In Which I Try to Talk About Weed But Get Distracted by the Weather

Last week while I was in a hotel in California...

Wait. I should explain that I wasn't supposed to be anywhere near California. But I had to get from Colorado to Oregon, and on the morning I was set to drive the freeway going west was closed due to ice and blowing snow. Closed all day, the gates shut. The Wyoming traffic cameras showed what looked like a perfectly untouched white meadow, no visible pavement as far as the eye could see. Colorado was equally awful. There was no way west.

Meanwhile on the national news, weathermen were warning about a vicious storm that might hit New York and surrounding areas, but fortunately hadn't made it past the Midwest yet and had a good chance of swinging down south or into Canada or somewhere else unimportant. While the West was getting hammered by blizzards, the edge of the weather map ended near Missouri.

This is always the case. Sometimes they show a map of the whole country, but the West is where the weatherman stands, even while swirling red and blue graphics rage behind him. Like this:


Or this:


Or even (what the heck?) this:


Do you know how annoying this is? I find myself weaving back and forth in front of the television as if I can peer around the weatherman's head. Oh! I got a glimpse of my town behind his ear!

The rest of the world complains about the US being too US-centric, but we in the West know that this is not true. The US is New York-centric. If the weather gets bad enough to kill more than a few people, we might get a mention. Ah well. He with the national network gets the national coverage.

(But we were just a little ticked off that NBC chose to interview a woman whose morning coffee didn't percolate while we over here were having avalanches and closed roads across five states. Vent. Vent.)

Since I couldn't drive straight west, I had to swoop down south through New Mexico and Arizona, coming up the backbone of California to get to Oregon.

Thusly did I find myself in hotel in California, and late in the night was standing at the sink when I detected a strange smell coming through the air vents. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Kind of sweet...Where had I smelled that before? It made me think of fairgrounds, for some reason. Shopping in Boulder...stores with Free Tibet bumper stickers and tie-dyed dresses...and incense...and mandalas...

That's when I realized that I was smelling marijuana. Okay, so I'm not terribly quick on the draw. This should tell you something about how often I've actually been around it before. I'm a big believer in getting my highs from life. Better highs. Like, I don't know...staying up until 4am listening to Wagner and deliriously writing Latin poetry. Whatever.

Because it was the time of night when my imagination likes to take off, I had an overwhelming desire to find which room the smoke was coming from. Not by walking the halls (dull!) but by scaling the building from the outside, via the balconies, crawling all around like a midnight vigilante. Then kick the window in and make a citizen's arrest. I could be a hero.

But medical marijuana is legal in California, and with my luck my "criminal" would be a 70-yr old woman lighting up for her rheumatism. Also, I reasoned with myself, I'm kind of against the over-criminalization of marijuana, what with all the other directions we could be pointing our police forces. And yet...I would never have the moxy to kick down the door of anything more severe, like a meth lab or a kitten-juggling ring. Arg, what a catch-22! How am I supposed to start my career as a citizen crusader if my level of crimes are the same petty crimes being over-criminalized?

I am aspiring, but meek. I'm going to go put some firmly worded notes on double-parked cars now.

The kicker to this story is the name of the city where I was staying- Weed, California. Seriously. The irony didn't even dawn on me until the next morning. This led to a whole series of jokes about how Weed got its suspicious name. Is that really fog hanging over the valley? What happens if you go to the Bank of Weed, or try to check something out of the Weed Library? Then there's the hypothetical Weed Airport, where one might reasonably assume you can catch a flight on Weed Air. Your pilot gets on the intercom to say, "Duuudes....this plane is huuuge!" You never go anywhere, of course. The plane sits on the tarmac while everyone looks out the windows saying, "Whoaaa..."

Fly Weed Air
"For when you don't care."

Direct Flights Are For Pansies

I have flown.

The longest flight I've ever been on was 14 hours, Sydney to LA. Fourteen hours was four hours too much. After three movies, a book, four jogs up and down the aisles, twenty jumping jacks in the bathroom (twice), and lots of sleeping, we were still somewhere randomly over the Pacific. A different take on the term "cabin fever."

The longest single journey I've been on, first airport to final airport, was 36 hours. I started in Seattle and had a 10 hour layover in Amsterdam before continuing on to Cape Town, jumper flights not included. By the end I had forgotten what normal life was supposed to look like, because the world only consisted of stewards and beverage service and departure boards.

But the prize for the most endlessly complex itinerary that I've ever pieced together was my attempt to fly from the US to Prague to the UK and back again. I could have been soft. I could have bought three tickets. Instead I had eleven.

Flight #1: Denver to Atlanta. Uneventful. Yeah!

Flight #2: Atlanta to Paris on AirFrance, possibly the best flight I've ever taken. Amazing food. A cute steward with a French accent. Video feed from cameras mounted all over the outside of the plane. Spiral staircase. Ability to play games with other passengers via the video system. Cute steward...did I mention the cute steward? Yes, AirFrance. Yes.

Except...AirFrance was late getting into Paris, which was apparently quite usual for that route, and I had another connecting flight. The staff nonchalantly put me in a van and drove me out to my plane somewhere in the hinterlands of the tarmac. That's when I discovered that all of the other passengers for that flight, ALL of them, had been waiting in a bus next to the plane until I arrived. Once I pulled up, they finally opened the doors on the bus. I lingered in the van, grateful for the shaded windows, until most of the other passengers had boarded. Sometimes it's good to avoid the limelight.

Flight #3: Paris to Birmingham, UK. Here I had to change airlines, which meant going through customs, reclaiming my bag, rechecking my bag, and going back through customs again - fab. On my entry form I wrote, "Duration of time in the UK: two hours."

"Two hours?" the customs official asked. More customs officials came over to have a look. It must have raised some red flags. "Not much of a vacation, is it?" said one of them.

Considering how narrowly I made the last flight, I was unsurprised, but crestfallen, to learn that my bag had not made it past Paris. Ate a Magnum bar to ease my pain, then went all out crazy, bought some makeup, and marched into the restroom with purpose. I might not have luggage, but I was going to not have luggage and look good, darn it.

Flight #4: A cheap hopper flight to Prague. The plane was stripped down to the metal bolts. I'm amazed they gave us pressurized cabin air for free. I had already paid to check my non-existent bag. Bitterness ensued.

Once in Prague, AirFrance gave me a consolation prize...gift bag...survival kit consisting of a toothbrush (which I already had - ALWAYS CARRY A TOOTHBRUSH IN CARRY ON, PEOPLE!), some other random toiletries, and a sized XXXL white T-shirt emblazoned with AIRFRANCE!

I guess I could have used a sharpie to write on the shirt "LOST MY BAG!" and then worn it around as an explanation to the world about why I was gradually transforming into a hobo. But in two days, AirFrance came through, delivering my bag right to the door of my apartment in Prague. Aw. You're forgiven now, cute-steward-hiring airline.

Flight #5: Prague to London on British Airways. Cancelled due to a British Airways strike. BA made a quick recovery, hired another plane, and got me to London on the right day, if a little late. They even used British Airways-stamped napkins aboard just to complete the illusion.

Flight #6: London to Glasgow. Nearly missed it. This was entirely my fault. I should have taken an earlier bus. If it hadn't been for the massive backpack pinning me to one spot, I would have worn out the floor on the tube train pacing back and forth. It's a long, long ride from London city center to Heathrow, especially when your plane's engine is revving.

Flight #7: And then a volcano erupted.

This was in 2010, when some fireball in Iceland threw up a plume of ash that shut down all of Europe's airspace. The entire continent came to a standstill. People were trapped wherever they happened to be. Hotels started charging double, then triple; rental cars were sold out; train and bus stations had queues that stretched for blocks. No one could travel.

I was extremely blessed to be visiting a friend in Scotland at the time, and she very very kindly put me up for the duration. I preemptively rescheduled my flight. (The airline would not officially cancel it until just a few hours before, optimistic that airspace would open anytime.) While faint news of the ensuing chaos drifted in from time to time, we enjoyed an extended visit under sunny skies, Scotland being one of the few places that was not choked by a dark cloud of ash.

God looked out for me big time. I'm constantly amazed how reliably he is when these kinds of things happen. I always run around in a panic until I finally get it through my thick head that he's still got everything under control. "Oh, right," I'll say. "You can do that. Cool."

Flight #7: (finally) Glasgow to Amsterdam. Stared in a daze at some tulips for sale. That's all I can remember.

Flight #8: Amsterdam to...geez, I don't even know. New York or Chicago, some big hazy airport with planes that looked like Tylenols. It's getting worse now. I'm losing touch with reality. I think I've taken enough connecting flights to bend the universal fabric. Am I travelling east instead of west, also back in time? Is that a dinosaur in the clouds? I don't even...

Flight #9: Somewhere to Denver. If I fled from the airport now, I have friends here who can take me in. Am sorely tempted.

Flight #10: Denver to Salt Lake City. Cancelled due to weather. I'm shuffled onto a different flight. I think Salt Lake City happened at some point, but can't be certain.

Flight #11: Salt Lake City to Portland. And for the grand finale, NOTHING EVENTFUL HAPPENED. No lost bags, no strikes, no volcanoes, no storms. Can such a thing be? Also, did I just get through eleven flights without sitting for five hours on the tarmac somewhere? (This happened to me on a different trip.) Holy cow. I don't even remember what real ground feels like anymore.

After this I vowed I would not fly again for a long, looong time. I kept good on my vow. It lasted for a whole eighteen months. But I'm excited about flying again now, because now I have this:

Beheading the Lion: Part the Second

Beheading the Lion: Part the Second
In Which I Bite Off More Than I Can Macerate

(Part One can be found here)

In Spanish sea lions are called lobos marinos, "wolves of the sea." This name is far more befitting. Like wolves, they mingle in gregarious packs of both males and females, even multiple families. The dominant bull, the Beachmaster, puts so much effort into defending his turf that he often forgets to eat, eventually weakening to the point where another bull easily takes his place. Thus the Beachmaster is constantly changing; there are no dictators among sea lions.

When the adults go out hunting for the day, they leave the youngsters in a nursery area with one or two nannies to watch over them. These nursery kids were the ones I played with most often, dependent on who the nanny was for the day. If the nanny was a particularly uptight lady, she would come over and break up the fun, shuffle the youngsters away, and heartily bawl me out for overstepping my bounds.

A true lioness would have just eaten me.

Besides, sea lions look rather more like dogs than cats, a thought that returned to me as I stood next to my dog looking down at the dead sea lion we had uncovered.

It seemed like a young and healthy lion, so the first thing I did was check for bullet wounds. Although all marine mammals here are protected, sea lions have become an especially reviled scapegoat for the failing salmon fishery, an anti-mascot for fishing just as spotted owls are for logging. When officials aren't looking, locals don't hesitate to pop a sea lion with a 7mm.

I'll confess, I too have been aggravated by the sight of a bobbing brown head beelining towards me through the water just when I've gotten a fat fish on the line. The sea lions will tear off chunks until there's very little left to reel in, Old Man and the Sea-style. It's easy pickings for them, and easy curses from me.

But the universal hatred of sea lions in my hometown, the perception that the world would be a much better place without them, that they are good for nothing...this I can't stand. This is misdirected anger, but such is the nature of a scapegoat. I get it. It's much simpler to shoot a sea lion than a dam, or a policy, or a pollution. In the midst of so much helpless frustration, it gives the shooter a satisfying "I've solved a problem!" sort of feeling. We act on our gut and we go by what we can see before our eyes...and we are a people who like to take things into our own hands. We've been on this land for generations.

But they've been here longer.

I digress - There were no bullet holes on this sea lion, nor did it have any other signs of particular distress. It was just plain dead. Unsettling.



The dog, always the optimist, thought this was the greatest beach find in the history of beach finds, something he could roll in for the rest of his life. I had to agree; it seemed a shame to let a perfectly good sea lion go to waste. But as for me, I was thinking of our local museum's educational collection of skulls. I imagined its head being passed around from kid to wondering kid as the instructor asked, "Now what kind of animal do you think this is? Look at its teeth. What does it eat?"

Yes, it was perfect. I would claim its head in the name of education! (And perhaps, possibly, sea lion appreciation?)

Mind you, this is my modus operandi. I'm responsible for many of the dead things in the local museum...no,no,no! Not for killing them. Heavens. For finding them and bringing them in.

Getting the proper paperwork was easy enough, but I had to get it quickly. A seven foot carcass doesn't usually go anywhere on its own, but with winter's stormwaves soon approaching, I knew that any day the sea might reclaim its offering, never to be seen again. Several days later I returned to the beach with a permit, a garbage bag, a hunting knife, and then...

Well.

The lucky thing about this sea lion was that it had been deposited extremely close to the parking lot. The tricky thing about this sea lion was that it had been deposited...extremely close to the parking lot. The day I went to finally fetch my head there were people out on the beach - a beach normally free of people - and so I was forced to wait for them to leave, loitering around in my clear plastic raincoat, humming up at the sky, carrying a huge unsheathed knife and a garbage bag...not at all creepy.

When at last I had the beach to myself, I knelt down and got to work, fearing that any moment a family with young children or a church group or a sheriff would suddenly come strolling up over the foredune, and there I would be - bent over, splattered in blood, hacking away at a sea lion. I prepared myself to say, "It was dead when I found it! I...I have a permit!" Really, there's no good way that conversation could have gone.

Fortunately no one came. A blessing, as I had my hands full enough as it was.

Disclaimer! Warning! - If you should happen upon a dead sea lion in your home or driveway or mailbox, please do not lay into it with a hunting knife. Dead sea lions can transmit leptospirosis through direct contact. Please notify a certified biologist, like me. We will come and creepily (but properly!) dispose of it.

So now at last I was safely back in my car with my treasure: a sea lion skull. Except, except...it was a perfectly wonderful educational skull trapped within about ten pounds of sea lion face. "How on earth am I going to clean this thing?" I suddenly realized.

In the past I've tried cleaning skulls manually. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I've put them into mesh nets and slung them over a dock to let the wee fishies do their thing. This works, but it takes a ridiculous amount of time. I read about burying bones, but this discolors them, and about boiling bones, but this weakens them (and really, did I want boiled sea lion in my kitchen? No, no I did not.)

So I finally decided on a technique I had never tried: MACERATION. Or in English, "putting it in water until it rots clean."

Now, if you really want to macerate a bone correctly, you should strip all the flesh off it first and then keep it in a sealed container at a constant, preferably warm temperature. Because I'm a cowgirl, I did none of this. I plunked the entire head in a bucket, filled it with the hose, and set it in the side yard. Also added a bit of pond water for good measure, figuring that all those little mandibled beasties might do it some good.

Five weeks later, I had an impressive bucket of sea lion stew.

The trick to this process, you see, is to change the water often enough to keep the water from turning so murkily anaerobic that every last bacteria in it dies, stopping the decomposition process. And this meant, much to my consternation, that I had to handle, frequently, a concoction that immediately rose to #1 in my list of All Time Worst Smells. (This list is not a mild list.) It made my eyes water, my throat close up; with hose and bucket I could be seen crouched on my driveway crying, "Dear God in heaven, why? why?" feeling like a scene from a Hitchcock movie, seriously reconsidering my commitment to children's education, retracing the steps in my life that had brought me to this juncture. The smell would haunt me with headaches and bad tastes for hours afterwards. It was an undiscovered WMD.

But I stuck it to it, determined that somewhere under that grey, somewhat sea-lion-head-shaped horror I had created there was a skull...somewhere, somewhere.

And there was.

After several months, and with one last triumphant tip of the bucket, I picked up my beautiful, perfectly cleaned specimen, a prize that would have been lost back into the ocean, now a sea lion that would teach, maybe even inspire. A sea lion that will pass through the hands of school kids for generations - I hope.



Because I'm not doing that again.

Raucous Caucus Debacus!

Last night I went to my first-ever caucus. As an observer. My home state has regular old boring ballot boxes, and since I happened to be in a caucus state, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.

I somehow imagined people sitting around a living room with glasses of port and trays of modest, homebaked cookies, reclining with neighborly good-humor while debating the merits of each candidate. When I learned it was to be held in the local high school instead, my mental image changed to a standing-room only crowd holding high-decibel heated arguments and spitting when an enemy candidate's name was mentioned.

Raucous caucus! Heck yeah!

No.

It was neither raucous nor...Well, it was a caucus, so it had that going for it. We all sat around clustered into precincts while the invocation was given, stood to say the Pledge of Allegiance, then listened as mild yet convicted citizens rose to endorse each candidate one by one, thusly.

What Each Candidate Has Going For Him:
Ron Paul - National defense, stop policing the world, get gov't off our backs
Rick Santorum - Walks the walk, a good guy
Newt Gingrich - Knows how to get things done in Washington
Mitt Romney - Most likely to win (which, in a way, means, "he'll get the votes of moderates," which, in a way, means, "he's the candidate least like a true Republican," but it wasn't quite spelled out like that)

Everyone was extremely civil, referring to Obama as "the current President," which I thought was rather nice considering the acridity that's been plaguing the primaries.

My first thought about the caucus was, "Wow, this is fantastic." A chance to meet neighbors for the first time, a place where politics can be discussed openly and unabashedly. In a ballot box state such as mine, you can conceal your party alignment forever, if you want. There's never a need to tell anyone if you're a Republican or Democrat, and most people are too polite to ask.

But here there are no secrets. You see who's with you; you see your local party more or less in its entirety. There's something old fashioned and wholesome about it, something that stirs up ideas of town hall meetings and patriot pioneers gathering underneath shade trees to debate the topics of the day. Suddenly voting isn't a lonely slip of paper, but democracy at its finest, a chance to sit shoulder to should and divide opinions before reuniting as one community. It made me feel involved, even though I was just an observer.

My second thought was, "Holy cow, all of these people are crazy-go-bats." Many parts of the night felt as though they were scripted by a comedian trying to poke fun at every Republican stereotype under the sun. There were people dressed in tricorn hats and red colonial uniforms. There was the celebrating a local candidate for the fact that she loved her guns (this raised many cheers.) There was the (joking?) reference to the fact that our country might not exist in another two months thanks to the current president. And there was the overwhelming assumption that everyone in the room was completely on the same page, a true-blue dyed-in-the-wool Republican walking lock step with all of the party's flagship issues.

Not so much.

There's something inherently wrong, I think, with the mentality of, "I don't care who our nominee is, so long as he beats the current president." Democrats are just as guilty of this as Republicans. Such a statement is a declaration of narrow-mindedness. To assume that the incumbent represents the worst of all possible candidates is a prejudice that would be heartily tested if one of the Republican B-listers somehow made it to November. I might buy, "Any of the four current nominees would be better," if this mantra hadn't already been initiated three years ago, long before there were any Newts or Mitts or Ricks to attach to the abstract.

Uncomfortable as the uber-Republicanniness made me, I realized that I would have been just as repulsed by its equivalent Democratic counterpart. I feel liberal when I'm with conservatives, conservative when I'm with liberals.

This made me feel better. This is why I am a moderate. This is why I detest labels and pigeonholes, and would be perfectly happy (except for not getting to vote in primaries) if I was not attached to any party whatsoever.

Or as one speaker last night described it, "a person who refuses to take a stand."

Hmm.

aaaaAAAAH!

*clasping ears, staggering around*

I'm not always the brightest taco in the piñata.

While trying to find an online hearing test for my dog, who has been ignoring low rumbly things like fire trucks lately, I found a thing on The Oatmeal site that said, "See if you can hear like a teenager!"

Well, who can resist that?

Flashback. My grandpa used to have an alarm to keep the mice out of his shop, one of those little devices that emits a high frequency squeal. It was the most painful sound in the universe. I understood why it would make mice run. Every time I had to go get something from the shop, I would dive in and out again as fast as I could.

From this I established the fact that my ears are quite healthy in the upper register, thanks.

The lower register drives me nuts. Any time I hear a low frequency rumble, I get nauseous, easily confused, angry...it's my Kryptonite. It has now reached the point where I wear ear plugs whenever I'm walk alongside streets with too much traffic. The rumble of combustion engines makes me want to fling myself into a wall. Hooray for the future day of blissfully silent electric cars!

I'm curious about things like this (synesthesia and such), so I started reading about all the various auditory/neurological issues that are floating around out in the great wide world, waiting to settle on some innocent's unsuspecting head. Phonophobia (the fear of certain sounds), misophonia (intolerance of certain sounds - hello, low frequencies), hyperacusis (oversensitivity to certain sounds...)

Wait, I think I have that last one too. This just confirms my theory that if you have any little quirky tic or pet peeve, someone somewhere has come up with a medical term for it. Are we nothing more than a jumbled collection of diagnoses?

I fell for the irresistible temptation of seeing if I "had hearing like a teenager." What I got was a redux of my grandpa's mouse whistle blasting out through my computer speakers. Could not fumble for the keyboard fast enough.

I may be bleeding at the ears now, but at least I've won a prize, yay:



(Created by The Oatmeal)

Synezthszesszsss...

Synesthesia. An unpronounceable name for an indescribable sensation. That's what I wanted to title this post. Or, if I was personifying the word, I might have titled it, "The Tiny Matriarchal Nation of Mild and Unassuming People Who Feel Embarrassed About Being Roped Into a Medical Term." (More on this later.)

Actually, I originally went for "Confessions of a Synesthete," but it turns out someone has an entire blog named this. And a colorful life they must have. I guess I could have gone with Synestacular!, which could also be the name for a travelling science museum exhibit, or perhaps "Synesthesia: Apparently I Have Every Form of It."

Well, no. That's not quite true. I don't taste pistachios when clocks chime, for instance. And besides, it turns out that synezthssss is fairly common. Nearly everyone has some variety, otherwise circular clocks and rectangular calendars would never have caught on. So perhaps the better title would be "In Which I Further Establish My Own Normalcy in Line with the Rest of Humanity."

This synesszths to which I refer, of course, is the condition where...words...and colors...er, collide to form vast new galaxies...wait, that's something else.

How do I describe it? (Let me count the ways: female, female, red, yellow...) At first I thought this would be easy, but I might as well try to describe that dream I had where the dinosaurs went to war with the Muppets. To Wikipedia!!

Synesthesia is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

Now you know what I'm talking about, right? It's the criss-crossing of perceptions, like if someone sees green when they read the word "library," tastes strawberries when they hear Dvorak's "New World Symphony," hears a cat meowing if they see a hexagon...that's synesthesia. It's the blazing of neural pathways, formed during the brain's early development, between sensory regions that aren't usually connected. And though it's not uncommon, it's unique from person to person, with as many possible combinations as there are possible perceptions.

(It's also apparently sponsored by Skittles: "Taste the Rainbow!"®™©)

Oh, these kinds of strange neurological phenomena hook me like nobody's business, a fascination that began when I first read Dr. Oliver Sack's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." Thus my delight when I discovered that, though I'm not quite worthy of a Dr. Sacks chapter (and that's probably a good thing), I can count myself among the proud number (blue) of the synesthete community...even if I can't pronounce its name.

I have three of the most common forms of synesthesia: OLP, color-graphemic, and time-space.


1. Ordinal Linguistic Personification, or "Number 72 Loves His Beef Wellington"

Anyone who has been around me long enough has inevitably heard my "letters have personalities" conversation starter (or stopper), which I like to throw out there because:

A) It is strange, and the reactions I get are amusing

B) I secretly want to find other people who can sympathize with what the heck I'm talking about

C) It's more dinner friendly than the "jungle parasites" conversation

OLP people begin personifying numbers and letters at a very young age, perhaps the moment they learn them, and once designated these personalities become fixed for life. If someone with OLP sees the letter H as a cocky Frenchman at age 6, H will still seem to be a cocky Frenchman at age 86.

H is not a cocky Frenchman for me, but I do have my own unique set of personalities for letters, numbers, colors, days of the week, months of the year, words...etc.


For instance, the letter F is a young, rather weak-kneed fellow who would get into trouble if it wasn't for the older, wiser gentleman G living right next to him. Troublemaker E loves to drag F into his antics, but can't do a thing with his other neighbor, the perky and somewhat daft lady D... and so forth.

So when I seen a word, I don't see just the meaning of the word, but a complex interaction of personalities. Perhaps this explains my unusually good ability to catch spelling errors. "If" and "of" are pleasing to my eye because the strong letters I and O put docile F in his place, but if I see something like "fo", it looks as wrong as a dog taking a man for a walk. Of course, I have to know what the correct word looks like to begin with, otherwise I'd think there was nothing wrong, per se, with a dog walking a man.

In that regard OLP imparts a bit of an editor's advantage, but sometimes the personalities are more confusing than helpful. I can never quite remember that the "subject" comes before the "object" in a sentence. O and the word she commands is very dominant, while S and her word are submissive. I want to rank them in order of their energy, so "object" always tries to come first.


The letters in my words sometimes shift vertically according to their relative dominance, making it difficult to scan text quickly. This is extremely exaggerated, but I see MOCK TURTLE SOUP sort of like:Besides an active emotional life for each letter, each word has its own personality too. This is dependent on the letters it contains and the order they're in. A word like "Eiffel" is a veritable frat house, thanks to E's loose morals. "Synesthesia" is a tiny nation of like-minded, mild, mostly female letters.

Words retain their identities no matter where they are. Within a sentence, the words interact with each other like a room full of people.

For example, in that last sentence there were three distinct social cliques, plus some aggression between the beginning and ending. The dominant words are marked in bold, the submissive by parentheses:
Withinasentence,thewords......interact(with)eachotherlike......aroom(full)ofpeople.

I never mind these interactions much when I'm reading, ignoring them sort of the same way that I might ignore all the conversations around me as I beeline towards the dessert table at a crowded buffet. But when I pause to consider the structure of the sentence, the interactions are always there.

Only once did I meet someone who experience something similar to my letter-personification, although the personalities of her letters were completely different than mine...and therefore heresy!! Truly, someone saying something like "the letter B is male" might as well try to convince me that the ocean is filled with toothpaste.

Recently while procrastinating by surfing the internet looking for anyone else who might have the same thing, I finally turned up a name for all this craziness: Ordinal Linguistic Personification. It's been officially documented only lately...although it's probably as common as mud, if subsequent forums and message boards are any indication. And everyone says the same thing - "We thought we were the only ones who had this!"

Actually, finding other people with OLP is deeply annoying. The conversations always descend into arguments about which letter is having an affair with which, etc. Or else the conversation consists entirely of dry, unreadable, unrelatable lists:

A is a boy
B is a polite lady
C is a vicar
D is a prostitute who's just trying to earn enough money for college
E is a dopey British man with a knife
F is my dog Steve

That kind of thing. Since no two people every have identical synesthesia, these discussions essentially become as pointlessly circular as blind men describing elephants.

No. I don't want to hear about who populates your alphabet. Please don't list the fights your colors have had, or the favorite foods of every number between one and a thousand. Because you are very boring when you're like this. Also, you're wrong.

Oh heck...As long as I'm throwing around graphics, here are the genders (sans personalities) of my cardinal numbers:While such arguments tend to be dull beyond salvation, I have to admit that it's very hard not to go around educating people that the number 2 is, in fact, a lady. (Whose personality is very similar to the letter R and Saturday and December and red....ah, can't stop!)

Truth be told, I'm really more of an EP (Everything Personifier) because I do this with all inanimate objects, including rocks, telephones, my own fingers...huh. (I never really thought about that last one until just now. What are you looking at, Mr. Pinkie-on-the-right-hand?) My place setting is a tangle of love and angst on an operatic scale, with the hot-headed fork in a relationship with the napkin, yet having a burning undying love for the spoon, who is in a committed relationship with the knife, who has a history with the napkin yet is far too much of a gentleman to leave the love of his life. The plate is a bachelor.

Come on now, synesthetic researchers. Come up with a name for that one!


2. Color-Graphemic, or "Your Middle Name is Too Purple"

Speaking of red, the colors in the above examples are far from random. For me, 2 is always red, 7 always blue, and so forth what have you. This is a different type of synesthses...syn...ssszz...

Okay, seriously. Can everyone in the synesthetic community (or "Synesociety") please agree on an easier, cooler term to use? I suggest brain wizardry.

Anyway, color-graphemic brain wizardry links the perception of colors with numbers and letters. It's the most common form of brain wizardry, and one that's easily measurable. And when I say that, I'm referring to the Synesthesia Battery, an online test that measures synesthesia based on colors, genders, and spatial relationships.

The Battery takes a bit of time, but it's a great deal of fun. Go on and try it. If you turn out to be a synesthete, I'll buy you a cookie. (Which you will not be able to eat, because it will have a personality and a backstory of tragic failure and redemption.)

I scored high, but here's my secret. This test measures mostly color-graphemic synesthesia - sorry, brain wizardry - and my numbers and letters have colors only because they and those colors share a common personality. The number 8 and the month of December are both red because, like the color red, they are both brassy women. Because their personalities align so much with the personality of the color red, they will always and forever be red.


But there are 26 letters, 10+ numbers, and only about 10 colors, so invariably I'll have a problem like the letter N, whose personality doesn't match that of any color. Consequently, I'm lost. G is like a Cherokee filling out a questionnaire that reads "White or African American, check one." And so the color of the letter G constantly shifts in my mind, sometimes dark green, sometimes dark blue or gray, a chameleon varying between the various shades of his personality.


3. Time-Space, or "Get Your Elbow Out of My September"

When I read James Gurney's Dinotopia as a kid, one section jumped out at me more than any other, and years later I was able to remember it almost word for word:

"You of the West," Malik said, "think of time moving in a straight line, from past to present to future. Your eastern brothers regard time as a circle, returning endlessly in a cycle of decay and rebirth. Both ideas have a dimension of the truth. If you were to combine geometrically the movement of the circle with the movement of the line, what would you have?" He snapped his mouth shut and peered at me with an uncanny resemblance to my old schoolmaster.

"The spiral?" I ventured.

"Yes, yes. Or the helix. They are our models of the passage of time."

"So time moves on, but history repeats itself."

This made so much sense to me. Time as a spiral! Yet even though it logically made sense, I couldn't undo my perception that years move in a forward line, months move in a circle, weeks move in an oval, and days move up and down.

Time-space synesthesia may be the most common of all the synesthesia. In fact, it's reasonable to believe that the human brain has incorporated this cross-wiring into its normal structure, a product of trying to convert an abstract concept - time - into something that can be communicated and, more importantly, recorded. All human civilizations develop a physical representation of time, whether it's marks on a clay cylinder or moons on a deerskin canvas. People are predisposed to time-space synesthesia.

Trouble arises when the mind's representation of time does not match the actual passage of time, and therein lies my problem.

There's a wonderful BBC News article called "Can you see time?" by Victoria Gill (9/11/09) that details many of the forms of synesthesia, especially time-space. While I was reading it, I came across an illustration (based on an illustration by Carol Steen) that made me nearly jump up out of my chair. It's the representation of how one synesthete views the calendar year:


I was a bit stunned by its familiarity. "That's it! That's it! That's just like mine!" I said. My second thought was, "What on earth happened to this person's poor year?" I wanted to take a bike pump to it.

I say this because, for comparison, here's mine, with the months' colors and the approximate dates for the 3, 6, 9, and 12 o'clock positions. It truly is that round.

Also, what is going on with the man in the middle of that illustration? Do...do some people mentally pivot around in the middle of their year? (And if so, do they feel trapped by time?) Does time rotate them, or do they work it like a hula hoop? Hmm, the article mentions nothing of this.

My circle floats vertically in my mind. The blank space in the middle does not exist, or if it does, it can't be looked at directly, an elusive timeless place beyond the water lilies, sort of like Aslan's land in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Unfortunately, because my weeks and years are so uneven I sometimes think I have a lot more time than I actually do. (October through December race by at an alarming speed.) And after the 6-o-clock position on the clock, I reverse my weeks and start climbing up through them backwards. The month of November:

But wait, it gets worse.

The way I envision a single week is actually like this:


So when I think of November, the looping week combined with the backside of the "annual clock" gives me a internal picture that looks something like this, if November 1st is on a Sunday:

(I've just realized that I gave November thirty-one days. Well, ignore that last Tuesday, because I'm not gonna redraw the whole darn thing.)

Unless I'm using something that puts time in its proper perspective, like a day planner, I struggle to track time realistically. You'd think I would learn how to ignore the idea that November takes up 1/6 of the year, but this mental image is so deeply embedded that I find myself completely surprised, year after year, when it's suddenly December. Where does the autumn go?

So that's what I can say about synesthesia. It's more in-depth than most of the other posts I've seen online about it. It's not nearly as in-depth as I could make it, but no matter. Since no one else sees the world quite the same way as I see it, it's more of an academic exercise, a self-affirmation, to attempt to describe it, friendly colors, frantic months, feuding forks, and all.

Blown In

A Colorado weather report:

My goodness, today has been FRIGHTENING. I've never been in a windstorm quite like this one before.

Yesterday, deceived by the cheerful sun and blue skies, I went out to the park. At first I thought, "Hum, this wind is rather harsh," then I started having trouble walking against it. I was thinking, "This the is the strongest wind I've ever felt," when I suddenly noticed a dark cloud in the distance rising with alarming alacrity, and moments later was being pelted by every loose bit of dirt and dust in the entire valley. By the time I dove back into the car (total time spent outside: 7 minutes) I was spitting grit out of teeth.

The paper that day, as I struggled to get it out of the mailbox before the wind could tear it from my fingers and blow it all the way to Kansas, read, "Severe Winds Predicted..." Yes.

It's been so deceptive, this wind. From inside the day looks perfectly manageable, all bright and breezy, with the first real warmth we've had in a long time. It lures me out of the house. Yet the moment I step outside, just as soon as I'm too far from the door to dive back into it again, I'm surrounded by the most tremendous sound.

It's a hard sound to describe. In print, it might look something like;

WHoOOORRRROOAARRRSHHHHHHH!

It's the sort of sound that makes a person crouch down. The sound you might hear if you were in the middle of a mighty breaking roller, or inside a kettledrum. It's the sound of wind tearing through the trees at 95mph.

I've heard disturbing weather-related sounds before. When I lived in the rainforest, we could hear the rain coming from miles way. It was a murmur in the distance at first, the patter against the leaves, then slowly multiplied a million fold like someone turning up the volume on an applauding audience. Whenever we heard it, we'd have conversations like:

"Rain's coming."

"A'yup."

*pause*

"Better get the clothes in."

"A'yup."

Actually, the conversations were never as relaxed as that. We were always stressed about drying our clothes. It rained so frequently, and was otherwise so incessantly damp, that the few precious hours of baking hot sun were the only chance we had to get the mold completely dried out of our clothes/mattresses/sundry items. If our clothes were still on the lines when the rains came, it meant another whole day of attempted drying. So our conversations were more along the lines of:

"...Rain?"

"Rain? Aaa! Rain!!!"

*group stampede to tear all the clothes off the lines*

I've also been in some pretty frightening thunderstorms, the sort where lightening is flashing all around, trees are exploding, etc. Those things are scary. But they don't generate a constant fear. It's more of a fearful anticipation, waiting to see where and when the next bolt...and thenCRASH BOOM! You jump ten feet off the ground, but you're still alive; you haven't been hit. Getting through one of those kinds of storms is stressful in the same way that watching a suspenseful thriller is stressful.

Now a windstorm like this, this generates a feeling of immediate NO, sort of like when the VCR suddenly eats that suspenseful thriller you've been watching and starts spitting out tangled loops of tape while shrieking like an injuring animal. This does not call for an edge-of-your-seat, wait-and-see type strategy. The body's instincts say, "I am not going to deal with this. Do not want." Immediately you either go rip the VCR out of the wall (does anyone still have VCRs?) or else go make some popcorn and ignore it while it catches on fire.

That's my reaction to the windstorm. I go outside, am knocked over by a blast of sticks and dirt and leaves, the whole world roars at me, and I retreat. Do not want.

This storm's been going for days now, and is supposed to last until tomorrow. I can't do a darned thing outside until it quits. I've heard about getting snowed in and rained in, but whoever heard about getting blown in?

And now something has just clunked down loudly on the roof - the days have been filled with mysterious clunks and cracks - so I'm going to go investigate whether a tree has fallen, or whether an elk has been picked up and dropped down, or whether we still have a roof over there at all.

Back on Land, Sad Sailor

My ship has come in, but I'm very sad to be a landlubber once again. I miss that the rooms don't all rock and that I hear no water lapping near my head as I go to sleep. I miss the steady action... but I don't miss jumping to the whims of the first mate. And I definitely don't miss having to hike three blocks to go visit the shore head. (Hooray for free showers! Showers forever! Showevers!)

I also miss the constant singing. Granted, it was usually just *me* doing the constant singing - I was compared at one point to the Singing Bush in "The Three Amigos." No one around; just me scrubbing the sole boards and singing, singing, singing. (But look, you have to sing while you clean heads or else you just go crazy, that's all.) There were also the chanties we sang while we worked the sails, songs you heard a million times yet never tired of - John Kanaka, The Esoquibo River, Cape Cod Girls. On a few crew-only sails we chantied to other songs...Memorable especially was when a particularly loony crewmate led us in a chanty that went "Man!...boy!...man!...boy!" over and over again. (The same crewmate who substituted "Pi-ka-chu!" for our traditional "2-6-heave!" while sweating up the lifts.)

I checked off a few of the goals I set for myself this season. Walked from the tip of the bowsprit to the end of the main boom without touching the deck. Learned how to splice line together. Helped set the anchor. The biggest by far was flying the topsails, the three additional sails to our usual four that we aren't allowed to set when passengers are aboard. The wind was mild and agreeable the day we chose to do it, but by the time we had everything ready to go, gusts and gales were blowing around us, and waves were breaking hard on our bow. But we had spent all that time preparing and weren't about to let a little weather stop us, so just outside Seattle we raised all seven at once, all hands to every line, then sent out our Zodiac tender to capture a few quick pictures of our ship in all her glory. As soon as the pictures were taken we dropped the sails fast, but the wind was yanking and ripping them all to skelter and threatening to whip any inattentive sailor right over the lifelines. While taking down the main topsail I myself was jerked down from my perch on the fife rail and dragged along the deck a few feet before I had the presence of mind to drop the line; the others on it were bunched together deck-of-cards style before they did the same, halyard dancing above us like a tiger's tail, sail canvas slapping against sail canvas with a crack that seemed to call back the ghost of the ship's battle around Cape Horn.

But alas, we were not off the Horn, only off Elliot Bay, and there was no one around to see our glorious show but a few ocean tankers, a distant ferry, and a curious Coast Guard. It was a good moment. A ship without all her sails flying is like an eagle with its wings folded in.

Give a Sailor Her Grog!

Hey look, I'm alive! Funny that while I have access to a computer, I avoid it at all costs, but now that I'm back sailing on the ship again, I lunge at the internet every chance I get!

Yes indeed, I'm back aboard the Adventuress and sailing along merrily as you please. This season I come back to the crew knowing my port from my starboard, my jib from my jibe, and that makes me "seasoned," I guess. An old salt. Neptune's own daughter. But I still don't feel entirely comfortable when I'm 70 feet up in the rigging.

I wish I had some fun pictures to post, but I forgot my camera cord at home, so the pictures are still trapped on the camera.

What to report so far? Well, I visited Olympia for the first time. The town is charming from the water. You look down the length of the deck along the very tip of Budd Inlet, last southern stand of the Puget Sound, and a mere four hundred feet away is a dancing fountain with the capital dome looming up behind it. Better yet, the same distance in the other direction is a seafood shack with better oysters than I thought the Sound could ever offer. But the downside is that the water of Budd Inlet is the backwash of Washington State, never flushed out, nasty and brown and devoid of all life but the hardiest filter feeders. I became rather depressed while searching for minnows for our educational aquarium, because I couldn't catch any that weren't deformed, diseased, or covered in tumors. I was at last tempted to go for one of the massive lion's mane jellyfish that dotted the waters. ("Hey kids! Here's our aquarium. Yeah, touch this!") So if the Washington legislators want an environmental project, they don't have to look very far.

What else? This year is bringing new challenges - learning to trim the sails myself, learning navigation, tying a turk's head knot, taking on the role of passenger herder in the event of emergencies. Also, I'm the Marine Science Officer (capitalized!), which gives the the glorious job of standing out in a tidal mud flat at 4 in the morning with a net and a bucket going, "Here, little moon snail! Here, moonie, moonie!" I's a'stockin' the aquarium, yeehaw.

The House of Falling Legs

The cabin I am living in requires fortitude. Fortitude and a sharp eye for little crawly things.

For some reason the summer has been unusually buggy. There are mosquitoes in the mountains. I don't remember there being so many mosquitoes in the mountains, but I do remember Al Gore mentioning that previously mosquito-free cities like Nairobi, built at elevation to escape malaria, are experiencing a rise in the mosquito altitude line and getting infestations that they never had before. Perhaps that's happening here, @#*& global warming. But I digress.

The cabin I am living in is the catacomb of choice for every insect within a ten mile radius. Though the doors and windows are always shut, they find their way in regardless, finishing their pilgrimage from great distances to come die on my countertop.

Correction: The countertop is where the gnats come to die.

The moths come to die in hidden places, like underneath my toothpaste.

The crickets come to die in the middle of the floor, where I will step on them in the morning.

How is it that one building can attract so many tiny carcasses? They're everywhere. If I space out and forget to check my cup in the morning, I will inevitably feel something that is decidedly not water but in fact hard and pointy, much like many little legs, against my tongue. My bathroom looks like someone thought to liberate volumes of mounted insects by pulling out the pins and dumping them everywhere. Case in point - I dropped my facecloth by mistake the other night and went to pick it off the floor. No problem, right? A little dust, a little hair... oh. And a large unidentifiable many-legged exoskeleton stuck to the cloth. Nasty.

The spiders flock to my cabin like mourners to a graveyard, gorging themselves, I suppose. They are mostly well-behaved spiders, except for the fact that they A) like to web up the bathtub, even hours after I've showered, and B) find their way into the clothes I drop on the ground. Yes, I have the bad habit of dropping clothes on the ground and forgetting them until the next morning. I do not "do" orderly. It is not such a problem if I remember to shake out my clothes before putting them on.

If I remember...

There's nothing that can jog your memory quite like a fast moving spider inside your sweatshirt early in the morning.

Crouching Spider, Hidden Moth Carcass. The House of Falling Legs.
*
*

A Story: In Which I am Challenged by the Land of my Fathers and Emerge Victoriously

Where I grew up, it is very wet. It is so wet that a typical week in November looks like this:

It is so wet that the fairway on the golf course moves like the surface of a water bed. It is so wet that people sit in bathtubs filled with air just for the variety. But this November, it has not been wet. The weather this month has looked mostly like this:

Until this past week. Finally, finally, it started to rain good and proper, a genuine Northwestern soaker.

Now, I've already established that my years away from home has degraded my immunity to the rain... as in, when I go stand in it nowadays, I clutch myself tightly, look like a bedraggled cat, and whine, "This is weh-he-he-het!" When I make fun of eave-hugging, umbrella-loving, dry boned non-Northwestern pansies, I can now point at myself and say "Ha!" And then I say, "Huh?" and then I go run in the corner and weep.

But not this week. No. The rain, knowing me well, kicked back and began working as lazily as rain can work. The day outside could be blue-skied and sunny, each dew drop a prism of rainbows beckoning me out to frolic - or, in this case, hang my Christmas lights - and as I leashed up the dog and pulled my galoshes on, it would invariably happen. There I would sit, one foot shoed and the other socked, and suddenly the rain would start hamming down on the roof. Sometimes I would try to wait it out, but finally I would pull off my one galosh, curl back into a blanket, and then, of course, then the rain would stop and the sun would shine and the birds would burst out of the bushes like a feathery fireworks display. The rain was doing as little work as possible to keep me inside.

Finally one day I took a stand. I was sitting with my one shoe on, and the rain had just began hammering the roof, but did I let it stop me? Ho-ho! Not this time, you rain, you cloud! You damp enslaver! I pulled on sweatshirt, raincoat, leather hat, work gloves, sunglasses, safety glasses, and all other manner of apparel and leapt into the front yard with my Christmas lights in one hand and my slingshot in the other, ready to do battle.

I should explain, hanging the lights in my yard, with its tangle of tall alder and maple trees, is really more a matter of trying to figure out how to get them up so high. The traditional method was throwing a tennis ball attached to a string, but this year I thought I would get serious with a slingshot and a 2lbs lead weight.

So there I stood against the elements, facing straight into the sky and the pouring rain, shooting my slingshot, and what should happen? Naturally, the drizzle turned into a torrent of apocalyptic proportions, while simultaneously the sun burst through the one hole in the clouds, exactly where I was trying to gaze into the tree branches.

The hat came off. The glasses came off. Off went the gloves, the rain jacket, as each wet layer hampered me more and more and I untangled string for the 500th time, my adrenaline surging. I might have also been laughing maniacally, I'm not sure. "Bring it on! Bring it on!" I cried to the forces of nature. "I'm an Oregonian! Bwa-ha!"

At last, defeated, the rain let up and slid away over the horizon in a dark gloom, thinking perhaps to dampen some inlanders. I had won the day. I was wet and cold and tangled in a spool of cotton string, but I had won.

And so I went inside and had some hot chocolate.

A Pumpkin Carvin' Fool am I

Pumpkins a'plenty, here they are, proof that my last few days before Halloween were full of carving craziness.

A dove and cornucopia.


A bull rider and a knight on horseback. Aren't carving kits fun? I used patterns for everything this year except for my face pumpkins and the big "Welcome 2 Trunk 'n' Treat" carving, a pumpkin that made the front page of the local paper!

Here's my personal favorite - George Washington praying at Valley Forge.

It was fun looking for ideas appropriate to put in front of the church. I ruled out all the blood sucking scary ghost zombie murderer patterns, plus all of the celebrities. Toyed with the idea of something patriotic, but finally decided that Halloween + political symbols + church had potential to be misconstrued on oh-so many levels.


Here's one of the Disco Pumpkins, white pumpkins filled with changing multi-colored lights. I Never did get a very good picture...hmm...maybe I should try again?


Here are the two Disco Pumpkins in daylight, looking mighty fine.

One nice thing about so many gutted pumpkins - endless supply of roasted seeds. Well, not endless, but the entire family's been devouring them since All Hallow's and we're still not making much of a mark. And right now I have a loaf of pumpkin bread in the oven, and pumpkin soup in the fridge, and we had pumpkin in the stir fry at lunch... You can never have too much pumpkin in life, says I.

Today's pumpkin bread nearly stopped at the eggs/sugar/butter stage. Such a delicious concoction, why bother going on?

Aaa...! I am the Ghost of Rotting Pumpkins, here to tell you to not to wait until the last minute to carve next year....aaaaaaaaaaaah!

Aunt Me

Big news!!

Here's my new little (>5 lbs) niece - Penelope!

I guess I'm still stunned. She was born a week ago and it's taken me this long to post anything. She was a month early, that's my excuse. I hadn't wired my brain to think "baby" yet.

Now, how does one go about being an official aunt?

Halloween Hangover

Parties are murder on a perfectionist. The last few days have kept me so busy preparing for my church's "Trunk 'n' Treat" party that I nearly imploded, having lain starkly awake in bed each night thinking about what I had left to do, hunching over pumpkins for hours on end, and mostly forgetting about food yesterday except for the occasional piece of candy I bumped into. I woke up this morning aching all over on an adrenaline withdrawal, the taste of Butterfingers still lingering in my mouth.

Weeah.

Last Saturday me and the fam visited a corn maze and pumpkin patch over in the valley for some Genuine Family Fun. After determining that the dog could not, in fact, guide us through the maze, (he kept attempting to lead us into the thick of the stalks), we loaded up the back of the car with many, many pumpkins, some of which later turned out to be mischievously rotting beneath their lovely skin. My plan for the pumpkins was to carve them all and line the walkway to the church, just like swp and I did a few years back at the ol' Gould Farm. Wasn't that fun? I still remember turkey parts floating in jars in the haunted house, and roaming madly through the dark woods. But I digress.

It turns out that carving 14 pumpkins in one's mind is much easier than carving 14 pumpkins with one's hands. By the end of the World Series (why must you suck, Rockies...why?!?) I had hollowed them all out, and then began the obsessive actual carving, in which I somehow gravitated to all of the most complicated patterns I could find - can we say "George Washington Praying at Valley Forge?" Oh yes. It's a lucky thing that the carving kit included two saws, because the first one bit it halfway through my flurry, while working on a rodeo rider at 4:30 in the morning, I think. Cheap Chinese piece o' crap.

Ah, but it was great fun. The idea of the Trunk 'n' Treat is for the people of the church to park their cars in a row and hand out candy from their trunks. Inside, parents can sit down for a while and get cookies and a hot cup of something (not the "something" that some might have been longing for, though, it being a church event and all). It's a safe place for the kids to come to, easy for moms with strollers, and lets folks in the community take a look at our church - building and people - in a non-imposing way.

And man, did they come! Our town only has 5000 people, and over the course of an hour we saw nearly 400 kids. (It felt like they were all their simultaneously, but then, I was a bit frazzled.) I decorated one of our cars with a gigantic spiderweb and child-eating spider (so I said) that kids had to reach underneath to get their goodies. Our other car was a bit more harvest themed, with a gigantic Cinderella pumpkin and two "Spooky" pumpkins, all-white pumpkins that I carved with spots and stripes and lit from the inside with changing multi-colored lights. They were my disco pumpkins. (W, hooray for our trip to the island!) That car was playing some nice Gregorian chant in the background, and one of the kids leaned in and shouted, "Halo 3!" I feel old.

Last night I learned a valuable lesson - If you volunteer to take over a fishing pond, you will never, never be able to escape. Every time I thought I could make a run for it, another clothespin tied to string would come launching over the sheet. (I ended up putting on my unicorn mask just for eye protection.) I quickly abandoned my instructions, "Give two tugs and throw the fish over," to adopt a more realistic fishing situation where I tugged and fought and made the fish leap a few times before finally chucking it over the edge. I was preparing kids for reality. (They needed it. One kid said, "Mommy! The fish won't let go!" Evil laughter.) Finally I ran out of fish and rose up out of the "pond" saying, "Go away you dumb kids! You bother me!" ( More or less.) Luckily, there was another fishing pond outside, so I was able to redirect the rabid candy-buzzed crowd safely away.

The whole thing could best be described as well-mannered absolute chaos, and by the end of the night I was saying, "AaaaaAAAA....Freak OUT!" But it was a satisfying feeling, sort of like finishing a marathon, and I survived with 14 pumpkins to take home and relight on the front porch, plus a very cute giant fake spider.

Most common costume of the night - the white mask thing from "Scream."
Best costume - a little cowgirl with a big inflatable horse in front of her. Her legs made up the back legs of the horse, so it looked like she was riding it.
Scariest costume - a teenage boy in a dress. I'm assuming it was a costume.
Best adult costume - goes to my mom, who made a very convincing baby.

Today may be All Saint's Day, but it's felt a bit more like Day of the Living Dead. My mind says wee! but my body is going eeeh? One of these years I'm going to start thinking about Halloween preparations before October 26...

Writing Drains and Baseball Games

I'm alive.

I've been busy lately dunking my head into the hot caramel coating that is the publishing world, and after reading the blogs of many fine folks who work as cogs in that massive industry, have come to the conclusion that
1) Reading about other people wading through submission slush piles is probably much more fun than doing it myself, and
2) Learning about publishing houses is fascinating on general terms, but encourages the prospective writer in much the same manner as holding a hamburger up to a milk cow. In other words, every agent, editor, editor's assistant, and editor's assistant's intern says, more or less, "Over 99.999% of all writers fail and most of what we see is utter crap, and even if it's not utter crap it will probably never make it through our labyrinthine processes, so abandon all hope, stop writing, and shrivel up into a little ball of shattered dreams while you go back to your pencil pushing day job, you loser."

I suppose the rare (and lucky!) writer might stay blissfully unaware of the publishing process, pop out a masterpiece, and get swept lovingly into the arms of a instant book contract, and that would be grand. The wiser writer might try to see the world through an editor's eyes, learning what the common follies are and how to avoid them, but might also become so discouraged by the odds that said writer scoops up their entire work in progress and throws it into the fire, watching it burn with a maddened eye and cackling something about "freedom." (The computer "Digital Age" equivalent of this would be going to the end of a working file and hitting the backspace key for every single letter. Slow and painful.)

But the editor's perspective is honest, I'll give it that. It's harsh and mean, but at least it's a realistic portrayal of what to expect should you ever be foolish enough to attempt publication. I would much rather read through editors' blogs than the floofy, flouncy blogs of would-be writers, which all go along the lines of "blah blah high art form blah future literature scholars will know what I really mean blah blah and, oh yes. I haven't actually published anything yet." Probably meaning that they are writing a story about the antics of their cat, complete with a sample book cover that somehow includes their name Photoshopped into large glittering letters across the top half of the page. In my own musings on the art of writing, I must be careful not to fall into this category, the hoity class of writers who stuck their pens too far up their noses.

So this I now publicly vow: I will never ever submit a manuscript written on stationary that has the inkwell and plume motif at the top. I will not include glitter in the envelope. Or cookies. Or action figures based on my characters. Or a market analysis. Maybe whiskey. I might include whiskey. I also hereby vow to disassociate my specific writing from anything to do with intent-to-publish, restricting it entirely for the purpose of "fun," and if the thought of publishing occurs to me while in the act of writing, to go soak my head.

There. I feel so cleansed.

But back to the more important matter at hand...

Go Rockies! Woo, we gonna sweep the Championships, hooya! I feel a speck bad for the Phillies, and more than a speck bad for the poor Cubs, but at least the next round pits Colorado against the Diamondbacks. We go, Western Division! They're calling it the Continental Divide Championship. (Does Arizona have mountains? Hmm.) Watch as the Rockies blaze past the D-backs for an unbroken post-season streak! It'll happen.

Still, poor Cubs...

I'm hoping that the Red Sox take it tomorrow, but Yankees/Indians? Whatever. I have absolutely no opinion on that one. A Red Sox/Rockies or a Yankees/Rockies showdown would be pretty fun, though. If the Rockies could blast their way through either of those teams, maybe they would gain some much-needed national cred. The western teams don't get a lot of hoopla, other than the ones in California (which we consider not only its own division, but possibly its own sport.) That's the nice thing about the West. Outside of CA, we only have the Mariners, D-backs, and Rockies to root for. We're all like one gigantic family out here. (Tho I'm for the Red Sox, if the Rockies bail out. Wee!)

So much fun watching the crowd at Coors Field tonight, and wishing I could be in it. The last time I was there, it was raining and mostly empty. CO friends, are you getting tickets to these things? Have a spare one? I'll bring my own broom!

And a random question - Sure, the Rockies have Dinger the Dinosaur as their mascot, which I'll grant you is rather weird. Dinosaur fossils...rocks...it sort of makes sense. But why in the name of the great gravy train is the mascot for the Arizona Diamondbacks "Bobby the Bobcat?" Is there something wrong with selling rattlesnake plushies for the kids to cuddle with?

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

I have not been in a writing mood lately, or at least not one that produces blog posts. Actually, I seem to have fallen into an irritating frame of mind, perhaps one that plagues all new bloggers a few months into the game. It compels me to take every random thought, every witty self-aside, and say, "I should blog about that!" I suppose it's good to have a net catching some of these things, but thank goodness for self control. Otherwise, the world would be subjected to my innumerably strange "shower thoughts." (i.e. Thoughts whilst in the shower, which seem much wittier there than when they appear in actual text.)

So while my brain is occupied with other things, I thought I would share a few pictures from TSO's visit, which you can also read about here and here. (His version.) Mine will be shorter because, as I said, I have no current blogging abilities.

Cape Disappointment, a grand place to start a trip, waking up to a morning stroll on the beach. I love low perspective, so I put my camera near the sand and captured the North Head lighthouse. Alas, my poor camera was to suffer many near-sand experiences in the next few days.

The wind off the Pacific is relentless in these parts, so it's not uncommon to see little driftwood structures built to block it. (Hard to start a fire otherwise, y'see.) This one was surprisingly elaborate. I suspect whoever built it had a lot of hands or a lot of time. And look! They left a wee little man hiding inside!

The Astoria Column, a tower depicting the history of the mouth to the Columbia, is difficult to photograph. It's difficult to see, period. The art and text scrolls around from the bottom up. TSO and I walked around a few times to read the bottom half, but it was a dizzying way to try to get a bit of history. Much better was the view from the top and the myriad of tourist shirt colors that we watched from above - hot pink, blazing blue, all the colors of the acid rainbow. I was not excused. I chose to wear one of my eye-hurting "Aloha" shirts, cattle brand of the tourist. But since I was technically touring, I couldn't care less. (Plus, it would make me more locatable in a storm, so there was that safety aspect.) Here is part of the Column in detail, with "Before the White Man Came" on the bottom and the entrance of Robert Gray's ship "Columbia" into the river's mouth.

Indian Beach, Ecola State Park (I keep wanting to call it "Ebola State Park") where we walked up a cliffside trail to gaze out on the lighthouse "Terrible Tilly," so named, I have since learned, because of the challenge it posed to keepers. The waves eventually battered the original Fresnel lens to pieces and now the lighthouse sits dead, quite literally. It is privately owned, converted into a resting place for the ashes of the deceased. The photo is stock. (We saw it without the waves.)

And here is good ol' Cannon Beach, cooperating by finally giving us some sun (the fog had been trailing us all day,) not much wind, and balmy, BALMY 53 degree water. Balmy, I say. It was brisk and delightful, one of those sorts of wades that makes you feel good all over, like you're really alive. It was in no way cold or unpleasant. We could have spent all day wading out to sea, deeper and deeper, the cormorant bones swirling at our toes, until the steep green sides of Japan rose up to meet us. (We would have come dripping out of the water like Godzilla.) Wading the Pacific is much like biting into a lemon at a dinner party, only prettier.


Hey, here's a fun side note. A university team has recently been running scale models on what would happen if a tsunami were to hit this particular area. The fault line sits very close to the shore, so there wouldn't be much warning when the big one started to come. In their scale model, all of the little scale buildings are pretty much blasted to smithereens. It's left them scratching their heads, going "Think, think, think," since, of course, sooner or later such a tsunami will actually happen. The current idea is to try to built vertical towers that people could run to, towers which would supposedly survive the initial blow and still stand above water line. Aren't disaster scenarios fun to think about?

Anyway, I got tired of taking "pretty" pictures.
And then we were back to my home turf, Land of Many Large Sand Dunes. We flung ourselves off the highest dunes just like I did back in my school days (TSO has a video on his blog). Unlike my school days, I felt the effect of the diving for many days afterwards. What happened to my youthful springiness? I would post the video of my own dune dive, but I was purposefully flailing around like a rag doll, which I realize, in retrospect, is a bit embarrassing to watch, unlike TSO's mighty heroics. Hmm. I, too, ended up with sand in my ears/hair/nose which continued to shake out over the next week. Someday I'm going to try diving in a plastic bag, just to see if I can sand-proof myself.

The wind was extremely vicious at the top of the dunes, so much so that I in my bare legs could hardly stand the pain of being sandblasted. We were diving on the leeward side where the sand was the softest, which meant that on each climb back up there came a point just near the crest of the dune where the wind would blast sand directly into your face, and as you were already disoriented from the tumble down, you would have to clamp your eyes shut and grope around for the top of the dune, trying not to overshoot and go falling down the opposite side. (I'm speaking of my own experience here. I don't know why I'm talking in second person.) We had been dodging ATVs while we hiked - they tend to come tearing out from nowhere if you don't pay attention - but after my last dive a group of them came to the top of the dune. One fellow pulled right up to us, took off his helmet, and said, "Wow! Did you do that on purpose? I can't believe you guys are doing that! That rocks!" Or something like that. It's hard to impress hotdogging ATVers, so I took it as a nice feather in my cap. (Since the real feather in my cap had been blown all the way down to California at this point.)

A picture of dune trekking. Sepia tone is oh so a'pretty.

After this day of much blowing sand, my camera suffered greatly, to the extent that even now I am still shaking sand out of it. For a short while the lens ominously refused to open, but I think it worked that out with itself. In case any of you camera-loving folks are wagging your fingers at me, I have to say that my beloved camera was never anywhere close to the actual sand, and that all the sand it accumulated was entirely airborne. If you want to photograph the dunes without such repercussions, you may want to look into getting a bio-hazard suit.

(And again with the second person! I must not be getting enough iron in my diet.)

The next day it was back up to PDX, City of Roses, where we wandered around the rose test garden just to make sure. (The garden is literally a place where they test new variety of roses, destroying forever the ones that don't pass muster.) I have now decided that my mythical future dream garden must include a few roses. Maybe even a black one. That would be all cool and Gothic, wouldn't it?

Thanks to TSO's eyes we were able to find our way downtown. (My reading abilities are still hampered by my recent bought with infection.) We wandered around downtown borderline "lost," enjoying all the wonderful sights and sounds and posters for scandalous things. (Portland is no city of vicars.) Total elapsed time to hear an inappropriate remark from a creepy stranger - 3 minutes. Yeah... I'm not such a big fan of cities, but they have their place, I s'pose. We strolled down the waterfront park until we found ourselves in the neighborhood of Voodoo Doughnuts, and this time I discovered the delights of A) vanilla doughnut topped with marshmallow and Tang powder, and B)devil's food doughnut topped with Coco Puffs. Maddeningly delicious. Afterwards we were sucked into the inescapable pull of Powell's City of Books, one of the largest independent bookstores in the world, a Twilight Zone realm where three hours feels like ten minutes. We entered through the main doors, glanced at each other, and said, "See ya!" The rooms at Powell's are all sorted by color, each color denoting a different subject, and I gleefully trotted between the Green Room and the Rose Room and the Orange Room (and the all-important Purple Room, where the bathrooms are) trying desperately not to fill my arms and empty my bank account. It would be fun to work there, except I think I would end up tipping over one of the bookshelves and just rolling around in the resulting pile of books like a buffalo in a dust wallow. Still, a girl can dream.

The river park gave me the chance to catch this nifty pic of the "Made in Oregon" sign, a PDX landmark. The words "Old Town" hang underneath. I played around with the graphics (chrome!!) to give myself a few jollies. I still remember that sign from times waaay back when I was a little kid riding in the car through Portland, and how they used to (and still do) put a red nose on the deer for Christmas. The deer is the symbol of White Stag Sportswear, what used to be one of Oregon's prominent companies before the time of Nike and Columbia. Guess who owns it now?

(Answer: Wal-Maaaaart... and it's now made in Chinaaaa... Cruel irony.)

The longer I type, the more my urge to blog is resurrected. Interesting. But it's late and I must away, and so suffice to say it was a grand trip and good fun to play the tourist game. Anyone else care to come visit?

I just have to add...

Dear...heaven...and...earth.... Could Blogger possibly make it any harder to work with pictures if it tried???!? I feel like I deserve an award every time I finish smashing a photo in the HTML. Criminelly, that's all I have to say about that.