Abby

Ok, I can't believe I have really fallen for a dog. Her name is Abby and she is a dog from the shelter in Bend Oregon. Amazing actually that she knows so well how to mind, how to heel, to come, to sit, to stay. The best part is that she is playful and fun without being a pain. She loves to play with her toys, and somehow manages to completely destroy them in a matter of minutes. She especially loves anything soft like a stuffed toy. The most amazing thing, however, is that she only tears up HER toys. I have stuffed santas and snowmen lying around on the floor for Christmas, pillow everywhere, socks, shoes, slippers lying around sometimes and she doesn't touch them. Amazing. If we show her that it is hers, it will be shredded in minutes. She even managed to shred a 'Kong" for those of you who are dog people and know what that is.

Ahh well, count my blessings. Mo was determined to have another dog so I am at least lucky that I really like this one! She walks with me every morning on my little 3.5 mile jaunt in the dark around the mobile home park. Loves it. Nice thing here is that there isn't any dirt around so she doesn't track stuff into the house and is basically a house dog unless we take her out. Couldn't have been any luckier with this, I am sure.

Yeah, it's a hard life

Gee, too bad I have to take off work again tomorrow to drive to Reno for out of state delivery of Mo's car since she is not about to pay California sales tax when she lives in Oregon! Like riding on glass surrounded by cream colored butter leather. I am such a pushover for luxury, I am embarrassed to admit. My back hurts today. Too many hours in a GM car which somehow doesn't seem to fit my body. Any surprise that Lexus fits my body just fine??

Christmas

So, Christmas was fine. I didn't even get weird until the very last part of the day. I missed being with my family, but wasn't depressed and made the best of it. I knew all my kids were happy and in a good space. Even Deanna, who is having a time of it trying to deal with sharing her kids and grandkids and not being with family on the day. She and I kindof in the same space. No kids, no family, but she had Keith, I had Mo and we both had basically a good time.

It was 66 degrees in Jamestown yesterday, a little bit cloudy, some sun showing up now and then. We drove up to Calaveras Big Trees for a hike in the Sequoias. Took lots of photos and walked a few miles with the dog. There is often snow there in the winter, but not this time, so we drove higher on Highway 4, all the way up to Bear Valley Resort. Ebbets Pass is closed over the Sierra's not far from where we turned around, but just before you get to the valley is this great overlook. I felt like a stupic californian, tottering over the snow in my tennis shoes from the highway overlook to get a snow photo. "Going to the Snow". I used to do that when I was a kid growing up in Southern California. We would drive up to Big Bear for a day with coats and mittens and shoes that were basically worthless. Lots of sledding and yelling and getting very very cold and wet before we drove back down the hill. Maybe 2 hours from 60 degree days and sunshine on Christmas Day.

The Sierra Crest was beautiful, however, even in the overcast, and every once in awhile the sun would light up the distant mountains with gold. Speaking of lights, I have to go take a photo of the house in Jamestown. Melody and Kevin stopped at Halloween to see it with the kids and now at Christmas those people have outdone themselves again. I don't think I ever saw so many lights on one little house. All lit up it reminded me of a Thailand temple in the sun. Still working on the Thailand photos. I may never get them done. I keep wishing that somehow I could have captured that sparkling moving sunlight over all those mirrors, but photos just can't quite get it.

And speaking of photos, Deanna made a great collage of my great grandkids for me all done up and framed in black. Wonderful. Funny. we both did photos for each other this year.

Back to work today and trying to stay focused. But it's lunch time so I thought I would drop a note to myself.

midnight and can't sleep

It's midnight on a Friday night and I can't sleep. Went to bed at 830 and now I'm awake with a mind spinning full of thoughts. "Monkey mind". Choices. Do I take an Ambien? Do I lie awake just letting the thoughts come? Do I work on the Thailand photos? Instead I write.

It's amazing to me what kinds of thoughts come in the dark alone. Slippers. I am wearing some slippers that Lance bought for me back sometime in the mid 80's. More than 20 year old slippers. Bright warm wool mukluks with leather bottoms. Still perfect. Lance was so sweet that way. He loved to buy special things for me that he knew I would love. He always had the best of taste as well. Lance. Talking with Melody the other day, I reminded her that I had been divorced from Lance as long as I was married to him, that our marriage, that seemed such a huge part of my life, was becoming more of a blip on the screen. Just a chapter in a very complex story that doesn't seem to really have much of a pattern to it, just separate and yet very interesting but unrelated chapters.

Other thoughts. Do any of the chapters really matter? For so long I have thought that I needed to write the stories. Not only my own, but my mother's and my grandmother's stories. But in the dark alone, I wonder what is the point of the stories. My children will care, but what about those that come after. Do the stories matter at all to Hillary and Elric, Matthew and Steven, Jeremy, the great grandbabies? In the whole scheme of things, the stories are all just blips in the lives of people who are blips in the hugeness of the universe. All with our stories, so many of them.

Shera, a life now past, Dorothy, a huge story, and yet now almost irrelevant it seems. Goggie, who will remember her, who that is still alive will remember her? The people that I have loved and all those stories. I am not my story.

Memoirs are all the rage now, classes exist in teaching the proper way to write a memoir. Not a sequential story, but a part of your life that somehow affected you and has a theme and a conclusion. I don't have a clue how to do that. Autobiographies. There are classes in those as well, teaching how to find the theme and make it interesting, not just a litany of happenings. Learning how to find the parts that matter and letting the detail slip away. So things like slippers. Are they the detail or are they part of something that matters, part of the memories, and symbols of a good marriage that once was.

Families. In Thailand it was such an eye opener to see how close families remained. No one moved across the country, they didn't even move across the town. They lived in big family compounds. We visited one such family, and the rest of our group visited several others, in small groups of 6 or 7 people. The story was all the same. Mother was a public relations specialist for a big company, Father brokered coffee beans. Their home was spotless, lighted with flourescent bulbs that are bright and dim at the same time. Two children, 20 months and three. Little girls that were the apple of their eye. Mother's mother had a pumpkin farm nearby but stayed with the kids while mom worked and Fathers mother stayed when grandma one was away at the farm. Auntie and Nephew were there for dinner as well, and lived upstairs. Various grandparents lived in the houses next door, and other assorted relatives. All sharing common values and common lives, picking the papayas and bananas from their compound trees, eating fresh vegetables, taking food to the monks at 6am.

We sat on her floor and made pyramid cakes, special food that the monks loved. Father had been a monk for several years. It is expected in Thailand that men will serve as monks for at least some time in the lives, from months to years. As monks, they learn the proper way to live. They learn the 8 precepts of Buddhism, and how to live in peace and equanimity. We asked how the women learn these values since they can't be monks, and were told that all people are taught from childhood the peaceful, calm, gentle way of the middle path.

The pyramid cakes are made from a paste that is kind of grayish purple, a bit like poi, but made from sticky rice flour and palm sugar, about half as sweet as american sugar. You brush oil on a perfectly cut banana leaf, form a patty of the paste, put in a spoonful of shredded deep fried coconut that has some kind of other stuff in it, and then wrap it perfectly with specific folds that end up in a perfectly folded little package. Amazing. They are then steamed for 15 minutes and served up warm for dessert or saved for the next mornings offerings to the monks.

I thought about my family, and how scattered we are, and this very different way of living and how good it felt, how close they are, how strongly they support their families. If I were Thai, I would have taken my grandmother and dorothy into my home, I would have cared for them no matter what it took. I couldn't do that, and I don't expect my kids to do that. And yet I wondered at what we have given yp with all our independence. That kind of family and community.

The back side of the lack of conflict is the lack of self expression. It is considered uncouth and totally unacceptable to speak poorly of your family, or to raise your voice. Conflict is avoided at all costs. What is lost in this is really having any idea what anyone really thinks. Can these people be any different than all the rest of us, with anger and frustration, and grupmy thoughts about all the expectations? Probably not, but you would never know it. Sitting in a huge gridlock traffic jam that Bangkok is well known for, I saw that calm and peaceful demeanor of the Thai people. Bikes and trucks and even a cement truck pushing in for space, people not exactly getting cut off, but gently pushed as the gridlock got tighter and tighter. No horns honking, except that little toot to let someone know you may be a quarter inch from their bumper.

Lessons and experiences I won't forget, thoughts that flow past my monkey mind at midnight on a winter night of Christmas Eve Eve.

Dorothy Lucille Schultz October 2006

Dorothy at her home in 1975

Dorothy Lucille Schultz 1919 to 2006

Dorothy Schultz, "mom" to me since 1952, wnen my own mother died, has passed away. She went to a care home because her Parkinson's suddenly advanced and her husband David could no longer care for her. They brought her back home after 5 days with help from hospice nurses. She passed away Thursday morning, at home, in the same house I left in 1962, with David and her 50 year old child like adopted son David with her. She actually died Thursday and her husband didn't call me because he thought I said "I didn't want to be bothered". For pete's sake. All I said to him was that I wouldn't be able to cancel my trip so I hoped she didn't die while I was gone. I only found out because I was calling and checking in. If I had returned from Thailand and discovered she had been dead a month I would have been furious.

I won't be at the funeral. Maybe that's why he didn't call. He knew I wouldn't come. He is doing some of the guilting thing for sure, but to be expected since he is hurting. I will be sending flowers for "mom" and a written something that David will have read for me.

At the moment I feel completely out of touch with any feelings I may have about this, but they do come in here and there. I learned over the years that many women have relationships with their mothers similar to the relationship that I had with Dorothy, it often has nothing to do with the genetic thing as I used to think. I know what it is to love my children, I know how that feels for me. I know Dorothy thought she loved me and mine as much as she would have loved us had we all been her blood. I believe that, it was just her own way of loving that I never understood. So many people of that era were so damaged. I did forgive her a long time ago, and she said she forgave me. I know I hurt her horribly, and disappointed her over and over again. She never really had a clue why. I had the benefit of therapy, she only had the benefit of her church and her religeon. I was the lucky one there.

Well, enough of all that. At least I am beginning to see that I might actually have some feelings here and that is a good thing. I will be leaving for San Francisco in the morning, and then for Thailand Monday morning. Mo is here and I am glad. Life just does what it is going to do and people come and people go. I guess what I feel most is the deep awareness that stories happen and those stories have a beginning and an end. But maybe not really. I know Melody and her story with Donna certainly hasn't ended. Our family story with Goggie will live as long as any of us who knew her will live. The Dorothy story is such a huge part of the bigger saga, the whole Connie, Evelyn, Bob, and "the Bentz's". In any life there are so many layers of overlapping stories that I wonder at the relevance of any of them. We are not our story, and yet....who in the hell would we be, really, without out story.

Dorothy is a huge part of my story.

Even later on a Friday Night

warning. this post is completely irrelevant so just ignore it if you are anyone but me. I'm rambling and trying to find the writer that used to live in here somewhere. She's out to lunch for the moment.

So I keep wondering if I should move all this blog stuff over to Melody's Live Journal where I go all the time. Maybe she can tell me whatever reasons people use to do different blogs. I haven't written anything of substance in a very long time, in spite of the ever changing season. Winter has already come to Klamath. Here in Jamestown, winter is just a breath of cold air on the morning walk, some frost on the pavement, 32 degrees on the car thermometer. Still sun coming in the office windows in the afternoon.

Today I actually felt cold enough to wear a sweater. Poor Stacy, my new soil scientist is from Southern California. She works in the office in a huge sweater, a long scarf doubled around her neck and down her back, a hat that looks like something out of a Russian fairytale and gloves. Yes, gloves. Fingerless ones that let her still type. I am still in sandals most of the time, and usually forget socks. But today I remembered, socks AND a sweater.

I am supposed to be packing for my trip to Thailand. My grandson is home from Iraq at last, amazingly safe back on US soil after a scary sojourn. Relatively safe at least, as safe as anyone is living in a city and driving in traffic. We are so lucky sometimes to live this life with so few really bad things going on for our family. Little troubles, emotional emergencies that are really so small considering the state of the world. I am grateful.

I wonder if my life really started turning around back a few years ago when I was doing my gratitude journals all the time. I found one today, with day after day of lovely things, sometimes 2, sometimes a dozen, things I was grateful for in a time when I was broke and living in a house with no plumbing. Amazingly, that was also a very long time ago.

Bel is still living in that world of doing without. Now and then I send her money, try to help her a bit. She so deserves so much more. Another lost person going down the tubes, between the cracks of life. Her money is pretty much gone, she is now making a meager living selling "stuff" at her daily garage sale. Good thing she has spent so much of her life collecting stuff, I guess.

So, my house is going to be vacant, and I feel like I am broke, but it's all so relative. I'm not really broke at all. I have more than enough of every little thing, everything. I'm even going to Thailand.

Ahh well.

winter fun

So, Friday night, and I finally finished the project. Just a small piece of the project, actually, but enough that Deanna will get a nice surprise for Christmas. It will come early, and I will already be gone, but she will know I am thinking of her. And hopefully she is waaay toooo busy to read this blog in the next week or so! HA! 

Hazardous Waste or just Poison Oak???

As I discovered in the most uncomfortable way, I am seriously allergic to poison oak, the bane of mapping soils in the California foothills. My review team leader is also allergic, and we had a review recently right in the middle of the stuff. I knew I had to do something to avoid the steroid shots and trips to the hospital, so came up with the chemically inert TyVek suits sold at the paint store. Obviously they were a hit. For some unknown reason, there are three MLRA Project Leaders and Team Leaders in California named Sue. Hence the photo here of Sierra Sue (me) with my technical leader Valley Sue from Davis at the head office in Davis. Got an email today from Valley Sue extolling the virtues of the suits and thanking me for helping her avoid one more painful encounter with the evil beast. She even sent a photo out to the California soil survey crew saying, "Don't laugh, it worked!!" Fun

Six weeks on NutriSystem and still going strong

Although I'll see how things will no doubt slow down as I try to deal with traveling to Albany for Thanksgiving! The shorterm goal is another 6 pounds before I leave for Thailand in December. I have this idea that great Thai food and lots of exploring will keep me from gaining during my travels! Yes!!

Halloween in Mill Villa

First day off since I returned from my daughter's wedding cruise. Took some time to go for a walk in the daylight instead of in the dark as I usually do in the mornings before work. Fall here is different, more like I remember Halloween in my growing up days in southern california. Crisp but not cold, still dry, and most of the color comes from all the planted trees, but still, it's color, and it's amazing. Melody has written so much about our cruise and is still writing away on her blog. I love it, and love reading it. Almost like living it over again. SO very much fun and good family time together, even though some of us couldn't be there, I'm grateful for the time we got for those of us that were. I'll upload my walk around the park to Shutterfly and put the link to my photos in here soon. http://kyotesue.shutterfly.com/action/?a=8AaMWLdu5Zs2zc&notag=1

Molly's last swim

For my birthday, Mo came to Jamestown and we drove to Yosemite and over Tioga Pass. Molly was with us, as usual, and as usual, we let her swim in the chilly Stanislaus River. She loved swimming so much, always was ready to jump in the water. She wasn't doing too well, though and the current almost got her. It was scary, and she dragged her tired little body out, shook off, and ambled up the trail with us to the warm car.

Mo knew Molly was ill, she was even cooking special food to try to offset the kidney disease that the doctor had ordered. In spite of all the extra care, at 13 years old, on October 15, Molly left, with a little help from the doctor. Mo was ok with it. The time was right. She hadn't eaten in two weeks and hadn't had water for days. She could barely make it up the steps. I guess it's healthy when you can let go when it's time to let go. Something I never learned very well. Mo misses Molly. I miss Molly.

Yet she found a new dog already (writing this in late November) and already our sweet new girl is filling up the place that Molly left behind. Another lesson in mortality, I guess.

workin'it

The Harvard Mine in Jamestown and photos of the Mother Lode, as in the real thing, the actual quartz vein that grew all the gold. Not the area called the "Mother Lode" as in the foothills of the Sierra.

Got a great chance to go behind the fence of the off limits area of the biggest gold producing mine in this area, now idle except for arsenic and sulphur laced water that will hopefully someday be treated well enough to provide another water source for this water hungry country.

Rapelling down the cliff was scary for me, but just at the beginning where the first step down was as high as my waist. Kinda hard to get back up that thing, but it was a lot easier than backing down! Glad I went down in there, though, because I got to see the amazing quartz vein that is along the Melones Fault and tons of really great rocks, including serpentinite, and mariposite, the gorgeous green stuff with the quartz veins running through it. The sheer wall in the photo to the left is the serpentinite that is so soft and incoherent that it tumbles down and the benches that they built for mining are completely gone.

The leader of the tour has spent a career in mining and is still trying to find another bit of gold, but it's hard to find any more. Not like the huge chunks of free gold that came out of here. It was a good trip.


 

SO what's new?

It seems that there is always something new going on. I'm almost a little bit tired of that, but not really, or I wouldn't keep doing things to make change in my life. It's the weekend, and instead of hanging around and relaxing, I am off to a geology tour put on by the Geoscience Teachers Association. Still don't know what the N in front of NAGT stands for, but it should be a good day of traveling around the foothills and listening to a bunch of geologists talk about s2 and s2 foliations and such gobbledy gook. I am sure when I start talking soil science it's just as strange to people outsied the field, but I laughed last night thinking about how we all get so caught up in our jargon and like to use the words to prove that we know what we are talking about.

So I can say accretionary tectonics of the metamorphic belt and talk about the comparisons throughout the cordillera now. And finally I have heard someone say "cordillara" instead of just reading it. Ah well. Maybe John and I can talk about something equally as esoteric while we travel about today.

In the mean time, I don't have time for photos yet, but hope to have some goodies up for myself as the weekend comes to a completion. Yippee.

And, one more change. I started NutriSystem two days ago. Trying to not talk about this very much, just between me and Mo, but I do want to chart my progress and document the path. I think it will work, I am motivated and have just enough help to make it work. Mo paid for the first month to get me going, so that's like some motivation. I don't want to let her down. In a good way. She doesn't pressure me to lose weight any more than I pressure myself when I look in the scale.

So, my computer is screaming away. sigh. I keep hoping it will hold out just a little bit longer, like at least until spring. If I get any kind of award from Dave, however, it will go for a computer I am sure. In the mean time, I keep backing everything up to my flash and external drives and am glad that all my writing lately is going to blogs so I won't lose them on the hard drive when it finally gives up the ghost.

Ah well. Another Saturday morning

So this morning I feel like writing and reflecting just a bit. New for me, since for the last few weeks I haven't really been looking very deeply. It's darker in the mornings as the season progresses into fall. Today is the Fall Equinox, this evening sometime after 9pm pacific time.

Mo is sleeping still. Molly wakes at 4:30 and needs to go out, so of course everyone else, including the cats, simply go back to sleep, but me? No, of course not. So here I am.

I just had my 61st birthday. Somehow 61 seems a lot older than 60. I'm really IN my 60's now, not just getting there. Sixty was closer to 59 and 61 is closer to 65. Go figure.

Usually I write about my year sometime around my birthday, try to reflect and remember and think of all that the previous birth year has brought to me. This birthday is momentous in that it actually represents the very last vestiges of my Death year, and the last of my 10 year cycle in the Emperor. All the male stuff, the integration of my own personal power, my inner male, outer males in my life. Done. Finished with my first experience of a Death year. I always say that Death isn't about real physical death, but is about transformation. Ha. Interesting to me how we dance around the death thing with fancy words about transforming. It may be transformation, but it is still death. My Death year was marked by the death of my soul friend, and my birthday is marked by the arrival of her ashes in my mail box. Funny timing. She told Jerri that I was to have her ashes because I would know where to take them. Shera died last February, and only now was Jerri ready to let go that much. So they are in a box, a white cardboard box filled with a plastic bag. Geez. Today I will make some kind of a funnel and put them in a container that at least seems a little more respectable. I do have a lovely gourd, painted black with images of goddesses around it and feathers and beads at the entrance. A very small entrance, hence the funnel. Such a passage.

Weather has finally cooled. Now it's in the mid 80's during the day and while that feels warm to me, I just have to remember those 115 degree temperatures to realize that it really has cooled. Mo and I have been working on house projects in the midst of me going to work every day, but today I am off, and will be home for the next three days while we finish up all that we can together on the house. Last weekend was for play time and this weekend is for working.

Last weekend I actually went to Yosemite and over the Tioga Road. A nice return to a place I grew up loving. Incredibly, the air was a crystal clear and fresh as I remembered from my childhood. There's a quality of light in Yosemite that seems unparalleled anywhere else. I thought it might have something to do with the granite, the whiteness of the granite and the way it looks almost blue in the shadows. And there is so much of it, and so much sky. Maybe it had to do with the nearly 10,000 foot elevation over the pass. It was a blessing, a dream, hiking to a high mountain lake, as pure and pristine as anything I have ever seen. A lovely way to spend a birthday.

The year really did bring some rather incredible changes to me. Most significantly, the loss of my friend, the move to Sonora, the first trip overseas, my grandson in Iraq. Other small milestones were everywhere, but these were the big ones. Again, in the midst of it, there doesn't seem much to write about. It's just a life progressing, going through shifts and changes, and as I look back, full of surprises and unexpected turns and twists. Maybe it's the end of the cycle and the next few years will not be so full of surprises, and then again maybe it's just the nature of life and the unexpected things are what make it interesting.

I know I am not bored. Not even close. I am challenged every day with the demands of my work, my new job here in Sonora, with the differences of living here, challenged every day in ways that keep me from ever thinking I am bored. That's a good thing. I think I could find lots of people in their 60's who might be tired and bored and not doing much that is very different from their old patterns. I'm trying to stay away from that place. I want to create stability in my life but I also want to keep it fresh and interesting, full of enough challenge that I am stimulated, but not so much that I crash and burn. A fine line.

Enough for today

Back to Klamath

I guess I miss the water and the lake more than anything else. I'm home again in Sonora and remembering the clear air, the cool temperatures, the water, the light, the lack of smog. It's all pretty amazing and I am glad to say that I never really took it for granted when I lived there. It is still hot in Sonora, and still crowded, and still expensive. I'm just glad that I can go home now and then and see moments like this one. I was on my way to work, driving in to town from Rocky Point, and thought, oh my gosh, I have to stop, I don't care what time it is, I have to stop and get a photo of this moment. I took several actually, and they are all wonderful and it's hard to decide which ones to put up here. But I suppose it's irrelevant. I shared them with shutterful and sent them off to friends and family. This blog is basically irrelevant as well, but I just thought maybe I should put something up here. Maybe I can get into writing about the diatomaceous tour in Klamath, or soil survey in Tuolumne County, anything, something other than whining about missing my home. Maybe I can remember winter in Klamath and be glad that this year I will be here. Mabye then it will feel better than it does right now. Mabye then I will appreciate it all. Who knows. I hope so.
This is a shot of Medicine Lake in the Highlands, actually in the lovely state of California, about 6000 feet high and as clear and clean as you could ask for. 5 days of quiet, still water, ospreys, ducks, all sorts of little birds, chipmunks stealing food from the dog dish. Rejuvenation. Healing. Respite. A gift






And then of course there are the mornings on the lake and the polygonum in bloom. Silly pink flowers growing on 6 foot long underwater stems looking for all the world like a field of flamingos. Life should be so simple. Someday it will be. I wonder what I will think of it then?

I am reading my daughter's blog, so full of life and questions and amazing things that she writes about. Thoughtful, intellectual, interesting. I think I had that in me once, but maybe never really like she does. She amazes me. If you haven't found her blog yet, go there. She is Penitence69 on LiveJournal.com. I guess I should know how to link this but of course I don't! LOL Guess I really am into a different stage of life. 

Testing my new google toys

Well, I have to say that Deanna and Steven were right. My daughter who is a whiz at just about everything, and my grandson who is a computer geek who excells at everything as well kept telling me about google gmail. I finally succumbed and have been playing with toys all weekend, including the shared calendars, and the cool automatic blogging tools, automatic photo emails and just about everything else that appears on the screen. I even changed my browser to Firefox. Now I'm an old broad, and didn't realize how resistant to change I am. (OK I can hear my youngest guffawing) But this is downright fun.

So, Youngest Daughter, how bout some change for you now as well. Sign up for GMAIL and lets all get going into the 21st century! Oh yes. Forgot to say the the photo subject of this blog is really my new wall that I papered with an amazing product called Paper Illusion. You just tear and paste randomly and voila! a sandstone wall right in my living room with cracks to match my favorite print! What fun!!

user photo

Adjusting

August 13, 2006

Day after my girls birthday. 37 years old. Amazing human that girl is. Always back to the same thing. I made her on purpose. I haven’t journaled in forever. Waay too long. I’ve lost my edge, my ability to write, my ability to put the feelings down in words. Maybe I have lost the need to do so. Wondering. And yet sometimes in the early mornings when I wake up I feel that I should be writing. That there are things to say that need saying. But now, on a late Sunday afternoon, I haven’t a clue what they are.

Where am I right now? I guess that’s always the place to start with. Where am I. I was full of dreams and excitement the last time I blogged, full of the move and the migration in the Klamath. And all the ideas that I had for being here in California seem to have migrated with the geese. Gone somewhere. Nowhere. I can’t find much to love about this place, although I keep trying to at least keep from saying I hate it.

I decided that yesterday I would take advantage of one of the good things about Sonora, the Blues Festival, but I was alone and didn’t want to pay the 40 bucks for the whole day and didn’t want to pay to park and deal with traffic, so I thought I would walk. So I cleaned up the house and decided to amble along slowly up the highway to the fairgrounds. Less than two miles. About as far as I used to walk to work back in Klamath, when it was 11 below zero. I remember looking at the temperature every morning as I passed the bank and wondering why it was always 11 below, not 12, not 9, always 11. So yesterday, walking up the highway on a sunny Saturday mid morning didn’t seem too threatening. Except it’s California. Well, of course.

But what the heck, I’m strong, it’s just two miles, it’s daytime. I can do this. So I packup a bottle of water and a camera in a bag and off I go.
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My mobile home park is right on Highway 108, but the nice part about this is that it is also on the other side of Wood’s Creek. An actual live creek with water in it even in August. I cross the little wooden bridge, under the shade of the valley oaks that are here and walk up to the highway. The sky was clear, a little bit smokey from the fires in the southern part of the county, but blue and warm, maybe 92 degrees. Sun high and bright. Grass is all brown, all annual grasses with their scratchy seeds and worn out lives. Grasses that have taken over brought in during the gold rush days from far away places, and like the people that brought them, opportunistic, ready to find an easy life. I guess they did that here in the hills, but in the process they killed out all the perennial grasses that once grew here. Trying not to hate the ugly dry annual grasses. Trespassers, maybe like me.

The cars are a thick line of bright colors passing me at 50 plus miles an hour. The highway is narrow, it is noisy. No big deal. There is plenty of room. Space to cross over as I take the turn from 108 onto the HWY 49 road, Stewart Road, somehow in my travels about town I don’t use this road very much. It’s narrow and winding and pretty in it’s own way, with cliffs that come straight down on both sides of the road, the shoulder maybe a foot wide, and curvy. Pretty cliffs except when I am flattening my body against them so cars coming around the curves on the shoulders don’t flatten me. Hmmm. Maybe I should have listened to my friend Tracy who thought I was nuts to walk the highway to town. Just two miles I remind myself.

I see a little trail, it looks well worn and well trodden so I take a break from the heat and the sun and walk down to what appears to be a dump hiding in the shadows. Then I see clothes, and pieces of mattress, lots of beer cans and some shopping carts. Hmmm. I back out and decide better of more exploration.

Finally I hear the music and in just a few more curves I am near the fairgrounds. I have decided that I am going to just walk around the neighborhoods and listen rather than go in. The creek here is wider, but the sound of traffic is ever present and the music is muffled by the sounds of Harleys in all their glory. I walk down a street past the park, looking through the fence at all the people sitting in the sun with friends, listen to the music a bit, which is good, but not good enough to make me shell out the 40 bucks and sit in the sun all afternoon. More walking and then I sit on a rock and call my girlfriend. Wish she was here. Call my daughter, the one who loves the blues. Wish she was here.

So what is the matter with me that I can’t just enjoy this on my own, listen to the music, shell out the bucks, spend the day there. I just don’t want to do it. I’m glad I came, glad I experienced what the Sonora Blues Festival is like, but want to go back home, past my little creek and my little wooden bridge. I want to put on my goggles, stop up my ears, and swim silently in the pool where I am usually alone in the afternoons. So I leave. I will go next year with Mo, or Deborah, or who knows who might come and share it with me, but a blues fest is really something to do with friends. Pretty boring all alone for me, at least on this day it was.

I walk back down toward my home. The sun is getting hotter and brighter, I am glad I am walking downhill. Another little path into the woods. This one looks as though it might be a really nice little trail to the creek. I walk down again, only to find another dump, bigger, with more stuff, and even a little old campfire. So much trash. So why do homeless people live with so much trash? It’s spooky down there, but I don’t see any sign of humans around so I keep exploring a bit. Trying to get down to the creek, but the brush gets thicker and thicker and I finally give up. Ah well. Back up to the hot road and fighting the cars.

I am appalled at the trash everywhere. Not just in the camps but all along the roads. When walking it’s even more visible than in the car. An old glove, cans, papers, pieces of foam, clothes, more paper, plastic, feathers. It’s horrendous really, are the roads back home in Oregon like this? Have I just missed it because I haven’t had to walk in tiny narrow road shoulders to get anywhere? Smells are there too, the smells they warned us of back in Spokane. The task force said, Don’t assume it’s an animal, it could be a person. Dead things. I keep smelling dead things.

I am almost home, and am turning down to my little creek just ready to get away from the highway and the noise when I almost step right on a very dead for a very long time cat. My heart jumps and I am one more time grateful that my cats are now house cats. I think of the person wondering where that cat disappeared to, never to be found in the dry dead grasses far off the highway, in the ditch. Someone loved that cat.

Home at last, to my clean house, my clean swimming pool. I lie in the sun, get in and swim slowly, it’s so clean. No bugs, no snakes. No flies landing on me as I like there in silence in the sun. The only sounds that come are the CDF bombers flying over carrying retardant to the fires. A breeze, perfect temperature, blue skies. What is there not to love about this place?

What do I feel here, what seeps in to my consciousness that doesn’t allow me to feel home, to feel comfortable, to love this place the way I loved Klamath when I first moved there? What am I feeling? 2200 homeless people all around me? Thousands of cars running up and down the highways frantically seeking recreation away from their cities and their traffic?

I visited my friend in Sacramento last week. There is a wonderful knitting store in Elk Grove, what used to be a 20 minute drive from where she lives now. She refused to go there. Said she just couldn’t deal with the traffic, that it could take up to 4 hours to try to get into Elk Grove. Truly. She insisted. 4 hours. 15 miles. So we didn’t go to the wonderful knitting store.

I guess that seems to be the gist of living here. There are great things around. After all, Yosemite is just 90 minutes away. But it’s too hot, and too crowded, and too much traffic and gas is too expensive to drive 45 minutes to go for a cool walk in the Big Trees at Calaveras State Park, so I haven’t been there yet. There was an article in the paper about all the swimming holes along the rivers around here, more driving, more competition with traffic, and so I haven’t explored them yet.

But I had my little adventure yesterday. I walked to town. I now know that I won’t walk to town again. There is no place to walk around here that doesn’t require a drive. I can walk around my trailer park on little roads and look at little trailers, but I can’t walk in the woods, or explore neighborhoods, or walk in the hills, or walk anywhere and feel like it’s something that is safe and pretty and enjoyable.

My daughter says I am complaining a lot. I am trying so very hard to stop that, and yet when I sit and write about this, what comes to mind is how it feels. My home feels good, it feels better all the time. My little patio feels nice, and when it’s only the 90’s as it was today, I can actually begin to enjoy it a bit. So that’ that I guess. Not much more to say about much at all. Is it worth blogging about? Is there anything at all that I want to say? Well, maybe, at least I can get some words up now that I have DSL. One good thing. I have DSL finally.

so i have dialup

explain to me how i can have only dialup in the great sate of california. more later, i hope

Moving

No photos this time. (Changed my mind, obviously) I think the camera is in the bottom of a bag somewhere. In the dining room is a pile of stuff with bright flourescent green stickers on each item, warning the movers not to move them. Hope it works. Red tape for the stuff to go to storage, and the rest, off to Jamestown. I have to get used to saying Jamestown instead of Sonora. I live in Jamestown.

I am downstairs in the office where I have the computer, listening to the sound of heavy boots on the hardwood floors upstairs. The guys are great. One of them is young and strong and smokes cigarettes and drinks 24 ounce cans of something filled with guarana and inositol. He has a really cool tatoo on his neck and he's really incredibly sweet. Last time I moved with the government the people were pretty trashy and were really rude. I'm grateful this is so easy.

I'm feeling it this morning. Boxes filling up everywhere. Space clearning out. It's amazing to have someone do this for me. I still remember all those years moving from apartment to house to apartment and again. Always renting and hoping that the next place would be a real home. I haven't had to rent anything since I moved into my grandmother's home more than 11 years ago. Whew! What a blessing. Amazing how many little blessings have come to me as I get older. Young strong guys packing and moving my stuff. Cars that actually run, that don't overheat, and don't have weird carburetors and have good tires. You have no idea how it feels to be in a beat up old volkswagon with little babies in the car, traveling, moving. I remember.

OK, so maybe I will take a picture and put it in here. Just for fun. It's cloudy this morning, weak sun, but the snow that fell overnight has already melted. It's happening.

I may even have a renter. That's pretty exciting. Not sure who she is yet, but the rental management company said she's a middle aged woman coming to see the house on Saturday after I am out of here. Moana coming today to help me with putting up the gutters that we never got up last summer, and scraping the windows that we never managed to get scraped after we painted right up to the snow time.

My computer is running slick. David came yesterday and worked on it. Everyone needs a computer Dave.

And David, my sweetie from work came by last night and we laughed ourselves silly over stupid soils stuff while we drank a beer together. He will come to Sonora and visit. Jamestown. (grin)

OK. time to go take some photos

Enneagram

Ok, Melody, So you did it to me again. My daughter has these tests on her blog and I keep falling for them. This one was especially interesting because it came to the same result I came to after a year of study on the Enneagram with a teacher. I hated that I was a 9 back then and still don't quite believe it. Ah well.


the PeacemakerTest finished!

you chose BX - your Enneagram type is NINE.

"I am at peace"

Peacemakers are receptive, good-natured, and supportive. They seek union with others and the world around them.

How to Get Along with Me
If you want me to do something, how you ask is important. I especially don't like expectations or pressure.
I like to listen and to be of service, but don't take advantage of this.
Listen until I finish speaking, even though I meander a bit.
Give me time to finish things and make decisions. It's OK to nudge me gently and nonjudgmentally.
Ask me questions to help me get clear.
Tell me when you like how I look. I'm not averse to flattery.
Hug me, show physical affection. It opens me up to my feelings.
I like a good discussion but not a confrontation.
Let me know you like what I've done or said.
Laugh with me and share in my enjoyment of life.

What I Like About Being a Nine
being nonjudgmental and accepting
caring for and being concerned about others
being able to relax and have a good time
knowing that most people enjoy my company; I'm easy to be around
my ability to see many different sides of an issue and to be a good mediator and facilitator
my heightened awareness of sensations, aesthetics, and the here and now
being able to go with the flow and feel one with the universe

What's Hard About Being a Nine
being judged and misunderstood for being placid and/or indecisive
being critical of myself for lacking initiative and discipline
being too sensitive to criticism; taking every raised eyebrow and twitch of the mouth personally
being confused about what I really want
caring too much about what others will think of me
not being listened to or taken seriously

Nines as Children Often
feel ignored and that their wants, opinions, and feelings are unimportant
tune out a lot, especially when others argue
are "good" children: deny anger or keep it to themselves

Nines as Parents
are supportive, kind, and warm
are sometimes overly permissive or nondirective

Migration

I read the other day that the Ross geese are destroying the alfalfa fields in Klamath. The geese are on their way north via the Pacific flyway and it seems that Klamath Basin alfalfa is a sweet delight to them. They eat the plants right to the ground, and since alfalfa is a perennial crop, the fields are destroyed permantly.

I suppose it's a bad thing for the farmers here, already fight for survival and dealing with power costs increasing 10 fold and the question of water always in the background. Yet, I can't help but love these geese. When I walk up to them, they lift off like someone shaking a sheet before folding it, waving and fluttering together as a single being. Symbol of spring. Something so incredible about the sound of rushing wings overhead as they lift and turn.

I drove with Mo down to Miller Island and Tingley Lake to find pelicans. There were no pelicans, but we found the geese. Ross and Snow and Canada, and a lot of great egrets, and hawks and eagles. Birds in the Klamath. It was a way of saying goodbye to this home of mine, at least for a time. The skies were much as I remember them 3 years ago when I found the geese at Miller Island for the first time, and posted similar photos to weatherunderground, so amazed at the spectacle of migration, so thrilled to see and hear it up close.

I leave this weekend, but not for good. I'll be back to move and pack, but then it WILL be for good, at least for a bit of time. I have no idea at all what life will bring to me in the next short few years, but as always, I do know it will be full of new experiences and adventure, and yes, maybe some sadness and hard times as I deal with living in a new world. I can always go back to these photos of the geese, though, and know that they will always be here in March. I can return just like they do to this magic wonderland of desert and water and birds. It's the refuges that draw me to this place, that and water in the desert, open spaces and sky. Winter is long and cold but when the birds return, I remember why I love it here.

Personal DNA Map

Moving to California

Moving to California after living away from there for more than 30 year creates all sorts of mind messes. My daughter told me it somehow made her all excited and happy to think of me living there. They have heard the stories, of the years that I worked so hard to get them out of the "evil state". Moved them to Northern Idaho to protect them from crime and drugs and smog, to give them farms and small towns, horses, chickens, good schools. Funny. Those things are completely irrelevant now.

I have become the prodigal daughter. Suddenly things like oak/savannah landscapes, the high sierras, Yosemite, access to culture, and of all things, really great restauarants have more meaning than how good the schools are. Just being in Sonora for a day or two, I felt such a huge difference in the way people act and interact. That california instant intimacy that I remember so well was everywhere. Friendly people, talking and sharing way too much according to those folks who live in colder climates. What IS it about warm weather than makes people different?

I am excited about it. I am so ready to not worry about shoveling snow, to escape that feeling of being old and crotchety on icy driveways. For pete's sake, I actually knocked myself out on my driveway this winter on the ice. Yeah, I know it rains in California, a lot actually where I am going. And it gets hot. Really hot. I guess I'll have to see how I hold up on that one. I guess the other difference for me is that I know that I no longer am trapped no matter where I go. The world is smaller for me, and I have the freedom to move around in ways I never used to when I had small children and no money.

If I get too hot, I'll drive to the Sierra Crest and hike in summer snows. If I get too bored with one landscape, I'll drive to another. If I want to see the ocean, I'll drive two hours and hang at the beach. If I miss Oregon, I'll get in my truck and take a long weekend back to Oregon. Easy. But in the mean time, I'll live in my little mobile home in a "holler" along Wood's Creek and fantasize finding another one of those magical miracle gold nuggets that float around there.

Work will be challenging, and that's a good thing as well. New landscapes, new project to develop, new opportunity to apply all the things I learned in Klamath and now I can do them even better. New people to meet. Even a knitting store in town that says "come on in and knit". I somehow know that I won't be anywhere near as lonely there as I was when I first moved to Klamath. Read that again, Sue, I know it.

Leaving Klamath is another story. For some reason I am ready. Not to leave my home, since I do love my little home a lot and know I want it waiting here for me to decide later on if I will come back here. I guess it also depends on how Klamath grows in the next few years and where we think it would be best to spend the rest of my retirement. As I always said, winter in Florida, spring somewhere green and fresh, summer in the mountains of Oregon, fall in Utah, or New England. Still sounds like a motorhome life that really awaits me and all I have to do is decide where I am going to keep my rocks and the family photos.

But for now, the adventure awaits, and I am excited about the growth that it represents for me, the career growth, actually it will be the culmination of that career, and the personal growth. No more looking for the right partner, the right person. I am content in my life, very much so, very content as it is right now. I have lots of love and carre, as well as personal freedom and the ability to be just who I am, all the time. Not sure how that happened actually. I got stronger, I got less frantic about the whole thing, I became more secure in the real me without having to be so "out there" with it all.

So, I plan to learn Spanish, my next project. and keep knitting. and ride by bike and swim every dayin the pool, and do lots of walking the hills. I plan to work on my photos, and make sure that I write and write and write. Most of all I plan to do a really great job as MMA project leader, and make that the best project that I possibly can make it. I care about it. The project will be my last career move, my swan song, so to speak. I want to go out with a bang and do it well.

In the mean time, I am here looking around me at the organizing things that need to be done, at the rooms waiting to be separated for storage vs moving, and waiting on the final word for the house in Sonora. Maybe I'll get some sleep this weekend.

Only Maybe

Home maybe sweet maybe home??

Home sweet home 

Eulogy to a Soul Friend

I haven't written here since Shera died. It's still too close. I think a bit, I start to type, and then it stops and the silence slips back in, the empty place where she was. In my heart. When you are 60, lifetime soul friend has a completely different meaning that it does when you are 20 or 30 or even 40. Different. Final. More empty, somehow.

Like the time I bought my new stove. A brand new Maytag, all the bells and whistles. It was just a few years ago and I looked at it and thought, "I will never have to buy another stove again. This one will last until I die". I won't live long enough now to worry about ever buying another stove.

I will never have the time to build another friendship the way I built this one. I will never be as hungry or as vulnerable or as idealistic or as ready to see someone new in my life in the same way I saw Shera back in 1994. Shera left this place and took with her something of me. Of course, she left something of her with me as well. Ahh, those old cliches. "Her memory lives on in me." The memory of our love and caring. But even more, the silly little funny memories of stupid moments among the red rocks in Utah. Those are the memories that she leaves with me. I can talk about them all day to others, but no one was there, they are meaningless words on paper that can't even come close to carrying the feeling, the sense of light and brilliance that surrounds the memories.

No one but Shera.

She is the only one who was there with me. I carry it alone now, with the deep luster of her memory as a shiny shadow in my heart, but just a shadow.

I carry the brilliance of Muley Twist rock and the frost on the dried seed heads of flowers at dawn, the empty space between the front of the motor home window and the depth of the canyon below the cliff outside that window. I can describe it all day and yet words can't even begin to convey what it was to anyone but me, what it felt like to be with this friend that I loved totally in such a sweet place of love and acceptance of each other. It was all the sweeter because we didn't mix it up with being lovers, or being romantic, even though I idealized her and loved her so very much, it was all from afar somehow. We knew we were friends. We knew that bond would last long beyond any of the temporary bonds she found with the women in her life.

Till Jeri, of course. She made it with Jeri, she learned how to appreciate Jerri, she stayed with her, and let Jerri be there for her in a way no one else had done. She fought it sometimes inside, she raved and ranted, she went into depressions and out, but still she stayed with Jerri till her end. Loyal. Loving. Appreciative of all that they had together and how muc Jerri had given her.

We lamented over the years, the wasted years spent looking for the perfect partner, the perfect passion, the perfect love. Of course it didn't exist, and because we somehow knew it didn't exist, we knew better than to look toward each other for that perfection. The friendship was ironically too perfect.

So this blog is about breast cancer, attended to far too late, double mastectomies, chemotherapy, brain tumors, lung tumors, losing her hair, her humor, but never her strength or determination to fight, to keep going, to keep trying. How many of us are taken by this beast. The young ones, the healthy ones. The lesbians who never had children and never nursed a child. Their breasts defeating them in the end. Breasts that are high and proud and firm because they never sagged under the weight of a child. In the end, their killers.

Hmmmm. Does everyone's picture always look like this? Notice the arm holding the camera. 

I got the job!!

Photo of Bel and her 20 plus year old cat, Snowy, in Florida

Still buzzy I guess. Since it's 5am and I have been up since 2:30. Can't sleep, thinking of all the things that I need to do in the next days and weeks during the move. This morning I started with going through some old work papers, trying to clear out the space, throw away what I no longer need and don't want to move.

30 years of soils work looking me right in the face. 30 years of digging holes and climbing mountains and fighting bugs. 30 years of scratching my head trying to figure out what in the world was going on in one more crazy mixed up landscape. Reading back over my old appraisals made me remember just how much soil survey has changed since I started with an auger and a couple of black and white 4/mile photos sitting on a velvet brown hilltop in Moscow, Idaho. Now it's GIS, LANDSAT imagery, spatial analyst, looking at the landscape in a million ways remotely via computer before we even think about putting a line on a map.

More changes. I have been selected to train new soil scientists in Basic Soil Survey. That should be a kick, but also requires me to travel to Nebraska to the soil survey headquarters for a week right here in the middle of my move. Someone said just expect for things to be all screwy for the first 6 months. Somehow I don't imagine my new boss being comfortable with 6 months of non productive time. I have to hit the ground running I am sure.But the teaching should be fun.

Teaching. I am in my first Heirophant cycle, and the Heirophant year. I have spent the last 10 years of my Emperor cycle paying attention to making my place in the world, developing my career, establishing myself. The Emperor. Integration of the male aspect of myself. Done. Now I move forward into the next cycle, and I felt it the minute the new year hit. Funny how Tarot numerology works. Those year numbers are a completely artificial manmade construct, and yet often you can feel the change when the numbers change. I am a scientist, and walk a fine line between belief and skepticism, but coincidence may only be that, but it's still fun to watch and observe.

It's also the ending of my Death year, and I have asked over and over what that means to me. Again, it seems that I am being asked to let go of so many things. My safe harbour here in Klamath, my home, at least for a time. I decided that any time I was presented with an opportunity to let go, I would do it fully. My biggest flaw is the hanging on thing.Letting go of even friendship with my ex love, one I thought would be a lifetime friendship, even if we weren't lovers. Not to be. And so I didn't return the last email where she said she didn't want to be friends, that our kind of emotional intimacy was reserved for lovers, that she didn't want a telephone friendship, that she wasn't willing. After four years. I almost emailed back all her letters saying she would be my friend forever, but that's irrelevant because as she said so often, "My truth changes". How's that for a copout!

Letting go of Bel. Well, I will probably never do that one completely. Bel is family to me. Bel is more of a grandmother to my kids than I was in so many ways. Always in the background, in her craziness, and yet always there and always loving my grandkids as if they were her own. Her biggest project right now is making sure that Jeremy is ok. No, I won't let go of Bel. My granddaughter Hillary probably has Asbergers, and Melody and I have talked about how likely it is that is what is different about Bel as well. She fits the syndrome perfectly. Makes it easier to understand her creativity, her intelligence, her amazing memory about things that are impossibly minute, and her seeming craziness to the world around her.

I do love Bel dearly. She is in my heart. So no, I won't let go of that. and I long ago let go of any idea of Bel and I as a couple. I couldn't even really accept that when we lived together because there was so much difference between us. Thinking about the Asbergers though I understand it all so much better now.I am writing away here, just for me, so if anyone happens to fall into this space, well, hopefully you have left by now.

Writing here to try to have a place to unload. Still wondering why I write it here instead of in my own journal in Word, but for some reason, it's different. Just a little bit different. Although it would be nice if ModBlog would at least manage to keep the photos up and such. Everything else is so easy and the layouts are easy and pretty, so I just avoid going to a new blog site because it's too much trouble. At least I figured out I could back up my entries so that's a good thing.

Tomorrow I go visit Bel in Florida, just a short 5 days there with a day on each end for flying, but 5 days of Florida velvet air, in the 70's. Getting away from this snow and ice and gray cold skies. Supposed to be windy today, but who knows. Weather advisories and yet I am planning to drive over the pass to buy a tv at Circuit City, just to save the interest. 2 years no interest if I can get there today. Geez. I feel slightly,....no a lot...crazy.My cat has been sick, and 400 bucks later, he is better now. My house is refinanced to a reasonable rate. My house is appreciating as I speak, so of course I won't sell it. Hope I find a good renter. Cat here on my arms, resting at the computer with me. Makes it hard to type. Ok. off to more stuff packing moving sorting all that stuff.Thinking about how my life is changing again. Trying to figure out where I will live and how it will feel to be leaving Klamath for California. 30 years ago I left California, and now I return. My feelings are all over the map actually.

Wild, it's wild. My head is spinning and I can't concentrate. It's the beginning of a new year for me and another step forward in my life. I put in the application thinking it would be months before I heard anything and suddenly, out of the blue, yesterday afternoon, he called. California's State Soil Scientist, asking for an interview. Would now be ok? Sure, why not. Can't offer you the job without going through channels, but must say...you are a VERY STRONG candidate and we want someone with your etc.... Lots of gushy kudos in his conversation, so even though it isn't yet final, by next week it should be.Sonora, California. Gold Country. Highway 49, My survey area will include all of the Sierra Nevada Foothills and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Yosemite. Sequoia, Kings Canyon, The Mother Lode. All new to me, challenging and exciting. So I'm 60, and embarking one more time on one last soil survey adventure. I could have stayed here in Klamath, finished my career here as a simple project leader, doing one county. But no, I wanted bigger stuff, and bigger money, and more excitement. Well, I am going to get it, it seems.Life just keeps getting better and better, I think. March. I will be there by March, will go look at places to live in February. Will lay low, will finish up what I need to finish here and then wil be off. Warm. Oaks. Digger pines. New soils, new life, new landscapes, new everything to learn about the environment there, from a different perspective then when I first drove the Mother Lode in 1965 and dreamed of living there. Obviously, it's a different place now, more crowded, more people, more traffic. Even air pollution over Yosemite. Yosemite. In my back yard. An hour away. What an amazing concept, actually.Mo and I drove through there a year ago on our trip home from Southern California, and it was so lovely. No snow where I will be going, maybe a skiff now and then. Hopefully above the fog. Today in Klamath it's foggy and icy and cold, with frozen leftovers of the last snow lying around in wait, excited about the prospect of dumping me. Warmth. Sun. California food, California sensibilities. A whole different world. So many things to do before I go. Get my house ready, get Bel's stuff out of my basement worry about the cats, the house, the paint job, my car, where I will live, am I really smart enough to pull this off? to do this job? Sure. I was afraid when I came here, and I feel a little bit afraid when I think about the challenges of going there, but I ddi this job and did it well, and I know I can do that one too.Life just goes on.