Alaska, Day 2

Day 2: Still flying!

So after four flights to get us from Medford, OR, to King Salmon, AK, we got to sleep one night in King Salmon before taking a float plane to Brooks Camp to see the bears. Darcy got to be co-pilot and had a blast! Rain, which would follow us for most of our trip, didn't stop us from seeing the tundra on the flight. These float planes saw service in World War II, so they don't fly high or fast.

Brrrrrrrrrrr!

It's been unusually cold here on the far North Coast. As you can see, we've had very hard frosts the last three or four days and they are claiming that we might actually get accumulations of SNOW tonight. IN TOWN. On the coast of the great and mighty Pacific Ocean.

I think this has caused some problems here and there. This water-whatever-it-is shares a campus with Darcy's school and there was a worried looking plumbing person looking at it this afternoon when I arrived to pick her up.

Luckily for us, this weather did not arrive until after our Thanksgiving guests had come and gone. The nights were chilly, but the days warmed up nicely. This allowed Darcy to introduce her cousin to some of her favorite things:

Playing on the beach

Finding tide pool creatures (in this case, a BIG sun star)

Sandy's Results, According To The Glores

Whew. Sandy has officially welcomed us to Pennsylvania, or perhaps exactly the opposite. We have been hunkered down in a very wet Pittsburgh while Sandy tried her best to destroy the lower part of Manhattan island. We had a great day, with 4.5 hours of fun at the Children's Museum (awesome art options!) and dinner with my cousins. The rain was light, the winds mostly non-existent.

But then we started trying to figure out what we do next. We haven't been able to get in touch with anyone at the new park, but know that the park itself is closed at least until Thursday. The vacation rental house we were planning to stay in for the next ten days doesn't have power and doesn't expect to have to have power restored for 7-10 days. Ooops. There are 19 road closures in our new county, including the main road in sections. Not so good either.

Our decision? We're going to move closer to our new home, but not quite there. Officials are asking people to stay off the roads except for emergency travel, for one thing. And for another, we're assuming that no hotel will take new guests if they don't have power and that any hotel in the immediate area that does have power is probably full of storm refugees.

So we're going as far as Scranton tomorrow. They have power, there are only minor road closures, and we found a hotel with a lot of vacancies. Also with a true one bedroom suite with a door between the bedroom and the rest of the suite just in case we end up staying there for several days while power is restored to everything closer to where we'll be living.

Ah, Sandy, you really know how to make people feel welcome in their new home! We could have done without this particular welcome mat.

Life Is Exhausting

I had this misconception that driving across the country instead of flying would minimize our experience of jet lag. But our driving schedule (and socializing schedule, to be honest) has meant that we haven't been able to take advantage of the gradual time change and keep Darcy's bedtime at a normal hour. And so, having crossed into Eastern Daylight Time earlier today, it was a struggle to get her to sleep by 10:15. Hopefully, we can start to fix this problem in Pittsburgh. It now looks like we may be there three nights, as all park employees are being told to ride out the storm at home rather than at work. We'll get updates about power outages, downed trees, and flooding and make that decision on Tuesday morning, I think.

And that's my extremely exciting blog post for the day. We had a great time in St Louis. Saw many, but not all of the folks we'd hoped to catch up with and some, but not all of the places we wanted to show Darcy. Pictures tomorrow unless somehow Pittsburgh is without power!

My Network Administrator Prevented Blogging

You know how your computer sometimes gives you an error message that ends, "If this problem persists, contact your network administrator." My network administrator is Michael. When we get to a new hotel, he's the one who figures out how to connect us to their padlocked wi-fi. If there's a problem, he takes care of it.

But last night, he failed me for the very first time and couldn't get me internet access in our friends' home. So you all went blog postless and almost did tonight as well. Luckily (?) for you, Hurricane Sandy is disrupting our travel plans, so I had to have access to cancel a couple hotel reservations and make new ones to keep us out of the storm for a couple days. We'll reassess depending on how widespread the power outages are on Wednesday.

We are having a great time in St Louis. Good friends, good food, almost no driving, and beautiful places to hang out. What could be better? 

That's all I have tonight. Hope those of you reading on the eastern seaboard are prepared for whatever ends up coming your way. Stay safe. We're hoping to get to western PA before the storm really arrives and then stay put through the worst of the driving conditions. I'll keep you posted unless all of PA loses power!

An Unconvincing Day

I had a surprisingly unproductive day at work today. I had anticipated selecting two candidates for the VISTA positions I'm recruiting for right now. A rescheduled interview with one of my top candidates derailed that. I got a few small tasks off my desk, but the day was just so unmotivating. Gray skies. Wind. Rain. My office never really got out of the original gloom. My overhead lights buzz, so I don't use them, and the floor lamp I bought to replace them doesn't give off all that much light. Most of the year, that's just fine. But today, I felt like I was in a hibernation cave all day and got about as much done as a hibernating bear. 


Now, that's probably not quite true, because I answered a lot of emails and took many calls, so it seems likely that I accomplished something over the course of the day. It just doesn't feel like it.


Tomorrow will have to be extra-special-productive to make up for it. It would be more likely if I had made a to-do list before I left today. But again, it was a very unconvincing day. I think it was really just one long twilight. With heavy rain. And wind.

Camping!

Well, the rain is finally starting to taper off (although it rained yesterday morning for the opening day of our farmers' market, which I missed due to work), so it's camping season again! We went camping the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend after the weather turned out to be so much better than predicted. We had originally planned to camp the whole weekend, but then the weather folk predicted a full three days of rain, so we didn't. And so, of course, it was beautiful until Monday afternoon. Darcy was, as always, a big help in setting up camp in her somewhat interesting choice of outfit.

Due to our late start, we headed to the closest Oregon State Park, about thirty miles away. It's right on the beach, so we spent some very windy time playing in the water and sand. The campground has a great playground, so we spent some time there as well.

The morning was a bit chilly and Darcy was having none of it:

That's about as bundled as a small fairy-girl can get. She eventually thawed out enough to eat her pancakes before heading out on a wildflower expedition. The evening program the night before was a wildflower walk, which Darcy ended up loving. The guides let her keep a copy of the photocopied cheat sheet they used on the walk and Darcy walked around with it looking for some of the flowers she learned (or already knew):

She's styling in her PJs, vest, pink gloves, and pink-and-green knit hat (thanks again to Missy for our favorite hat!). On the way home, her flower chart got "scrunchled" so she had to draw her own. She drew a series of many boxes, just like on the chart. Hers are a variety of greens with a blob of color in the middle of some of them, but she did it so seriously and it came out as a pretty stunning piece of art even if it wouldn't help you identify a single flower.

Art is a major focus of Darcy's life these days. She made a leap a few months ago into representational art and will now draw very complex pictures that really do tell the story she wanted them to tell. Based on our earlier "Darcy Goes Camping" book that was the tale of her first camping trip illustrated with black and white photos, we made a "Darcy Goes Camping in Oregon" version for this trip. This time, though, we wrote the words -- mostly hers -- on the pages and then she illustrated it herself. The picture of the wildflower walk is amazing, with very recognizable foxglove, which is in peak bloom right now. My favorite might be the "hicycle". Darcy coined the phrase to describe a bicycle that rode around the campground. The seat and handlebars had been raised a few feet into the air so it was a high bicycle = hicycle. Without any guidance, she figured out how to draw that, along with the ice cream truck featured on the same "Darcy saw some cool things" page. We did not visit the ice cream truck due to the s'mores and popcorn that had already been consumed.

Maybe next time. Ice cream while camping does sound like a pretty good treat.

The Unfairness Of Weather, Crescent City Style

From January 1st to February 13th, Crescent City received 1.7 inches of rain. Since February 14th, the first day of my two weeks off between VISTA and job, we have received 1.82 inches of rain, not counting any of the steady, sometimes heavy rain we've had so far today. Yesterday, we had six or seven periods of hail. Overnight, the snow level was expected to be down to 500 feet and our low was in the 30s.

Did I do something offensive to the weather gods that they banish the sun during the time I could spend so much time working in the yard?

A Day Of Moss

Today was one of those rare winter weekend days without rain. It's raining now, of course, but the precipitation held off until about six o'clock and we got to spend quite a lot of time outside. It was warm(ish), too, so very enjoyable!

We walked around the Mill Creek campground after having a slightly disappointing salmon-viewing in Mill Creek. We saw a few huge salmon, but only a few. The water was high and fast, so the water clarity was against us. Mill Creek campground is one mossy, fungus-y place and I took lots of pictures of cute mosses and fungi. I will share them very soon. But for this evening, your entertainment is in the form of Darcy.

After we walked around for quite a while, we went back to the bridge to see if there were any more salmon. We started throwing leaves in one side of the bridge so we could watch them as they appeared on the other side. The big-leaf maple leaves were perfect for this game, but Darcy just threw handfuls of whatever was lying around, too. Here she is, getting a running start after dropping leaves in:

...and waiting for them to come out downstream:

Rain! Rain! Rain! And snow?

I finished work today and almost didn't want to leave because the rain was beyond pouring down. I did leave, of course, and got quite wet. I was proud of myself because I went to the store even though I wanted to just settle for dinner from ingredients already at home. It's time now to get into the "rain-can't-stop-me" mode. It's a difficult mode of thought for me to enter. I spent a fair amount of time this evening looking for a new raincoat online.

The weather witches are claiming that it might actually SNOW here early tomorrow morning. I don't really buy it, but I'll be watching.













Please note: When you live in a place like Crescent City that has such extreme weather in terms of precipitation, you get to post about the weather any old time you want. My blog, my rules.

Just One Of Those Days

You know the ones I mean. It's raining. And very windy. And kinda cold, even in my office that is usually hot. And the work was piled up to the ceiling and will be again tomorrow. It just wasn't my day.

Darcy, on the other hand, got to ride little belly-scooters across the big room at preschool as part of their "we're stuck inside" play plan. And we opened up a big box that came for her yesterday so that she could marvel at the three wrapped (and staying that way!) presents inside. I think she got as much enjoyment over petting the wrapping paper and talking about what might be inside them as many people get from the actual presents. She also (I'm putting on my proud-mama hat now) told me that the envelope said, "Darcy! D-A-R-C-Y -- Darcy!! That's for me!"

Rain, Rain, Rain

I'm home! It's raining!

I had a very swift day of traveling today -- starting at ridiculously early hours again. My flight to San Francisco was so early that we had to wait for the guy with the orange sticks to show up to roll the final twenty feet to the gate. Our pilot said that we had surprised them, being that we were an hour early.

A lot of our flight was in sunshine with scattered clouds, but as we got closer and closer to Medford, the western exposures were all cloudy, with valleys socked in by viscous fog much like that I drove through Wednesday morning. Luckily, most of my drive was pleasant, although very windy.

And now I'm exhausted and I'm done with today's post.

Picnic At Yontocket

Today was sunny and actually warm. I was out and about for work during the afternoon and the thermometer read 74! In Crescent City! So I got a picnic together before Michael got home from work and we all went out to enjoy the evening sunshine. A coworker had told me about three hikes that share a trail head in the dairy lands of Fort Dick, so we decided we'd try those. One trail leads to Yontocket, a historic Tolowa village site. In the 1850s, the white settlers of Crescent City and Smith River attacked the Tolowa and Yurok tribes in a series of massacres. At Yontocket, local tribes had gathered for an annual world renewal ceremony and 600 people were killed.

This might seem to make for a strange picnic site, but it is an absolutely beautiful place and there's a picnic table just outside the fence for the memorial site. We weren't exactly expecting the picnic table, but we took advantage of it. Looking out over the mountains, dunes, Smith River, flowers, and incredible trees, it's hard to imagine how people could come to such a place for the purpose of killing other people.

The sun was still warm while we ate. Darcy enjoyed her standard sesame seed bagel with butter. Adventurous eating -- in other words, not-starch -- is not in her game-plan these days. She tried a bite of strawberry under great protest and then moved on to starchier and better things.

And then it was time to go play in the flowers. These rolling hills are really grown-over beach dunes and some of them were covered in these white flowers. After we packed up, we followed a second trail to the Smith River, almost at it's mouth. I have more pictures, but they'll have to wait. It's too late and we have another indoor farmers' market tomorrow morning followed by a haircut for Darcy in the early afternoon. It's going to be a big day.

We're Still Here

I know I haven't posted a lot in the past few weeks. Part of that is our new computer -- being a netbook it doesn't have convenient things like Photoshop on it, so I'm having to find and learn web-based applications for that sort of thing. So photos will be a couple more days in coming, but we have some very cute ones from Portland, so stay tuned!

In other news, we have storms moving through Crescent City for the next week. Tonight, the winds are high and the rain is hard. Our power has flickered four or five times already, but come back on immediately every time so far. Gusts over 50 mph have been reported today and the house is shaking when they come. The gusts are also scaring Darcy (along with some freakishly loud, unidentified noise that's come with each flicker), so Michael's just moved her into our bed so she can sleep. No bedside reading lamps for us!

Hail!

A few days after Christmas, we had a night of crazy rain. As Darcy was waking up, the noise level of the wind and rain increased dramatically. It was only when we opened the blinds that we figured out that part of the increased volume was HAIL. Serious hail. And thunder! And lightning!

Darcy and I were on our way to check out a daycare option three hours after it hailed. The roofs had been completely covered earlier in the morning. Some of the hail on the grass was still there at five in the afternoon even though part of the day was very sunny.

Hail on the windshield.

Accumulated hail at an intersection.

Whales! Sunshine! Picnic!

I know that Crescent City is supposed to be all cold and grey and foggy and wet, but there are exceptions and the last three days have been quite delicious and sunny. Today, we started out our sunshine appreciation with a trip to the playground. A family showed up about fifteen minutes later with take out sandwiches. Darcy, ever the shy girl, went up to them and announced that she wanted to have a picnic with them. I took the hint, went home and made sandwiches, and we took them to an overlook a mile or so from the house to have our picnic.

It was a very beautiful spot with great views of the ocean and the "sea stacks", small rocky outcrops just off shore. There are quite a few flowers blooming and lots of birds flitting about, so it was a great place for a picnic. But it had another draw for us: Whales!

Whales migrate past Crescent City every year and Michael's boss reported that he'd seen some on Sunday. Darcy and I tried to find some yesterday, but had no luck. Today, however, we (or at least I; I'm not entirely sure Darcy really saw the spouts) saw several or many whales, depending on how many spouts belonged to individual whales. (You might want to click on this picture to really see the two water spouts in the center of the photo.)

Many thanks go to our friend Missy in King Salmon for sending our girl the most girly thing she owns. Yesterday, we got a package that had this be-flowered tutu and wings outfit. Darcy enjoyed dancing around in it and then stripped down to just the leotard until bed time.

The Aftermath Of The Rain

This picture doesn't really have anything to do with the rain and its aftermath. I just really like this picture of Michael and Darcy on the rocks. We were trying, without success, to meet with some folks for Michael to climb with, and he was scouting for their car.

But this is the aftermath of the rain. This is our washed-out road. Our driveway joins the road on the right hand side of the photograph. Luckily, Kate came by the next day to test our water and very kindly dragged the road and driveway for us. We got more rain that afternoon, but nothing that caused further damage to the road.

During our post-flood walk, Michael and Darcy took advantage of the newly-formed curb for a short rest.

The rain and flood caused some gorgeous patterns in the sand. Our road has a layer of black sand that pops up in a few places; the storm uncovered quite a few patches. We think it's just a very iron-rich sediment of some kind.

And, again, this has nothing to do with the rain. Darcy wanted to go play outside after dinner tonight, but didn't want clothes. Michael took his guitar out and Darcy ran around and around, checking in with "Orville" every few minutes. Just thought I should show the scintillating social scene that is Cima, CA.

Rain Comes To Cima House

Up until yesterday, I'd been feeling slighted by the rain in these parts. I'd watch the storms come through the valley or we'd hear that Cima Dome was getting pummeled, but it would never come here, to Cima House. Then yesterday, we got home from Las Vegas having traveled over roads with sand and gravel washed over them in many places. I had high hopes. They weren't in vain. Our dirt road into Cima House had clearly been a river while we'd been gone.

I was mostly satisfied, but I wanted to see our road when it was a river, not after the water was gone. I'm greedy like that.

So when we started hearing loud thunder and I saw this lovely storm sweeping through the valley, I started hoping that maybe, just maybe, we'd get to see the river.

And so we did! Here's the stream heading down our driveway and out the gate. I went out in boots, under an umbrella to get these shots. My clothes are still very damp.

Our road, looking north from our property. Our driveway enters at the exposed apron.

And our road, looking south from our gate.

I took quite a bit of video, which I'll try to splice together into something presentable and get up in the next few days. I just have to remember how to do it; I haven't made a multi-video film since the one of the belugas in King Salmon.