was close enough to the front to hear the driver's question for them. "Hey, I don't really know about going all the way to the Woodburn station," he confessed. "Is there someplace closer to the freeway where I can drop you off?"

The young man was remarkably agreeable. "Sure, there's a McDonald's just off the exit."

"And that's just off the freeway?" the driver pressed.

"Yeah, yeah, it's just right off the exit," the man said.

"And I can just drop you off there?"

"Sure," the man nodded, "that's all right."

Another passenger also overheard the conversation. She turned and caught my eye and grinned. "We're going to save so much time that way!" she hissed eagerly.

"Yeah, great," I said. Except for the poor folks who bought a ticket to Woodburn...

We pulled off the freeway, stopped at the McDonald's, let out the young family and their bags, and left them in the parking lot as we roared off toward Portland.

We arrived in Portland just two hours later than I'd originally been scheduled to get there--on a bus that had departed only one hour late, originally. (I did the math in my head--if we didn't lose any more time, I'd be home by midnight!) Our driver announced our arrival--"Portland! Everyone exit the bus so they can clean it, please!"--and then spryly hopped off the bus without giving any additional information for those of us continuing northward. He wandered around near the disembarking passengers for a couple of minutes, handing out re-boarding passes in an offhand way to anyone who claimed to be continuing north.

I hustled into the station, having no idea how long it would take to clean the bus. I had a pressing concern for my two checked bags. In Roseburg the harried ticket agent had loaded everyone's bags onto the same baggage cart. The baggage cart was then loaded on to the first bus--the one I didn't get on. I realized this just a few minutes too late to stop it. She told me I could check for my bags in Portland. Or in Seattle. They'd be in one place or the other, she assured me...probably.

The amiable ticket agent in Portland told me, "Oh, we wouldn't hold any bags labeled 'Seattle.' They'd go on up, we wouldn't hold them here."

"OK, so they probably just stayed on that earlier bus?" I asked, relieved.

"Yeah." He paused. "Or they might go on a later one."

I was too worried that my current bus would leave me in Portland to stay and puzzle through this logic, so I thanked him rushed back outside. The bus was just backing out of its spot. I yelped in dismay and ran a couple of involuntary steps forward. Immediately I was accosted by a stern security guard. "Ma'am," she barked, "Do not run after the bus. No buses are currently departing. Which gate are you supposed to be at?"

I stared at her. "I have no idea," I answered. "Our driver didn't tell us anything."

She found out where I needed to go, and directed me there to wait "until your bus is announced, whenever that may be."

I waited. I walked over to the concessions and bought a fast-food dinner. I bought a Coke. I text-messaged a friend. Just then my mother called to make sure I'd arrived safely in Seattle. I laughed hollowly at her optimism. I was that hopeful once, I thought wistfully. Those cheery morning hours seemed so far in the past, so impossibly far behind. I had matured since then; I was a harder, wiser person now. I swigged my Coke, and I waited.

Finally our departure was announced, and we reboarded. When the new driver asked for our reboarding passes, about half of the passengers who'd been on the previous bus with me realized in consternation that they'd never even heard of such a thing. Fortunately they didn't seem to be an actual requirement, as the driver peered at their ticket stubs and waved them onto the bus.

This leg of the trip soon promised to be far more pleasant for three reasons. First, it wasn't actually a Greyhound bus; it was a "Raz" bus contracted for the heavy holiday traffic. So there was more legroom and the seats were a bit larger. Second, only about a dozen passengers were continuing north on this bus. A dozen passengers on a 50-seat bus means double seats for everyone! And finally, we wouldn't need to make all of Greyhound's regular stops, because this bus was just for dropping us excess passengers off at our destinations: Vancouver, Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle.

I sprawled out across my two seats, pulled my hat down over my eyes, and dozed off. Vancouver came and went. I woke up in Olympia to look out the window and watch as we glided past the capitol building. I fell asleep after that, but woke when the bus slowed again.

Assuming we'd arrived at the Tacoma station, I sat up and blinked around. We were driving up a hill on an arterial street. As I looked, disoriented, we took a sharp curve and slowly passed by an overturned shopping cart next to the road. We turned again, onto a smaller street. It got darker as we passed beyond the illumination of the streetlights on the main road. We passed a Taco Pronto! restaurant and a few auto body shops, and then we drove past small houses in the dark. Again we turned; other passengers on the bus had awakened and were beginning to mutter in confusion. I overheard one guy on his phone: "No, man, we're just in some neighborhood up here." He cackled loudly. "I think we're lost, bro! Naw, dude, I'll call you when we get to the station."

We must have really been lost, because we ended up in a cul-de-sac. The driver hauled the bus around in a U-turn and we headed back down the hill. Past the dark houses, past the Taco Pronto!, past the overturned shopping cart. I don't know Tacoma very well, so I was thoroughly lost myself. We found ourselves going under I-5; for a moment I thought the driver was just going to take the northbound onramp and skip on to Seattle in disgust. I kind of wished he would, actually.

At last the driver found his way to the Tacoma Greyhound station. This time my brother happened to call to be sure I'd arrived safely home. (So young! So innocent! May he never be as jaded as I had now become!)

We didn't get lost again (or if we did, I was asleep and missed it). The bus pulled into the station with the final six of us just before midnight (so, in the end, the trip took just about exactly twice as long as it takes to drive it--twelve hours versus 6.) I didn't see Mr. Thel anywhere, so I went on inside and began to explain the woman behind the ticket counter the story about my bags. She cut me off after a sentence or two and told me to go outside to the baggage claim area.

I went outside. There was a sign that said "Baggage Claim." Below it was a handwritten sign that said "Closed." But below that was an arrow directing me further on. I went on along the side of the building and found an open bay. Large signs sternly warned "Employees Only--Do Not Enter." I peered inside and hollered, "Hello?"

Nobody came. But as I looked around I spotted my bags on a baggage cart a few steps inside the forbidden bay. I glanced around again, hoping I wouldn't end this unforgettable trip with an arrest for trespassing, and darted inside. I grabbed my bags and nonchalantly strolled back out. Nobody yelled, nobody accosted me to demand my identification or denounce my trespass. Whistling cockily, cheerfully wheeling my duffel bags behind me, I strolled out toward the dark street to meet Mr. Thel.

Wildlife Rehabilitation

2007-12-30T13:14:00.000-08:00

My mom spent a few years as a volunteer for a wildlife rehabilitation organization. All I can remember about it is the time she caught a bunch of baby mice and swiftly dispatched all of them so as to feed an injured owl she was nursing back to health. Plus I remember that she spent a week away up north somewhere just after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, helping clean the oil off of sea birds.

This morning Mr. Thel burst into the house and informed me that he and Chloe had just spotted an injured red-tail hawk down the street, flopping around on the ground. He found a large cardboard box and a couple of old towels to help capture it; I helped by tippety-tapping at the computer to find a nearby wildlife rescue group. It turns out that PAWS has a wildlife center open 7 days a week up in Lynnwood. Mr. Thel donned bicycle gloves to protect his hands and together we went back to the bird. The hawk was alert and definitely opposed to being captured, but Mr. Thel successfully managed to place a towel over it and gently transfer it to the box without much fuss. The bird's halfhearted struggle (and the way it sort of flopped over on its head in the box at first...) made me even more concerned about its condition.

We brought it back and left it in the driveway for a few minutes while I staggered about trying to find my glasses and get dressed. PAWS is across Seattle from us, but Sunday morning traffic was light and we were there in half an hour. They have this whole compound up there; I'd known of them as an animal shelter but had no idea they did rehabilitation and release of wildlife. The woman at the wildlife center transferred the injured hawk to their facilities and assured us that a vet would be out to take a look at him tomorrow or earlier. "When I transferred him to the cage he immediately clutched at it with his talons, so that's a good sign," she said. She took our address and the location where he was found, and said that if they can heal him they'll release him back here where he came from. "We'll send you a card to let you know what happens to him," she promised.

Northwest Wonderland

2007-12-29T23:12:00.000-08:00

Recently I took a day trip with a friend up to the Anacortes area. It was grey, rainy, and chilly, but once you accept the cold and realize that you won't melt it's delightful to have a place to yourself the way you do on a winter day. These pictures were all taken in Washington Park outside of Anacortes, a spot which must be jam-packed with people during the warmer months. We saw only one other visitor during our slow trip around the loop road, and he looked as surprised to see us as we were to see him.

We stood behind this tree for awhile watching a seal pop up nearby.

On the other side of the headland the wind was much stronger; we only lingered long enough to admire the foggy view of the islands and this gnarled old snag.

Someone added a festive touch to the bluff behind the deserted beach!

Greyhound, part 1

2007-12-29T09:48:00.000-08:00

I only bought a Greyhound ticket from southern Oregon to Seattle because Amtrak was sold out. I think, next time, I would rather ditch work for an extra day or two and hold out for Amtrak.

Now, mind you, I had purchased a bus ticket online five days previously, so I'd been pretty breezy about the prospect of riding Greyhound home. It couldn't be that awful for a 350-mile trip, right?

Wrong.

My first inkling that it would be a very long day came when I checked in at the ticket counter Wednesday morning, a full hour early as recommended. I'd wondered why the heck you'd need to arrive an hour early just to sit and wait for a bus (Greyhound doesn't bother with things like metal detectors and security lines). The reasoning became clear when the ticket agent informed me that buying a Greyhound ticket doesn't guarantee the purchaser a seat on any particular bus. But I had a ticket! And I'd bought it almost a week ago! Didn't matter: I'd be added to the list of passengers waiting for the next bus.

"Oh and by the way," she added, "the 9:00 bus was so full he didn't even bother to stop here this morning--so everyone who was supposed to get on that bus is now in line to get on the noon bus. Ahead of you. You're number 21."

When the noon bus arrived, wouldn't you know it, they had 20 seats available. I and numbers 22 through 35 watched forlornly as it filled up and pulled away.

Now, the next scheduled bus wasn't due to arrive until 4:30. I did the math in my head (something I'd do over and over throughout the day) and figured that would put me in Seattle at 1:45 a.m. That was assuming the 4:30 bus would have a seat open, of course.

However. The ticket agent, bless her heart, had been talking to her dispatcher all morning to plead for an additional bus to be sent down from Eugene to pick up us poor slobs who'd been getting left behind all day. Not long after my scheduled bus departed, another bus unexpectedly arrived, loaded eleven of us, and headed north.

This is where the fun really started, because our bus driver had no idea where he was going. Oh, he had no trouble figuring out the "north on I-5" part, but as we pulled out onto the freeway he said loudly, "Okay, which exit do you think I should take for the Eugene station?"

Those of us sitting close enough to the front to hear him looked at each other blankly. Fortunately the fellow in the very front had been making this trip frequently throughout the year to visit his spinal surgeon in Eugene. He directed the driver to take a particular exit, and take a right. Of course then other passengers who knew Eugene pretty well began to argue about which way was best.

"Naw, you don't want to go right here, you'll end up in Springfield."

"But I-5 goes down the middle, soon as you get under it you'll be in Eugene."

"This isn't the way we usually go."

"Shouldn't we take a left up here?"

"No, take a right."

The passenger in the front stuck to his guns and guided us in to Eugene. The driver announced that we'd have a five minute break--"Maybe closer to ten, but then we're gone," the driver said. I hopped off for a quick bathroom break and to stretch my legs, and then slid back into my seat. Most everyone else was similarly punctual.

Forty-five minutes later the driver reboarded the bus, a styrofoam leftovers container and Starbucks cup in his hands. "Okay, everybody ready to go?" he asked cheerily. I heard a few low mutters--I've been ready...We've been here...Man, if I knew we had time to go to Starbucks...--and then we were off. As we pulled away, the man in front of me (a new passenger who'd replaced the knowledgeable co-pilot) said to his wife, "Well, we'll be a little late, but that's all right."

The driver bristled. "Late? Late? Did somebody say we're going to be late?"

Everyone was quiet, so he persisted. "Who said that? Who was it that said we're going to be late?"

The guilty man protested, "Well, we are going to be a little late."

The driver shook his head fiercely. "Greyhound," he admonished us, "doesn't guarantee you anything."

Into the silence that spread out from this announcement, he lamely added, "Except safety."

Each Winter as the Year Grows Older

2007-12-28T07:44:00.001-08:00

By William & Annabeth Gay

Each winter as the year grows older,
We each grow older too.
The chill sets in a little colder;
The verities we knew
Seem shaken and untrue.

When race and class cry out for treason,
When sirens call for war,
They overshout the voice of reason
And scream till we ignore
All we held dear before.

Yet I believe beyond believing,
That life can spring from death:
That growth can flower from our grieving;
That we can catch our breath
And turn transfixed by faith.

So even as the sun is turning
To journey to the north,
The living flame, in secret burning,
Can kindle on the earth
And bring God's love to birth.

O Child of ecstasy and sorrows,
O Prince of peace and pain,
Brighten today's world by tomorrow's,
Renew our lives again;
Lord Jesus, come and reign!*

______________________________________

* I am unable to let this post stand without stubbornly pointing out that the last stanza isn't, in fact, a call for a triumphalist conqueror; that there's a beautifully oxymoronic quality to longing for the reign of a person who rejected traditional power so thoroughly that he even declined to resist his own torture and death; that the "reign" of such a God will be almost unimaginably different than what we expect a "reign" to look like; that it's an inverted picture of a kingdom, percolating from the bottom up rather than pontificating from the top down, beginning from the poorest and saddest and least...

Keeping all that in mind, this is a song that makes my throat close up a bit every time I hear it.

Christmas Eve Dinner

2007-12-24T22:29:00.000-08:00

Grandma's kitchen was abuzz with activity when I showed up on Sunday night. "What's going on?" I asked.

"Your cousin is cooking Christmas Eve dinner," Grandma told me.

My cousin, S. arrived from New York the weekend before and asked my aunt about the plan for Christmas Eve. "Well, I have to work, and so does [Thel's mom], so we're just going to have pizza," she was told.

Apparently S. announced that she'd be damned if she flew across the country to have pizza for Christmas Eve dinner, and that if nobody else could do it then she'd cook a meal. She spent most of the weekend in Grandma's kitchen, I think, making three varieties of cookies, fudge, two vegetable dips, potatoes, ham, cheese puffs, roasted vegetables, and a stir fry for her vegetarian husband. It was delicious, and more than a bit impressive to watch our mothers hover around the edges at loose ends. It seems that the Christmas Eve dinner torch has been officially passed to the next generation.

Unfortunately, as the next oldest grandchild, that means my family began claiming that next year it's going to be my turn to take charge. I think they should let S. keep doing it for a few years...or at least until I expand beyond a regular dinner rotation of spaghetti or lasagna; Caribbean beans & rice, burritos, or fajitas; chicken or potato soup; and that good old standby, the stir fry.

Train cohorts

2007-12-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

He was a bit deaf, and the dining car steward put him off with his unexpected questions. When the steward had departed, the elderly gentleman bellowed across the table to his dining companions, "Why was he asking me that?"

"Asking what?" one woman replied.

"Well, he wanted to know whether I was in a sleeper car or in coach. What'd he need to know that for?" the man asked suspiciously.

"I think your meals are included if you're in a sleeper car," she answered. "So he would have needed your room number if you were."

"Aw, well, that's all right then," he admitted. "I thought it was so he'd know how good to treat me!"

None of the three at that table were travelling together, so they chatted about children and grandchildren across the country. He announced that he was 85 and that he'd been a skier until he was 78 years old: "And I'm proud of that, too. I wish I could say it was because I led a clean life, but I sure didn't."

The older woman looked up, startled. "What did you do?" she asked a bit mischievously.

He misunderstood her--or maybe he didn't. With a big smile he answered, "Well, I ran a corporation for fifty years."

In Peace

2007-12-22T21:18:00.000-08:00

I did get myself motivated, at 11:00, to catch the bus to Ballard and finish my Christmas shopping. I got the Traditional Socks for my mother, and at a dollar store next door I found the best White Elephant gift ever. Made in China (where all the best White Elephant Gifts are made), it's a plastic statuette of a little girl in a fancy, flowing dress and a jaunty little hat, seated on a triumphantly rearing elephant. At least, I suppose it's supposed to be rearing triumphantly. As it is, the girl is about four times the size of the elephant, and the elephant's belly is smushed down against the base of the figurine, so it looks like it's being horribly squashed by a gigantic, wide-eyed, nose-picking child. I mean I know she's supposed to be placing her finger contemplatively aside her mouth, but it honestly looks like she's going for gold in a nostril. While crushing a baby elephant.

It's awwwwwesome, is what I'm saying. I'll try to get a good picture of it before I gift it.

I bought a toy car racing set at the same dollar store (I never even made it to Archie McPhee, this haul was so perfect), emblazoned with starred suggestions like, "Try My!" and "First Enter!!" Then I boarded the 44 toward home (bus # 4171!), which turned out to have a tiny little despot at the wheel.

It was pouring rain, and about 40 degrees outside, and I'd been waiting in the weather for about ten minutes. After a few minutes on the bus I realized, hey...I'm not getting any warmer. A quick look around revealed the problem: all of the windows on the bus were open. Thinking I could easily remedy this problem on my own, I stood and briskly began closing them.

The driver's voice came over the loudspeaker. "Windows are open for ventilation," he said. "Do not close them."

"Um, I'm freezing, so I'll just close these three near me," I answered. Good as my word, I closed those three and sat back down.

The driver stopped the bus. Yes, really. He came back, reopened all three of the windows, and stood over me. "These are open for ventilation. I don't want fog on the windows. You sit in back if you cold."

I was in the mood to argue, but he seemed the type who'd toss me off the bus for backtalk (I don't really love the explicitly parental role some drivers adopt toward their riders), and I didn't want to stand out in the cold rain any longer. So I meekly shivered my way to the 48--which, I noticed, had all its windows closed and not a trace of a fog problem.

Then I did dishes and laundry and made dinner and wrapped presents and noticed that I had thrice as many hits here today as any other day, EVER, in Heavy Duty Power history. Just in time for me to turn the lights out for three days! I don't know if I'll be able to catch up for Holidailies when I return, though I'll give it my best shot.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas, new friends and readers. May the final days of 2007 be full of reassurance and peace for all of you.

Olé! Maté!

2007-12-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

When Mr. Thel and I lived in Ballard I ended up doing a bit of last-minute Christmas shopping at La Tienda one year. I bought these lovely squishy, soft socks for my mom and my sister, plus a pair for me so I could fit in. They adored them so much that I did it again the next couple of years. Having established something of a tradition of the Christmas socks, now I need to make a bus run up to Ballard today so as not to drop the ball. I may be able to find good socks elsewhere, but I also need to get a $10 odd gift for our Christmas Eve "White Elephant Exchange," and if I go to Ballard I can plunder Archie McPhee.

This is how I plan things now that I don't usually have access to a car: where can I accomplish a set of errands in the same small area, with the least number of transfers? It hasn't really been a burden so far, even in the rain. I missed one friend's party on Queen Anne because I'd have had to transfer at least twice in order to get there, but most of the time I am more clever than that. And so far this winter I've only been soaked through once while waiting for the bus; since that was during the deluge on December 3rd, the 3rd-wettest day in Seattle history, I'm willing to accept a bit of damp as my worst hardship from that storm.

I must admit, however, that I'm having a bit of trouble motivating myself to leave my cozy upstairs room to go out into today's downpour. The rain is rattling like a thousand tiny tapdancers on the metal roof above me, and I'm drinking my first cup of yerba maté. My friend bought me a little kit for drinking yerba maté, and although I'd never tried it I was delighted. I'd never have bought it for myself, but as a gift, sure, I'll sip that.

The gentleman she bought it from was apparently quite a fan of yerba maté himself. She told me that when she was looking at it in the store, the guy came up behind her, put his hand on the box, and looked at her gravely. "This," he said reverently, "may quite possibly be the most nutritious beverage in the world."

When I asked another friend if she liked it she said with great certainty, "I do not. It tastes like dirt."

A dirt-flavored nutritional beverage? Sounds like a winner! I brewed up a cup of it this morning to try it out. I stirred in a small bit of honey and milk, and I am pleased to admit that I am enjoying it. I can see how it tastes earthy--but it's more grassy than dirty, to my tongue. I have recently begun to admit that I prefer the taste of tea to coffee anyway, so this is perfect.

Now, to drain enough of this superbeverage to motivate myself to trudge out into the wet day.

Happy Solstice

2007-12-21T19:45:00.000-08:00

The other day Kimberly reminded me of a poem I've posted here before. It's the right day to post it, once again.

The Shortest Day
by Susan Cooper

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Holiday plan alteration

2007-12-21T08:50:00.000-08:00

So. Mr. Thel has this really abysmal client this month. Said client has, to date, been nothing but irritating and shady. I started to list them all out and after line item 3 I was starting to get angry on Mr. Thel's behalf again, so I'm not going to do that. Anyway, Mr. Thel originally agreed to finish the project by Christmas. It was going to be tight, but possible. Then when he showed up for work on Wednesday the house was all locked up. His tools were all locked inside. Nobody answered his doorbell-ringing or his phone calls.

Mr. Thel therefore lost an entire day of work. Still, he's so full of honor and integrity that he's going to try to get this project done by Christmas anyway. Mostly, I think, so he can shake the dust from his sandals and never deal with this asshat again. Even though - fun twist! - that means he won't be able to take the time to drive down to Oregon with me for Christmas as planned. I'll be travelling down there by train and bus instead. I feel guilty leaving him all alone for Christmas.

And yet, internet, I will confess: despite being frustrated at the client, and disappointed to be parted from Mr. Thel on Christmas...I'm still really looking forward to riding the train again. Hey, it's been a couple of years. And this will be a sweet precursor to the planned trip around the country this spring--for which my vacation request has officially been approved.

Fly, you fools

2007-12-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

What are you doing here when you could be reading one of these blogs I've fallen in love with lately through Holidailies?

Music and Cats - I've been following the adventures of Lyra, Sasha, and Sergei, as well as Kimberly's beautiful and mouth-watering expeditions to the farmers' markets, ever since last year's Holidailies. Kimberly takes beautiful pictures and writes evocative posts. Plus, her posts about cooking make me want to jump up and head for the kitchen. Trust me, that's an accomplishment.

this ain't livin' - Meloukhia left a comment on one of my recent bus stories, and I slid over to see what s/he had to say. Clear, smart writing on all kinds of topics from someone who writes and edits for a living, so...yeah. I overcome my wistful envy and just keep burning through the archives.

Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come - Schmutzie is a poet, an artist, a fabulous writer and another person whose writing makes me want (and try!) to be a clearer, more concise communicator. I keep forgetting to bookmark her, so here--let us bookmark her together, you and I.

There are tons more, but oh look, I got distracted in the archives of all three of the above, and now it is bedtime. I promise two things: I will make a real post, with my own words, tomorrow; and I do have more new favorite writers to gush about.

Seasoned Santa

2007-12-18T21:00:00.000-08:00

Saturday my friend and I were eating lunch on 45th in Wallingford. We were having a fairly intense conversation about her middle school students, and mental illness, and certain intersections of the two topics. Serious as the conversation was, I was startled when her voice trailed away mid-sentence. I glanced up sharply to see if she was, I don't know, overcome with emotion or something.

She was staring out the window behind me, smiling an enchanted sort of smile. "Thel!" she said. "Look at all those Santas!"

I swiveled to follow her gaze. Across the street from us, a ragged line of about 25 Santas trudged east on 45th. We watched in amazement as they all schlepped out of sight. It wasn't the last of them, either; throughout our lunch, smaller groups of Santa Clauses streamed east through Wallingford. It was a delightfully bizarre holiday sight.

On our way back to my friend's car we happened upon two more costumed women, dressed as loose interpretations of Santa. And I do mean loose!--they were a couple of stocking-clad, plunging-necklined, mini-skirted hot mama Santas.

"What's up with all the people in Santa costumes?" my friend queried them.

"It's a training for Macy's," one of them answered as they strolled away.

We got into the car and looked at each other. My friend raised her eyebrows. "Macy's?" I asked.

"Dressed like that? Not a chance," she scoffed. (Later investigation reveals that it was the procession of Santarchy Santas traipsing down to the U-District.)

The best part, though, came as we were driving away. We spotted one final couple walking up a side street toward 45th, festively garbed in matching red-and-white outfits. There was something different about their costumes, though; their suits seemed like patchwork quilts, not the traditional solid red with white trim. As we drew alongside them I gleefully recognized the material: it was dozens of red-and-white beef Ramen packets, flattened crisply and fastened together. They were actually tailored quite well! I really wish I'd had my camera with me; as it is, you'll have to trust me that I did not hallucinate Mr. and Mrs. Ramen Santa.

Jingle Bells, Batman Smells

2007-12-17T22:05:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make: I grew up in a rural household without a television.

It's difficult to explain the permanent gap this situation opened up between me and my peers, then and now. Their adventures were peopled with characters from video games and cartoons, and their soundtrack was Michael Jackson, Poison, New Kids on the Block. My sister and brother and I ran around in the muddy creek valley, brandishing sticks as swords and making up names for our warrior selves. Our only soundtrack was the oldies station that my parents listened to, or the records they occasionally played.

I have a vivid memory of making them play "Mr. Bojangles" over and over again, and being mesmerized by the melancholy that the song swept through me. That was around the same time that my friend Alethea confessed that she had a crush on Patrick Swayze. Who? I wondered. We were probably about eleven.

I was already introverted and shy, and I wandered through the hallways not knowing or asking what much of the imagery around me signified. Kids wore KISS shirts or put Achtung Baby pictures in their lockers, and it was all as meaningless as if I were a foreigner just visiting. In some ways I suppose I was: a newcomer to the land of Pop Culture. Our P.E. teacher that year at McGovern Middle School frequently wore a t-shirt with a funny drawing on it: an open mouth, with just a few oddly crooked teeth visible. I shrugged it off as one more obscure artifact in the insane territory of middle schoolers.

It wasn't until a couple of years later, when I finally saw the movie Batman, that I realized what the symbol really was. Ever since, the experience has served as a good metaphor for the feeling of alienation I still get sometimes when my peers reminisce animatedly about music and movies and cartoons from our childhood years. "No, guys, seriously: I just thought it was a mouth. How would I know any different?"

Lazy like a fox

2007-12-16T22:47:00.001-08:00

To briefly recap:

Wednesday evening I was out with a friend.

Thursday I was sick (terribly sick).

Friday night was the "Thanksgiving" party.

Saturday I spent most of the day with a friend. We went to a little art show in someone's house, and then had Thai food in Wallingford. When I finally got home Mr. Thel was restless, so we went to see The Golden Compass.

I'm not a social butterfly by nature, so I was thrilled and relieved to have no plans for today. I am not ashamed to announce that I spent the day doing small things of small importance, and that I couldn't even motivate myself to do any housecleaning. There's always tomorrow.

May your words be merry and bright

2007-12-15T20:55:00.000-08:00

Every workplace has its quirks and rough edges. I do try not to succumb to the "grass is always greener" syndrome when it comes to loathing my own workplace's particular oddities.

One of our particular oddities is our CEO's refusal to purchase random basic office supplies. Pens, for example, are on the "WILL NOT PURCHASE" list. Paper clips? OK. Post its? You're on your own.

Finally tiring of the pervasive hoarding of pens (and the frantic searching and surreptitious "borrowing" of others' pens), a co-worker and I have teamed up on a holiday gift: a box of pens for everyone in our department. Today I am working on printing out fancy gift tags for them. Ho ho ho!

Thought, speech, and deed

2007-12-14T22:19:00.000-08:00

Confidential to EVERYONE I WORK WITH: When you treat me like a child (and especially when you treat me like a child with cognitive delays), I have this funny urge to live down to your expectations and act as petulant as the child you seem to believe me.

It isn't a pretty cycle. I'm not proud of it. But there you go. Next time you carefully explain to me about the document you're expecting, and carefully outline exactly what it looks like and who it will be coming from, as if I am not the one who actually created and sent the damn thing in the first place...well. Just don't be surprised if I fling myself on the floor and begin screaming.

Repeated condescending treatment by multiple co-workers had me in a foul and antisocial mood by the end of the day. Fortunately, I still managed to drag myself to the party I'd agreed to attend...and it was exactly the right balm to my irritated spirits. We enjoyed a Thanksgiving-themed meal with a dozen or so other friends and acquaintances. Every last one of them was at least ten years my senior, yet they all still treated me with more jovial respect and appreciation than anyone at work had all day. It did wonders to make me feel and act like an adult once again.

Crazy bus lady

2007-12-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I added my own tiny thread of crazy to the endless tapestry of bus stories in the world.

I stopped at a bakery on the way home and reboarded the next bus. Clutching a bag of crusty loaves, I maneuvered my way down the aisle to an inward-facing seat inside the middle, articulated section of the bus. One or two stops later I was joined there by an adolescent girl wearing brightly striped socks and talking on her cell phone.

Talking on your cell phone on the bus isn't, in my personal Book of Justice, an unpardonable offense. But talking LOUDLY on your cell phone on the bus, or at the bus stop, or in the grocery store is a rude intrusion. Rather than respond in kind, however, I responded by becoming a slightly crazy bus lady.

"HELLO?" my seat partner bellowed into her phone as if to her aged grandmother.

"Hello," I responded quietly, looking straight ahead.

"I'M ON THE BUS," the girl shouted after a pause.

I looked off casually toward the front of the bus. "Hey, me too," I softly agreed.

"ON THE SEVEN."

"That's where I'm at."

"ALMOST CLOVERDALE, I THINK."

"I'm about there myself."

I kept my "responses" soft and casual, never glancing in the direction of my seat partner. After a few "exchanges" she hung up and sat sending text messages. I stared out the windows and hummed quietly to myself. Soon her phone rang again.

"HELLO?" she shouted, if possible even louder than before.

"Hello!" I said cheerfully.

"I'M ON THE BUS!" she said again.

"Me too!" I agreed.

There was a longish silence. I watched the sky through the window and waited. Abruptly my seatmate stood and stalked to the back of the bus, where she continued her conversation. Either she lowered her voice, or the noise of the bus kept the rest of her words from my ears. Inwardly I chuckled with passive-aggressive success; whether or not she had heard my crazy little dialogue, my goal had been realized.

Any question I might have had about whether my behavior had actually caused her relocation was soon answered when I again heard her raised voice. Speaking to one of her friends in the back, she explained in frustrated tones, "No, it was like she was answering me every time, you know? I said, 'I'm on the bus,' and she goes, 'me too,' like that."

I almost laughed out loud when I heard the response. Her friend, confused, asked, "Wait...so she was on the phone with her mom, at the same time as you were on the phone with your mom?"

"Noooooo," the loud girl wailed. "Look, I'll try it again." I kept staring out my window, so I couldn't see whether she lifted her phone to her ear; all I heard was the familiar, "HELLO?"

I stayed silent.

"I'M ON THE BUS??"

I checked my watch and yawned.

I didn't catch any further conversation, so I don't know if she ever managed to explain our "interaction" to her friend. But we got off at the same bus stop, and she hopped into a waiting car. As I strolled back past the car I kept my eyes fixed off in the distance until just as the car began to pull away. At the last second I turned my head, caught her eye, and winked broadly.

Darkness

2007-12-12T20:43:00.000-08:00

I am counting the days to the winter solstice. It isn't, I tell myself, a perpetual sense that the grass is greener in the season farthest from me. It's a human anticipation of the turning of the year, a gleeful faith that that other good season will come again.

Earth daringly leans away from Sol, our half of the hemisphere tilting into darkness until an overtoppling into permanent night seems inevitable. The small, bright strands of Christmas lights in windows and on trees seem almost like a beacon, a weak imitation reminding the sun that he is craved and beloved and that we beg him to return. We dig in our heels against the nights that loom and lengthen, we heave hard on the reins, and yet nothing avails us but these pale lights gleaming in our dusk, bravely beaming out our unconscious hopeful plea: return, return, return.

And every year, almost imperceptibly, it happens. The trump sounds. Arthur wakes. The cycle turns, and the sun returns.

Party Bullies

2007-12-11T21:23:00.000-08:00

The two of them surrounded me at my desk last week. You'd think more than two people are required in order to fully surround another person, but between the two of them they still capably managed to convey a sense of siege. I shrank a bit from their intensity.

They glanced at each other, and J began: "Let's talk about the holiday party."

Each December as a company we pick a date and someone volunteers their home, and we have an informal little holiday party, just as countless other workplaces do. This year, oddly, there had been no talk of having a holiday party, so I figured that was the problem at hand.

"It's funny that we haven't heard the date yet, isn't it?" I mused aloud.

D ignored me. "Don't you think it would be more fun to have a nice party at a restaurant, for a change?" she demanded, looming over me where I sat in my stubby office chair.

J nodded vigorously and added, "Instead of just hanging out at someone's house..." Her perky nose wrinkled ever so slightly in distaste.

I tried to subtly scoot my chair away to give me just a hair more breathing room while I considered the suggestion. "Yeah, that would be fun," I agreed. "I mean, I always like having it at someone's house because, well, it's free, but..."

J didn't wait for me to finish. "See, I told you nobody would want to do it," she spoke over me. She folded her arms across her chest and looked meaningfully at D. "Everyone just wants to do the same old thing, year after year."

D returned her look, shaking her head in exasperation. "God forbid we try anything new around here!" she snorted.

"Um," I began, torn between feeling offended at the way they talked about me right over my head, and feeling terrified that they might rend me limb from limb if I didn't board the Fancy Holiday Dinner Train. (I can lurch my chair into D, and while she's off balance I can probably leap beyond J's reach and slip to freedom out the fire escape...) "I didn't say I thought it was a bad idea--"

J shrugged. "Come on, D," she sighed. "Let's see what B says." Together they turned and left me alone in my office.

King of Summer

2007-12-10T20:17:00.000-08:00

Approximately 18 months from today, Sound Transit expects to begin offering light rail service from downtown Seattle to Almost-The-Airport. (They will begin offering service on the additional distance to the airport, they say, about six months after that.) With the addition of the light rail line down the center of MLK, the entire area has seen massive changes. The street, obviously, has been widened and improved. Streetlights, sidewalks, and landscaping have been added in many areas. Several of the future stations have small plazas with benches and trees already nearly completed.

About a mile north of our house on MLK, the sidewalk widens for a few blocks, becoming a broad pedestrian boulevard that could easily let four or five people walk abreast. Saplings have been planted between the sidewalk and the street here as along much of the route. You can imagine a summer stroll to the light rail station, ten years hence, in the dappled shade of tall oaks and maples.

For one short segment, you don't have to use your imagination. A huge old oak sprawls skyward above the sidewalk. The first time I walked that route I was delighted to see the smooth new sidewalk take a sharp bend to the left around the tree, squeeze out into the street parking area, bump up and back down over old roots, and swing back to the right to resume its straight course. Who knows how many other trees were torn out to make room for the necessary street-widening and sidewalk-adding? But this one, at least, stands impassive where it has stood for years, now nestled in the new curve of acquiescent sidewalk.

I try not to anthropomorphize the world around me too much. But when I pass, I find myself unable to resist reaching out to pat its bark appreciatively. I am glad the planners--for whatever reason--found themselves forced to bend their pavement to spare an oak for a few more decades.

You can see more about the light rail project over at Sound Transit's website.

Reusable Wrapping

2007-12-09T22:13:00.000-08:00

Around the same time that I began pondering whether I could make a Christmas "tree," I decided I didn't want to give presents wrapped in paper--paper that would likely be destined for a landfill or a burn barrel. One of my friends has always given gifts in simple drawstring cloth bags, and they didn't look too complicated to make. I determined to copy her.

For about $5 I bought two yards of this lovely red costumey fabric covered in playful red swirls of velvet. It's been sitting in a drawer in the craft room for a month, so tonight I finally pulled it out and hand-stitched a small bag with a yarn drawstring. No doubt using the sewing machine for the rest of them will speed the process somewhat; still, I'm pleased with the result. The fabric was billed as Halloween costume fabric, but it's very Christmasy. Here's hoping most of the recipients will feel moved to reuse their drawstring bags for their own future gifts.

Anniversary, Shmanniversary

2007-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

Not long ago a few of us at work realized that one of our co-workers would soon have been at Workplace for fifteen years. Such longevity being a rarity in our department, we decided the occasion merited some recognition, however informal. A card featuring carefully bland cartoon animals expressing slightly jokey cartoon sentiments was purchased and circulated for everyone to share their good wishes with our sincerely beloved co-worker.

One busy employee misunderstood the occasion provoking the card. Among all the scrawled lines of "Congratulations on fifteen years, Jill!" and "We're so glad you're here!" which filled the card was this short missive: "Congrats to you and your husband. May you enjoy many more happy years together!"

Brainache

2007-12-07T21:21:00.000-08:00

This afternoon found me short-tempered at work. I dismissed it, assuming I was letting work stuff get to me, but as soon as I left for the day I promptly got a migraine. That will teach me to listen more closely to what my body's trying to tell me.

Lucky for me, my "migraines" are almost always pain-free. (When they're not, of course, they are excruciatingly painful. All or nothing!) Attempting to read something will lead me to notice a small dark patch obstructing part of my vision. The dark part is usually flashing or glowing bright around its edges. It will grow in size until I can scarcely see anything that I focus on directly; I have to let my gaze sidle up on things using my peripheral vision. Luckily again, this strange flashing blurriness usually dissipates within about half an hour.

I don't get them terribly often, but the frequency seems to be increasing, which is why I'm musing "out loud" about them here, trying to keep track of when I get them, what I was doing just prior, food I had eaten earlier, and that kind of thing. (For the record: today around 4:30 on the bus; staring at a computer screen for most of the day; Triscuits and dried apricots, and earlier than that, half a leftover calzone. And I did have coffee that morning.)

The brain is a strange thing, eh? As much as I used to pine for some kind of mystical experience, I know that I'd gnaw it to death after the fact. I'm not sure I'd ever be able to trust that it wasn't just one more trick of my unfathomable brain. "Flashing lights! Dead pixels in the middle of your eyes! Jesus Christ enfolding you in a loving embrace!" Is one of these things not like the others? Am I certain of that?

The Final Straw

2007-12-06T19:41:00.001-08:00

It wasn't the night last spring that someone came to our door at midnight. We were both sleeping, and Chloe's furious barking woke us up. Muzzy-headed, I staggered into the living room and peered out the front window. A shadowy figure stood hunched up against our front door. "There's someone out front!" I hissed. Mr. Thel and I crossed paths as I retreated back into the living room, and he ominously strode to the front door. He opened the door about five inches, blocking the opening with his body. In a low voice that would've made the devil himself take a step back, Mr. Thel asked, "What seems to be the problem?"

The bulky stranger was nearly to the road by now, but he turned to say that he needed his car jump-started. In the same quiet tone, Mr. Thel calmly explained that it was midnight, that we were sleeping, and that he wouldn't be able to help just then. Then he gently but firmly closed and locked the door. (He then told me that he'd helped someone at the (alleged) crack house who needed a jump earlier that same day; he says this wasn't the same guy, but that he did watch this fellow walk back to the (alleged) crack house after we turned him down.)

But that wasn't the last straw.

It wasn't even the late summer night when we discovered them stealing our water.* Mr. Thel was at band practice that Sunday night. I was reading in the living room when I heard a weird rushing sound. I dismissed it and kept reading; a few minutes later Chloe sounded the alert, and at first I irritatedly shushed her for barking at nothing. Then I heard the quiet male voices just outside. A peek through the bedroom blinds revealed two figures huddled in our side yard, right up next to our bedroom window.

I will freely confess to you that I am, by nature, a timid person. Two men skulking in my yard after 9 pm? The phone was smoking from the speed with which I dialed 911. I kept an eye on them while I talked to the dispatcher, who took me very seriously and had a patrol car at our house within five minutes. But by then, I had watched the two stagger away carrying between them an obviously very heavy laundry bucket sort of container. When the police came, two excruciatingly polite and adorable fresh-faced young officers** had me show them where I'd seen the trespassers. The yard there squelched wetly, though we hadn't had rain for days. One cop ranged out to the street and remarked, "Well, there's a trail of water down the street here."

They strolled off following the wet trail. I watched it lead them unerringly to the (alleged) crack house. Quiet voices, no loud confrontations; soon the police trudged back. One of them told me, "We got up there and asked them about it, and they were like...'Water? Oh, yeah, we do have a bucket of water back here, but that's our own, we didn't take it from anyone.' I was like, 'Dude, we just followed the trail straight here.' We told them they can't be trespassing like that, and they said they were real sorry..." He shrugged. "You got the best alarm system around, though, with that puppy in there," he nodded approvingly.

The next day one of the residents of the (alleged) crack house came by to apologize directly. "Our water's been shut off, and I told them when I left for work that day that I just wanted the toilets flushed by the time I got home. But my God, I sure didn't tell them to go take water from our neighbors." She seemed genuinely angry with the men in her house--relatives or friends, who she said came to stay through a rough patch and hadn't yet hauled themselves out of the roughness yet--and embarrassed about the situation. And yet her best defense was that she had told them to take the water from the other blue house on the street, the one that didn't have anyonen living there. And the neighbors next to us say they had the same water-thieving situation a few nights later. (Mr. Thel cleverly shut off the valve to the outside spigots at that point. I wish I could say we've been merely happy, instead of retroactively disgruntled, by how much lower our water bill has been since then.)

But that wasn't the last straw, either.

It wasn't the constant foot traffic in and out of that house. It wasn't the steady stream of cars that pull up to that house for a minute, wait while someone runs out to them, conduct a brief exchange, and drive away. It wasn't hearing the neighbors' story of seeing one of the residents at the (alleged) crack house get beaten by several other men in the front yard, one of whom (allegedly!) kept yelling out, "Where's my money, man? Where's my money? Get me my money, man!" between punches. It wasn't hearing the neighbors tell us that the victim broke away and ran off to hide in our dark back yard from his assailants.

No, those things piled up, and we said to ourselves, "We need to start documenting this." We got used to rolling our eyes about the (alleged) crack house, and telling ourselves we should figure out where to report this kind of thing.

But a final straw has been detected. A five-gallon bucket, last seen tucked against the corner of our house, has disappeared. Water is one thing; water, after all, is life. Skulking around to steal it is Not Okay, but it's understandable. But setting foot all over our land and taking actual stuff? Even our cheap plastic car-wash bucket? Oh HELL no, y'all.

And that, my friends, was the final straw.

For your reference, the number to call is one of these:

Narcotics Section (206)684-5797 (8:00 am - 4:00 pm)
Non-emergency 9-1-1 (206)625-5011
Community Police Team:
North Precinct (206)684-0851
South Precinct (206)386-9180
East Precinct (206)684-4370
West Precinct (206)684-8996

More info here. The person you speak to will be interested and polite, if my experience is any guide. And it won't be an instantaneous process. I'll keep you posted.

*That was the same night that Chloe locked me out of the house. While I was out talking to the unbearably cute policemen, she was still amped up over all the agitation and excitement. She jumped up against the door several times. She knows the general principle of a doorknob, being foiled in attempts to operate them only by her lack of opposable thumbs. Failing to open the door, she managed instead to lock the deadbolt securely. Naturally my keys were still in the house. Fortunately Mr. Thel arrived mere minutes after I convinced the cops it would be okay to leave me there for the few minutes it would take him to get home.

**I know I sound like such a crone. But it's all true.

Oh Christmas wire, oh Christmas wire

2007-12-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

I had a germ of an idea about a Christmas tree, this year. Our house has no room for a cut tree. In the past, purchasing a potted tree hasn't worked out very well for us either. (We neglect them to death.) Perhaps, my idea-seed whispered, I could make some kind of a facsimile of a Christmas tree. After all, I'm a crafty soul, am I not? Do I not have creativity a-bubble in my soul?

Having not planted this germ, nor thought further on it in any way, I found myself last Friday evening with the news that snow would probably fall on Saturday. Mr. Thel and I went out to see August Rush (an insufferable, cloying, eye-rolling, suspension-of-disbelief-puncturing blot of a movie that I am almost completely unable to recommend), and on the way home I made him stop at a Fred Meyer. I had a vague idea about using wire; couldn't find wire. Maybe coat hangers? Only wooden ones available. Frustrated and idealess, I wandered through the home section willy-nilly, hoping inspiration would strike. I paused at the live trees for a moment, feeling defeated, but a burst of defiance led me out into the garden area.

Aha! Madness and inspiration struck me like a hammer. I bought one package of something similar to these:

plus one roll of green tape. $8 later I scurried out the door, cackling and rubbing my hands with glee. Metaphorically.

Saturday morning, of course, the sketchily imagined project itself turned out to be a bit harder to create than I had airily visualized. No doubt buying a potted tree and plunking it down in the living room would have been several times easier and faster than wrestling with wire all morning. Nevertheless, I finally ended up with a roughly conical structure that let me wrap a strand of colored lights around it, hang all my ornaments on it, and even throw a star on top. Without falling over. And it never needs watering! Works for me. Ring in the holidays, my "tree" is decorated and proud.

December 4

2007-12-04T21:50:00.000-08:00

What Thel Saw

1. On my blog statistics. I had more visitors yesterday than any other day in Heavy Duty Power history, y'all. This pleased me until I realized that at least half of them were due to my excerpting a big chunk of news from KOMO's website, leading people interested in storm updates straight to this scraggly little corner of the internet. Oops. Sorry about that. But if you like occasional pictures of a wily German Shepherd, or rambling about about riding the bus through Seattle, do stick around.

2. On the bus. Scratched in a plastic panel, amidst all the gang graffiti and illegible scrawlings, is a well-done rendering of Homer Simpson's head.

3. At Real Live Preacher, some words that resonated with me:

Are you just ornery enough to stare down an empty universe and say, “I DEMAND that there be meaning in these skies.” And then you stare real hard and angry right into the Milky Way. Then you laugh because of how small and silly you are. You laugh at yourself, but you keep staring. You ARE going to stare down the universe.

I might stare for awhile, but then I crumple away and slink off in anger and terror. Still, something makes me keep coming back for another attempt at bending the universe to my will. Smart.

4. At home. Unfinished knitting projects compete with Robin Hobb's Tawny Man< series for my attention. Guess which group won? As if I could set down book 3 of the Farseer Trilogy and not be impatient to move on to see what happens next.

5. On the bus again. A boy of about 2 years plays with his sister, closer to 4, while their mother tries to get some paperwork finished. He darts away once too often, and mom has sharp words for him. She makes him sit still in his seat, and he sobs at the injustice of being unable to run up and down the aisle any longer. Then--I wasn't staring, I could see their reflections in the window--his big sister gathered him up into her arms, tucking him up onto her lap and patting his back soothingly while he cried softly. Aw.

And the floods came up

2007-12-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

At last we bid farewell to December 3, 2007: the second-wettest 24-hour period in Seattle's recorded weather history.

I thought there weren't any signs of the extreme rainfall near my house as I approached tonight. But then I got off the bus and saw that I was wrong. Just around the corner from us is a P-Patch which has become a lake. The picture doesn't convey how deep that ditch is that leads down to the gardens. The corner of the new pond was spilling steadily over the sidewalk; fortunately the storm drain there was handling it capably.

Perfect use of the internet

2007-12-03T11:57:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that, like many people, I get a little obsessed with severe weather events. Refresh, refresh, refresh on the local media sites.

The Seattle Times has set up an interactive updateable map of local areas affected by the recordbreaking rainfall today:

Not too many folks have updated yet (likely people with flooding houses don't have "update the internets with my plight!" at the top of their task list), but it could be a really helpful resource.

Down came the rain

2007-12-03T08:48:00.000-08:00

Uh, holy Northwest hurricane, Batman:

Updated Monday 8:30 a.m.
Current Headlines: Winds easing a bit along the coast, but still over 60 mph. Peak gusts from 80-120 mph recorded. Almost all major roads along coast are blocked by down trees and power lines. Several local mudslides and urban flooding problems. Amtrak service suspended between Eugene and Vancouver. Flood Warnings continue for several rivers. Freezing rain is falling at Snoqualmie Pass. Heavy rain continues to fall across Puget Sound -- Seattle well over 2.5" of rain since midnight.

SEATTLE - The largest of three consecutive storms was moving through Western Washington Monday, bringing heavy rain, damaging wind, and potential for major flooding along Olympic Mountain-fed rivers.

The Washington and Oregon coast were severely battered by the storm Monday morning. Wind speeds have been clocked at 85 mph in Astoria and 81 mph in Hoquiam. (Hoquiam has since lost power, so we don't know if it's been worse.) Meanwhile, an unofficial report out of Bay Center, Wash. (near Long Beach) had a measured gust of 119 mph. (They stick out on a headland a bit and have a free shot at strong wind.)

But these aren't occasional gusts -- there have been steady gusts in the 65-75 mph range in those areas all morning. Meanwhile, weather instruments at Tatoosh Island and Destruction Island along the coast are reporting sustained winds of 70 mph, gusting to 85 mph.

Power outages and hazardous driving conditions have forced many school districts to delay or cancel classes. (See complete school closure list)

Grays Harbor County Sheriff Mike Whelan says the storm damage on the Washington coast is the worst he's seen in 30 years in law enforcement.

The Washington State Patrol says most major roadways in Grays Harbor and Pacific Counties, including U.S. Highways 12 and 101, are closed or blocked due to high winds and numerous trees and power lines down across the counties. It is not known when roads will reopen.

Two Grays Harbor PUD power line workers trying to restore service were injured, one seriously in a 40-foot fall, when a windblown tree hit a lift truck bucket Sunday night, sheriff's deputy David A. Pimentel said. Both were hospitalized, one with head injuries and the other with back injuries.

Whelan says rescuers had to use chain saws and dodge falling trees to clear the highway to get an ambulance to the scene. One worker has been taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. The other is at Grays Harbor Community Hospital in Aberdeen.

Whelan is a storm victim himself. A falling tree smashed his truck in the driveway at his home. He had to be picked up by a patrol car.

Grays Harbor PUD says they have at least 33,000 people without power, but won't be able to further assess the damage until daylight. In the interim, they have pulled all their crews off the streets until the winds calm down.

Schools in that area closed for the day due to lack of power.

Problems were plenty in the Puget Sound area as well. Sounder service between Everett and Seattle was canceled because of some mud on the tracks. There are extra buses in Everett and Edmonds to help with commuters.

Mudslides halted north-south Amtrak passenger train service between Eugene, Ore., and Vancouver, British Columbia.

In the greater Seattle area, heavy rain -- storm totals of over 2" since late Sunday night -- is creating local flooding problems.

A mudslide blocked part of Westlake Avenue North in the 2400 block. Another mudslide blocked one lane of Highway 99 near 14th Avenue South, and a sinkhole ruptured the road at Golden Gardens Drive NW and NW 85th Street near Ballard.

Standing water was also a big problem on all area roadways.

Several Warnings In Effect

Here are the myriad of warnings and watches in effect for the storm:

A HIGH WIND WARNING remains in effect for the coast, Admiralty Inlet area, northwestern Olympic Peninsula area, the greater Everett/Snohomish County area, the Hood Canal area, the lower Chehalis Valley, and the area around Port Townsend through 4 p.m. Monday.

This storm is expected to bring sustained winds of 40-50 mph, gusting as high as 80-100 mph along the coast and Sekiu/Clallam Bay, Neah Bay area. For the rest of the places listed in that warning, gusts are expected as high as 60 mph.

The largest gusts are expected until around 7 a.m. along the coast, then the winds are expected to abate a bit through the morning (still very windy though), and then perhaps another wave of wind toward late morning/midday, but not quite as strong as before.

As to why the seemingly sporadic locations for the Wind Warning, this storm is poised to bring out a local wind-generating effect, which I'll get to a little later in this discussion.

For the rest of Western Washington, including the greater Seattle-Tacoma (but not Everett since that's in the warning) area, A WIND ADVISORY is in effect for the same time frame. (A Wind Advisory is a notch below a High Wind Warning). Here, winds are expected to gust as high as 40-50 mph. Yes, while the coast is going gang-busters, this does not look like a big wind event for the I-5 corridor, save for perhaps the Snohomish County area, as the Olympics are providing a barrier to strong wind here.

A WINTER STORM WARNING remains in effect in the Cascades through Monday morning. Conditions have warmed considerably, but pockets of cold air near the surface means continuing snow for Stevens Pass, and freezing rain problems in Snoqualmie Pass.

FLOOD WARNINGS are now in effect for all rivers that feed of the Olympic Mountains. That includes the Bogachiel, Skokomish, Elwha, Dungeness, Satsop, Deschutes, and Chehalis Rivers. A FLOOD WARNING has also been issued for the Puyallup River near Orting, the Tolt River and the Issaquah Creek.

The information is fast changing so the best advice is to go to and bookmark this link:

forecast.weather.gov. ( You might need to scroll down. Some of Portland's flood warnings will be listed there too, and it's listed chronologically by update time.)

That is the direct page to the National Weather Service Flood Warnings. It has specific details on all rivers under Flood Watch and Warning.

As much as 6-10 inches of rain are expected in the Olympic Mountains, and some Olympic-fed rivers could see record flooding with this event. If you live in this flood plain, take immediate precautions and finalize them as soon as possible. Flooding will likely begin Monday and continue through Tuesday and possibly into Wednesday as the water flows downstream.

The Cascades will also see rain approaching 5 inches, so flooding is expected on Cascade rivers as well, but hopefully not to the extent the Olympics will get it.

A FLOOD WATCH remains is in effect for all other mountain-fed rivers in Western Washington in anticipation of Monday's heavy rain, but many Cascade rivers could go on Flood Warning soon.

A HIGH WIND WARNING is also in effect for the mountains, where ridgetop winds could reach 80-100 mph gusts -- especially in the Olympics. This is not a time to be hiking or mountain climbing. Pass travel will also be very difficult.

A HIGH SURF WARNING is in effect for the coast, where seas have been recorded as high as 40-45 feet off the north Oregon coast, and 39 feet off the south and central Washington coast.

And in a related warning, a COASTAL FLOOD WATCH is in effect from Sunday evening through Monday evening for problems associated with high surf and beach erosion.

Finally, an AVALANCHE WARNING is in effect for the Cascades through Monday as conditions are very dangerous in the mountain backcountry.

Storm Stats So Far:

Wind: Peak Gusts So Far

Bay City, Ore.: 129 mph (Unofficial)
Bay Center, Wash: 119 mph (Unofficial)
Tillamook, Ore. (tide station): 100 mph
Florence, Ore: 91 mph
Clallam Bay: 90 mph (estimated)
Hurricane Ridge: 86 mph
Astoria, Ore.: 85 mph
Destruction Island: 84 mph (Sustained 65-73 for several hours)
Tatoosh Island: 82 mph
Hoquiam: 81 mph (Station went dark at 4 a.m.)
Tillamook, Ore (Airport): 74 mph
Aberdeen: 62 mph
Forks: 58 mph
Bellingham: 53 mph
Shelton: 51 mph
Oak Harbor: 49 mph
Kelso: 41 mph
Olympia: 39 mph
Rain: Storm totals since Midnight through 8 a.m.

Shelton: 3.71"
Seattle: 2.58" (About to climb into Top 10 wettest days ever.)
Olympia: 2.17"
Everett: 1.70"
Tacoma: 1.41"
Sequim: 0.18". (The Olympic Rain Shadow is in full force today. Take a peek at the radar and note the big hole over the northeastern Olympic Peninsula.)
The Rain Timeline

Heavy rain will continue through the day and into Monday evening before finally tapering off. As much as 2-4" of rain is expected in the lowlands, while 8-12" of rain are expected in the Olympic Mountains, and 4-6" possible in the Cascades.

Combine that with warm temperatures (highs Monday will be well into the 50s), and that's a classic recipe for major flooding.

And with that much rain in the lowlands, urban flooding is possible as well. You can help by trying to keep drains clear of leaves.

The Wind Timeline

For the areas listed in the High Wind Warning:

Strong winds will pick up along the coast in the wee hours of Monday morning, and continue to blow through the day. This is not a typical windstorm where we have the low center pass through and we get 2-5 hours of wind. This is an extended event where strong winds are expected from 6-10 hours in the areas listed in the wind warning.

So high winds are expected to blow through the day Monday and then taper off Monday afternoon or early evening.

For the areas listed in the Wind Advisory, it shouldn't blow quite as strong or as long, but it will still be a very blustery day.

Why Snohomish County for the Wind Warning?

As we mentioned before, this is not our typical windstorm where the winds don't pick up until we have a big area of low pressure passing through to our north. Those typically last, oh, 4-6 hours on the coast, and 2-3 hours inland.

This one is different, but difficult to explain in layman terms. Suffice to say, even though it's farther offshore, it's a rather large storm, and the way its fronts are aligned, it'll "open the door" to the winds to race out toward the low earlier than usual. That door will open very early Monday morning and won't "close" until late Monday evening, thus making for an extended period of strong winds.

Aside from that, we have something forming called a "lee-side low" or "lee trough". This is a very localized effect caused by large amounts of air rushing around a mountain. On the other side, it'll form an eddy on the back side of the mountains where the air is rushing. (You might see this on the beach, when waves rush past a rock, note how the water swirls in wake of the rock.)

In this situation, the lee trough is forecast to form around the northern Hood Canal area. This creates a localized effect where that low will cause a "mini-windstorm" and enhance the pressure difference over a small area. That area is expected to be that Admiralty Inlet, western Snohomish County, North Hood Canal and the northeastern Olympic Peninsula, like Port Townsend and Port Ludlow.

The other areas in the warning outside this area are just in the warning for "normal" winds to get strong. What a crazy way to start December!

Bus fuss

2007-12-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

I waited in the teeth of the wind as the daylight faded. If you wait inside the bus shelter, out of the worst chill, the bus will not see you; it will rumble past without slowing, and you will wait another fifteen minutes. Ask me how I know this. So I waited outside, hunching my back against the wind.

The bus, when it came, was warm, all the windows heavily steamed up from all the passengers. A couple of people stood in the back, and I resigned myself that all seats were taken and staggered down the aisle toward them as the bus lurched into motion. Just a few seats from the front, though, a young woman wearing a fuzzy white hat sat in the aisle seat with only her tote bag slung across the window seat. White earbuds plugged her ears and her head nodded rhythmically to her music. Stopping at her side, I waited expectantly.

She didn't look up. I cleared my throat. She finally tilted her head toward me. I pointed at her bag. She raised her eyebrows. I enunciated carefully, "I'd like to sit down."

Surprise flitted across her face. "Oh, um. Okay," she said. She slowly picked up her bag, drew it onto her lap, and turned her body slightly sideways, leaving a gap of about four inches between her knees and the seat in front of her. When it became clear that this was as far as she was going to move, despite my own body being slightly wider than four inches, I dragged myself through and flopped down heavily into the window seat. "Thanks," I said, and then I snidely added with a little smile, "I don't think your bag needs a seat all to itself!"

I wasn't sure she heard me; she said nothing, and soon her head began to bob rhythmically once again. But soon my conscience smote me mightily for my passive-aggressive little act. Once I'd gained the seat, there had been no call for further verbal barbs. An apology was in order, obviously. Or was it? On the balance sheet of our interaction, had my rudeness outdone her own so much that I had fallen into her debt? I wasn't sure. Yes, I'd been a sarcastic brat. But she had forced me into it through her own headphone-wearing oblivious selfishness!

She began to hum softly to her music. Probably not on the verge of sobbing, then. And now minutes had passed. Wouldn't it be obtrusive and weird to turn to her and abruptly apologize? No, an apology would be too much, now. It would draw us into a conversation that her humming, head-nodding ways were obviously meant to forestall.

Still, I had to do something. And it came to me. I determined to thank her when we parted ways. When at last she or I rose to depart, I would catch her eye and give her a humble smile. No, it would have to be not so much a smile as a wry look of slight regret, and shame. I would also manage to tinge it with gratitude and forgiveness.

I would fix this incredibly communicative expression on my face and softly say, "Thank you." And in those two words, I would pour out all the emotion in my remorseful soul. With that look and those two words, I would let her know that she had been oblivious, and that I had been rude, but that it was all behind us now. My face would make plain that we were two sisters on the bus, bound by our transit route, and the world stretched anew before us. Somehow my glance would make her resolve to be more aware, and would tell her that I vowed to be less snappish. She would hear my thanks and know that I was grateful not just for the seat, or for her forgiveness and her new intentions; she would know that I was grateful to be alive, on this bus, and that I wished her well in her struggles. She would feel a flood of gratitude for our human family, foibles and all.

And perhaps I could add just a slight twinkle of humor to my eye, to share my amusement at her increasingly loud humming--no, no, better not make any further comments on her behavior. No twinkle, then. Just the World's Most Expressive Look and Heartfelt Thanks. My mind made up, I mentally rehearsed this upcoming performance until we drew up to my bus stop.

I turned to her. She swiveled her legs, once again leaving me a scant few inches to squeeze out. Nevertheless, I strengthened my resolve. I looked her in the eye, and nodded. "Thank you," I said with a smile.

She ignored me. Putting her tote bag where I had been, she settled back into her seat and adjusted her earbuds.

Clearly my performance needs more work. Next time I also probably shouldn't roll my eyes and sigh loudly before I walk away.

Welcome, winter

2007-12-01T16:45:00.001-08:00

Last year at this time we'd had snow on the ground for a week straight. This afternoon it began to fall again, heavy wet flakes blizzarding in the breeze. Mr. Thel and I strolled up to the taco truck for lunch, and the wait outside turned us into snowcones. Luckily my year-old wool hat, knitted at Thanksgiving last year, kept my head toasty. My khaki-clad legs were not so lucky; I was happy to scuttle back inside with my ginormous burrito.

Mmmm, carne asada. Mmmm, snow.

Hi-diddly-ho there, neighborinos

2007-11-27T21:11:00.000-08:00

Wow, where'd the last week go? I am a bad, bad Nablopomoer.

I came down with a cold two weekends ago, which had me lolling about uselessly for a few days. When I get sick, which is rarely, I'm so unaccustomed to the state that I feel pathetically unable to deal with it. I whine and loll and sniffle and whine and make Mr. Thel fetch me soups and juices...a terrible patient.

We drove down to good old Roseburg (well, Winston) (well, Lookingglass) (well, further than that...up into the f'real sticks) for Thanksgiving weekend. Played with the nieces, lounged about with grandparents, and ate the requisite 4,000 calories or so. Less, actually, because there wasn't any damn stuffing! My mom said she was roasting a ham, and when I asked about stuffing everyone laughed at me. "Where would you stuff it?" my dad chortled. Please--as if you'd have stuffed it in the turkey, anyway! Thanksgiving without stuffing...and they wonder why I so infrequently coming home for the holiday.

I jest, of course. Mostly. The ham was nice, and the hollow caused by the absence of stuffing was filled by the delicious salmon we had on Friday night. Then a small person all hopped up on pie launched herself, howling gleefully and windmilling her arms, at Mr. Thel, and Chloe leapt to intercept the threat, and there was a collision, and some sobbing, and oh dear. Fortunately the small person is a hardy soul, and the next morning found her once again happily patting Chloe and tweaking her ears, and Chloe enduring such untender administrations with admirable equanimity.

Happy Thanksgiving, la la la.

Illy

2007-11-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

I've been sick and missed a couple of days. But apparently this counts as a posting! So I don't have to miss three days!

Day 17 is a mini-vacation day

2007-11-17T15:22:00.000-08:00

A rundown of the last 24 hours:

--Enjoying delicious Indian food at the restaurant across from our hotel
--Listening to good music until after midnight
--Sleeping in late
--Eating bananas, doughnut holes, orange juice, and coffee in our hotel room overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca
--Driving the half-hour out to Lake Crescent, beautifully draped in grey mists and rain
--Stopping at the easy-to-overlook "Granny's Cafe" on our way back to Port Angeles for a tasty cheeseburger, sitting at one of about eight tables in the cafe, and eavesdropping on the conversation among the three park rangers sitting nearby
--Lounging in the hotel room, watching the clouds slide past and indulging in a trashy magazine

Day 16

2007-11-16T16:32:00.001-08:00

Made it to Port Angeles by 11:00 this morning, so we spent a few hours wandering around town.

We stopped at a music store so Mr. Thel could purchase spare drumsticks, and I found the piano instruction book I used to pore through, trying to teach myself to play, when I was a kid:

We had an old piano stool, all the upholstery worn off it to reveal the wooden seat lid. Under the lid lived a hodgepodge of music books. The John Thompson one was old and tattered, falling to bits around its edges and its cover faded to pale orange. For all I know it was an original first edition print from the book's 1938 origin.

When my parents moved into a smaller house they gave the piano away; I didn't ask, but I imagine the piano books went away as well. I still don't know anything about playing the piano past a first-grade level, but it was such an unexpected delight to flip through and hum all those old songs to myself. Maybe one of my nieces will find it useful someday.

Day 15

2007-11-15T22:01:00.000-08:00

My bus driver this evening drove as if she were trying to work the gas pedal and a yo-yo with the same foot, simultaneously. Lurch, brake, lurch, brake, lurch, brake. I disembarked and came reeling home like a drunkard after a six-month sea voyage.

Tomorrow Mr. Thel and I are heading over to Port Angeles for two nights; his band has shows there on Friday and Saturday. We have engaged our lovely neighbors to take care of Chloe while we are gone, and I'm nervous as a mother about it. I wanted to write out a detailed list of all the instructions and suggestions we'd already discussed with them, but Mr. Thel convinced me that as competent, dog-friendly adults they are unlikely to forget to feed her. (To be callous about it, she could stand to lose a few pounds anyway. When I took her to the vet two weeks ago the assistant noted approvingly that Chloe had lost about three pounds since her last visit. Then the vet came in and started to lecture me that Chloe is getting slightly chunky. Fortunately, the assistant leapt in to note that we're "heading in the right direction, actually." Mm-hmm!)

I'm not as worried about the neighbors neglecting her as I am about her getting into some kind of trouble between their visits, including but not limited to:
--having an attack of diarrhea and tracking it through the house
--chewing on an electrical cord
--chewing on something of ours in resentment at our prolonged absence
--knocking over a bookshelf, OR! --having a bookshelf fall on her in an earthquake!
--Or having the whole house fall in on her in an earthquake!
--Or having the whole house fall in on her in an earthquake, surviving the house's collapse and fleeing the scene in terror, ending up in the greenbelt on Beacon Hill where the coyotes are rumored to live and, believing herself abandoned by her people, insinuating herself into the coyote pack, until one day getting into a poisoned chunk of meat set out by a coyote-hater and dying a slow and terrible death.

This is why I don't do well at "thinking through the potential outcomes" of my choices. Too many appalling possibilities. Better to leave the vet's phone number, our cell numbers, and a new bag of dogfood on the counter and zip away before I talk myself out of it.

Books and lists

2007-11-14T22:23:00.000-08:00

I need to update the list of books I've read this year, languishing at midsummer's point there in the sidebar. I'm fairly sure I've surpassed my year's goal of 50 already, thanks in part to my belated discovery of Diana Wynne Jones. Though I'm past the age at which I should have read them, I have still fallen in love with her young adult novels.

A fun thing about the last year or two has been realizing and embracing the fact that I adore well-done fantasy writing. Aside from a handful of best-beloved series from my childhood (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Loyd Alexander, and Madeleine L'Engle spring to mind as the reigning quintumvirate of those years, although Robin McKinley and Patricia McKillip shouldnt' be left out), I'd somehow managed to miss most of the genre for the last decade or so. Thinking about it now, I can't imagine what kept me away...probably some sense that it was a childish interest best put away as I became an adult.

Well. You know. Fuck. That. Shit.

I think it was Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Paladin of Souls, plucked in idle curiosity from a shelf at Third Place Books about 3 years ago, which deftly reminded me of how much delight, satisfaction, and beauty there is in fantastical literature done well. Since then I've been bolder about picking up fantasy books I've never heard of, and trying them out. As with anything, I've had varying success with that approach; some extremely popular books just aren't my cup of tea. But then there's Neil Gaiman, and Diana Wynne Jones, and Bujold, and now Robin Hobb (whose Assassin's Apprentice just swept the evening away from me...), Philip Pullman, Susanna Clarke...

It's nice to stretch out more comfortably inside my skin. Openly relishing the fantastical is one way I'm getting more comfortable in here. It's jolly good fun, too.

The view from my office, three weeks ago

2007-11-13T09:58:00.000-08:00

It's barren now, but this tree turns such a determined yellow in the fall that I frequently mistake its brightness for sunshine even on the gloomiest of days.

Weeeoooeeeoooeeeooo...

2007-11-12T20:20:00.001-08:00

I just spent about fifteen minutes squinting at this. For the life of me I could only see her spinning counterclockwise, and then I realized that if I focus on her feet I can trick my brain into seeing it both ways. Freaky.

clipped from www.news.com.au

Right Brain v Left Brain

THE Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

Into the grey

2007-11-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

With the second Windpocalypse of the season behind us, we are well on our way into the heart of winter around here. Solstice is nearly six weeks away, and as always I find that facing three months of short days makes my spirits sink a bit.

I don't mind chilly, wet weather. In fact, I prefer it to hot, dry weather. You can always throw on another layer of clothes in the winter, but there are only so many garments you can remove in the summer (and sometimes removing them all leaves you wishing for still more layers to peel back). It's the brevity of the daylight hours, combined with the prospect of finding most of those daylight hours sodden and grey, that makes me quail.

But then I always shake myself sternly as I begin to wilt and whine, mid-November, and remind myself of three things:

1. Long, dark evening hours provide you the perfect cover to do the things you most enjoy--knit, read, journal, drink hot sweet beverages, squirrel around on the internet, etc. Indoor activities, you know. During these months nobody questions the notion of spending hours curled up in bed with a good book; the same practice in June gets you a scornful sigh.

2. 'Tis the season of three-day weekends and holidays aplenty, starting with today's federal holiday and lasting through February.

3. Even the dimmest days tend to have long enough dry spells for a brisk walk with Chloe, or around the block at work.

I had a lovely reminder of that last point today. A windstorm blew in, pelting the windows with rain while the winds banshee-wailed at the front door. Chloe had the world's fastest potty walk in the rain this morning, and then we hibernated in the living room with the aforementioned reading materials and tea (Chloe satisfied herself with a bone and a nap). I worked on my revised mitten, curling my toes inside my slippers, and began to feel those first pangs of the rainy-season blahs. But by midafternoon the wind had blown a hole in the cloud cover, the sun came blazing out dazzlingly on all the wet, and I spent the better part of an hour romping outside with Chloe and a tennis ball. My bright new rubber boots, as hoped, made running around in the tall, wet grass a satisfyingly dry-footed experience. So even on a stormy day, we were able to gallivant in the sun with the brisk winds no more than a nose-nipping nuisance.

The wheels on the bus go round and...wait. Hold on. OK, we're moving again...the wheels--wait, just a minute...

2007-11-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

Someday I would like to take a journey to the Fantasy Land where dwell the writers of the bus schedules.

I took the bus up to Northgate tonight, so I had to make a transfer downtown. I managed to catch my connecting bus, but at that point reality branched sharply away from the lovely dream printed in the bus schedule. This particular bus only runs once per hour on Sundays, so there were approximately twenty people waiting at each of its downtown stops. Now, in Bus Schedule Land, each downtown stop is finished in under seven seconds for perfect timeliness. In Reality Land, unfortunately, most people require more than three tenths of a second to climb aboard the bus and find a seat. Thus before we had even left the downtown core we were running ten minutes behind. On a Sunday evening.

The difference in worlds was compounded by the Schedulers' apparent assumption that each bus travels in a wondrous warp along the surface streets, magically gliding through uniformly green lights and unclogged interesections at ten miles per hour faster than the posted limits. The real bus was constrained by the need to wait at stoplights, yield to pedestrians, and of course to stop at the bus stops where people waited to board or exit the bus.

And so a trip which in Schedule Land could be accomplished in about an hour, took in reality more than 50% longer.

The thing is, I wouldn't be as cranky if I knew ahead of time what I was getting in for. An hour and a half to Northgate? Okay, that's all right, I can deal. But don't tell me I can get there in an hour and then snicker in your sleeve when I, trustingly relying on the fantasy printed in the schedule, make plans accordingly.

My grand plans were just to see Ratatouille at the $3 theater in Shoreline, and we did sneak in just as it was starting...so I guess it worked out. However, this isn't the first time my ETA has been foiled by the bus schedule's pipe dreams. My Northgate friend was skeptical of my carlessness in the first place, and my recurring tardiness is doing nothing to convince her that buses are a useful transportation option for an adult with a driver's license. So really, the fluffy bunny fantasy travel times are helping to alienate potential riders. One wonders whether perhaps Kemper Freeman helps construct them.

Day 10

2007-11-10T19:59:00.000-08:00

Mr. Thel and I spent Friday evening at the Little Red Studio, which was even more fun than I had expected. There was painting and poetry and dance and ritual, and nobody was pretentious (quite the opposite). I think I can safely say that we'll be back there again.

I took Chloe for a nice long walk in the sunshine this afternoon. Poor thing, she pulled a muscle a couple of months ago and now she has a pronounced limp in the mornings. She walks it off within a few minutes, but the sight of her hobbling around first thing in the morning is still quite pathetic. Last week the vet said she might be developing arthritis in that leg and recommended glucosamine, so now we're grinding up these enormous pills and mixing them in with her food once a day.

I can't believe I am reduced to telling you about my dog's pills. This doesn't bode well for days 11-30, does it?

Bye-bye

2007-11-09T19:21:00.000-08:00

This, my friends, is the major reason why I'll be switching cell phone companies when my contract is up in the spring. Good riddance, AT&T.