Practicing For Crescent City (And Other News)

We had an overcast, cool, off-and-on damp day the other day. We never managed to get real precipitation for more than a minute or two at a time, but it felt like a practice day for our new life in Crescent City. Darcy passed the test with flying colors; it was everything I could do to get her to come inside once her hair was verging on wet rat.

Her sleeveless dress might not be appropriate in the northern rain, but she's got the right attitude! She started out with just the hat and moved on to the umbrella when she wanted to play peek-a-boo. It wasn't at all to keep the rain off her, just for the play.

As you can see behind her, our summer rains have left a green wash behind. The video for Mojave says that the water from summer storms runs off quickly and "does little for the fabric of life" in the desert, but you couldn't prove that around our house. There are several kinds flowering plants that are in a second full burst of bloom. A lot of the green on the ground is just grass from the hay seeds in our resident cows' poop, I will admit that. But there are a lot of natives having a second hurrah these days.

In other news, Michael will officially work for Redwood National Park as of October 11th, so our move should start the 12th or 13th and take three to five days, most likely. The movers will be done in a day, if our experience in King Salmon is any measure. Then we'll drive north. And drive north. And then drive north some more. We'll keep everyone posted.

On the book front, I've just finished Rebecca today. Somehow, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca have always been linked, loosely, in my head, and I still think that's not unrealistic. Rebecca had a modernized element of suspense, with the sinister housekeeper playing a more active role than the insane wife in Jane Eyre. I felt this book ended rather abruptly, but I need to go back and re-read the prologue to see if that sheds a bit more light on what happened next. I like it in a fairly vague way. Not something I'll feel compelled to read again, and I read a lot of books multiple times.

Next up is Middlemarch by George Eliot.

(For those of you paying attention, Dickens should be coming up next, but I've requested it through the Bookmobile, so when I was at the library in Las Vegas yesterday, I skipped ahead.)