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.

Tide Pools

Tide pools! There are a few places to visit tide pools in and around Crescent City. One Sunday morning, we headed down to these ones. You can see orange and purple-ish starfish on the rocks.

Starfish are strong. This one is holding three large rocks!

Darcy loves the sea! (And has no fear of it.)

Yoga poses on the beach in honor of Uncle John and Auntie Best.

Sometimes, when a girl just doesn't want to leave the beach, she needs to become very, very limpet-like. We got Darcy to leave by letting her limpet her way from one rock to the next.

Arcata Market

Sometime around Labor Day, we went to the very fabulous Arcata Saturday farmers' market. It's held in Arcata's plaza, with vendors going all the way around all four sides and a few in the center (mostly prepared foods and the live music). Darcy was having fun dancing and playing with hula hoops while I shopped the edges.

The most-wonderful balloon man made a pink octopus for Darcy while she watched in awe. She's holding a sunflower taller than she is, but you can hardly see it. Michael reported that some random stranger went and bought it for her in appreciation for her great dancing skills.

These next photos are in honor of my Uncle Nick. Those of you who don't know him probably don't know that he has a website called Poems for Free. He used to do exactly what this Poem Store does: people would send him a request for a poem on a certain subject or in honor of a person or event, and he'd write a poem. He got too many requests after a while, but he still writes and posts poems that anyone is free to use.

This poet is at the market all the time (as far as I can tell) and types up her poems on her portable that she hauls around (with her chair) in her kitted-out hauling bike. It's very cool. High pressure creativity, though!

After market, we went to the local, organic ice cream shop, which Darcy adores. (I do, too -- the lemon-poppyseed ice cream is delicious!) They have a pretend ice cream shop that she plays in long after the ice cream is gone. They have very cute homemade aprons, which Michael is helping model here.

Now, I have to go eat Ethiopian food! Yay!

A Day Of Travel

5:29 am, Medford, Oregon:

I rounded a sharp curve in the middle of my drive to Medford this morning and saw bright, shiny stars ahead of me. It shocked me because on the other side of that curve, I couldn't see more than two dashed center lines ahead of me in the center of the road. Most of my two-hour drive this morning was through dense fog, which just added to the fun of driving US Highway 199 along the Smith River.

I pulled out of our driveway at 2:50 and I was very glad for that 10-minute cushion when I realized that the fog was NOT going away as I got further from the coast. I always have an out-of-time experience when I travel for a full day, but usually, the sensation sets in much later in the trip. But when the world closes to a car-length of visibility with a wall of white all around you, time doesn't mean much. Except that I had a plane to catch, of course.

(So I spent time in Denver, but it went really fast and I didn't get a chance to open the computer. The flights were both on time, which made things easier.)

8:13 pm, Arlington, VA:

I keep thinking it's really, really late, but then I look at the clock and realize that it's not late HERE and Darcy and Michael might not even be home from work/preschool back at home. Crazy. I'm trying to stay awake long enough to be sure I'll sleep straight through the night.

I stopped at the conference hotel when I got off the metro (after the shuttle and the train and the other metro) and spent a little time at the meet and greet. There was a small group heading out to Adams-Morgan for Ethiopian food and I was very, very tempted to go with them, but I'm too tired and too traveled-out to get back on the metro.

I was forgetting that most of the people at this training would be farmers' market people, but it seems like a good group of folks are here. It will be fun to hear what kinds of projects people are funding with these grants.

Day Two Has Followed Day One

I am packed and ready to head off to Washington, DC, for a USDA adventure! Ok, so probably grants-management training won't be all that adventurous, but driving to Medford at 3 o'clock in the morning will be!

A few weeks ago, many of you were kind enough to sponsor Darcy's spins around the Trike-a-Thon course at her preschool. It was complete madness -- 20+ preschoolers on bikes, trikes, and scooters! Here's a small taste of the fun:

Darcy is styling in her Very Hungry Caterpillar helmet. She (YOU) raised a lot of money and she had a blast cycling around with all her friends. They spent the week before the event learning safety rules for riding. I'm not sure that they listened very well to the "watch where you are going" rule. I know Darcy didn't! I have very cute video, but I have to figure out how to massage it for Blogger.

Thank you all for your contributions!

Day One: Where Did It Go??

As previously mentioned, I have decided to participate in National Blog Posting Month, requiring me to blog every day during the month of November. It has not been an auspicious start being that it's almost nine o'clock and I just now remembered that I need to blog today!

I spent more time than I like to admit trying desperately to make travel plans to Washington that make any sense at all. I gave up. They will not make sense. I will drive to Medford at 3 in the morning on the way there. I will change hotels on the last day of the training so that I don't have to take the Metro to the airport at 5 in the morning on the way back. Now I just have to hope for a cancellation at the training hotel so I can actually have somewhere to sleep that doesn't require a commute.

On the other hand, I also got to talk to my community about a project Michael and I have been a part of for a few months. Preschool and childcare options around here are limited in both quantity and quality. Darcy loves her preschool now, but there are parts of it that don't work for us. We've been working with a group of parents to start a new preschool (that should open in early 2011) and two of us described at a public meeting how this came to be -- in other words, how this community of parents became organized to actually solve a problem we see in our daily lives. It was part of an evening of celebrating "early wins" in something called the Building Healthy Communities initiative. The future Little School of the Redwoods is considered a win!!

And that's my blog post for today. Most of the other 29 -- with any luck -- will include what you really come here for: pictures of Darcy Jo.

Hold On To Your Hats!

The deluge will soon begin. I have (perhaps foolishly) signed up for NaBloPoMo, otherwise known as National Blog Posting Month. It started as a tie-in to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I was briefly considering participating in NaNoWriMo, but decided that November was busy enough without contemplating writing 50,000 words of fiction! And since I learned last night that I'm headed to Washington for the second half of this week, I'm glad I made that decision.

I figured I could handle NaBlogPoMo a little easier than the novel, so you can look forward to new blog posts EVERY DAY in November. I'll do a little catching up of our lives in the beautiful redwoods.

We spent part of today in the redwoods, as it happens. I'll save some details for November (see how I'm already thinking ahead?), but the park opened its first new trail in a decade this morning with a dedication ceremony near the plaque commemoring Lady Bird Johnson's dedication of Redwood National Park and a ribbon cutting at the trail head. We didn't join the inaugural hike because Michael was a shuttle driver, taking folks back to their cars if they weren't hiking either.

Wish me luck and check back every day in November for exciting new blog posts!