Alaska: Day 10 of NaBloPoMo

It seems like this single-topic NaBloPoMo might be cheating, but life is BUSY this November. I started a new job on Friday, but I'm still dragging from an early-season Crescent City cold, so it's been tough. We're recruiting for my old position, I'm learning my new position...also recruiting for a new VISTA. I have jobs to fill! 

So I'll take my cheat and stick to my topic.

We stopped for part of a day and one very fun night outside/in/near Denali National Park to visit with Jim and Jess, friends from Michael's ELEDP days. Jim made CHIEF while we were there, which was very exciting. Also exciting? Denali's fairly new main visitor center and the nearby Murie education center. 

There was so much art in both places and it was all art to a purpose, there to teach something cool about the park. In this photo, for example, is just one corner of a massive quilt made by a local quilter's guild. It is a map of Denali National Park depicting its different ecosystems. The boarder featured scenes from a variety of those ecosystems and you can see that even the background was treated thoughtfully, with animal tracks quilted onto the white. It was very, very cool and there were a couple other quilts from the same guild in the visitor center as well. (I was only going to do one picture, but it deserves more, so enjoy!)

(Teaser for tomorrow: I got to pet a BABY DINOSAUR at Denali!!)

Alaska: Day 9

We were in Alaska the week after President Obama's visit and the very tail end of the tourist season. The last cruise ship of the year was in harbor while we were in Seward and we got to take the very last of the summer sled dog rides. These pups were resting mid-run because it was "so hot" -- at least 60 degrees! They were amazing pups. They'd all drift a little during the rests and the musher would practically whisper, "Tighten up," and they'd all hustle back into a straight line, ready to run again.

Got a picture during the rest -- otherwise, it was too bouncy! Those dogs were FAST despite carrying a dozen passengers on a "sled" that weighed 800 pounds empty.

At the end, we got puppies! This is a training center for Itidarod winners and these pups have serious bloodlines attached to their names. There was much snuggling of puppies:

Alaska: Day 8 Friends Past and Present

Next stop was Seward! I had never been to Seward before and good friends of ours from Katmai are now at Kenai Fjords National Park, so we were excited to get there. We headed straight for the Alaska Sea Life Center for some closeups with the sea creatures. 

I love myself a good octopus and this one was showing off! Darcy got a cameo with it, too. 

The highlight, though, was meeting up with our good friends Sharon and Bryce and their daughter, who was born just two months after Darcy and slept in the same bassinet we'd bought used in Anchorage and passed along when we headed home to King Salmon. They were each other's first playmates, as seen in the very last photo. 

 It was very sweet to see how well they got along now that they were reunited after almost eight years. There will be more evidence of that tomorrow.

Finally! Early Dinner!

Tomorrow,Daylight Savings time begins.That means early dinner!I love that!Today,I am going to a birthday party.A hunting for Bigfoot party.A toy gun party.A getting dirty party!This is the first time I ever predicted the future :We are going to have macaroni & cheese at the party!

(Another guest post by Darcy. Stay tuned to see if her prediction comes true!)

Sunset

Moving across the country and back again in just over a year was never our choice of how life would go. But here are a couple reasons we did the "back again":

These pictures represent more than a gorgeous sunset on the beach. Darcy and Michael could go to the beach easily to enjoy that sunset because of our amazing social network here. When living with our friends became detrimental to Darcy's sleeping needs a month after we moved here, other friends offered their "one and a half bedroom" guest house for more or less as long as we needed it. The guest house is separated from this beach by one house and one road. So Darcy and Michael walked down the driveway, across the street, and there they were, on this unbelievably beautiful stretch of the Pacific coastline.

From Reading To Stage!

A couple years ago, Michael and I helped our friend Ruthe by joining other friends to read her fantastic play, This is Crescent City, out loud for the first time. It got some edits out of that reading, a few more suggestions from my helpful cousin Seth, tons more work and sweat and thought from Ruthe, and last night, it premiered on the stage with the Lighthouse Repertory Theater!

The play is about our town's history and present, and what makes people choose to stay here. Our local newspaper has given it good coverage and with luck, that will be just the beginning of the conversations this play will inspire.

We'll be seeing it next weekend and babysitting so other friends can go see it this weekend. If you're nearby, you should choose a performance and GO. 

(And if you were admiring the poster, that's good. It's Michael's handiwork! Ain't he great?)

The iPhone's Connected To The...Other iPhone?

Look! I managed to add a recent photo. This is our small cowgirl on Halloween. I'm still not exactly sure why she wanted to be a cowgirl, but she was insistent for a few weeks and there she is in her hat and boots.

This picture is brought to you by the wonders of modern technology. A friend took this picture with her phone, sent it to Michael on his phone. He posted it to Facebook by request, and I was able to grab it from there and post it to the blog. Ain't science and social media great?

Ok. Guilt Works.

So I had said that I was doing daily blogging in October and NOT in November, but now two of my fellow bloggers (see my blog roll on the right side of the screen) appear to have taken the leap for NaBloPoMo. And I feel that it's partly my fault. I obviously did not blog yesterday (and I missed a couple/few days in October, too), but I'll try to keep blogging daily through November. 

It is after 11, I just helped paint a ceiling while my laundry dried (isn't that what you do when you're doing laundry at 10 o'clock on a Friday?), and I'm feeling very, very sleepy. So here are a few pictures to get you through until tomorrow:

(Oh. And for those keeping track, we are now at my parents' house for the weekend, we do not have temporary housing for our return to Pike County on Sunday, and we have not looked at a single house for our permanent residence either. It looks like the Dingmans Ferry Post Office pegged us right: We are transients!)

On our drive east from St Louis, we stopped to see our friend Jim and Karla and their boys, L and BabyL. We were terrible about getting a picture of the whole family and photos are loading very, very slowly, so these are my offerings for tonight. WashU folks will recognize Jim showing Darcy how to shoot a bow and arrow, with BabyL's legs just visible on the right of the photo. BabyL very nicely fell asleep in my arms while we were outside. In the bottom photo, L was throwing leaves at Michael while Darcy was playing with Paddington. Yes, Paddington and Nutmeg, dogs formerly of St Louis, are alive and well in Indiana. 

It was too short a visit, but much better than no visit at all. We had never met either of their boys and now we have! Hopefully, there will not be time for two more children to be born before we see them again!

Getting Closer To St Louis

So, of course, part of me is excited about living in Pennsylvania, near my folks and other family, a lot of old friends both from high school, college, general life, and Ashokan, and near the big, wicked city that I do love (in moderate doses). But another part of me is sad to have left Crescent City friends and California family. While talking with a Crescent City friend today, I realized that I'm dealing with this by not thinking as much as I should about house-hunting in Pennsylvania and other details that indicate the permanency of this sojourn across the country. Right now, I can close my mind and think of this as a really great vacation. After all, we stopped at a Lewis and Clarke interpretation site this morning and we're staying in a cool old hotel on the Missouri River tonight.

And tomorrow, we'll arrive in St Louis where we can show Darcy our old house and school and favorite places. That is the most vacation-y part of the trip, and we will stop driving east for 48 hours of old friends in our old city. With any luck, the time with old friends will remind me that leaving  a place with great people doesn't mean that the great people leave your life. It just means that they're a little further away.

There's an anthropological term for people who aren't biologically related to you, but play the role of family in your life: fictive kin. I have gathered fictive kin wherever I've gone in my life and it makes for a richer, more meaningful existence. And just as my uncle isn't any less my uncle if he's on the other side of the country, neither do the ties of fictive kinship lessen with distance. 

It's a good thing to keep in mind during transitions.

Hickison Petroglyphs

As mentioned yesterday, one of our stretch breaks along the "Loneliest Highway in America" was at the Hickison Petroglyph site. I had read about it as one of the few possible stops during that drive and it couldn't have come at a better time. We were all ready to get out of the car. There were beautiful views and beautiful lichen (if you didn't already know, I'm a huge fan of lichen and I know I've posted lichen pictures on this blog before, but I can't find them):

In this picture, as you can see, I've combined the view and the lichen...clever, huh?

If I was more ambitious, I'd get the pictures from today off the camera and show you all the mind-blowingly beautiful scenery in and around Arches National Park. But my child is asleep, my husband is well on his way to asleep, and I'd like to get there, too. Tonight, we are all sleeping in Denver, after a lovely visit with our friend Gretel for dinner. Last time we saw Gretel, she had her lovely dog Tule with her and they got a mention in this blog post about Darcy and animals (Gretel, there is a picture of Tule).

Tomorrow, we drive the rest of the way across Colorado and much of the way across Nebraska. It's been a lot of driving and I have to say that I am looking forward to TWO NIGHTS in the same place. Two more long days and one very short day of driving left until we hit St Louis and stay put for 48 hours!

Darcy Jo Love

Our girl is an amazing person. We are her parents, so we would believe that no matter what. One of the things that has constantly amazed and touched me deeply is that so many other people believe that, too, and are quick to tell us and show her. She is truly loved by a measurable percentage of Crescent City's population. I say this not to brag about my girl (although I'm not adverse to doing so). I say this because I am overwhelmed by the outpouring of love showered on our Darcy Jo in the past weeks.

Michael said lovely words at our last dinner with friends on Thursday night. He claimed that he understands why people want to be friends with me, but is often surprised that people are genuinely and equally fond of him and his company. I think both of us could say that about Darcy. I sometimes think that our family is welcomed into society because everyone loves Darcy. We are merely her transportation staff.

Darcy's last day of school just confirms this view for me. After a wonderful evening with a dozen or so close friends and a night spent in the home of the ever-generous, gracious, and much-beloved Leonard-Rhodes clan (our house was empty), Darcy did early-morning yoga with our hostess and we all ate huckleberry pancakes (one last gift from our garden/yard). Then off to school, somewhat coincidentally in the same outfit that started this school year:

Her teachers and class showered her with gifts (which I have to find proper stowage for in the trunk this morning) and hugs. Our good friends at Vita Cucina shared their own daughter's birthday glory by providing cupcakes to the whole Cohort A that were for both B's birthday and Darcy's departure. More gifts followed from her after-school contingent, who has posed for a group picture earlier in the week that was framed and gifted yesterday.

Darcy's fans (well, one fan anyway) even met us at the school when we went to pick her up to be sure he could say a proper good-bye:

We have extended our fictive-kin family while in Crescent City: there is no doubt about that. Darcy will forever have extra honorary aunts, uncles, and siblings on the North Coast.

One of her friends went the extra mile, however. The beautiful elder Miss W was sporting a homemade shirt expressing her sentiment for the day:

And this proves my point. We all got bone-crushing hugs from Miss W. I personally got four, all of them long-lasting. But only Darcy Jo got the t-shirt.

Oh, how we will miss you, our Crescent City friends. Never doubt that. You will be welcome in our home always, no matter what national park is outside our doorstep at the time.

Step One

It's a small step, but we have said our farewells to friends and places in Crescent City. Our stuff is on a moving truck (or in our car in Oregon or our pickup in Wyoming). We are in Ashland with a zonked-out Darcy and two parents very close to joining her in dreamland.

Some highlights of the day:

Watching the truck drive away from the house

Eating a last lunch from Vita Cucina

Being surrounded by good wishes from good people

Seeing Darcy Jo showered by gifts and hugs and love from her school mates

Going to the Medford Trader Joe's on its Grand Opening: that's right -- they opened the day we are leaving

A last drive along Crescent City's beautiful coast

One more drive through the redwoods on Howland Hill Road

Almost three years ago to the day (I think we arrived on October 18th and we've left on the 19th) that we first came here, we repeated some of our first stops. It has been a tremendous three years and this place has shaped who our child will be in many ways.

Tomorrow: Lake Tahoe and the kokanee salmon!

A New Year Begins

We have been very fortunate in the past year, despite some blips here and there, and we ended the year with the great fortune to spend the night with good friends in an absolutely beautiful spot. Our friends who own the beautiful Requa Inn brought us all together in a wonderful house further up Requa Hill. It is rented out to guests as a sort-of extension of the Inn. The views are unbelievable. We saw only a glimpse of the splendor last night, as we drove to Klamath while the sun was setting, giving us only a little light to see the view as we unloaded the car.

All of the children involved tend to be early risers, but they had had so much fun and stayed up so late before falling asleep on a strata of blankets laid on the floor of the (empty) master bedroom walk-in closet, that they slept in a bit later than usual. Our child was the first to rise and stay risen, climbing into our bed just before 6:30. We had turned out our light around 1:30, so this felt too early. As it turns out, it was worth it. We got to witness the full glory of the sunrise, viewed in one direction up the Klamath River and eventually, in the other direction where the Klamath meets the Pacific. Here's a poor copy of the real deal -- the colors in the reflection on the window are closer to reality:

 I'll provide a better photo of the mouth, not quite seen here next to the house, with the white line of surf crashing on the spit, another time. Now I need to wake up my sleeping beauty who fell asleep sitting up on the couch because she was Just Too Tired. Michael is busy felling trees with two of his fellow rangers. Hopefully, the all end the day completely intact, with loads of firewood for everyone.

Happy New Year to you all. I hope the beginning of your year was as magical as ours. I have a hard time beating this location as a place to wake up and start a new year -- I'm not sure how we'll face the end of 2012.

Thanksgiving In Bend

In case it hasn't been clear, we spent Thanksgiving in Bend, OR, and arrived home safe and sound a few hours ago. We didn't want to broadcast our absence too much, because you know that house-breakers spend their days reading obscure blogs to see who's out of town. We didn't want to invite them back to steal our hand-me-down chairs or Moomintroll books.

Now that we're home again, let us talk of Bend! We love Bend! How I lived forty-two years without knowing how great Bend is, I'll never know, because I feel very at home there. We went with a family of friends, so Darcy had a play mate and we could all take turns with child-wrangling. Thursday, we had a more or less traditional Thanksgiving meal with our friends from Crescent City and our friend Kathy who worked with us in Katmai and is now living in Bend. Michael and I got a date night on Friday and spent it in downtown Bend eating lovely Thai food, browsing used bookstores, and previewing a few stores for after Buy Nothing Day was over. We decided that buying our meal couldn't count -- it was date night!

Michael and our friends all skied on Saturday. Bend -- amazing Bend -- has a drop-off play center/day care, so for twenty bucks each, Darcy and H played in an indoor play ground for almost four hours. This was because two kids and a baby was more than I was willing to take on by myself. I know that many, many people do it all the time, but there is a reason Darcy is an only child. They had a great time, the skiers had a great time, and once two of the skiers came back, I got to wander downtown and do a little Christmas shopping at the local toy store and an Etsy collective store. Fun! 

Today, in order to wear out the small beasts for the drive back to Crescent City, we all started with a trip to Juniper Pool, the site of Darcy's summer stitches. Although it's much smaller, the indoor kids' pool was just as big a hit as the outdoor one was. We splashed around for over an hour, with a few adult trips to the hot tub and steam room (my first -- it was insane! I felt like a boiled lobster). And the ploy worked. Darcy stayed awake and apparently very hungry while we went back and cleaned out the last of the rental house and went to a fun pizza place that lets kids make their own pizza. It was very cute. They brought the stretched dough over to the table on a peel with bowls of sauce, cheese, and the kalamata olives Darcy requested for her topping. She put it all together and then we sat at the "pizza bar" so she could watch them put it into the wood-burning oven. 

Ten minutes into the drive home, she was sound asleep. So was I, for that matter. It turns out that three children, five and under, in one house leads to less-than-wonderful sleep for everyone. Darcy slept for half the ride home, which was perfect.

Now we're all gearing up for a totally insane week. Darcy is taking swim lessons two days a week for the next two weeks. Her first is tomorrow. Tomorrow night, Michael has a read through for Willy Wonka! Tuesday is Food Council for me in the evening. Thursday, we're going to do some sort of complicated switch-off with Darcy in Orick in order for Michael to teach a training there during the day and for me to be able to make an evening meeting of the Humboldt Food Policy Council. Whew! We'll be all tuckered out for the weekend just in time for a birthday party Saturday and a bead party on Sunday.

Life doesn't stop.

Dog Rehab

This summer, Darcy had a somewhat traumatic interaction with a dog named Gus. Darcy met Gus when he ran into a room where she was along. Gus, who outweighs Darcy by probably a couple dozen pounds at least, ran right at her to say hi. She ran and jumped on the couch to get away from him. He jumped up next to her. To say hi. And as I got into the room to intervene, Darcy was climbing off the couch and onto the end table in an attempt to escape Gus. She was truly terrified. I'm not sure I've ever seen her so scared, even though Gus was most definitely not trying to scare her. He just wanted to say hi. Up close. And personal. With a wet tongue and drool.


We were bummed out because she avoided dogs like the plague for quite a while after that incident. It took a lazy old lab to help get her warmed up to dogs again. Recently, it's been clear that the fear is gone, but there is still a bit of hesitation about actually touching dogs.


Our park friends came by today for brunch and brought poor cooped-up Gus to play in our yard. This is a different Gus, considerably smaller and less interested in saying hi unless he's saying it to a ball or frisbee. Darcy was quite fond of Gus and did eventually pet him. Here, though, she was just insisting on getting her picture taken NEAR him:

The picture was taken with an iPhone and emailed to me because, of course, our camera was stolen, so the quality is not the greatest. But you can see our gorgeous sunny day with my proud girl interacting with a dog. It was a great visit and it will be very nice to have Gus and his person living in California, even if they'll still be 8 or 9 hours away.

Park Friends

We're all just back from a wonderful dinner with friends. The talk was all national parks and Alaska with the current Chief of Interpretation at Katmai National Park and the just-about-to-start Chief of Interpretation at Pinnacles National Monument. They hadn't seen Darcy in a couple years, so her chatter amused us in between stories of dream parks and former coworkers. It was a great evening.


Pinnacles is not exactly the most-well-known park out there. We passed a sign for the western entrance about a year ago on our way to Simi Valley for Christmas. I looked it up and was entranced. The name-sake pinnacles are part of an ancient volcano that formed on one of the many, many faults in California. Over time (lots of time), half of the volcano stayed where it was born and the other half traveled north with the fault line about 600 miles to its current location in central California (if I'm remembering correctly from my research a year ago). That is pretty darn cool if you ask me!


I know that an awful lot of my blog readers are already big fans (or employees) of the national parks, but seriously, if you're not already, you should start reading. Our national parks protect some of the most incredibly beautiful and truly awesome places. They are everyone's backyard and should be on everyone's bucket lists.

My Bags: Confessions Of A Bag Hoarder

A while back, I started attacking some of my belongings that I really don't need to own anymore. We have too much stuff and while we can try not to buy a lot more, there's accumulated stuff to get rid of. I wrote about some of the shirts I got rid of here.

My bags seem like a useful collection: I try to avoid using plastic bags, so I take bags with me, but I find that my canvas bags aren't the best for grocery shopping. I have lighter-weight bags with gusseted sides that hold more and take up less space. But many of my bags hold sentimental value. They were easier to get rid of than my shirts because I had somewhere to send them. A co-worker's niece makes hand bags out of old canvas bags, so I gave them to her. Here are a few of my favorites, photographed this spring in our yard:

 Mosquito Books is in the Anchorage Airport. I bought it when I went to visit Michael during his second summer at Katmai. I was trying to get a giant CostCo bag of tortilla chips to Brooks Camp without having them reduced to crumbs. I didn't have any way to carry them on the two flights from Anchorage to Brooks and bought this. The float plane crew treated it like the most delicate cargo they had and we had a great picnic with a bunch of the Interp staff. With intact chips.

We celebrated my birthday while I was in King Salmon, I won a chowder cook-off as part of Fishtival, and then I managed to cut my finger to the bone the day before I left. I then used this bag to carry two copies of the new Harry Potter around Anchorage before sending one back to Brooks Camp for Michael and taking one on the plane with my heavily-bandaged finger. It served me well.

The Warwick Valley Farmers Market bag was one of the hardest to get rid of. I was part of the large group of folks who helped get the market started, I was its treasurer for a while, and I sold my beautiful veggies there for two years. More than just a special market, the bag itself is special because my friend Barb designed the logo and helped get our original merchandise. Barb was a great graphic designer. Her specialty was children's book catalogs and many of her rejected, coverless books are now on Darcy's shelves. She loved her puppies and her orchids. She hated removing the frogs that would fall into her pool on a regular basis. When she was sick, she ate only white foods, including white beans straight from the can. Barb died after being diagnosed with leukemia. I still miss her and her blunt opinions. I still cook with her pots and think of her every time I do.

I think it will make an exceptional hand bag.
 

Sorry For The Lack Of Photos

I'm feeling a little lazy, so I'm not getting you a picture for this one, but I thought I'd give an update on our life in Crescent City so far. This is our fourth night in the house and it's getting pretty close to being unpacked and semi-organized. Mostly, we're as far as we are in that process because we appear to be missing the shelves for one piece of furniture and we're trying to get through every box to find them. I actually cooked in the kitchen today and hope to have an actual MEAL produced in it tomorrow!

But here's the real news:

On Friday, one of Michael's coworkers invited us over for dinner to give us a break from unpacking. We walked over to their house around six. You read that right. We walked to a neighbor's house. We have neighbors. Who live close enough to our house that we can walk to their house. It's revolutionary. Not only that, but they also invited another coworker as well and she walked, too, and we walked home TOGETHER after dinner because also she lives so close.

Now, you might think that story is over, but no. There's more. On Saturday, we went to the second-to-last farmers' market of the year. We bumped into our neighbors. At the farmers' market that's a five minute drive from our house.

And as if that's not enough? Our house is about 150 feet from the complex's play area. Darcy played with random kids over there this afternoon. After that, we were all back in the garage trying to find those dang shelves and Darcy spied a little girl riding in a little car toy across the street and asked to go meet her. So we did, and ended up visiting with Safira and her mother, Mary, for fifteen or twenty minutes. Darcy let Safira play with the octopus she had been playing with and Safira let Darcy take a few turns in her little car.

We live in an actual town. It's amazing.

And on the natural side of life, today was a gorgeous sunny day and we hiked down a bluff to get our first glimpse of the tide pools. Unfortunately, we tried to squeeze too much into our morning and got there a little after low tide, so the pools were getting covered back up when we reached them. But we did get to see a lot of itty bitty mussels, lots of barnacles, and star fish and anemones from a distance. We'll go back soon. This time, we'll get there well before low tide.

Tomorrow, Michael has his first full day at work and the forecast says there's a 100% chance of rain. So we won't be going to the tide pools tomorrow. But we might be going to a group toddler activity at the Family Resource Center (or something like that). They have activities with music, reading, and dance pretty much every day. I can't remember which activity happens tomorrow, but something does.

They also help fund the WonderBus which is part bookmobile and part something else with toys. What I hope Darcy will end up loving is that they have kids keep reading logs: In order to add a book to their list, the kids have to "read" the books to the rabbit who lives on the WonderBus. We visited it at the farmers' market and the woman who runs the bus spied the chard in our bag. She asked if Darcy wanted to feed some to the rabbit because it's Tiger Lily's favorite food. She seemed to think we were doing her a favor by giving up some of our chard to her rabbit, but Darcy was so thrilled by being allowed to feed the rabbit that I thought we were the recipients of the favor.

To sum up: Life is good in Crescent City so far.

Migration From St. Louis

Some of you might know that when we moved to Alaska (Michael in June '05 and me in January '06), we moved via USPS. That's right ... everything we moved from St. Louis to King Salmon moved by parcel post. That left a lot of stuff behind. We sold a lot on Craig's List. We had a fairly successful yard sale. We gave away a very motley assortment of things (a two-hole three-hole punch, anyone?) at a party we had that was most definitely not a going-away party for Michael.

And that left the things we really cared about. My grandparents' dresser. The chair given to Michael by Patty Jo. Books. CDs. CD jewel cases. My wedding dress. And virtually all our wedding gifts because I couldn't bring myself to send our new dishes to Alaska and risk having them all break. We rented a storage unit and filled it up.

And then we paid for it. And paid for it. And paid for it. Last summer, we considered going to get our stuff. But gas prices sky-rocketed and truck rentals were expensive, too, so we put it off. And paid for it. And paid for it some more. But no more!

We are all done with paying for storage because our stuff is all here in Cima! It's very, very exciting, let me tell you. Even with the pictures of the full storage unit, we had still managed to forget some of the things that were in there. Olivia poster? Totally forgot that we had a framed Olivia poster, but Darcy has now claimed that as her very own.

In theory, I'd love to go through some of those boxes and totes and get rid of some more stuff before we move next month. After all, we've lived without it for almost four years. There must be some of it that we could continue to live without. But it's not in an easy-access format right now, so we'll see how much of that gets done. If not here, we'll do it in Crescent City where it can live in half of our two-car garage while we work our way through it.

We owe a huge thank you to Michael's brother Stephen for flying out to St. Louis and helping with the packing and driving. They did an amazing job of packing and unpacking quickly -- the whole trip was only about 72 hours.






We enjoyed an extended visit with Juliana and Henry, too! They came out on Friday and spent the night so they could take Stephen home after the unpacking was done. Henry seemed keen on walking around outside in the desert. He and Darcy had a good time together!

Out here, company is always nice, and we had even more over the weekend. Our friend Matthew, an undergraduate student while we were at WashU, was on a whirlwind trip to the (wild) west, and stopped last night for dinner before heading on to Vegas (last night) and Zion and Bryce National Parks today.

It's been an eventful week, but with a lot of fun and satisfaction in the mix. It's going to be very nice to set up our new house in Crescent City with ALL our things instead of just the parcel-posted stuff plus what we've acquired over the past four years.

Fun In Baker? It Turns Out To Be Possible!

Please forgive the lack of photos; I didn't think to grab the camera for our temporary residence in Baker. I probably should have, given our activities last night.

I was on the phone with Amy, planning the menu for a fungus conference we're going to cater for in October. I mentioned that we were thinking of checking out the Baker Community Pool in the evening. Pool? Did somebody say pool? A little over an hour later, Amy and family were at our door, ready to swim. Michael had to work late, unfortunately, but the rest of us headed over to the pool, which lives across from the high school and share its parking lot.

There were more people working there than swimming, but for a buck each per adult, it was hard to beat the surprising cool water, diving board, and very shallow end that Darcy could stand up in. We swam, dove, and splashed for a while and then headed back to Baker House for a big veggie dinner and some dancing to the I Like Yaks song.

Two future social events are coming out of this as well. On Wednesday, with the other adult residents of the Granites away, we're going to watch a kids movie projected onto the side of a building. Movie still to be determined, but there will be lots of popcorn. On Saturday, I might go with Amy and Matthew when they head to Vegas to contradance. Yes, you read that right -- there is contradancing in Las Vegas! Woo-hooo! Who would have thought it possible?? If this Saturday doesn't work out, I'll probably try another week, as it's a twice-a-month dance. I miss contradancing.

In other news, I've finished Wuthering Heights and didn't love it. I didn't even like it, except for the last four or five chapters. Bleah. I've started The Color Purple. I know I saw the movie a long time ago, but I don't remember all that much of it, so the novel still has the capacity to surprise me and I'm not constantly comparing it to the film because I just don't have a clear picture of that. I like it. There are actually many miserable characters (either in misery or handing it out), as there were in Wuthering Heights, but it feels that there is hope for better (within the characters, not just in the narrative) in The Color Purple and that was absent in most of Wuthering Heights.