Repeating History

Montana museums

2012-01-31T10:30:00.000-08:00

On my next stop on my blog tour, Velda Brotherton has hosted my article about visiting museums and archives in Montana and in Yellowstone while researching Repeating History.

I have to say that museums are one of the best idea founts on the planet. I hope you enjoy the article.

my first blog interview!

2012-01-09T16:35:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, I was interviewed by L. Lee Scott, a fellow author I met through Women Writing the West, an organization I belong to. It was a fascinating experience, and she asked me a number of good questions that really made me think about Repeating History and about the writing process.

If you would like to read it, the interview is here. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed being interviewed.

The Mt. Rainier shooting, national parks, and sacred space

2012-01-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, on New Years Day 2012, Park Ranger Margaret Anderson was shot and killed in Mt. Rainier National Park during a routine traffic stop, by a man headed to the wilderness to hide after having shot four people in Seattle at a New Years Eve party the night before. Which makes one wonder why, if he was trying to hide, he chose one of the few parts of the thousands of square miles of wilderness in this part of the world that is as well patrolled and protected as Mt. Rainier is to hide in, but that's another question altogether.

For me, as I suspect it is for many other people, the question right now is, how safe should we feel in a national park?

It's not that we don't expect danger in national parks. Heck, I know of at least two books on the subject -- Death in Yellowstone, and Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. We expect natural danger, like wildlife and cliffs and boiling springs. But we do not expect to need to be wary of our fellow man there, especially since this is the first time something like this has happened at Mt. Rainier in its entire history.

I find myself in the odd position of suddenly understanding why people resent the knowledge that the public library is not a safe place to leave one's children alone for an hour or two. As a reference librarian for sixteen years, I was often confronted with parents who refused to believe that the public library is not the safest place to let their children roam unescorted. It isn't, unfortunately. Anyone can enter the library, from flashers to kidnappers. Things can and do happen there, admittedly not often, that should not from any rational point of view, no matter what the library staff does to try to keep them from happening.

But libraries are sacred. Therefore they must be safe. I often watched people struggle to figure out a way to make that argument even as they sadly realized they could not.

And that's how I feel about national parks. Yes, I expect to have to be careful when I visit them, to not overestimate my abilities, to watch my step, to stay a safe distance from grizzly bears and geysers and the edges of cliffs. To carry an emergency kit. To not drive in weather conditions my car and I cannot handle.

But I do not expect to need to protect myself from deranged gunmen at Mt. Rainier or, for that matter, in any other national park.

Perhaps that makes me naïve. Perhaps that makes me like those parents who want to feel safe dropping their children off at the library for an hour or two while the parent goes shopping or to a dentist's appointment. But while I don't think this is going to change my habit of visiting Mt. Rainier or other national parks on my own, or of taking short solo hikes as I've been doing for decades, I do think it will make me even more careful when I do so, and maybe that's a good thing.

National parks are sacred. Only the kind of people who appreciate our natural wonders, who want to see them and share them with others, who want to learn about nature and science and history, to explore and climb and wander, visit our national parks. Right?

Yesterday, a great many of us learned that this is not the case. And now, like it or not, I understand why those parents resented me disillusioning them about libraries. Because I feel exactly the same way.

ETA: The body of the shooter was found today (1.2.12) in deep snow not far from the site of the shooting. He was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and one shoe. He apparently died from exposure.

A time to reckon, I guess

2012-01-01T15:57:00.000-08:00

These were my goals this time last year

1) Complete my first two freelance museum gigs.

I did. Both well enough to get rehired [g].

2) Find more potential clients and land more gigs.

I found one more new client, which I've been working steadily for since April, plus, as I said, rehired by both my old clients, although one has since gone dormant till spring for lack of funds.

3) Go to more museum workshops and a conference, and continue Heritage League committee work.

I've been to two workshops and taken two classes, but I didn't make it to any conferences. The HL committee I was on finished its work in September, but I've been asked to be on the board, and probably will.

4) Write the mystery house rough draft.

Well, no. I've been working on the Yellowstone trilogy, though, and I will get back to it after I'm done with it.

5) Revise Sojourn, last year's NaNo book.

Again, no, because of the Yellowstone trilogy. It's in the pipeline, though.

6) Figure out what I'm going to do about the rest of the Yellowstone trilogy (which may end up as a duology), and get back to work on it.

I did figure it out, and what I did was do one more edit on Repeating History, create a cover, and format it for Amazon and Smashwords. I self-published it in early August, and it's been selling a steady trickle of copies ever since.
And, no, the Yellowstone trilogy is not going to be a duology. True Gold, the second book, has an almost complete rough draft, and I have begun revisions.

7) Finish piecing the Imbolc Flame quilt, and finish quilting the Yule Log Cabin quilt. Maybe start a nice, simple throw of animal fabrics and the animal cross-stitch patterns I did last summer.

The Imbolc Flame quilt is pieced. I haven't layered it yet, but I'll get there. The Yule Log Cabin, well... It's the disaster I finally ended up giving away partly quilted. First time I've ever done that with a quilt. The throw has just started to materialize (sorry, bad pun). I started piecing on it last week. I've also created several quilted pillows and am almost finished quilting a baby quilt for the great-nibling due in April.

8) Find some good 6" square flower cross-stitch patterns for my Beltane quilt and begin stitching them.

I've stitched half a dozen of them, but I got sidetracked with some other projects, including a cross-stitched pillow. The Beltane quilt will happen. Eventually.

9) Go to Crater Lake, Yosemite, and WorldCon in Reno in August with my friend M.

We went, we had a great time [g].

10) Do more research on Washington history -- find some more good stuff for my writing.

I did some, but I got kind of sidetracked researching True Gold.

11) Blog regularly.

Weell... Regularly, but not nearly as often as I would have liked.

And now this year's goals

1) Complete the new museum exhibit by the end of February, and keep getting rehired to continue the textile collection work.

2) Pursue more collections work as opposed to exhibits work. Only sign with the dormant client if they have sufficient funds to finish what they hire me to do and a concrete objective for that work. Sign a contract with at least one new client.

3) Join the Heritage League board. Take a Photoshop class. Pursue other career educational opportunities including the Washington Museum Association conference, in Seattle this year.

4) Finish True Gold and self publish it by the first of June.

5) Write Finding Home (the third book in the Yellowstone trilogy) and self-publish it, hopefully by the end of the year.

6) Learn better book marketing skills and put them into practice.

7) Redecorate the living room. My living room has had a lighthouse theme for the last twenty years, and it's time for a change. I have picked out some cross-stitch patterns and quilt fabrics with North American wild animals on them, so it's a start.

8) Finish the baby quilt. Finish the animal sofa throw. Make a new table runner for the sofa table. Layer the Imbolc Flame quilt and start quilting it.

9) Make new cross-stitch pictures for the living room. I have eight picked out. We'll see how many I can finish this year.

10) Make my first long car trip alone in five years [sigh]. The plan is to take off for two or three weeks in June and drive east. Maybe a night or two in Yellowstone to scatter bookmarks, but I want to go farther east than that, maybe as far as Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I also want to visit some of the historic sites like Fort Benton.

11) Get the garden cleaned up.

12) Blog more frequently.

So, what are your goals for 2012?

Twas the night before...

2011-12-24T22:29:00.000-08:00

Or two nights after, or in the middle of eight nights of, or maybe just Saturday night, depending on your persuasion.

But I do wish everyone a wonderful midwinter season.

And a fruitful new year.

For me, I've gone as far with the draft as I can, and I am just beginning extensive revisions. I'll have to post about goals next week.

Happy Yuletide!

Success, success, I did it, I did it!

2011-11-30T21:16:00.000-08:00

By the skin of my teeth. It is 9:08 pm on Wednesday, November 30th, and I just wrote:

Ta-da! I'd rather have wine, but the little guy can have his beer. He's been working hard, too [g].

2404 words on Monday the 28th.
2242 words yesterday, Tuesday the 29th, and
a whopping 2950 words today!

So I have won NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row.

I only have what I think is half to two-thirds of a rough draft at this point, but I will have a completed rough draft by the end of the year if it's the last thing I do [g].

And now I am going to bed. Phew!

progress, and an interesting Yellowstone link

2011-11-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

I've been head down in NaNoWriMo, so haven't been blogging properly, but I do want to report that I'm up to over 23,000 words on True Gold, the sequel to Repeating History.

And here's an interesting link to a series of photos made by NASA about the recovery from the 1988 fires in Yellowstone. I hope you find them as fascinating as I did.

I love the Internet

2011-11-06T19:34:00.000-08:00

Actually, what I love is the Open Library, which very politely digitized one of the early "no, we've never been there, but there's a big market for it" guides to the Klondike gold fields, published in 1897. And made it free on the web.

There's something just so incredibly civilized about being able to access an otherwise almost impossible to get hold of book by clicking a mouse a few times.

Also, I have written over 8000 words since November 1st. We're still on the decrepit steamship, less than a day out of Skagway, and Our Heroine has already had more adventures (well, she is a long time ago and a fair distance away) than is good for her.

And it is officially Day 1

2011-11-01T17:13:00.000-07:00

Of NaNoWriMo, that is. 2043 words on True Gold, the sequel of sorts to Repeating History, which is about a young woman caught up in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. I will be posting word counts, commentary, and occasional snippets at my NaNo LiveJournal account (sojourn_town). These posts will be friendslocked, which means that if you wish to read those entries, you will need to have either an OpenID account or a LiveJournal account, and you will need to "friend" me at LiveJournal, at which point I will happily friend you back as long as I know who you are (comment here as well, with your ID, so that I do).

I'm sorry to make it so difficult, but I don't want to be posting even just snippets of the draft out where anyone can find them.

That said, if you are interested, and you do jump the hoops, I hope to make it worth your while...

plotting

2011-10-16T17:10:00.000-07:00

I have finally restarted work on True Gold, a sequel of sorts to Repeating History (one of the main characters is the son of the hero of RH, and the book takes place twenty years later). Things sort of came to a grinding halt earlier this year, but I'm trying something new to me. Plotting has always been my bête noire. I love character development, world-building (or, in my case, historical research), writing dialog and description and all the other goodies that go with writing fiction, but unfortunately none of them are any good whatsoever without a plot.

In the past I've used the process outlined in John Vorhaus's wonderful but grossly-misnamed book, The Comic Toolbox, and it's been a great help, but it just wasn't working this time around. I had run across Holly Lisle's website a couple of years ago and had read some of her articles on writing. So when I was casting about for something to help me get past the plotting beast this time, I ran across Holly's website in my lengthy list of links to writing websites, and discovered her Create a Plot Clinic ebook. What the heck, I thought, it's only $10. So I downloaded it and read it.

I appear to be getting somewhere now, so it was obviously a case of Right Book Right Time. I've never outlined a book before -- I've always been a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person (what the romance writing community affectionately calls a "pantser"). But since that wasn't working this time, well, heck, I'm always open to trying something new.

I'm beginning to hope to have the outline finished by Halloween, just in time to take advantage of the worldwide cheerleading gang that is NaNoWriMo. And to have the entire draft finished by the end of the year.

Eep. Did I just say that? Granted, I've got large chunks of manuscript from the failed drafts that I can use (just because it failed as a whole does not mean there aren't some -- or many -- individual scenes that will work just fine), but still. I think I just heard myself committing to getting the whole thing straightened out by the end of the year. Publicly (for whatever values of publicly the couple of dozen readers of this blog consists of [g]).

Oh, well. As a college friend of mine used to say many years ago, "'S good for you. Builds character." I certainly hope it does...

Oh. My.

2011-09-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Today Repeating History received its first reader review on Amazon. It's by Janet Chapple, who wrote the definitive guide to Yellowstone, Yellowstone Treasures.

And, not that I'm trying to pull a Sally Field here or anything, but -- she liked it! She really liked it!

Five stars.

Wow.

Go check it out: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005E8S8UM

home again, home again

2011-09-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

Jiggety-jog, as my mother used to say.

Our last day on the road mostly consisted of beautiful fog-swept beaches and one disappointment before we cut back over to I-5 and booked the rest of the way.

The disappointment was the fact that Heceta Head lighthouse's entire park was closed. We did get a picture of it from the pullout on 101, but I was really hoping to take the hike up to the keeper's cottage and the actual lighthouse in order to get some good digital photos of it. The last time I'd been through here I was still shooting film.

The lighthouse is that white dot on the cliff, and if you look just below the second hump, down in the fog, you can barely see the keeper's cottage.

But the rest of the morning, when we stopped at the Cape Perpetua visitor center and also at several pullouts along the highway to admire the beaches and seastacks, was wonderful.

I think that's Cape Perpetua in the background, but I wouldn't swear to it.

Somewhere between Yachats and Newport.

Ditto.

With added pelicans.

At Newport we cut east to Corvallis and I-5, where we ate lunch, then headed up the highway, just beating the rush hour traffic in Portland, and on home.

It was a good trip, all in all, but I think we were both glad to be back.

more redwoods and plenty of ocean

2011-09-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

Our second-to-last day on the road began with a view of the ocean, because Eureka is where U.S. 101 first reaches the Pacific.

Beach just north of Arcata

After a few miles of this sort of gorgeousness, we ducked back into the wooded sort.

Things have changed north of Eureka since the last time I was there ten years ago. They've built another new section of U.S. 101, and done another Avenue of the Giants thing with the old section, only the entire old section is within Redwood National Park, so there aren't any little towns along the way. There is, however, a very nice visitor center. And an elk refuge (we didn't see any, but after Yellowstone I'm kind of blasé about elk, anyway), and several nice walking trails.

The elk refuge with redwoods in the background

Due to Mary's leg, we only walked one short trail, but we both enjoyed the drive very much. And the visitor center, which had a very nice bookstore where I bought a history of the redwood region, both natural and cultural.

The "Big Tree," from a distance because that's the only way to get anywhere near most of it into a photo.

And the sign on the fence that surrounds it. Yeah, that's a pretty big tree, even if it isn't very creatively named.

After we got back up on 101, we drove past the Trees of Mystery, a tourist trap which basically consists of a bunch of warped trees and a very large gift shop (my ex insisted on visiting it when we'd been here on our honeymoon), and over the Klamath River bridge, decorated with two California golden bears on each end:

I love those bears, and I had completely forgotten about them.

Then it was on to Crescent City.

That's the Crescent City harbor.

Mary said that she kept doubletaking at the name of the town, because to her New Orleans is the crescent city. We stopped at a park in town to take a photo or two of the town's lighthouse:

I don't know the real name of the lighthouse. I know it isn't St. George Reef, which is near here but on a rock out in the ocean.

Then it was across the border into Oregon and up one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world, which is not just my humble opinion. We stopped in Brookings for a quilt shop and lunch, and then enjoyed our way north.

Somewhere between the Oregon/California border and Coos Bay.

Ditto.

We finally stopped for the night in Coos Bay, Oregon, about halfway up the coast, first at a Fred Meyer for a few various and sundry things, then at two motels, the second of which met our criteria of a ventilation system that did not involve leaving our windows open onto a busy highway all night.

And that was our second-to-last day on the road.

into the redwoods

2011-09-23T16:13:00.000-07:00

This is a month ago yesterday's post, which didn't get made on time.

We left Williams fairly early in the morning, although it was already almost 80dF outside. About 10 miles west of town we spied another fruit stand, where we stopped and stocked up again, then headed west around Clear Lake to U.S. 101, which is the coastal counterpart to I-5. We stopped for gas in the town of Willits (home of the Skunk -- a short railroad built back in the days when they were still lumbering old growth redwoods, but now a tourist trip), then headed up into the redwoods.

This is where we picnicked, after purchasing delicious sandwiches in a hippy dippy general store along 101

This is the Eel River, where my ex-husband almost drowned on our wedding night, but that's another story.

We drove up past the Benbow Inn (where I spent part of my first honeymoon 30+ years ago) and Garberville, and turned off onto the Avenue of the Giants.

Just one of lots and lots of enormous trees.

I love everything about the Avenue of the Giants. I love the quaint little towns draped along it at intervals, and the way it forces drivers to be leisurely and enjoy the drive (it really should be a National Parkway like the Blue Ridge and the Natchez Trace, in my humble opinion), and then, of course, there are the trees. I'm not going to get all clichéd on you and talk about how small and young they can make you feel, because to me that's not the point. The point is that they've watched everything happen in their long lifetimes, and they're still there. There's something comforting about that.

It is difficult to get decent pictures of them, though. I did try...

I like the light in this one.

This is how shallow-rooted those enormous trees really are.

Both of these photos were taken in the Founder's Grove, at the north end of the Avenue of the Giants, which is also the home of one of the tallest living things on the earth, the Founder's Tree:

346 feet tall, actually

A great many of the groves are named after people or events, since the remaining old-growth redwoods were originally saved by charitable donations back in the middle of the 20th century.

This one was named after a military veteran.

There are stones with metal plaques like this scattered all through the groves.

We also stopped at a visitor center along the Avenue, where, of all things, we overheard a young man talking to the woman behind the counter about how he was thinking about going to Yellowstone. He seemed to be under the impression that it would be just a short jaunt. I couldn't help but jump in and try to explain things -- like how Yellowstone is about 1000 miles from the redwoods. I was glad to see the distance didn't daunt him, but I do wonder if he ever made it.

We eventually got back on 101 again and drove through Eureka to the college (Humboldt State University) town of Arcata, where we found a motel. We'd gone from 80 degrees at 8 am to 60 degrees at 5 pm. After over a week of 90s and single digit humidity, 60s and fog were absolutely a balm to our parched souls.

On our way home again

2011-09-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning we packed up and checked out of our lovely hotel room and went back to the con for one last morning of panels. Mine were mostly on self-publishing and how to market one's books. We met back at the car at one in the afternoon, then went to get lunch and do a little laundry and shopping (for things like ice for the cooler and milk) before we headed west out of Reno towards Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe was gorgeous, but you'll just have to take my word for it. There wasn't really any place to stop and take photos, and the one place I'd counted on to stop and walk along the lakeshore was crowded with a street fair, so we couldn't even find a place to park. We drove on to somewhere I'd wanted to visit for a long time instead.

When I was a teenager, I had a rather morbid fascination with the Donner Party. I read enough books about that horrible incident in California's history to give myself nightmares. Even though that was thirty-five years ago, when I realized I was going to have the chance to stop by Donner Memorial State Park and visit its museum, well, I couldn't resist. Mary politely went along for the ride.

It was an interesting stop, I thought, even though the park was in the process of being renovated and there wasn't as much to see as I'd hoped. We did see the monument itself.

The base of the monument is how deep the snow got the winter the Donner Party was marooned here.

The museum was a bit antiquated (part of the renovation is that they're getting a new museum), but still interesting. Here's an example of one of the exhibits, a wagon like the one the Donners and company would have traveled in:

Boy, am I glad I live here and now

After we left the memorial, we headed west, first down I-80, then on U.S. 20. We stopped at a viewpoint on U.S. 20, out over the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. We were back in the gold country.

Beautiful, rolling countryside. It seemed as if we could see forever.

We also saw some gilia at the viewpoint. We saw a lot of this particular flower on our trip.

We gradually made our way down into the Central Valley again, but since we were headed for the coast we did not head up I-5 when we crossed it. We spent the night in a little town called Williams, which was on I-5, though. And when I say little, I mean little. Three motels, a couple of gas stations, a few fast food places, and probably a grocery store somewhere. And that was it.

WorldCon, Day 4

2011-09-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

I'm tempted to write, well, more of the same, and unfortunately I'm not inclined to take a lot of photos at SF conventions, mostly because I'm pretty much a scenery photographer rather than a people photographer.

More panels, more meeting up with friends from the Bujold list, more interesting conversations.

In the evening Mary and I went to the Hugo Awards ceremony, which is basically a People's Choice Award for all things SF (although you do have to be a member of the World Science Fiction Society, attending WorldCon or not, to vote), but it's a good deal more prestigious, or so I gather. "Hugo Award winning" seems to mean something when it comes to book sales, at any rate.

It was highly entertaining, at least from my point of view. The two hosts, Jay Lake and Ken Scholes, really should do standup comedy together more often, and several of the presenters and recipients were quite funny as well.

The best novel category did not go to Bujold's CryoBurn, but to Connie Willis's time travel duology Blackout and All Clear. I've enjoyed some of Willis's previous work (To Say Nothing of the Dog was laugh out loud funny), so I really ought to look into these. One of these days...

And that was my fourth and last full day at WorldCon. Tomorrow, headed west again.

WorldCon, Day 3

2011-09-19T08:30:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, I don't have any cute or clever or pretty pictures of the third day of the con.

The day's panels started with Lois Bujold reading from her upcoming book. Ivan His Booke, as she's been referring to it on her email list. Ivan Vorpatril is the quintessential sidekick from Bujold's Vorkosigan space opera series. One of his several catchphrases is, "It's not my fault!" but that's not always the case, which is good for him. Her fans have been begging for an Ivan book for years, but I don't know if that's why she's writing it, or if Ivan has just quit sidling off onto the sidelines and out the door. At any rate, the excerpt she read was Ivan at his best, and I'm really looking forward to this book. We probably won't get it till at least next year, though. Alas.

Another panel was on treating horses and other animals realistically in one's fiction, and yet another on world-building. Both were interesting and useful to me. Given that Repeating History features horses (it's rather difficult to write a book set in the Old West that doesn't), it was nice to know that my research on the subject paid off.

That evening the listees (as the members of the Lois Bujold mailing list call ourselves) went out to dinner at an Irish pub-style restaurant with Lois. I think there were about twenty of us there, and a good time was had by all. At least a good time was had by me...

Mary and I decided to skip the masquerade that night. We'd been to the masquerade at WorldCon in Denver, and hadn't been all that excited about it. We did hear some interesting tales about some of the costumes the next day, though.

And that was my third day at WorldCon.

WorldCon Day 2

2011-09-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

The second full day of WorldCon was much like the first. I wandered from panel to panel and ran into friends.

One of those friends is James from England, who is yet another member of the Lois McMaster Bujold email list, which is the venue that got me hooked into this whole SF congoing thing in the first place. James was in the process of arranging for listees attending the con to have dinner with Lois, and I helped a little. Sort of.

Panels included one on alternate universes, and the panelists included Steve Stirling, Harry Turtledove, and Eric Flint. And as my friend Jim (as opposed to James) commented admiringly, they didn't get into a single argument. It was highly entertaining in spite of that fact.

Another was about writing full time, something I doubt I'll ever do again simply because I prefer to have a lot of irons in the fire, and because I like the museum curator gig. But it was interesting.

A third panel, purportedly on cover art in the age of the ebook, turned out to be several professional cover illustrators bemoaning how they're not getting paid as much as they used to. I walked out of that one before it was over.

That evening I attended a Girl Genius Ball. It was basically a steampunk dance, although the costumes ranged rather more wildly than that. I did take some pictures, although most of them did not turn out well. Here are a couple that did:

The young gentleman in the tailcoat was a sight to behold. The lady next to him was running the show, very very well.

The gentleman in the center looked like he'd just stepped off the Titanic. The costumes really were much more fascinating than these photos show.

The dancers performed all sorts of sets, from waltzes to complicated country dances. It was great fun to watch. And, no, I did not get up in my khakis, t-shirt, and sneakers and dance.

A lovely second day.

WorldCon 2011, Day 1

2011-09-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

And now to the geeky part of our travels. Renovation, the 2011 WorldCon, was held in Reno, Nevada, in August. I suspect it's partly because Reno in August is a very cheap place. The hotel certainly was cheap and luxurious, a combination I can seriously get behind. But then given the weather I could understand why they might have trouble getting folks to come visit in August. I could literally feel the moisture being sucked out of my body every time I set foot out of doors, and the smoke from the range fire burning down near Carson City while we were there enhanced the effect nicely.

All that aside, WorldCon was very enjoyable. This was Mary's and my second WorldCon -- our first was in Denver in 2008. I think what I love best about science fiction conventions is the sense of humor of the organizers and attendees. It's delightfully off-kilter. For example, take a look at this grass-skirted Dalek:

For those who are not Doctor Who fans (and why aren't you?), Daleks are the good Doctor's most traditional villain. However, I've never seen one in a grass skirt before.

Then there is the Discworld golf cart:

Discworld, according to Terry Pratchett, who authors the books set there, is a flat world that sits on the back of four elephants perched on the back of a turtle which swims through the universe.

Here's a better view of Discworld itself. The fringe is the water perpetually falling off of the edge of the planet.

My first full day at WorldCon was partly spent wandering through the art show and the dealers' room, but it was mostly spent at panels where the topics ranged from writing in shared universes to the geek as hero. I also enjoyed the opening ceremonies.

All in all, a very good opening day.

Mono Lake and on to Reno

2011-09-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

The next morning, much refreshed after a clean shower and a good night's sleep, we stopped at Mono Lake before heading north to Reno.

Mono Lake has a very impressive visitor center,

No, I don't know who those people are [g].

We not only learned about the geology of the lake, but also about its natural history and human history. I must say that I'm very glad I wasn't an Indian in this area. They apparently lived on larvae harvested from the lake.

The lake itself is beautiful, in an extremely austere way.

From the patio behind the visitor center. The beige things in the water are tufa formations, which are a kind of rock that forms in water this full of chemicals.

And another view. The lake is many times as chemically saturated as the Great Salt Lake.

We stopped at the Mono Basin Historical Museum, too, but unfortunately it was closed.

The building is an old schoolhouse.

There was a rather odd-looking building in the yard, though,

I've never seen an upside-down building before.

After that we headed north from Lee Vining through the desert along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevadas, through several tiny towns with gas prices that made me really glad I'd paid that $4.20-something in Yosemite. These prices were almost up to $5. As soon as we crossed the state line into Nevada, though, they dropped back to around $3.65. Politics does strange things to gas prices...

We arrived in Reno in time for a late lunch (just fast food), and then visited our first quilt shop of the trip. Both of us walked out with fabric, and I found a couple of patterns, too. Then we went to the strip and found the con hotel. It took a bit of maneuvering and figuring out how things worked, but we finally did, and found ourselves in the lap of luxury, for about $20 more a night than we'd paid for that tent cabin in Yosemite. We went to register for the World Science Fiction convention, held in Reno's convention center, which looked very retro-sixties but was air-conditioned, which was all that mattered at that point.

It was in the 90s and single-digit humidity the whole time we were in Reno. I've never felt so much like a potato chip in my life.

over the pass and down to the desert

2011-09-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

The day we left Yosemite National Park, we drove north out of the valley towards the Tioga Pass Road. This was the part of our visit to the park that I was looking forward to the most. Because most of my visits to Yosemite have been in the off-season, and the road over Tioga Pass is closed eight or nine months out of the year because of snow, I hadn't been over Tioga Pass since about age five. I don't remember anything at all from that trip. So this was, to all intents and purposes, one of my alltime favorite things -- a stretch of road I'd never seen before.

We stopped for gas at the junction. It was over $4 a gallon, but not by much, and was not by any stretch the most expensive gas I saw on the trip. Then we headed east. The first twenty miles or so reminded me greatly of the endless lodgepole pine forests of Yellowstone, although the pines (I don't know the variety, much to my chagrin) of Yosemite are much larger.

The first view we reached was at Olmstead Point, named after the guy who designed Central Park, and also worked in Yosemite for a while. The views there are amazing:

That's the back of Half Dome in the distance

We also saw lots of lovely wildflowers:

Yet another variety of penstemons -- we saw at least half a dozen different kinds on this trip

A mariposa lily, which I'd never seen growing in the wild before

I love adding flowers to my life list (not that I keep one, except in my head).

I love these, too:

A bronze relief of the landscape at Olmstead Point

A number of these reliefs are scattered strategically through Yosemite. There was one at Yosemite Falls, and one at Glacier Point, too, and probably several others that I missed along the way. They're tangible, touchable, graphic demonstrations of exactly how rugged this landscape is.

The next landmark along the way was Tenaya Lake, named after one of the last of the Indians who lived in the park. It is a picture perfect alpine lake.

Tenaya Lake in the distance

And much closer up. Note the young woman sitting on the rock.

If you look just below the big green spot in the middle of the photo, and just above it as well, you'll see who she was looking at. Climbers, who are everywhere in Yosemite.

Our next stop was completely unplanned. A buck mule deer came charging across the road from between some rocks, far too quickly for me to react to it, and he whammed into the side of the car, bounced onto the hood, slid across, and bounced back down to the pavement, where he ran off down into the woods. Fortunately there was a pullout nearby, because I was absolutely shaking and gibbering.

There is a new slight dent in Kestrel's left front fender. It was lined with stray deer hair. But it is barely noticeable unless you know what you're looking for, and that was the extent of the damage, to us and the car. I really hope that the only thing the deer got out of it was a big bruise on his back end.

I'm so glad his antlers didn't go through the windshield. It certainly could have, because he and I stared at each other for a split second that lasted for several hours as he slid over the hood.

After that, Tuolumne Meadows, while lovely, was something of an anticlimax.

I don't know the name of that mountain, alas.

Or that one. But the river is the Tuolumne. The stick is a guide for the snowplows. The snow gets measured in the yards up here.

This is actually on the east side of Tioga Pass, outside of the park entrance.

Once we left the park, the road dropped like a stone in switchback after switchback. Tioga Pass is 9943 feet high. Lee Vining, the town where we spent that night, is 6781 feet, in the high desert next to Mono Lake (more on Mono Lake tomorrow). The distance by road between the two is slightly under 13 miles.

And between the two is the difference between mountain meadow and arid desert. Midway between we saw prickly poppies:

Beautiful to my eye, but common as sand to my west-Texas-bred friend Mary

We arrived in Lee Vining in time for a late lunch, which we ate at a place called Whoa Nellie Deli, that I'd read about in one guide book or another. It was good, but nothing to write home about. We spent the rest of our afternoon dealing with the practicalities of travel -- laundry and groceries and getting everything cleaned up and reorganized.

It was nice to be back in a real motel room...

in which I climb a lot of stairs -- and I mean a lot

2011-09-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

One month ago today I climbed the Mist Trail, which is the most popular hiking trail in Yosemite National Park. I got up at 6:30 in the morning to do it, because a) it was supposed to get to close to 90dF that day, and b) it's the most popular trail in Yosemite National Park.

Hiking it that early in the morning was definitely the best thing I did in Yosemite Valley. I caught the first valley shuttle bus at seven and rode it the two stops to Happy Isles, which is the trailhead for the Mist Trail (and the trail to the summit of Half Dome, but I'm not that crazy). The trail was practically deserted (relatively speaking), and it was about 60 degrees out. Perfect.

The beginning of the trail. It looks pretty innocuous, doesn't it?

A lot of even the early part of the trail is carved out of the side of a cliff. Getting gradually steeper, too.

It's about a mile to the first landmark, a bridge over the Merced River. After that, the pavement ends and the hike begins.

The view upstream from the bridge. Vernal Falls is, unfortunately, overexposed in the top center of the photo.

After that, things start to get a bit steeper. Over 600 stairs steeper, as a matter of fact.

Only 3/10 of a mile. Right.

The sign says it's less than a third of a mile to the top of the falls. What they don't tell you is that it's straight up. I've done this hike several times before, but I hadn't done it in ten years, and there's a lot of difference between 42 and 52. Trust me.

The first really good glimpse of Vernal Falls.

The drier part of the stairs. Closer to the waterfall it gets pretty darned slippery.

Edging ever closer. At least the mist from the falls keeps a person nice and cool.

The really interesting part. The space between the railing and the cliff is about eighteen inches wide in places. And wet. And the opposite of smooth.

The top of Vernal Falls, with glacially-smoothed granite. Fortunately, it's dry.

Emerald Pool, above Vernal Falls. The day I hiked this trail, there were signs posted all over the place about three people who'd gone swimming there a couple of weeks before and gone over the falls. They still hadn't found two of the bodies.

After I reached the top, I went looking for the John Muir/horse trail back down, because I didn't think it was a good idea to try to go back down all those stairs. I wound up hiking up another half mile, not finding the trail, and hiking back that half mile plus down all those stairs anyway. I did get a good view of Nevada Falls, but by the time I took that photo, I was tired and frustrated enough that I didn't appreciate it all that much.

Here it is, anyway. Nevada Fall on the right, Liberty Cap on the left.

That's much bigger than the Liberty Cap at Mammoth in Yellowstone.

I got back a bit after noon, and collapsed in a heap for a while before Mary, who'd spent a much more sensible morning looking up at the cliffs instead of trying to climb them, and I went to find lunch, taco salads at Curry Village, which were actually pretty good. After that, she and I rode the shuttle bus over to Yosemite Village and went to the visitor center there, which impressed me very much. It's a lot shinier and newer than the last time I'd been there, the history exhibits in particular were really nice, and they had a nice bookstore.

Then we came back and discovered just how disgustingly filthy and unkempt the shower facilities at Curry Village were. If I hadn't needed a shower that badly...

And that was our second and last full day in Yosemite.

big trees, Glacier Point, and more crowds, alas

2011-09-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

Our first full day in Yosemite it was so cool and lovely first thing in the morning that we got an early start. This had the advantage of allowing us to beat the crowds slightly as well. The parking lot at Bridalveil Falls, completely full when we'd arrived the afternoon before, was all but empty at eight a.m.

Bridalveil Falls from the parking lot

And from the end of the short trail leading up to its base

Next we headed out of the Valley altogether, to go visit the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees at the southern end of the park. A viewpoint on the way called Tunnel View brought back some good memories for me -- it was there, as a high school student, that I got the idea to write an essay for my English class comparing Yosemite Valley to a cathedral. Yeah, me and all the other John Muir imitators, although I didn't know who he was at the time [wry g]. The paper got me an A, at any rate.

The view from Tunnel View, El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Falls on the right, Half Dome in the distance.

From Tunnel View, the road traverses a tunnel (obviously) and then heads south towards Wawona, which is a hotel/visitor center/historic area complex in the south end of the park. It was here that we had to catch the tram going to the grove of sequoias. First, however, we strolled through the village of historic buildings from throughout the park that have been gathered here, and watched a stagecoach go past.

Then we boarded the shuttle bus, which was, of course, very crowded. The trees, what we saw of them, were worth it, though:

The main trail from the shuttle stop, with a Very Large Tree or three

The problem with the Mariposa Grove was that my friend Mary was having a hard time walking for very far due to a pulled muscle in her leg, and so we didn't get to see as much as either of us would have liked to. But the trees were still impressive.

This is a very famous fallen giant, made so by this image, which gives you a much better idea of exactly how big that puppy is

After our abbreviated stroll through the giant sequoias, we rode the tram back down to Wawona, and ate lunch at the Wawona Hotel. It was a very elegant lunch at a very reasonable price, once again proving that if they can do nothing else right, at least the concessioner at Yosemite does do food well.

On our way back to the Valley that afternoon, we drove up to Glacier Point. The controlled burn was near the Glacier Point road, and we could see flames right alongside it. I was surprised that they hadn't closed the road altogether, but they hadn't.

We stopped first at Washburn Point, with its lovely view of Half Dome and Vernal and Nevada Falls:

The upper fall is Nevada, and the lower fall is Vernal. Half Dome, of course, is to their left.

Then we drove on to Glacier Point, where it took me two circuits through the parking area and almost half an hour to find us a parking space (there is no shuttle to Glacier Point, which I'd have taken in a heartbeat). If I hadn't let Mary out at the walkway to the point to save her from having to walk so far, I'd probably have given up altogether. But I did eventually find a spot, and walked back up to the point to take these pictures, among many others.

Half Dome, of course, and the upper valley

The actual point, made famous by this image, and Yosemite Falls across the valley

3200 feet straight down into the valley. That's Camp, er, Curry Village down there with the swimming pool.

It took us a while to make our way back down to the valley after that, and we were both pretty tired, Mary with her poor leg, and me from fighting traffic most of the day.

So we picnicked at our tent cabin and called it an early night, especially since I had some serious hiking plans for the crack of dawn the next morning.

I did say at one point that I would talk a bit more about the kind of people who visit Yosemite. Yosemite, in my humble opinion, suffers from being too close to too many major population centers. I ran up against the same issue in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on my long trip twelve years ago. At the time I chalked it up to the fact that GSM is one of the few large parks in the national park system which doesn't charge admission, the theory being that people value what they pay for more than what they get for free, and I'm still quite convinced that's part of the issue there. But Yosemite costs $20 per car to get in, and so I am forced to revise my assumptions.

With Yosemite I think it's a combination of too many rats in the maze, and too many people thinking of the Valley as their backyard as opposed to somewhere they should cherish (call me an old curmudgeon, but the kind of people who visit Yosemite on a summer weekend don't seem to know how to appreciate a national park), and the confining aspect of the Valley itself, which is only seven square miles with no place to go out but up. All of which is exacerbated by being within a weekend trip of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Reno, Sacramento, Stockton, San Jose, and probably half a dozen other cities I've forgotten to list here.

At any rate, it was saddening to see people treating the place, as someone on the shuttle bus said, like "Disneyland National Park." I have wonderful memories of Yosemite from my childhood and early adulthood. It's just too bad they were tainted by my experiences on this trip.

into Yosemite

2011-09-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

One of the things I do like about California's Central Valley is its farm stands. No sooner than we left I-5 at Manteca the next morning, we ran into a produce stand that had white peaches and Asian pears for Mary, and yellow nectarines and pluots (whoever decided to cross a plum with an apricot, well, I just hope they made lots of money because pluots are nectar of the gods) for me.

With our cooler fully stocked, we headed east into the gold country and the Sierra Nevada.

A view of the gold country, aka the foothills of the Sierra Nevada

I used to love the gold country when I lived in the Bay Area. It was a wonderful place to explore in the spring or the fall, and one of these years I'm going to visit it again in the off season. But that day we were eager to get to Yosemite. Mary had never been there, and I hadn't been there in ten years (the last time I was there was on September 11, 2001, but that's another story for another time). So we did not linger.

I had also forgotten about the Priest Grade on the Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite, possibly because I'd never been behind the wheel while traversing it before. I've been on steeper, more winding roads, but not many.

So, we finally arrived in Yosemite, or at least at the entrance station. Only to discover that there was a controlled burn going on in the park, and the smoke was obscuring some of the views. We stopped where you're supposed to be able to see Half Dome for the first time, and this is what we saw:

That is El Capitan on the left, but Half Dome, which should be in the center, was obscured by smoke.

So we drove on into the Valley and found ourselves a picnic spot of sorts for lunch (including some of that delicious fruit). It wasn't easy. This was our first run-in with the extraordinary amount of traffic in the valley. Yes, it was a weekend in August, but I've spent weekends in August in Yellowstone, and it was nothing like this. I will have more to say on the kind and number of people who visit Yosemite later.

This lovely little orchid pink flower literally carpeted the west end of the valley -- it looks like baby's breath we never did identify it definitively

After lunch we went to check in at our lodgings, a tent cabin at what I persist in thinking of as Camp Curry, but the official name is Curry Village. I wish I could find better things to say about Curry Village, or, in fact about anything run by the concessioners at Yosemite, but I can't.

I guess Yellowstone and Mt. Rainier have spoiled me. Actually, any other national park I've ever been to (with the possible exception of Great Smoky Mountains National Park) has spoiled me. At Old Faithful, you can drive right up to your very nice, very clean cabin with meticulously maintained restrooms and showers a few steps away for about $70 a night. In Yosemite Valley, you are lucky if you find a parking space in less than half an hour. It is at least 500 feet from your filthy tent cabin, which is crammed in less than 5 feet from the cabins around it, and the restrooms and showers, far more than a few steps away, are so badly maintained that you feel dirtier coming out than you did going in. All of this is $115 a night.

However, that's what the traffic will bear, and it, like the cabin at Old Faithful, was the most inexpensive lodging in the valley (a regular motel room will run you well over $250 a night). I had booked it almost a year ahead of time because if I hadn't we'd have been out of luck altogether, so there was no hope of upgrading. So we gritted our teeth and managed for three nights.

The views are spectacular, though. These were taken as we drove through the valley to Camp Curry.

El Capitan

Yosemite Falls

Half Dome and traffic

Mary was tired, so she stayed behind while I went exploring. I took the shuttle bus (one thing the park service does right in Yosemite, but what they really need to do is ban daytrip traffic from the valley altogether -- make the shuttles mandatory for daytrippers) to Yosemite Falls, and walked with the crowds to the base of the lower falls:

Beautiful, but the crowds...

From the shuttle stop

We ate supper at the Curry Village buffet, which wasn't bad, actually. Reminded me a bit of the buffet at the Old Faithful Lodge. The one thing the concessioner did do well was the food. Go figure.

One other thing, which I was actually expecting -- it was hot. Upper 80s the entire time in the valley. Fortunately, it did cool down nicely at night, and it took a while to warm up in the morning. I took advantage of this later in our stay.

more Crater Lake, Mt. Shasta, and a long day on the road

2011-09-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

Our second day on the road started back up at the lake, where we walked down to the Steel memorial overlook, built back in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The view from there is spectacular, too:

Wizard Island again

The Steel memorial, named after William Gladstone Steel, the man who almost singlehandedly was responsible for persuading Congress that Crater Lake deserved to be a national park, contains displays that tell about the eruption of Mount Mazama, which happened about 10,000 years ago and so was witnessed by the ancestors of local Indians, and the formation of the lake and of Wizard Island, which is another, much smaller volcano that was created after the collapse of the larger mountain.

Llao Rock

Llao Rock is one of the main characters in the tales told about the formation of Crater Lake.

The view south from the rim, complete with grazing mule deer.

After we stopped briefly at the Crater Lake Lodge and at the visitor center at Mazama Village, where we watched a short documentary movie about the lake and the national park, we left reluctantly and headed south.

After we passed through Klamath Falls, we crossed the border into California and saw our next great landmark:

Our first view of Mt. Shasta, so far off in the distance it almost looks like a cloud

And a much better view when we got closer

The last time I saw Mt. Shasta, almost ten years ago, it hadn't had any snow on top. Speaking as a Pacific Northwesterner, I have to say that volcanoes just don't look right unless they've got snow on top, so this view pleased me greatly.

We stopped for lunch in the oddly-named small town of Weed, and then returned to I-5 and the plunge down into California's Central Valley.

By the time we got to Redding, it was 99 degrees and the sun was baking down. Thank goodness for air conditioning. We saw our first oleanders and palm trees not long after that. Not that I have anything against palm trees and oleanders, but I grew up in California, and driving halfway down the Central Valley was not the part of the trip I was looking forward to.

We'd planned on spending the night in Sacramento, but we did not see a single motel (except for one big fancy hotel right downtown) along the entire stretch of I-5, and we wound up in the small town of Lodi, almost all the way to Stockton, before we found a place to sleep for the night. I wasn't complaining (at least not too much), because it would make for a shorter drive into Yosemite the next day, but I was beat. And it takes a lot of driving before I will admit to being beat.

This summer's travels, starting with Crater Lake

2011-09-10T08:30:00.000-07:00

One month ago today I was on my way to Crater Lake with my friend Mary. I had just picked her up at the Seattle airport the day before. She lives in North Carolina, and we met online. This wasn't our first trip together -- she's been out here four times before -- but it was one we'd been planning for a couple of years.

We left out early in the morning, and even with a stop for a huge pancake breakfast in Centralia, we arrived in Portland just in time for the last of rush hour. Portland seems to have a rush hour second only to Seattle's, alas, but it didn't delay us for too long.

I used to live in Eugene, Oregon, two hours further down the road, in the mid 1980s, back in the last economic downturn, back before it went yuppie, in the days when it felt like the Island of Lost Toys, from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Eugene used to be where all the old hippies went to die [g], and where the loggers protested the demise of the spotted owl (or, rather, the fact that it hadn't, er, demised, so that they could log the remaining old growth), and where the University of Oregon fans still dreamed about the glory days of Steve Prefontaine. It's not like that now, of course. But apparently I'd talked it up enough to Mary that she was expecting some sort of magical place, and I think she was a bit disappointed that it looked just like any other college town. Except for being in the middle of the forest, that is.

But highway 58 over Willamette Pass seemed to make up for it. I'd forgotten what a glorious climb that was, even if Mary didn't approve of its pronunciation. "It's Willamette, dammit," is the standard rhyme, which I admit is a bit vulgar. Sort of. We drove past reservoirs and one of Oregon's famous covered bridges, and up and up and up into the forest to the pass, where one of my favorite places to ski was, back in the days when I still skiied.

It took a lot longer to come down the east side of the mountains than I remembered. We stopped for a very late lunch at a rest area on highway 97, where a ground squirrel decided that Mary's cheddar cheese was the best appetizer it had ever had.

The road leading west from highway 97 to Crater Lake might as well have been laid out with a ruler. It's an anomaly in such mountainous country. At last we turned south into the park, and started climbing again.

Crater Lake is one of those places that is at least as amazing because of its unexpectedness as it is because of its beauty (which is saying a fair amount, given that it's as gorgeous as it is). It's like the Grand Canyon that way. You're driving up through what looks like a very pretty, but fairly ordinary (for Cascades definitions of ordinary, anyway) alpine meadow, when all of a sudden the road stops, and you look out over the edge, and there's this incredibly deep blue body of water that looks as if it had dropped from the sky. There really aren't words, and, to use the cliché, pictures aren't going to do it justice, either, but here are a few, anyway:

See? Perfectly normal mountain scenery

But just turn around...

The island is called Wizard Island.

It just doesn't look real, well, except for the park service boat (no private boats on the lake, mostly because you'd have to haul it over a mile straight down just to get to the dock).

That other tiny island is called Phantom Ship.

We drove all the way around the lake that afternoon, stopping at various viewpoints along the way, and also once to see a pine martin trot across the road. Unfortunately, neither one of us managed to get our cameras aimed before he darted down into the bushes. We also saw more wildflowers than I expected given that the road itself had only opened for the season three weeks previously, and there were still snowbanks lying about.

Alpine phlox, one of my alltime favorites.

One of many varities of penstemon.

We spent the night at the cabins in Mazama Village, which were very nice, and ate dinner at the dining room there. All in all, a very good start to our trip.

tortitude, lesson one

2011-09-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

Don't ever try to put a thermometer up Elli's hind end unless she's completely immobilized in a towel. We had our first vet visit today, and I have four scratches on my left arm and three scratches on my right hand to prove it. Elena just whined and took it like a lady. Elli -- well, let's just say she could have given Linnet lessons in how to initiate World War III. She went completely ballistic, then got away, ducked into the carrier, crawled into the back corner, and had to be poured out in order to finish the exam. Of course, I have to say that if someone stuck a thermometer up my rear end I'd be pretty annoyed, too...

On the bright side, everybody's healthy except for a possible small case of worms (dewormer has been given) and being slightly skinny. Suggestions were given on how to tempt their little appetites (the problem isn't enough food, it's getting them to eat it). It is to be hoped that the dewormer will also have a positive effect in that direction.

I have learned more in the last hour about my new cats' personalities than I have in the entire last three days.

One more thing. Elena sat in my lap for almost an hour straight last night while I was watching TV. Just climbed right up on her own initiative, cuddled in, and purred. She chirps when she purrs. It melted me into a puddle.

I'm being a proud cat mama

2011-08-31T13:34:00.000-07:00

Besides, they actually stayed still long enough for me to get some more photos today.

Balls with bells are absolutely mesmerizing -- Elena on the left, Elli on the right

So are sparkle balls, until they get stuck under the darned chair

Elena prefers to sit in the middle of her food -- so does Elli, even if I don't have photographic proof

The post-prandial bath, however, requires at least a little space, according to Elli

There haven't been any mutual bathing activities so far.

The kitchen chairs are the nap spaces of choice so far. This is Elli, looking, as my mother would say, like a toad in a hailstorm.

Elena's still slightly more awake, but it won't last long.

I really had forgotten how much fun kittens are.

new occasional cats

2011-08-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Warning. Terminal cuteness ahead.

As most of my readers know, I used to have two elderly male cats, both of whom passed away earlier this year.

I don't know if sufficient time has passed, but I do know that I am not a happy camper when I'm catless. And so, now that I'm back from a two-week trip that had been planned for a couple of years, I have gone to the the Humane Society for Tacoma and Pierce County today, and came home with two new housemates!

This is Elli

This is Elena

They're named after two characters in the Miles Vorkosigan science fiction series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Actually, they're named after two of the former girlfriends of the titular character [g].

I had thought I wanted male kittens, because I'd had such good luck with the last pair (the late, lamented Morgan and Linnet), but these two sort of looked at me and said, aren't you taking us home? Which may be why I couldn't come up with any male name possibilities over the last couple of weeks.

Anyway, they're settling in, if you can call playing popcorn kitten for the last two solid hours settling in.

Here's my best attempt so far at a photo of the two of them together. At least it shows you how much darker Elli is than Elena...

Elli is on the left on the cushioned chair, Elena is on the right in the non-cushioned chair

It is so wonderful not to be catless anymore!

Mt. Rainier by starlight

2011-08-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

This is just gorgeous. Well worth watching. And there may well be Aurora Borealis over The Mountain tonight. Too bad I probably won't be able to see it due to low clouds from our onshore flow...

This sort of makes up for it, though.

aw, shucks

2011-07-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

According to this article and some scientists in Hong Kong, time travel isn't possible. Nobody'd better try to tell that to Chuck McManis, though. Who is Chuck McManis? He's the hero of Repeating History, my new novel now out on Amazon and Smashwords.

Maybe they should have tried using a geyser. Or an earthquake. Or maybe both? [g]

And another small accomplishment

2011-07-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

I have learned how to format a book for Amazon. I'm not the techiest person in the world, so there was a bit of a learning curve, but I seem to have mastered it. I still have a bit of tweaking to do (a bit of odd spacing in a couple of spots that, now that I look at it, are in the manuscript, too), but soon there will be a real ebook.

In the meantime, here's the shiny new cover:

Making progress. Moving like a herd of turtles, as a friend back in Ohio used to say. The photo is of Grand Geyser, which I took during the actual eruption that inspired the writing of the book. Which is kind of nifty in itself, if I do say so myself.

Virtual Exhibits!

2011-07-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

Today is the day that all that work cataloging photographs for the Tacoma Historical Society pays off.

Today, four virtual exhibits of historic photographs, one of postcards and photographs of early Tacoma schools, one of people, known and unknown, one of parks of Tacoma, and one of early Tacoma business and commerce, are available for public view on the Tacoma Historical Society's website.

Please go take a look, and tell me what you think!

what's in a name?

2011-07-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

I always knew I was going to have to change some of the names in Repeating History, which, if all goes well, will be available for purchase at Amazon or via any of the formats Smashwords will provide, by the end of this month.

Some of the characters in this story are real historical people. Those who had only fleeting walk-ons have kept their names, but several -- mostly members of a family in 1870s Helena, Montana, and the man who married the eldest daughter of that family, are central characters in my novel. I don't want to offend any of their descendants, so I've spent the last several days figuring out new names for all of them.

Speaking as someone who once fictionalized the small town of Libby, Montana, by giving it the name Campbell (okay, the reason is obvious to me, but I may be dating myself if no one else remembers the commercial jingle "Libby, Libby, Libby on the label, label, label"), I needed the names to be similar in ways that may not make sense to anyone but me. Not just ethnically, although I did take that into account. But the way they sound, their resonances and associations, and whether or not they come with nicknames were important, too. For instance, I wanted to give a name that had a nickname to a man whose real name did not come with one. This would have added some serious unnecessary editing time as I chose where he'd go by his nickname and where he would not, so, reluctantly, I chose another name. Fortunately, as it turns out, I like this one better, anyway.

Why didn't I do all this at the beginning? Back when I first started the novel? Because, frankly, I didn't know who these people would turn out to be. Generally speaking, most characters who show up in my head come complete with first, middle, and last names, and with entire backstories. But most of the characters who show up in my head are not in real history books. I wasn't sure how much they would change from their real lives as the story was written.

And so this was my last editing chore before I sent the book off to be proofread.

Now all I have to do is correct any errors found in that process, format the book for Amazon and Smashwords, finish monkeying with the cover image, and upload the darned thing!

I love the whole process of naming, whether it's a cat or a character. Do you?

my first hike of the summer

2011-06-25T16:32:00.000-07:00

I didn't go very far. The Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, where I used to volunteer before I went to museum school, is on Interstate 5 about 25 minutes from my house when the traffic cooperates. Back when I was volunteering there, they started a project to open the formerly diked farmlands that comprise part of the refuge back to Puget Sound. This involved tearing out a very popular hiking trail that ran along the dike. To replace it, the refuge built a two-mile-long boardwalk out across the new wetlands to Puget Sound. It opened last year, but this was the first time I'd ever hiked it. I meant to get out there before now, but on a rare sunny day last week I finally did:

This is the path leading to the beginning of the boardwalk. The fog from overnight was still burning off over the water.

Former farmlands, now a mecca for migrating birds.

Along the shiny new boardwalk. That odd little building built into the boardwalk is a bird blind.

Two great blue herons. I saw about six of them flying together, but the shot of these two was the only one where you can tell what they are in it.

Almost to the end. The mountains in the distance are the Olympics,
and the little roofed pavilion at the end of the boardwalk is barely visible.

Mt. Rainier from the pavilion at the end of the boardwalk, with zoom.
There aren't that many places where you can see both Mt. Rainier and the Olympic Mountains on the same hike. I was pleased to discover that this was one of them.

I highly recommend this walk. I suspect if I'd managed to take it earlier in the spring I'd have seen many more birds (I only saw the herons and gulls on this one), but then the weather hasn't been exactly cooperative this spring.

I will be making the four-mile round trip again, though, I'm sure.

Something I never really thought I'd see

2011-06-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

On an agent's blog:

Rejections from agents or general trade editors is hardly ever a measure of the quality of your work. If you've gotten a lot of those, look at other ways of getting your work in front of readers.

This makes me believe that the publishing world honestly is beginning to change. Speaking as someone who is finally getting up the courage to self-publish my books, that first sentence is the antithesis of what I've been internalizing for the last ten years or so. To read that in a "traditional" agent's blog validates the route I've decided to take. Mind, I would have taken this route, anyway, as on a personal level I need more control over my career than traditional publishing would give me (which is also why I am a former librarian and currently an independent curator and exhibit designer in my other life), but it's incredibly good to see this right now.

too soon

2011-06-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

Morgan P. Kittycat

That’s what I called him, in my sillier moods. He never did tell me what the P stood for.

He had the softest, most lovely fur on the planet. He felt even silkier than a rabbit. It was an incredible tactile experience to pet him. It shed in clumps all over the house every spring, and I swear sometimes he shed enough to make another cat. He had one blue eye and one gold eye. When I took him in to the vet on Wednesday, the technician who took his temperature and weighed him made the delighted comment that one of his eyes glowed green when she took his picture, and the other glowed red. It was rather disconcerting when I would come downstairs for something in the middle of the night. And when he was happy, he drooled. I’d never had a cat who drooled before. Two kinds, one watery that dripped right away, one thick that hung from the sides of his mouth. For the first few years I used to think he would grow out of it. When he hit five or thereabouts, I finally gave up and kept a box of tissues on the end table next to the wing chair to wipe his mouth with when I petted him. He loved it, and would butt up against the tissue, making his mark.

His ears were normal when he was born. When he was about nine years old, he developed hematomas in his pinnae, the part of the ear that sticks up. The blood blisters, first in one ear, then in the other, thickened his ears to over a quarter of an inch. The cure was to drain them, then to “quilt” the two layers of skin together so that it couldn’t happen again. After that, people sometimes asked me if he was a Scottish fold. No. He was just a garden variety part Oriental, part domestic shorthair. With odd eyes, an incredibly sweet face, and fur that makes me want to cry knowing I’ll never touch it again.

I have to admit, when he first came to live with me, I thought he was a bit dim. That was a slander on a cat with more common sense, if not brain power, than any other cat I’ve ever met. The few times I ever had to medicate him, he would see me coming with the pill or the syringe, do the feline equivalent of a shrug, and open his mouth. His brother, who was an otherwise exceptionally intelligent cat, would start World War III. Morgan knew what had to be done and whether he or not he could understand why, he trusted me to know what I was doing and why I was doing it. And he forgave me almost immediately for just about anything. Either that or he had a very short memory. I prefer to think it was the former.

I think this was my very favorite Morgan photo

He was also the most limp-wristed cat I’ve ever had. If I had a nickel for every person who’s said that to me about him, I could take us out to a very nice lunch. But he was also the cuddliest, most loving animal it has ever been my pleasure to live with. As soon as I sat down, if I didn’t immediately pick up my needlework (he always left my needlework alone, although, like his brother, he thoroughly enjoyed sleeping in unfinished quilts when I wasn’t working on them), even if he’d been asleep the moment before, he was right there, ready to jump in my lap and snuggle. Whenever I had company, he’d be right there on my lap, looking at my guests with an expression that said, as clearly as if he’d stated it out loud, “this is my mom.” I’m told that some folks found it a bit intimidating [wry g].

The ultimate diagnosis was kidney failure, and he went downhill very quickly. To the best of my knowledge, he was fine two weeks ago. Not a shock for an almost-eighteen-year-old cat, or it wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been in such deep denial about how old both of them had become. I’m lucky they lived as long as they did.

Morgan, like his brother, was a most absolute and excellent cat (as the Dauphin said about his horse in Henry V). As I said when I eulogized Linnet four and a half short months ago, it’s hard to talk of one without the other. Morgan and I grieved together after Linnet died. He made Linnet’s death easier to bear.

Now that both of them are gone, the house feels incredibly empty. I know it probably won’t stay that way for long – once I get back from a planned trip in August, I’ll probably be going to the humane society for a new pair of kittens. They’ll have enormous pawprints to fill. But a person can’t do without kitty hugs indefinitely. At least this person can’t.

I hope both Morgan and Linnet approve.

it's been a long time

2011-06-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

Too long, I'm afraid. I'm about to finish my second gig (the photo curation for the Tacoma Historical Society). I have finished curating and cataloging over 2200 images, ranging from glass negatives to prints from digital images, and am now in the process of building virtual exhibits, collections of photographs with informative captions, which will be placed online as part of the Society's website. I will post the link as soon as it becomes available. The first two virtual exhibits will be about early Tacoma schools and historic personages of Tacoma, respectively.

I have started a third, curating textiles, beginning with a collection of wedding gowns running the gamut from late 19th century to almost modern, for the Fife Historical Society. And I am in discussions with yet another local historical society for the creation of another exhibit this fall. So the freelance museum curator business seems to be keeping me in cotton gloves and acid-free tissue, at any rate.

Today I had the wonderful opportunity to go behind the scenes at the Washington State Historical Society research center, where I attended a workshop about curating baskets and other textiles. The first part of the workshop was standard lecture/question and answer (and very informative), but the second part was touring several of the textile storage rooms, including one that housed over 1500 Northwest-made Indian baskets, many of which were over 100 years old. I wish I'd brought my camera. The baskets ran the gamut from thimble-sized to one I could almost have sat in, and included materials from bark to reed to beads. I think my personal favorites were the one woven to look just like a china cup and saucer, and the collection of thimble-sized baskets. I felt about those the way I do about miniature quilts at quilt shows. Wow, that's impressive. Man, they must have been insane...

One other piece of unrelated news: I am in the process of editing, creating cover art, and formatting my historical with a whiff of fantasy novel for the Kindle and Smashwords. I hope to have it up and for sale by the end of July, and I will announce it here (and everywhere else I can think of) as soon as it becomes available.

And I'll try not to disappear into the ether on you again any time soon, too.

This is why I live in the Pacific Northwest

2011-04-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

Among other reasons [g]:

Mt Rainier from the air

I took these while flying back home from visiting my mother in Texas week before last. It's taken me over a week to get them off my camera and onto my computer.

As a good friend said to me last week, I need relief. She wasn't talking about it in the usual sense, but in the topographical. As in relief lines, which become more numerous and closer together on the map the more rugged the terrain gets. Mt. Rainier is about as much relief as you can get south of Alaska. And it's right in my backyard. So to speak.

When we had the terrible floods a few years ago that shut down Mt. Rainier National Park for six months because the roads had washed out in more places than you could count (the park permanently lost an entire campground to the raging Nisqually River, too), I drove up to the Nisqually entrance, where the rangers were leading guided walks a mile or two into the park. I made a comment to the ranger about needing to come up and see how "my mountain" was faring, and he told me that if he had a dollar for every time someone had said that to him since the floods, he'd be able to retire.

Seeing my mountain, whether it's from the air like this, or from the east side of the Cascades north of Yakima, or my first glimpse of it heading north on I-5 from Portland, is the one sure sign I'm almost home after any trip. It's always such a relief [g].

What's yours?

And on a completely different subject...

2011-04-03T13:15:00.000-07:00

I finished a quilt top today. Not just any quilt top, but my flame quilt top, which I've been working on, off and on, for about a year and a half now, from fabric selection to hemming and hawing about how to do non-half-square triangles (I wound up cutting the diamond blocks using templates, and rotary cutting the others), to cutting the pieces to sewing the blocks to sewing the blocks into a top.

It'll probably be a while before I get around to quilting it. I'm a hand quilter, and I have two other projects to finish first (a throw that will be a wedding present for my nephew in July, and the Yule Log Cabin quilt that I am going to be sleeping under this coming December come hell or high water). So I probably won't start quilting it till at least Thanksgiving. But the top is finished, and here's the proof:

The golds look a bit more brown in these photos than they do in real life, but otherwise it looks exactly as I had planned. Which doesn't happen very often.

Houston, we have quilt top!

a finished exhibit

2011-03-16T14:53:00.000-07:00

Today I finished installing my first exhibit for pay, Clover Park: How a school district helped build a community, for the Lakewood History Museum. The grand opening, complete with ribbon cutting, will take place on Saturday, March 19th, at 1 pm. The museum itself will be open from noon to six that day (the regular hours are 12-4, Wed.-Sat.). If you will be in the Tacoma, Washington, area, on that day, we would be very happy to have you drop in!

If you can't, well, here are some photos I took this afternoon after I wiped the last fingerprints off of the display case covers [g]:

The introductory panel. The graphic design, four large panels, and templates for the smaller panels were created by the inventive Chris Erlich. I couldn't be more pleased with them.

The first display case. The 1960-vintage Hudtloff Junior High School beanie is fun. I mounted it on a styrofoam ball covered in polyethylene fleece.

One of the photo panel walls, including a timeline.

More photos, two small text panels, the acknowledgements panel, and another timeline panel. Lakes High School has national award-winning choirs, as illustrated at the top of this photo. The top left panel is about extremely recent history, since the Clover Park Warriors won the Washington state 2A basketball state title, and the Lakes Lancers won the Washington state 3A state basketball title, all in the same week last week.

The other display case, including a 1940-vintage high school diploma (Clover Park High School's first graduating class), and two annuals, a 1940 Clover Park Klahowya, and a 1964 Lakes High School Legend (Lakes' first graduating class).

This is a small sample of what's in the exhibit. In case you're wondering about the colors, Clover Park High School's colors are kelly green and gold, and Lakes High School's colors are royal blue and orange. They don't look bad together, do they?

just wondering...

2011-03-09T19:03:00.000-08:00

I've been blogging here for a little over a year now. I have to say I'm curious as to whether I'm just blogging out into the ether, or if anyone is actually reading this.

If you are reading this, please comment and let me know a little bit about yourself. And what you'd like to read about on this blog.

Maybe we can all learn a little bit more about each other.

Or maybe I will discover that I am indeed blogging out into the ether [wry g]

promise

2011-03-05T17:29:00.000-08:00

Today I sowed seeds, an annual ritual, of course, and one that my poor Morgan does not appreciate. They take up his favorite windowsill, you see:

But he's very good about not disturbing them. Well, except for the couple of times I planted morning glories. Apparently their hallucinogenic properties are just too much to be resisted. Every time I planted them, I had to put them out of his reach, otherwise he eats them to the ground every time they dare grow an inch. Since they don't do well in my garden, anyway, I've given up on them in spite of the fact that I love them (along with almost every other blue-without-a-hint-of-purple flower I can grow).

So. What kinds of seeds are in my 17 little pots? Linaria, larkspur, and hollyhocks, mimulus, bachelor's buttons, and Rocky Mountain columbine (the blue kind), Signet marigolds and godetia. All standbys except for the mimulus and columbine. I grew the mimulus once before and liked it, and the trouble with the standard varieties of columbine is that I always seem to end up with every color but the blue.

So it must be just about spring. Only two months till it will be time to plant the seedlings in my yard.

What's your favorite harbinger of spring?

Morgan's is when his windowsill is his again:

One of these days I'll have to take a picture of him on it.

Have you ever swung a wall around?

2011-02-26T17:05:00.000-08:00

When I was a teenager, the year after my three sisters got married (yes, in the same year -- 1971, the year I turned twelve), my mother decided that it would be nice if the newly-vacated two smallest bedrooms in our house could be turned into one. On one side of the wall between the two rooms was a large built-in bookcase. So she asked my father (who could do just about anything) if he couldn't just swing that wall around so that the bookcase would be on the wall between the two doors.

My father, as I remember, gave her a pained look and gently told her, it doesn't quite work that way. Then he took the bookcase down, tore the wall out, rewired the ceiling lights so both would come on no matter which switch you hit, filled the gaps in the walls and ceiling with drywall, scraped asphalt tile off the floor of one bedroom and removed carpet from the other, sanded the floor till it was even, painted the walls and ceiling, laid down new carpet, and reinstalled the bookcase on the wall between the two doors. It took him about six months, if I remember correctly.

Today I helped swing several walls. Granted, they are temporary, made out of hinged-together hollow core doors, but if a device to separate one large room into several small ones can be called a wall, these are walls.

They were at the Lakewood History Museum, where my exhibit, "Clover Park, how a school district helped create a community," will open three weeks from today. It's coming down to the wire. The photos are selected, the text has been written, the text and photos for the four large panels have been sent to the fabricator, I have received the templates for the small text and the photo panels from her, and I have begun to create the smaller panels to put on a flash drive to take to the printer. Next week we will have a mounting party, myself and several volunteers, to mount all the panels onto foam core board, and I will also fill the two cases with artifacts. Week after next we will hang all the panels and I will add the case labels to the display cases. We will have our grand opening on Saturday March 19th. If you happen to be in the Tacoma, Washington, area on that day, the museum will be open from 12 noon to 5 pm, the ribbon cutting will be at 1 pm, and I would be extremely pleased to see you there.

I've been working on this project since the beginning of last November. Not quite six months -- it'll be about four and a half by the time the exhibit opens. I've interviewed about twenty people (including the 100-year-old daughter of the woman who pretty much founded the school district singlehandedly -- sadly, she died last week, so this exhibit will be in her memory), collected photographs and artifacts from everywhere and everyone I could think of plus a few more, scanned dozens of the former, visited archives both here and out of town, assembled more information and facts about the Clover Park School District than I ever knew existed, and written a story in words, pictures, and objects that was far more interesting to create than I ever expected. I hope it will be as interesting for the people who experience it.

I'm almost there. I'm -- figuratively speaking -- painting walls and laying carpet.

But today I actually did swing a few walls around. Literally. My father would have been jealous.

spring, winter

2011-02-09T15:42:00.000-08:00

And back to spring again. I made my first plant nursery visit of the season last weekend. My personal philosophy when it comes to stuff is that every person should get three categories of stuff that are not clutter, by definition, no matter the quantity. Mine are books, quilt fabric, and garden plants. All other stuff is fair game for the clutter label, but not those three.

The result, of course, is that plant nurseries are dangerous places for me to go, even in February. Things are just beginning to bloom here. I have a clump of extremely brave species crocus that's been blooming for a week or so now:

Hellebore

And here are two of my purchases from Saturday:

English primrose

Actually, I bought three primroses (the others are red and gold), which come on the market here near Seattle in January every year, not just at nurseries, but even at discount and hardware stores, and another hardy cyclamen, which isn't much to look at yet. And eight packets of seeds. It's getting to be that time of year, too -- the one my cat Morgan hates, because the flats take up his favorite windowsill. He's very good about not bothering them, though. Except for morning glories, for some strange reason. I suspect it's because they're hallucinogenic, but he finds them extremely tasty and irresistible.

And then yesterday I took a trip back to winter. I had planned to drive up to the Paradise area up on Mt. Rainier, the only alpine part of the park that is open all year, but it was a chains-only sort of day, in spite of the sunshine here in the lowlands. I don't do chains unless absolutely required, and certainly not on a pleasure jaunt.

But I did make it as far as Longmire, where there was about five inches of snow on the ground when I arrived:

That's the National Park Inn, viewed from across Longmire meadow

The beginning of the Trail of the Shadows, a short nature trail that wanders through old growth forest around the edge of the meadow

One of the hot springs that caused James Longmire to develop this area as a resort in the 1890s

The woods were incredibly beautiful

I don't know the name of this mountain, but the view across the meadow was lovely

And then I came back down to spring.

I have to say this is how I prefer my seasons to work. Snow staying in the mountains where it belongs, and early blooming plants in my garden to lift my spirits.

What's your favorite way to experience this season?

a sad week

2011-01-22T12:44:00.000-08:00

I called him Mister Linnet

He and his brother Morgan (who is still hale and healthy, thank all the gods) came home with me in a paper grocery sack when they were six weeks old, in September, 1993. They were small enough to stand one each in the palms of my hands. Small enough that my brother-in-law nicknamed Linnet Lint when he clawed his way up Bob’s leg. Small enough to completely disappear into the vertical blinds of my first apartment in Tacoma when he crashed headlong into his brother in pursuit of a fur mouse.

Ann and Bob and I laughed till we cried as they both jumped back, tails fuzzed and backs arched.

But he knew what was what – when I came home a few weeks later from Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Loralee’s smelling like the ferrets we’d played with at her house, he arched that back and fuzzed that tail again and wouldn’t have a thing to do with me till I not only changed clothes, but took a shower.

A few months later, when the three of us moved together for the first time into a duplex with a back yard, he staked it out for his very own. He became my mighty hunter, my little lion, bringing back mice and shrews and snakes and lizards. Morgan would watch and cheer him on – and then take every kill away from him the moment it landed on the back step. Linnet would look at him as if he expected it. Neither ever ate Linnet’s prey. And only once did anything live ever make it into the house.

That was always the way it was. Linnet was my smart, brave, aloof cat. I used to say Morgan wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier (I have since learned better – there’s smart and then there’s sensible), and he always hogged the food. In seventeen years if I didn’t watch like a hawk, Linnet would have never gotten enough to eat.

Morgan is my dishrag cat (as in limp as a), with no dignity to speak of. Linnet was nothing if not dignified. I’m sure he would have been horribly embarrassed at his name had he known (I’d been told he was female by the woman who gave them to me, and did not find out he wasn’t until his first vet visit, but by then the name had stuck). He didn’t just walk, he stalked and strode. He could glare anyone down at thirty paces.

Morgan is my girl baby. My mother, with her vast experience of babies (four children, six grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren) always said that girl babies cuddle up to you, and boy babies stand on you. Linnet was my boy baby.

It’s hard to talk of one cat without the other. I don’t think they ever spent more than a few hours apart Linnet’s whole life, except when one was ill enough to spend time at the vet’s. I can’t count the number of times I found them sleeping together, wound up so closely that if it weren’t for the color I wouldn’t be able to tell where one cat stopped and the other started. Morgan misses Linnet as much as I do. The sun also rises in the east.

About ten years ago, Linnet got sick for the first time. He dropped from a sturdy twelve pounds (people always used to exclaim how big my cats were, even though I’ve known cats who weighed much more) to a scrawny eight in a matter of a few weeks. The vet ran tests, oh, did she run tests, until I finally put my foot down when she said the next step was exploratory surgery. We tried some medication aimed at reducing a possible overgrowth of bacteria in his stomach, which was the most likely suspect. It also came with a “prescription” for Pepto Bismol, to protect his stomach from the medication.

I don’t know anyone else who’s Pepto’d a cat. Linnet never was sensible about medication to begin with. I had to back him into a corner, stick his front paws between my heavily-jeaned knees, pull his head back, and aim the syringe. Then hold him until I was sure he’d swallowed. He would stalk away with the Look of Death (mine, not his) on his face, his mouth rimmed in pink. I still regret that I never managed to get a picture of that, but he’d probably never have forgiven me. When we left that residence several years later, I was still finding pink dots in obscure places in the laundry room.

But he recovered. After a fashion. He was never my mighty hunter or my chunky-style cat again. He still went out – insisted on it, as a matter of fact – but he never brought home big game or challenged the neighborhood cats for the backyard bragging rights again (although I did once catch him exchanging curious stares with a horse). And he never did get completely back up to twelve pounds.

We battled Linnet’s stomach troubles twice more after that. Each time it left him a bit more decrepit, and the last time the vet said the treatment would probably do him more harm than good if it happened again. The last few years, the nickname I used most often for him was “my old man.”

But it hadn’t come back for several years. He’d had some work done on his teeth a while back, and I’d hoped that had done the trick (the two problems can be connected). But I knew what it was the moment he started dropping weight and looking at his food like he was hungry but walking away after only a couple of mouthfuls. It went fast this time. It was like the weight just vanished. I took him to the vet on Wednesday, and she wanted to start running diagnostics on him again. Why? I thought. I knew what it was, she knew what it was, and he’d have been lucky to make it through the medication regime again, let alone all the unnecessary diagnostics she wanted to put him through first. I just wanted my cat back, and, failing that, to make him comfortable.

Then I came home Thursday afternoon, and he was so much worse. So fast. I called the vet’s office and took him in again.

And he’s gone.

Linnet was the cat who used to keep me company while I got dressed in the morning and put his front paws on my knee while I put my shoes and socks on. The cat who loved to stand on my “front porch” and butt his head on my ear and purr loud enough to deafen me. When I had shoulder surgery five years ago, I couldn’t let him do that for about six months. When I finally was able to pick him up and hold him across my chest again, he went nuts. I’ve never seen such a happy cat in all my life. I was back and he was back, and all was right with our world.

I miss him.

I know he was just a cat, but he was my cat and I miss him.

so much

2011-01-15T16:59:00.000-08:00

For my new year's goal to get my blogging back up to speed again.

I thought I was coming down to crunch time on the exhibit project, but due to circumstances which are due to someone else's deadlines, it looks like the exhibit is not going to open until March (it was originally scheduled to open in mid-February, then the end of February). I'm ambivalent about this. I'm about to the point where I want to get it finished, but then again, two to four more weeks of a chance to improve on what I've already got done is nothing to sneeze at, either.

The photo curation project has acquired several volunteers. My good friend L donated a few hours of her time, and one of the members of the collections committee (except for me, this is an all-volunteer organization) has been giving me about six hours a week of his time, too. Then there's the college student whose school requires her to do a certain amount of volunteer work between semesters. So I have her for about fifteen hours a week for the next couple of weeks. All of a sudden the work is going much faster than it had been. Having someone to a) label photos and their sleeves before I catalog them on the computer, and b) scan the photos after I've done the cataloging, has really sped up the process. Quite amazing.

I've never been on the "working with volunteers" end of the spectrum as opposed to "being one of the volunteers" before. Anyone have any good advice on the subject?

Being a bad correspondent.

2011-01-01T22:21:00.000-08:00

One year ago today I started this blog.

It's sort of ironic that the reason I haven't posted much since I finished my Long Trip posts is because my museum work is going so well, and I've been incredibly busy during the month of December. I am going to try to write more often in future in spite of it, because what I've been doing is so interesting. At least it is to me, and I hope it will be to you.

For instance. This week I just finished cataloging and properly storing two collections of about 100 glass plate negatives for the Tacoma Historical Society. They're over 100 years old, but the images are still clear and sharp, which is amazing to me. The subjects ranged from scenes of Old Tacoma to turn-of-the-last-century hiking trips to Mt. Rainier. Miners and sawmills and steam locomotives, too.

The second, as yet incomplete, volume of what I hope will someday become my Yellowstone trilogy features a photographer during the 1890s Yukon gold rush. He's based on a real man named Eric Hegg (the University of Washington has a large collection of his photographs here), who hauled crates of fragile glass plates over the Chilkoot Pass and down the Yukon River to Dawson City and on to Nome, Alaska. Handling the Society's collection of glass negatives really brought home what that would have been like. I am shocked, honestly, that any of them survived intact.

Now it's on to the much less fragile paper photos. I can't say I'm not glad.

For my other project, at the Lakewood Historical Society, I interviewed the almost 100-year-old daughter of the woman who was the driving force behind the creation of the Clover Park School District in Lakewood, Washington, for the exhibit I'm building on its history. She's amazing. I hope I keep my brains and memory as intact as she has when I'm 3/4 of her age. I've discovered, too, that, in spite of my preconceptions (having moved 26 times in my lifetime, 14 times long distance), many people do still live in the same place (and sometimes the same house) all their lives.

I also interviewed the former superintendent of the district in the 1950s, and a 1951 Clover Park High graduate, who very graciously lent the museum his letterman's sweater and hockey skates for the exhibit, and a 1960 graduate, who donated her junior high school banner and beanie and high school dance cards to the museum. And visited the state archives, and the school district archives.

Did I mention that I love research? And who'd have thought that the history of a school district would be so interesting?

Lucky, lucky me. I've never had work that has made me as happy as this work has.

Do you love your work? Have you ever been in a position where you look forward to your work every day?

Wow

2010-12-25T19:45:00.000-08:00

It's been three weeks since I last updated this blog. Bad Meg.

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday, no matter what you celebrate.

And, in lieu of real content, here's what my traditional day at the coast should have looked like:

Beach at Westport, Washington, December 25, 2009

We won't discuss what it looked like today. Suffice to say that the windshield wipers got a great workout, and my raincoat was dripping.

But it was still beautiful, and will always be.

Here's to lengthening days! And a bright new year.

Pineapple Express and NaNoWriMo

2010-12-12T19:17:00.000-08:00

First off, it's been raining steadily since Saturday morning (it's now Sunday night). Yes, I live near Seattle, and, yes, the rest of the world thinks this is normal for us. Some people even seem to think that this is normal for us year-round -- never mind that we average less than an inch of rain for July, August, and September.

But this is a bit more than normal -- this is a Pineapple Express. If you look at the satellite pictures you'll see that the stream of moisture aimed at the Pacific Northwest like a firehose comes from the tropical Pacific Ocean, basically Hawaii. Hence the moniker Pineapple Express. Our high today was in the mid-fifties Fahrenheit, about ten degrees above normal. The snow level was pushed up to 8000 feet (normally this time of year it ranges from sea level to about four thousand feet). This sort of thing happens maybe once or twice a year. And we're all prepared for floods (at sea level) and avalanches (in the mountains -- what happens when inches of rain saturate a snowpack).

There are two choices about where to live in this part of the world -- on a floodplain or on an ancient glacial moraine. You can float away, or you can dig rocks out of your garden every year. I'll take the rocks, thanks...

Anyway. NaNoWriMo was an interesting experience. I had never done it before, never really seen the need for it. But I'd had this idea in the back of my brain percolating ever since this dream I'd had a couple of months ago, about a highway patrolman chasing a little old lady speeding in an extremely old vehicle out in the middle of nowhere, when he rounds a corner and -- well, let's just say that the ghost town that should have been there wasn't a ghost town anymore.

The original dream took place in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona. When I decided to write it as a novel, I changed the location because I wanted to set it somewhere where I could actually go see the landscape, a trip to Arizona not being in the cards this year. So, the last weekend in October, I took an overnight trip to the Okanogan Country of north central Washington, and explored around and found an old gold mining country, a number of ghost towns, and stories (and places) that dovetailed so cleanly into the story that was percolating in my mind that I finally decided my sleeping mind must have just gotten confused.

Item the first:

Road to Conconully

Road to Molson

Have you ever seen such beautiful isolation? The whole Okanogan Highlands looks like this. Interspersed with:

Golden larches

Which turned out to be something of a story point in themselves -- larches are a highly unusual species. They're deciduous conifers, and they turn into flaming torches in the fall.

Then there was the ghost town/outdoor museum in Molson (yes, it was named after the Canadian beer -- the Molson family helped bankroll the beginning of the town):

I suspect it's a bit more lively in the summertime, but in late October it was delightfully desolate.

And this pig, who lives in a Molson storefront and became another important bit of business:

Doesn't he make you wonder what the heck?

And then there was the town of Conconully. Which has got to be one of the most fabulous names I can think of, even if, since it's not exactly a ghost town (it has a population of a couple hundred these days), I'm going to have to rename it in the rewrites:

Post office road, Conconully

The town that gave my story a history.

So that's the setting of Sojourn, which is about a young man who'd been uprooted from everything that mattered to him long before he found where he really belonged.

And what I wrote for NaNoWriMo this year.

I am sorry

2010-12-02T21:41:00.000-08:00

That I vanished for two weeks. November was three months crammed into one for me, and real life took over. To begin with, my first freelance museum gig -- I am researching, writing, and designing an exhibit for the Lakewood Historical Society -- swung into high gear. Secondly, my second freelance museum gig (they're both part-time, adding up to 30 hours a week total) -- I am cataloging the photograph collection for the Tacoma Historical Society -- began in earnest. And thirdly, I picked this year to do the National Novel Writing Month challenge. I finished blogging my Long Trip, too. Three months crammed into one, indeed.

Oh, and we had two windstorms and a snowstorm this month.

This was the view out my front door the Monday before Thanksgiving

The Lakewood job is researching and designing an exhibit, my first one for pay (I created a small exhibit as a volunteer project last summer). It will recount the history of the Clover Park School District, which was and is a very large part of the identity of the community that finally incorporated as the city of Lakewood in the 1990s. Clover Park is both a microcosm of how school districts were formed and grew in Washington state during the 20th century, and a unique-to-Washington example of how the extremely strong military presence in Pierce County could and did change and form how a school district develops, including the creation of a technical college begun to train soldiers during WWII that only moved from the school district to the community college system fifteen years ago. It's been much more interesting research than I expected it to be.

The Tacoma job is helping bring order out of chaos, by cataloging the hundreds (perhaps over a thousand, I don't know yet) of historic photographs the Society has collected in its 20 years of existence. Everything from 19th century glass plate negatives to digital images. Through a grant, they were able to purchase PastPerfect, a museum cataloging software program, storage and preservation supplies, and my time for twenty hours a week for seven months. This week I have set up PastPerfect, transferred what collection files they already possessed from Excel to the new software, and started cataloging, beginning with a collection of antique postcards of local scenes from the turn of the last century. Some of which have writing on the back. Talk about social history...

And then there was NaNoWriMo. I think I'll wait and talk about that one next time. Suffice to say for now that 50,000 words in thirty days is a faster breakneck speed than I've ever written at before, but I did it. Which is pretty darned cool, in my humble opinion.

11 years ago today, Day 81

2010-11-19T23:13:00.000-08:00

The last day, for all intents and purposes. I drove up I-5 in the rental car, to my sister's in the Bay Area. I had been supposed to arrive there just before Thanksgiving, but due to the wreck, I'd decided to cancel the reservations I'd made at Sequoia and Yosemite, and just go on to her house.

I got there about the middle of the afternoon. She helped me unload the rental car and return it, and I accidentally got more bits of glass in her washing machine when I attempted to wash the rest of my clothes (I'd shaken them out as well as I could, honest). At least it didn't damage her machine like the one in the motel.

I spent the weekend with my niece at her apartment, then went back to my sister's for the last couple of days before Thanksgiving. The day after Thanksgiving I climbed aboard an airplane headed for Seattle.

The plane ride was a bit -- boisterous. You see, I arrived home in Tacoma the day before the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in late November, 1999, and the plane was full of protestors. I'd been so out of touch that I had no idea what was going on, but my memories of the WTO protests are mixed in with apartment hunting and car shopping (don't ever, ever try to buy a new car and find a new apartment in the same week) and pouring rain and a lot of running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

I did eventually find an apartment. And a car. And, in the midst of all this, before I moved in, I went to the library to check my email and found a message from my other sister (I have three) telling me that my oldest brother-in-law had died. The message was a couple of days old, and they were holding the funeral as I read the message. I liked my oldest brother-in-law. I wish I could have made it to his funeral, but I like to hope he would have understood.

At any rate, on December 1, 1999, I moved into my new apartment, went to bring my cats home from their temporary lodgings, and settled back in to normal life again.

Even given how it ended, I still wouldn't have missed that trip for the world. It certainly didn't cure my itchy feet -- in 2000 I drove to both Crater Lake and Yellowstone, and went on a kayak trip down the Missouri River, and I've been traveling as much as I've been able to ever since. I hope someday to make another long trip, this one across the midsection of the U.S., north to the Maritimes and back across Canada. Maybe in another four years...

And maybe I'll blog that one as it happens.

11 years ago today, Day 80

2010-11-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

Picking up the pieces. The first thing I did the next morning was finish arranging for a rental car. I was out in the middle of nowhere. I had to drive myself out. Fortunately, Ridgecrest was large enough to have an Avis franchise, and they rented me -- another Chevy Cavalier, just like Owl, only two years newer and red.

My next stop was the towyard, where I finished salvaging what I could out of Owl's wrecked innards and took a few pictures for posterity. I'll inflict just one on you:

He was pretty crunched

"Salvaging my stuff was an interesting experience [now that I think about it, in the Chinese sense]. I found everything but the sweatshirt I'd bought at Niagara Falls. It may very well be in amongst all the clutter, but I didn't see it. I left all but a couple of the audio tapes behind. They were ruined with the dust and dirt. Ditto for a bunch of the paperbacks. The cooler [which was smashed]. The food. I did salvage most of the cooking implements. And I rescued the magnets and [some gifts]. Most of the brochures I'd picked up. All my clothes except for the aforementioned sweatshirt. And the little pot I'd bought in Death Valley was sitting on the back seat, its box open, most of its padding gone, without a damned scratch. I laughed so hard I think I was a bit hysterical."

I said goodbye to my poor dead Owl, climbed into the rental car, and headed west towards Bakersfield.

"It was scary driving at first, and I had to consciously keep myself from squeezing the steering wheel, and I know I drove the people behind me mad because I didn't go very fast, but I did okay. And I'm back in the saddle, which is good."

After I crossed 395 again, the road climbed "over the southern end of the Sierra Nevada. I went over a 4500 foot pass, then stopped at Lake Isabella for a late lunch. The road down from Lake Isabella was narrow and winding, but I was careful and handled it just fine. It was also very beautiful," but there weren't really any good places to pull over and take a picture.

"I drove on through Bakersfield to Buttonwillow, which is on I-5, and found a motel. Tomorrow I'll be at [my sister's house -- she lives in the Bay Area].

"And I'm alive and in one piece, dammit. The top of my head hurts a little, my left shoulder aches, and I'm stiff and sore all over, but I'm alive. And I'm not in the hospital. And I didn't put anyone else there, either."

Which was saying quite a lot right then.

11 years ago today, Day 79

2010-11-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

This is going to be the hardest post of the trip to write, especially as I don't particularly want to shortchange what was mostly another lovely day on my Long Trip. So bear with me, please.

Anyway. I spent most of the morning exploring more of Death Valley. First I drove up to Scotty's Castle, an extremely absurd place up on a hillside overlooking the valley:

The castle

The main entrance

I'll let you read the link for yourself, but suffice to say that the living history tour (given by a docent who pretended it was 1939 during the house's heyday) was fascinating.

After that, I drove up to Ubehebe Crater, a placename I never could find the origin of. It's a meteor crater, way up on the hillside, and it was very cold and windy up there, at least for someone wearing no more than shorts and a t-shirt:

From the edge

After that I headed back to Stovepipe Wells where I bought, among other things, a small pottery jug as a souvenir, and ate lunch. Then I headed west, out of the park and over the Panamint Mountains to U.S. 395, the highway that runs north-south east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I needed to go south almost to the bottom of the Sierras before I could cross them, because most of the more northerly passes, here in late November, were closed for the winter (I suppose I could have gone north a hundred miles or so to I-80, which stays open all year in spite of the snow, but I don't remember why I didn't do that).

On my way out of the park I stopped to take a picture of a coyote:

He was interesting to me because he was so different from a coyote I'd seen in Yellowstone a couple of months before. Longer legs, thinner fur, bigger ears, longer tail. Obviously the Yellowstone coyote was compact and furry because he needed to stay warm during the long, cold winters there, while this Death Valley coyote was lanky and less furry because he needed to stay cool in the desert heat. At any rate, I found the contrast interesting (and I still regret not being able to get a photo of that Yellowstone coyote to demonstrate it).

Outside the park, I turned south on US 395, a route my parents and I had traveled many times on our way from LA to Oregon and Idaho for summer vacations when I was a kid, and drove south through the desert for an hour or so:

The Panamints from US 395

I was headed for the town of Ridgecrest, which is about the only community of any size in that neck of the desert. I had just turned east on CA 178 when I glanced at my map, as I had hundreds of times before, for over 14,000 miles in fact, to see how much farther I had to go.

It didn't turn out the way it had hundreds of times before. Apparently I bumped the steering wheel by accident, because the next thing I knew the car was on the shoulder of the road about to plow headfirst into the sand. I panicked, waythehell over compensated, and, well...

I came to hanging upside down from my seatbelt. I let myself out of it and, carefully avoiding a number of sharp, pointy things, managed to get myself upright. I shoved on the door. It wouldn't move. I reached up to the steering wheel and honked the horn. It worked.

A few minutes later, I heard scrabbling noises outside the car, and a couple of minutes after that, the door opened. I crawled out and stood up.

There were about a dozen people, half a dozen cars, and at least three cell phones. When I asked how they knew to find me, there was a chorus of "dust plume." A state trooper arrived a few moments later and took charge.

I and my car (which had to be loaded on a flatbed tow truck) were hauled to Ridgecrest, where Owl was taken to a towyard (after the trooper liberated some clothes and other belongings for me -- including my camera and binoculars, which were undamaged inside the armrest storage thing between the front seats) and I was taken to a motel, after declining a trip to the hospital since I had survived, so far as I could tell at the time, remarkably unscathed (I did develop some interesting bruises and a small sore spot on the top of my head by the next day, but that was it -- yes, I know how lucky I was).

I will be the first to admit I was in shock. My heart is pounding now even just thinking about it. I made phone calls, insurance and family and a rental car. "I walked two blocks to a little fast food joint called the Golden Ox and struggled to keep the tears back long enough to eat half a hamburger."

Oh, and I tried to run a load of laundry, only to have the washing machine at the motel die in the middle of the cycle, apparently from all the crud in my clothes. Bits of glass and rocks, mostly -- oh, and mud. If I may make one recommendation for anyone who travels with a cooler, it is to please empty the melted ice out every morning before you set out. Just in case.

Anyway. I didn't get much sleep that night. I spent quite some time on the phone with a friend back home, but I couldn't close my eyes. I kept seeing the accident, over and over and over.

And that was how I came to roll my car out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. As my brother-in-law told me a few days later, "You understand that this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, don't you?"

11 years ago today, Day 78

2010-11-16T21:08:00.000-08:00

More desert. Actually, much more interesting desert, in my not so humble opinion. I got up and out fairly early, and headed west into Nevada, then north to the town of Searchlight, which has got to be one of the niftier place names I've ever run across. Along the way I took this picture of a rock formation that struck my fancy:

Before I reached Las Vegas, I turned west on I-15 for a few miles, then off on a two-lane highway, crossing into California and on to the town of Baker, where I attempted to grocery shop (Baker's supermarket was nothing to write home about -- I'd have shopped in Kingman, except that I was expecting to have to go through a California agricultural inspection station, which the road I crossed the border on did not have). Then I turned north, heading towards Death Valley National Park, and lost all my traffic, which was very nice.

My next stop was the hamlet of Shoshone, where I bought gas at what seemed to me at the time an appalling $1.70 a gallon (for my non-U.S. readers, yesterday I paid $2.99 a gallon, which is fairly normal this year, but I'd been averaging somewhere around $1.35 on my Long Trip). I thought about stopping for the night at the hostel there, but decided instead to call ahead and see if I could get a room at the Stovepipe Wells Inn in the park. Which I did, and could. So I ate lunch in a funky little restaurant which had one wall completely papered in foreign money, with notes written on the bills. "Turns out some Chinese fellows left a note for some friends there, and sort of started a tradition."

"After lunch, I drove up into the park over a 3300 foot pass, which doesn't sound like much until you realize that most of the park (well, the most important part) is below sea level, and down, down, down into the valley."

" I stopped at the place with the lowest elevation in the western hemisphere, 282 feet below sea level."

The sign says "Badwater" and the elevation. And I'm not arguing about the description.

See that white dot a bit more than halfway up the hillside? That's sea level.

"I drove through multicolored bluffs on a narrow one-lane road."

The sign says "Artist's Palette," and tells about the minerals that create the colors

"I stopped at the visitor center at Furnace Creek, where the temperature was in the 80sF, and saw their exhibits and picked up a guidebook. I walked a short trail out to an old borax works (still haven't figured out what makes borax so valuable)." And then I came on up to Stovepipe Wells and settled in.

The last time I was in Death Valley I was about seven or eight, I think. My parents and I drove up there from LA for a long weekend in February one year. I have two really strong memories of the place. One was of my dad pulling over at a rock formation called The Devil's Golf Course (they're big on Satanic names here), my mother opening her car door, putting a foot out, and yanking it right back in. Turns out there was a rather large tarantula waiting to show her around.

My other memory is of getting rained on. Yes, in Death Valley, where the average annual rainfall is less than 2", we got rained on. It wasn't enough to do more than stir the dust on the car, but still. How many people can say they were rained on in Death Valley?

I sat out at a picnic table to eat my supper while darkness fell around me. The stars were spectacular that night. It's too bad I couldn't get any decent photos of them.

But I was awfully glad my motel room was air conditioned. Even if it was the middle of November.

11 years ago today, Day 77

2010-11-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

I made a rather late start eleven years ago today, after discovering that my milk had leaked into the melted ice in my cooler, and, worse, vice versa. That was pretty much the most horrid-tasting milk I've ever tasted, which is saying quite a bit.

I spent the morning at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. I was less than impressed by it, "mostly because I was expecting a museum of Southwest Native American history, and what I got was Southwest Native American art. Which is all fine and dandy, but I'm not real enamored of art museums. They did have a room full of kachina dolls, which was excellent, and a couple of examples of their housing (a hogan and an Apache brush shelter) and a few exhibits on the different tribes, but most of it was art."

I will be the first to admit that I'm not a big fan of art museums for their own sake. If I'm interested in the period and place the art was created, or if I'm interested in the people who created it or are depicted in it, then I last longer. But as it was I only spent about an hour and a half there.

"Since it wasn't even noon yet, I decided to go on to Kingman, in the northwest corner of Arizona. The road leading out of Phoenix took forever, stoplight after stoplight after stoplight, but I finally got back out to the desert. ... I headed northwest, out across a vast plain of Joshua trees." I hate to say this, but "they are so ugly. They're all contorted, as if they're in pain, and they don't have enough foliage on them for a self-respecting carrot, let alone a twelve-foot tree. Can you tell I'm getting tired of the desert?"

I arrived in Kingman fairly late in the afternoon. "Kingman's a funny town. It grew up along Route 66, the famous old highway that used to run from Chicago to LA, and that's still its claim to fame (one of the few parts of of the route not buried under I-40 is on either side of Kingman). I stayed in the Route 66 Motel, next to the Route 66 Gift Shop. It was kind of cool, in a kitschy sort of way."

And Kingman did provide me with one of the more glorious sunsets of the trip:

Sunset from the Route 66 Motel

11 years ago today, Day 76

2010-11-14T19:56:00.000-08:00

"I just noticed that the last few days I've been writing 10 instead of 11 in the date. Wishful thinking or the heat confusing me?"

"I was about three miles down the road when I suddenly realized that a) I hadn't made a note of the car's odometer number this morning (as I had been every morning since I'd left home) and b) I couldn't find my journal. Panic ensued. I drove back to the motel and there it was, sitting on the dresser in the room I'd just vacated. Scared the crap out of me. After all, it's only two and a half months of my life in there..."

After I rescued my journal, I headed west out of town again, to Tonto National Monument, which, of course, is more cliff dwellings, as well as desert views and lots of saguaro cactus:

I don't ever remember seeing saguaro cactus in person before

The reservoir in the distance is Lake Roosevelt, part of Phoenix's water supply

Cliff dwellings

Up close

And again

Another view from the cliff dwellings

Tonto National Monument is up on a hill, actually in sort of a canyon (kind of hard to have cliff dwellings without a cliff, after all). There was a nice little visitor center with an interesting video telling the story of the place, and a ranger that reminded me very strongly of a friend back in Tacoma.

The half-mile trail to the cliff dwellings themselves gained 350 vertical feet in that distance. Which isn't much except in 90dF+ temperatures and sun beaming down like it was August in November. I drank almost an entire bottle of water out there. "In spite of the enormous difference in scenery and the fact that I only met four people on the trail instead of hundreds, it reminded me a lot of the trail up to Clingman's Dome in the Smokies," too.

After I left the monument, I drove back to the main highway towards the little town of Miami, where I got gas and asked the attendant where I could get some good Mexican food. She directed me to a very crowded restaurant (I think the entire town was eating Sunday dinner there that day) that was excellent. Shredded beef tacos with homemade shells, rice and beans and sopapillas for dessert again. By the time I was through I was so stuffed that I didn't bother with supper that day.

After I waddled out, I headed west over the Superstition Mountains to Phoenix, and spent as much time crossing Phoenix to the motel near a museum I planned to visit the next day as I did driving from Globe in the first place. Then I settled down in the air conditioning and read my Sunday paper (an Arizona Republic).

"I have to say that Phoenix is way too much like Southern California." I grew up in Southern California. This is not a compliment. And the desert was starting to get a bit old, too. I was really looking forward to the Sierra Nevadas in a couple of days.

11 years ago yesterday, Day 75

2010-11-14T19:38:00.000-08:00

Life got a bit out of hand yesterday -- I'm also doing NaNoWriMo this year, and starting up a new business, and well...

Anyway. Eleven years ago yesterday, I climbed into the car and headed west out of Silver City for forty miles, then when that highway turned north, I turned west again onto a smaller road. The warning signs were a bit off-putting, "steep mountain grades, sharp curves, no commercial traffic," but the road itself was much better than what I'd been driving on for the last two days. The worst was a couple of 15 mph switchbacks. "And it was very scenic -- ponderosa pines, junipers, golden cottonwoods, wide grassy fields. At one point it took me out on the end of this finger of land jutting out into a valley, then in gentle swooping curves down to it.

A nice desert view

"I was, however, having a hard time enjoying it this morning. Something in the car (not the car itself) was rattling. It sounded like someone crumpling a piece of paper over and over and over again. It was about to drive me mad. I must have pulled over to the side of the road half a dozen times and rearranged where I thought it was coming from, but the problem with that, of course, is that the noise stops when the car does, so I didn't have a prayer of pinpointing it.

"The strangest things can drive you bonkers when you've been traveling alone for a long time. That sort of thing has been my bete noire off and on during this trip. Car noises. People snoring. People acting like idiots on the road or in hostels.

"Anyway, the rattle mysteriously vanished when I stopped for lunch in a little town amidst the cotton fields called Safford."

I arrived in Globe, Arizona, about 2:30 in the afternoon. I'd been having a craving for ice cream all day, so I hit a Dairy Queen for a butterscotch sundae, then went looking for a motel. It was a good thing I didn't put that off any later. There was a rodeo in town, and I got one of the very last rooms for the night.

When I asked the desk clerk what there was that was interesting to do, she told me about an archaeological site on the edge of town, so I went there. "Another group of Indians contemporary with the Anasazi except that these folks built pueblos rather than cliff dwellings." They were called the Saludo, and the site was called Besh ba Gowah:

A view of the site

One of the exhibits

A closeup of one of the reconstructed buildings

After that I prowled the main street, bought some milk, and went back to my room to rest.

I think the heat was beginning to get to me. There's something just Wrong about 90dF+ temperatures in the middle of November.

11 years ago today, Day 74

2010-11-12T21:29:00.000-08:00

Another day, another road that thought it was a Slinky.

This one led north from Silver City to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. Which is only about 45 miles from Silver City, but... "I wound up and over ridges and down across valleys and around switchbacks so tight I thought I'd run into myself." The drive took me about two hours. That tells you how twisty the road was. The views along the way were pretty, however:

You can see a long way from the ridgetops in southwest New Mexico

And the drive turned out to be worth it when I arrived at the monument, which was pretty tiny. "The mile-long trail to the ruins led along a small canyon with views of the dwellings, then switchbacked up the hill so that it's possible to walk through some of them. It was a small community, about 40-60 people, and they weren't Anasazi. They were a related group called the Mogollon (muggy-on)." The Anasazi are the folks who built Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, and I'd mistakenly thought till that day that they'd built all the cliff dwellings in the region.

Here are some of the pictures I took on my walk:

Doesn't this formation look like a gigantic foot?

My first view of the cliff dwellings

Closer

And more dwellings

And really close

It's amazing how much cooler it is under those rock overhangs. Natural air conditioning, circa 1000 CE.

After my walk, I ate my lunch at the monument's picnic area, in the company of rather a lot of Steller's jays, and some smaller gray birds with a chestnut patch on their backs that I'd never seen before.

Then I headed back to Silver City, by way of a longer road that wasn't quite so tightly corkscrewed, and got back in time to hit a used bookstore, where I got a cat fix from a little gray and white fur person named Rue. Then I went looking for a library, and ended up at the University of Western New Mexico, which had Internet access for the public.

"I think I know which way I'm headed tomorrow. Sort of. Or at least I thought I did. Either Show Low, Arizona, which is northwest of here, or Globe, which is southwest. I guess I'll make up my mind when my hands hit the steering wheel in the morning. I haven't been this indecisive on the entire trip."

11 years ago today, Day 73

2010-11-11T21:16:00.000-08:00

"Long day. I only drove about 160 miles or so, but the route I took made it seem a lot longer."

Perhaps it also seemed longer because at one point I drove right past The Middle of Nowhere:

Well, you can't read it, but that yellow sign along the top of the building? Says, "Middle of Nowhere" and the name on the sign next to the mailbox out front says "Nutt, NM"

I drove north a few miles on I-25 until I reached the village of Hatch, where I regretted not stopping for groceries before I'd left Las Cruces. I did get ice, though, and then headed west on a two-lane out through the desert. "In about 20 miles I headed north on what turned out to be a state scenic byway, and it was definitely scenic." In a dry, desolate way:

Those mountains, way off in the distance? Are a lot bigger than they look from here

After a bit, I turned west again "on a highway that thought it was a Slinky. Fifteen mile an hour curve after fifteen mile an hour curve." I swear I thought the front end of my car was going to rear end the back end of my car. Or vice versa. Or something. "And climbing. I was absolutely astonished when I hit a 9,000 foot pass. Up into the ponderosa pines. It was really beautiful, but the drive took more than twice as long as I thought it would."

Eventually I did arrive in Silver City:

The approach to Silver City lined with yellow cottonwoods

Which is a very nice small college town out in the middle of absolutely nowhere in southwestern New Mexico. I did my grocery shopping and hit a lovely little quilt shop where, among other things, I bought a quilting stencil that looked like a cluster of chili peppers.

I found a hostel in the basement of a bed and breakfast, which was very nice. And I brought my travel guides and my maps in with me, because I was hitting the point on this trip where I absolutely didn't know where to go next.

11 years ago today, Day 72

2010-11-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

I got up way too early eleven years ago this morning, the indirect result of having forgotten to set my alarm clock to Mountain Time the night before. I'd set it in the first place because I wanted to get back to the Caverns in time for the 9 am ranger-led walk. So I had plenty of time, which was good considering that the ticket seller at the visitor center was having computer troubles which delayed things a bit.

The tour I took was through a part of the Caverns called the King's Palace and the Queen's Chamber. "It was beautiful, just like the rest of the cave, and awe-inspiring. It became especially awe-inspiring when, to show us what the cave is like in its natural state (sans electricity), the ranger turned off the lights. I've been on cave tours where they've done this before. It's disorienting in the extreme. Black enough to where your eyes never will adjust. Black enough to where you literally cannot see your hand an inch from your face. Black enough to be terrifying. I don't know what the total stranger next to me thought of me moving my arm enough to where it touched his, but I needed to, in a very atavistic way. I don't think I could handle it for more than the few minutes they were out (which seemed an eternity, by the way)."

After the tour I climbed gratefully back onto that incongruous elevator and, reluctantly, went on my way. On my way out of the park, I took some pictures of what the land above the caverns looks like:

This one in particular shows what I meant when I said yesterday that the mountains just sort of appear out of nowhere

You can barely see the road winding up the canyon in this one

My next stop was Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which, even though it isn't that far down the road from Carlsbad, is back in Texas even though I went southwest to reach it. Guadalupe Mountains is best known for the mountain named El Capitan:

One view of El Capitan

And another

Now, I don't know about you, but the first place I think of when someone mentions the name El Capitan is Yosemite. Here's a link to a photo of Yosemite's El Capitan. An entirely different place. But I think both are equally beautiful.

I stopped at the McKittrick Canyon Visitor Center and "walked their nature trail through the desert along a lovely arroyo with wonderful views," and read the signs about the native plants along the way. I was surprised to discover that there is a madrone that lives down there in the desert. I think of madrones as coastal trees here in the Pacific Northwest. After the trail I went through the museum, then ate lunch in the tent section of the campground as opposed to the picnic area, on the recommendation of the park ranger at the museum. "Good recommendation. They were the only shady tables for miles."

After I left Guadalupe Mountains, I headed west towards El Paso, which was pretty much a nothing drive all the way. "Desert, salt flats, a few mountains in the distance (the Guadalupes were the first mountains I'd seen since the Blue Ridge, though, so I'm not complaining)."

I arrived in El Paso about the middle of the afternoon, found the AAA office, picked up enough maps to last me home, which was not a welcome thought, and decided it was too early to stop for the night. So I crossed the state line back into New Mexico for the last time and drove forty miles on to Las Cruces.

The motel had Thanksgiving decorations in the lobby. It was extremely odd to see them when I was wearing shorts in the 80dF temperatures.

11 years ago today, Day 71

2010-11-09T21:48:00.000-08:00

I may have taken more photos eleven years ago today than on any other day of the trip. Maybe. At least in the top five. I will not inflict all of them on you, but you're going to get a good selection.

I headed west from Big Spring towards the New Mexico state line on "a road so straight I swear they laid it out with a ruler. If it deviated more than a few inches from left to right the entire distance (about 80 miles), I'd be real surprised."

After I crossed the state line, I noticed something bright orange way up in the air off to my left:

Natural gas burnoff, or at least so I was told later

I arrived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, around eleven in the morning, having gained an hour crossing back from Central time to Mountain time when I crossed the state line. I used that hour (plus some extra) with a visit to the Living Desert State Park, on a hill overlooking the city. It's sort of the desert version of Northwest Trek, a wild animal park featuring local critters rather than exotic ones, and where at least some of them get to roam relatively free.

They had just about every animal native to the deserts of New Mexico known to mankind, and I managed to take pictures of quite a few of them:

I did not note what kind of birds these were, alas

Owls, obviously, not sure what kind. Barn owls, maybe?

Wild turkey

Road runner

Badger

The only critter they didn't have, which disappointed me, was an armadillo. They even had big cats and wolves, and, out in the area where they had room to run, they had bison, of all things, and deer, and desert bighorn sheep, none of which I managed to get photos of, unfortunately.

The view from the hilltop the park sat on was very nice as desert views go, too:

After my time with the animals, I went back down into Carlsbad in search of lunch, and once again Lonely Planet hit a home run. "The place was called Lucy's and it was very good." I ate way too many fajitas, and had twenty-five cent sopapillas for dessert.

"Then I headed 25 miles south of town to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. This was a completely different world. I turned off the highway and mountains just sort of appeared. The road switchbacked up 1400 feet higher than Carlsbad's 3000 feet, to a visitor center perched out in the middle of nowhere."

I bought a ticket that would allow me to hike down into the cave from the natural entrance, and headed out.

"Words are going to fail me here. [I wrote, and then wrote about a page of them -- bear with me because this place made an enormous impression on me] The path switchbacks below an amphitheater lined with stone benches:

From above

From below

"Down into what looks like a bottomless hole. A huge bottomless hole. Down, down, down, the light getting fainter with each step, until finally you realize that all you're seeing is electric lights placed strategically to provide just enough illumination to keep you from falling over something and killing yourself. Down. Your eyes adjust, sort of. A bit of level and you think, ah, finally, the bottom. Nope. Just a respite for your wobbly legs before yet another set of switchbacks. A touch of claustrophobia hits, then passes as you stare in awe at the magnificence of the speleothems (the collective term for stalagtites and co.).

"Finally, you reach the Big Room. You're 750 feet below the surface, in the biggest single cave chamber in the Western Hemisphere. Except that it's not a single chamber. It's a labyrinth of columns and draperies, soda straws and boulders bigger than a Mack truck. There's a place tall enough to take the Statue of Liberty, and places so tight that it's hard to walk through.

It's really hard to take photos inside the cave. I have lots more, but they're mostly blurry, basically useless, and meaningless to anyone but me, and I'm not going to try to inflict them on you

"Then you come around a corner, and there's a bloody elevator. A coffee shop, with decor straight out of the Jetsons. And restrooms. How they got the plumbing down there is beyond me. The elevator is the kicker, though. It's like the bloody Twilight Zone."

I was grateful not to have to climb back out the way I came in, though, I must say.

It was an adventure. And since the last time I'd been to Carlsbad Caverns was at the age of three, carried around the Big Room on my father's shoulders or so I'm told, it's an adventure I'm glad I had.

Like so many other things I did on this trip.

11 years ago today, Day 70

2010-11-08T20:59:00.000-08:00

Texas is a Very Large Place. I drove almost 300 miles eleven years ago today, one of the longest single-day stretches on the entire trip. "It certainly felt like it, mostly because it was one of the most monotonous days I've driven so far. But I am only about two hours from New Mexico, so I did make a lot of progress."

I left the motel west of Fort Worth and headed out on U.S. 377. "The land varied from being undulating to flat as a billiard table:"

Also, you wouldn't know it from these photos, but, "I've never seen so many mesquite trees in my life. No wonder Texans tout the wood for barbecuing. They're trying to get rid of the bloody things.

"It was interesting to see how the land went from looking Southern to looking distinctly Southwestern. Gentle hills changed gradually to bluffs, and then to flattopped mesas. The cactus got thicker. And the land got drier and drier. It's sort of like the parts of Arizona and New Mexico where you're driving endless miles to get somewhere like, say, the Grand Canyon, except in Texas there's no bloody destination. Just the miles."

I stopped late in the morning in a town named Comanche to use their library's computers. I should have taken a picture of that library building, because it was a nifty cross between a standard Carnegie library and the Old West. They'd had quite a time retrofitting computers into it, with wires strung all over the place, but their internet connection was one of the fastest of the trip.

I ate lunch in my last Southern cafeteria of the trip, which had terrific barbecue and cherry cobbler, but no fried okra, alas.

About mid-afternoon I drove through San Angelo, which had been the setting for a romance novel I liked. It was very obvious that the author of the romance novel either lived here or had visited here often enough to know the details, because the place looked exactly as I'd imagined it would.

And those were the highlights of the day. I ended the day in the city of Big Spring, which wasn't all that far from the twin cities of Midland/Odessa, where my father spent a fair amount of time on business during the year and a half we lived in Denver when I was a teenager. He was a petroleum engineer, so it stands to reason, given how many grasshoppers I also saw that day:

Yes, I know that's technically an oil rig. I grew up calling them grasshoppers.

11 years ago today, Day 69

2010-11-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

Eleven years ago this morning I left my mother's house and hit the road again. It was nice to see her again, and we did do some interesting things together (including visiting a Christmas bazaar -- which was rather odd given that it was 78dF outside and humid, which did not feel at all Christmassy), and I built her a bookcase from a kit to hold still more of her burgeoning paperback collection, and we went shopping for her semiannual front porch plant swap (in the spring it's out with the holly bushes and in with the geraniums, and in the fall, it is, of course, out with the geraniums -- always peach-colored -- and in with the holly bushes). But mostly we just sat around and talked. "From the moment I got there till the moment I left, from the minute I came downstairs in the morning till we hugged before I went back upstairs at night. As we always do."

"So the Visit With Mother is over. It was sort of nice to light in one place for a few days. But I'm tired of being social, even moreso after what I did today. It's a good thing I don't have to be social again until California."

What I did eleven years ago today was drive from Tyler to Dallas, call up a former coworker who lives in Fort Worth, and, as I'd promised when he left Tacoma while I was planning this trip the spring before, spend the afternoon visiting with him and his wife. It was nice to see him again -- he'd been one of the people I enjoyed working with most while I was at Tacoma Public Library, and he genuinely wanted to see my photos (he insisted, as a matter of fact).

So we spent the afternoon going through the fourteen rolls I'd had developed in Atlanta, and the three more rolls I'd had developed in Tyler (because my mother wanted to see the pictures of the house in New Orleans). The main comment I remember from his ongoing patter as we perused pictures was in regard to the photo I'd taken of the Logan, Ohio, city gates:

Which was, and I quote: "Why'd you take a picture of a Texas stop sign?"

Well, it just happened to be in the way.

They offered to let me spend the night, but I decided to go on to avoid Fort Worth's Monday morning rush hour, so I spent the night in a motel a few miles past the southwest edge of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.

Where I perused maps, trying to decide which way I wanted to go to get across the rest of Texas, and watched a Ken Burns documentary about the women's rights movement in the 19th century on PBS. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and co. Which brought back good memories of my visit to Seneca Falls.

11 years ago today, Day 63

2010-11-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Eleven years ago this morning I cleaned out and reorganized my car yet again. When you're basically living out of your car (well, not living, but I definitely spent a lot of time in it every day) for a couple of months straight, this process becomes absolutely necessary on a regular basis.

Then I headed west on the Interstate into Louisiana. "There wasn't much traffic, and I knew there wasn't much of anything to see off of it, anyhow. About an hour and a half later, I took the exit for backroads leading into Bastrop, Louisiana, from the east (the only main road into town comes in from the west). And I'd been right. Not much beyond cotton fields and trees and the occasional small town."

Once I got there and fed myself, I went looking for my grandmother's house, which was another of those addresses I'd inexplicably memorized at a very young age. The few times we visited Bastrop when I was a kid, we always stayed with my grandmother, and I had very good memories of her little white house with the green trim and screened-in front porch with its swing, and the enormous pecan tree out back. However, things had changed since the house was sold after she died fifteen years prior to this trip. And not in a good way. "I found [the house] after stopping once to ask directions, but I sort of wish I hadn't. It's awful. The neighborhood is horrible, all run down and full of trash, and the house itself was in terrible shape. Somebody'd painted it blue years ago, but the paint was all dingy and worn. The yard was full of junk, and it was a mess. Just barely recognizeable. Sad."

After that, I went to find Uncle Cooter (short for Carl Clay -- I did mention that we're in Louisiana, right?) and Aunt Helen's house, on Justus Road outside of town. I'd called from Baton Rouge two days prior to make sure they'd be there, and they were, along with their great-grandson who my aunt was babysitting while his mother was in nursing school.

This was a much happier experience. The last time I'd seen my Bastrop relatives (except for my late Aunt Punch and Uncle Doil, who came to my first wedding) was when I was thirteen. My uncle Cooter is my late father's younger brother and looks so much like him that he makes me want to doubletake. And my cousin Ellen, who was the closest cousin to me in age, stopped by to say hello and visit, too. So that was really nice. Ellen had four kids, which kind of boggled my brain. And I've never seen anyone whose appearance changed less from age twelve to age thirty-nine than hers had.

They offered to let me spend the night, but I decided to go on that evening, and spent the night in Bastrop's "big city," Monroe (MUN-ro, not mun-ROE). Which was fine, except that Monroe has the worst-tasting water I've ever had in my entire life. It tastes like what the Dragon's Mouth Spring in Yellowstone smells like. Apparently they've got more sulphur in their water than they can get rid of.

11 years ago tomorrow I drove the five hours from Bastrop to Tyler, Texas, where my mother lives. I spent five days in Tyler on this trip, and I'm going to spare you the blow-by-blow of a visit with my mother. Aside from getting some essentials taken care of, oil changes, tire checks, mailing a package or two, mostly what we did was what I always do when I visit my mother -- go out to eat and sit around and talk.

So I will pick this up again on Sunday, November 7th, when I start to make my long, long way across Texas!

11 years ago today, Day 62

2010-10-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

Eleven years ago today I woke up to rain. I also woke up with my head no longer hurting, for which I was very grateful.

Halloween at a battlefield. "Maybe not the best planning in the world..."

I headed north out of Baton Rouge along some pretty backroads, stopping at a fruit stand just before I crossed the Mississippi state line to get more satsumas, and up to Natchez, and the beginning of the Natchez Trace. The Trace follows the old route the Kaintucks (early Midwesterners) used to use to travel back north after floating goods down the Mississippi River to sell them. Then they'd sell their barges, buy a mule if there was enough money or walk if there wasn't, back up the Trace towards home. My trip on the Trace predates the writing of the Sharing Knife series of books by Lois McMaster Bujold, but her characters travel a path based on this part of American history. It was neat when I read the books to be able to picture it in my mind. The Trace is also the setting for several of Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon mysteries.

"The Trace -- the modern version, anyway -- is a lot like a flat Blue Ridge Parkway. It's gently curved and landscaped, devoid of commercial enterprise, and very beautiful. I found myself wishing I could drive it all the way to Nashville, where it ends, especially after I found out that Meriwether Lewis's grave is on the Tennessee part of the trace. But I had promised Mother I'd be at her house [in east Texas] day after tomorrow, and I want to stop in Bastrop tomorrow." Bastrop is the small town in northern Louisiana where my parents both grew up, and I still have aunts and uncles and cousins there.

So I turned off the Trace at Vicksburg and went off to explore the battlefield in the rain:

Monuments abounded, of course

Siege earthworks, or what's left of them

Grant's headquarters, if I remember correctly

Cannons on a ridgetop

Another monument

The detail on some of these monuments is incredibly realistic -- look at his trousers

Statue of Grant on horseback

More siegeworks with cannon and view off into the distance

A Union gunboat that had been pulled out of the Mississippi River within the last few years

"It was all very interesting. And I had a reaction similar, if more subdued in some ways (the weather was not conducive to getting out of the car much), reaction to the one I had in Gettysburg. Sounds under my hearing, things out of the corner of my eye. And something quite different. A feeling that my heart was clenched. Like a fist. Sorrow, or something. The site of a siege (and Vicksburg was a siege -- Grant and his troops made his name for fighting and stubbornness here over a period of weeks) has a very different feeling than the site of a short, pitched battle. Civilians were involved. The nature of the land is changed because there's time to build earthworks and fortifications. More time for memories to seep into the earth. Anyway. It was moving. And beautiful. And sad."

Also, without context I'd never have known this was the same war that was also fought in Gettysburg. As my mother once said after a visit to Gettysburg, "they didn't fight the same war we learned about." We, in her case, being Southerners, since she grew up in Louisiana. The text and subtext couldn't quite get their locations standardized out of them. Which is a good thing.

So was the sight of trick-or-treaters as I headed back to my motel in the rain.

11 years ago today, Days 60 and 61

2010-10-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

I am combining these two days, because I combined them in my journal. Also because I was out of town all day yesterday and today, so the two issues dovetailed nicely.

"I woke up to much muggier weather yesterday, and rode the streetcar and walked to the French Market for breakfast, where I ate beignets at the Cafe du Monde (which, I understand, you aren't allowed to leave New Orleans without doing)." They were hot, odd-shaped doughnuts drowning in powdered sugar and very tasty.

Then I spent the morning in the Cabildo on Jackson Square, which is a unit of the Louisiana History Museum, "and learned about Bienville and Iberville (who [my] mother has mentioned on numerous occasions but I was clueless about), among a lot of other Louisiana history. New Orleans [like Texas] has been under six flags. Spanish, French, Brit (for a very short time), its own (after it seceded but before joining the Confederacy), Confederate, and U.S., some more than once. A very interesting place in which to be born."

At noon, I took a streetcar to the Garden District for a walking tour, thinking I'd grab a bite to eat when I got there. I ended up walking quite some distance before the tour even started, but the po' boy (New Orleans's version of a sub) sandwich I found was pretty darned good.

The first part of the walking tour was spent in one of New Orleans's aboveground cemeteries. The water table there is so high that if you dig a hole it will fill with water, and the coffins float after a heavy rain. So they build these fancy little mausoleums:

The cemetery was interesting, but not why I'd taken the tour.

"I was expecting gardens in the Garden District, for some strange reason. The rest of the tour was mostly spent pointing out famous people's houses (the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, Anne Rice, Archie Manning) and places where movies (Cat People, Interview with a Vampire, Easy Rider, but not, to my disappointment, The Big Easy, the only New Orleans movie I've ever cared anything about) had been shot.

"There were a few (a very few -- most houses had either just lawns or they had a jungle) gardens, but they were pretty incidental to the tour. Not what I was expecting at all. Towards the end of the tour it really started getting muggy (in spite of the tour guide's insistence that it wasn't -- she obviously wouldn't have known dry weather had it walked up and kicked her in the teeth)" and I was coming down with a migraine (the second of the trip). So I left the group a little over two hours into the tour and went back to the hostel to nurse myself.

11 years ago this morning I left New Orleans, still with a pounding head, and headed up to Baton Rouge. I arrived about the middle of the morning, found a motel, turned the air conditioning on high, and crashed for a few hours.

In the afternoon I went out to see the Louisiana State University campus. My father graduated from LSU in, I want to say 1948, with a degree in petroleum engineering, so I was interested in trying to find things that might have been there when he was, which I didn't have a whole lot of luck doing. He has his name on a plaque there, too, because once upon a time not long after he died, my sisters and I contributed to a scholarship in his name, but I couldn't find it, either.

"Oh, and I happened to arrive on the day of the LSU/ Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) football game." For Washingtonians, that's like the Apple Cup. Or for Indianans, like the Indiana University/Purdue game (my grad school alma mater is IU, so my favorite team is IU and whoever beats Purdue). Anyway, it made getting around campus somewhat problematic.

So I gave up on finding anything on campus, went to the public library and did email, went back to the motel, and crashed again.

Migraines while traveling are, if possible, even worse than one when I'm at home.

11 years ago today, Day 59

2010-10-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

It's kind of odd, writing about New Orleans pre-Katrina. I haven't been back since the hurricane, so I don't know what parts of what I'm writing about are still there, and what parts have been destroyed. I do know that the French Quarter was mostly spared, and that's where I spent most of this day.

The St. Charles streetcar is cool. Sort of like the San Francisco trolley only without the hills. It dropped me at the edge of the French Quarter, where I started off on foot for the visitor center at the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, where one of my guidebooks said I could sign up for free walking tours. Unfortunately, this turned out to be another thing like DC where I had to be there at the crack of dawn or they'd all be filled up. But they told me about the Louisiana State Museum walking tours, and I did manage to sign up with the one for the French Quarter that afternoon and the one for the Garden District and cemeteries the next day.

Then I went to the Apothecary Museum, which was fascinating. "Did you know that prescriptions, as such, didn't exist until the 1930s?" The museum also had a lovely jungle, er, courtyard:

I am less impressed than most with masses of tropical foliage, because I grew up in Southern California. I'm more a big perennial border, flowering bulb and shrub kind of gal. But it was awfully pretty.

I needed to eat lunch before the walking tour started, and once again, Lonely Planet came to the rescue with a restaurant called The Gumbo Shop. I swear, almost every bite of the best regional food I ate on this trip came from a Lonely Planet recommendation, and The Gumbo Shop was no exception.

My mother (and I) make something we call gumbo, with chicken and tomatoes and sausage and okra (among other things), but what The Gumbo Shop served me was more like a thick brown soup than what I thought of as gumbo. With shrimp and and an utterly incredible flavor (my mouth is watering just thinking about it). The bread was French and crusty and delicious, too.

I was seated in a corner next to a local older couple who were very friendly, too.

Then it was time for the walking tour. "The lady who took us around told us she was 78, and had moved here in 1948 from Illinois. She still had her northern accent and it sounded odd to hear it after a week or so of Southern ones. She was very knowledgeable, and told us all kinds of historical and architectural stuff." And she walked my feet off.

Here's some standard touristy photos of the beautiful French quarter metalwork on the balconies and some of the biggest, lushest Boston ferns I've ever seen:

I mean, just look at them

After the walking tour, I did something I'd always wanted to do. I went back to Jackson Square:

Where I had my cards read by a tarot reader who was one of the many buskers set up around the edge of the square. I've mucked about with the tarot for years off and on, but I'd never had my cards professionally read. It was great fun, and fascinating.

Then I went to the French Market (sort of New Orleans's answer to the Pike Place Market in Seattle) and bought a satsuma (a delicious relative of the tangerine) and a praline.

Then I took my tired, sore feet back to the St. Charles streetcar, where I collapsed in a heap on a bench while it took me back to the hostel. What a wonderful, wonderful day.

11 years ago today, Day 58

2010-10-27T20:56:00.000-07:00

"An odd feeling, being back in the city I was born in. I wish I remembered something about it. Pretty much anything would do. But I was 3 1/2 [when we moved away] and one doesn't remember much of anything at that age." And, "it was definitely a shorts sort of day. Almost 80 degrees and a bit of salt stickiness in the air."

I crossed into Mississippi and stopped briefly at a welcome station and rest area, with the most elegant picnic table shelters I think I've ever seen:

My second stop was at the Gulf Islands National Seashore. I turned off the highway there thinking that a national seashore would, well, have access to a beach. Silly me. The road ended at a visitor center in the middle of a swamp. An interesting visitor center, and a very pretty swamp, but not at all what I'd had in mind. So after a little while I headed back up to the highway in search of a beach again.

I found one in Biloxi. And a lighthouse, which is always a plus in my opinion:

Biloxi Lighthouse -- they do tours now, but I don't think they did then

Beach -- and casino -- at Biloxi

This is where I got out and waded again. And was stalked by a great blue heron again. I don't know what it was about herons watching me wade in the Gulf, but every time I put a toe in the water, there one was.

After lunch I crossed into Louisiana and across Lake Ponchartrain. First thing I did was go find the house my family was living in when I was born. I had the address memorized. I've always had that address memorized -- I'm not sure why, given how young I was when we left there. But the house was easy to find, on the west bank in a nice little neighborhood:

I was glad to see that it looked like somebody loved it and cared for it. Nobody was home when I knocked, but a very nice man who was working on his car in the driveway next door kindly let me go in his backyard and peer over the chain link fence. "There were two reasons I wanted to do that. One was that I wanted to see if I remembered the backyard at all (I didn't -- the "remembrances" I do have are obviously because I've been told the stories of Mother pushing me in a swing back there so many times that I've internalized them). The other was that I wanted to see the addition Daddy [we always called him Daddy, not Pop or Dad or Father, even as adults] put on the back. It was odd, looking at something Daddy built over forty years ago and left behind a few years later, never to see it again. Odd to see where my family lived before I was born. ... I miss Daddy" [he died six years before my Long Trip].

That house did not survive Hurricane Katrina, by the way. After Google updated its satellite pictures I went and looked, and there's nothing but a concrete slab where that house used to be.

After that trip down memory lane, I went in search of the hostel in the Garden District where I had a reservation, "a rather large cluster of rundown buildings around a courtyard, and a converted apartment building across the street." But it had free parking, and was only a block from the St. Charles streetcar, which was an excellent thing.

"I can't actually believe I'm here. What an odd feeling, 36 years later. But I'm glad."

11 years ago today, Day 57

2010-10-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

Here I sit with the heat running, after our first big fall storm of the season. The high today was 46. It's been raining since Sunday. And eleven years ago today I reached the Gulf of Mexico and was enjoying what I, after seventeen years near Seattle, think of as a nice, warm summer day. Around eighty degrees. On the 26th of October. Sigh.

Anyway, the Gulf was really dropdead gorgeous. I've never seen so many lovely shades of turquoise in my life:

These were taken from where I first encountered the Gulf, near Fort Walton Beach, Florida

I rolled up my pant legs and waded a bit here. The water was as warm as a comfy bath, there were no waves to speak of, and the slope was so gradual that I must have walked the length of a football field before I was in up to my knees. A great blue heron standing on a sandbar further out and I kept an eye on each other as I splashed around.

You have to understand. I grew up on the West Coast, and the ocean I am most familiar with is the Pacific, which does not generally live up to its name. My mother's reaction to the family's first trip to the beach after we moved from New Orleans to suburban Los Angeles when I was three was that it was far too cold and rough to be a swimming ocean. And, of course, here in western Washington, beaches are for walking on, not swimming.

I had to go inland a bit to get past Pensacola, then made my way out onto the barrier island road, which ended up at a ferry that goes across Mobile Bay:

I took this while waiting for the ferry to arrive

A pelican and a couple of seagulls on the ferry dock pilings

From the ferry

The ferry ride was wonderful. It was cooler on the water, and the views were lovely. That was the second time I'd seen pelicans on my Long Trip, too (the first was on Lake Yellowstone, so quite a contrast -- I don't know if they're even the same species of pelican). I got slightly lost making my way from the ferry landing through Mobile proper to I-10, where the motel I was looking for was, but I did eventually find it.

All in all, a very good day. And the next day I was headed for New Orleans, the city where I was born, which I hadn't visited since I was three years old!

11 years ago today, Day 56

2010-10-25T21:28:00.000-07:00

I wasn't very impressed with Stone Mountain, Georgia:

For one thing, it cost me six bucks just to go in and take a picture. For another, it wasn't nearly as magnificent as Mt. Rushmore. But I was curious, and satisfied that curiosity before I left Atlanta that morning. End of that story.

I headed around Atlanta and south to Warm Springs, Georgia, the site of my third and last Long Trip encounter with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at his little White House:

Warm Springs is the site of a then rundown little health resort where FDR went to bathe in the mineral springs in hopes that it would help the paralysis left from his bout of polio. There's a wonderful HBO movie about FDR and his polio, partially filmed on this site, starring my favorite actor Kenneth Branagh, who did a terrific job despite the fact that he looks nothing like FDR through the face. The movie is called Warm Springs, oddly enough.

Warm Springs itself was a fascinating place. I spent several hours there, going through the little White House, and through the museum, where I saw, among many other things, FDR's hand-controlled car:

And strolled down a walkway lined with stones, one from each state in the Union, that led to a rather lovely fountain:

After I left Warm Springs, I drove down through Columbus, Georgia, where I stopped to run a couple of errands, and then down into Alabama, to the town of Enterprise, where I spent the night.

Enterprise has since, unfortunately, had its fifteen minutes of fame in the form of a tornado that struck and completely destroyed its high school in 2007, killing nine people, injuring many others.

Somehow I managed to miss the Boll Weevil Monument, though. And I drove on both the Lewis Grizzard Highway (Grizzard was a very funny newspaper columnist), and the Billy Watson Highway. I never did figure out who Billy Watson was at the time [googles]. Nope. Still nothing. Anyone know? I'd be grateful...

11 years ago, Day 55

2010-10-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

Fourteen rolls of film. Fourteen rolls of film. That's how many photos I had developed eleven years ago today. We'd dropped them off on our way to Rome the day before, and, after H drove me around parts of Atlanta, we stopped to pick them up.

Atlanta was a nice place to be in late October -- if I ever was to go back there, I think I'd try to choose either that or early spring. The temperatures were in the low seventies, and the air was nice and dry. None of the humidity that I'd dealt with in my one previous visit there. But of course that was for the American Library Association conference in 1991, and the ALA conference usually takes place around the Fourth of July, usually in the hottest, most humid place the conference committee can come up with. They have the January midwinter conference in Chicago, for balance.

We drove around Emory University, and through a ritzy part of town called, oddly enough for a city in the heart of the Bible Belt, Druid Hills. H didn't know the origin of the name, I made a note to check and find out if I could, then never did. [googles cursorily] Nope. If anyone does know where the name came from, I'd be most curious to know...

Then, finally, the camera store opened (it was Sunday eleven years ago today, too), and we went to pick my film up. Then we went to a pub and spent the rest of the afternoon going through all 504 (14x36) photos. I was very pleased with how most of them turned out, too. And it was fun showing H (who if she wasn't actually fascinated, gave a very good impression of being so) where all I'd been. We then stopped by her office where she scanned a few of them onto a disk for me and went back to her place, where she got herself ready for her workweek, and I gathered myself together for the next leg of my trip.

11 years ago today, Day 54

2010-10-23T17:06:00.000-07:00

I have no pictures today or until the day I left Atlanta, I'm afraid. And I forgot to mention one last thing on the way back to H's from the restaurant the night before eleven years ago today. "After we left her friends, we drove back into Atlanta and stopped at a drive-thru doughnut place. At midnight. And there was a line of cars. I was like, H, what the hell are we doing? When she handed me the hot box with the incredible smell wafting out of it and told me to eat one, I obeyed. The darned thing melted in my mouth." Today, of course, Krispy Kreme doughnuts are pretty much a cliché, to the point where there's a KK outlet three miles from my house here in Washington state (and a lot of people don't think much of them, although I still like them). But at the time? I was pretty darned impressed.

The next morning we got a late start, got hold of H's friend V, and drove up to the small town of Rome, Georgia (my second town named Rome on my Long Trip, the first having been in New York), and went looking for grave houses. "Long story. A young relative of V's is doing some kind of research on them, and H was sure she'd seen one at the cemetery in Rome. So we went looking, but didn't find it. I never did find out specifically what a grave house was, but I assume it's an old Southern term for a crypt or a mausoleum.

"Anyway, this cemetery was on a very steep hill, and V wound her enormous Infiniti around the little paved roads and the narrow unpaved tracks and at one point wound up backing up several hundred yards on one of those unpaved tracks on the side of the hill. 30 feet up on the left and 50 feet straight down on the right. It was quite an adventure."

That evening we went to see a production of Romeo and Juliet, which was mostly pretty good. "Juliet started out sounding like Melanie Griffith and I didn't think I was going to be able to handle two hours of that, but she improved so quickly that I think it may have been deliberate on the part of the actress. Juliet the child vs. Juliet the adult." In my humble opinion, the actor who makes or breaks most productions of R&J is Mercutio, and this production had a brilliant Mercutio.

After the play we went out to a very fashionably late supper (we closed the restaurant down at midnight). The food was good, but my stomach objected to the timing. We didn't get to sleep till about two in the morning.

It was good to be social again. I hadn't seen a familiar face since Cincinnati, almost a month previous. I like traveling alone, don't get me wrong, but even I need to see someone who knows me every once in a while.

11 years ago today, Day 53

2010-10-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my 100th post on this blog. I didn't notice that until this morning.

"I woke up to another hard frost this morning. I have a feeling I got out of the mountains just in time, as they were predicting snow on the higher elevations on Sunday, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they got it." This was written from Atlanta that night.

"The last of the Parkway was beautiful. It goes up to 6000+ feet," which is as high as Sunrise on Mt. Rainier and almost as high as the Upper Geyser Basin at Yellowstone:

"So parts of it already looked like winter, with bare trees. The wind was howling pretty good, too. ... But on the lower parts, the technicolor sheep pelts were spread everywhere, and I could see forever from every overlook:

"Especially down to the low valleys where the fog settled like the colored stuff in a lava lamp when you unplug it. As if it had been spread with a knife:"

I reached I-26 just south of Asheville, and spent the afternoon on it and I-85, making my way to Atlanta. I-26 "was a good, four-lane highway, going down, down, down, and I had only one objection to it. It was, however, a serious one, and one I had to contend with all the way to Atlanta, and, I expect, will have to all the way across the South [which was true]. Kudzu. Not that it was growing across the highway or attacking me or the car or anything, but there were great stretches of it along both sides of the highway, bowing over trees, coating the ground, and generally smothering everything in its path. The very ground looked as if it were crying for help. It's as sinister-looking as it actually is. Horrible, horrible stuff. I tried not to look at it, but sometimes I couldn't help it, and every time I did, it made me shudder. How am I, with my phobia of vines, going to make it across a South smothered with the stuff?"

It makes me cringe just to remember that. I have a horror of vines, to the point where I can't even prune my own clematis, the result of being allergic to ivy (the regular kinds, not just the usual reaction to the poison variety) and recurring bad dreams resulting from a shoot of ivy growing through the electric socket and a wisteria that tried to take shingles off the roof and grew down into the chains of a porch swing in one of the houses where I grew up. Kudzu, which grows 80+ feet a season and engulfs land by the acre, is my worst nightmare.

Anyway, I did make it to Atlanta without being strangled by vines, or stranded in a construction zone, for that matter. As my mother says, I wish I had the concession for orange barrels, because I'd be rich. I met up with my friend H that evening (the whirlwind from Yellowstone). She took me out to a hilarious dinner with some of her engineering friends then back to stay with her for a couple of nights, one result of which was that I will never look at an elevator the same way again. As another Atlanta friend says (one I met via email after my Long Trip), "further deponent sayeth not."

11 years ago today, Day 52

2010-10-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

"Today, while beautiful weatherwise, has had its ups and downs." Mostly of the touron variety, alas.

I drove in to the Smokies through Gatlinburg (clogged with traffic at nine in the morning) and headed down towards Cade's Cove, where I experienced one of the worst traffic jams I've ever encountered, and that includes Seattle at rush hour. An hour and forty-five minutes to go five miles is a bad traffic jam, yes?

The grist mill

I'd had a lot of expectations for Cade's Cove, having read about it fairly extensively before my arrival. Almost every one of them (historical, natural) was pretty much torn to shreds. It was picturesque, I'll give it that:

The church from the old settlement

But it was full of incredibly rude people on a narrow, poorly-designed road.

Cade's Cove, before it became part of the national park, was a backwoods settlement. A lot of what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park was privately owned, unlike the large western parks the land for which was mostly government land when the parks were created.

One disastrous (I use that word deliberately) consequence of the park having been assembled piecemeal was that the federal government was forced as part of its acquisition of the land to allow free entry into the park in perpetuity. Most national parks charge a fee for entry, ranging from a couple of dollars for the tiny parks to $25 for places like Yellowstone and Yosemite. Having the most heavily-visited park in the national park system not be able to charge a fee does several really rotten things to the entire park system as well as to the Smokies in particular. One, it contributes no funds to the national park system in spite of being very expensive to run. Two, people value what they pay for. It was extremely obvious in my short visit to the Smokies that people do not value this park the way they do, say, Yellowstone or Mt. Rainier. Three, it's not fair to the other parks and their visitors that they must charge admission and the Smokies get away without doing so.

Anyway, there's a gravel road that leads up out of Cade's Cove, and when I hadn't made it halfway around the loop in two hours, I decided to get the heck out of Dodge. It was well worth the steep climb and the rough road, which my little Owl took like a trouper:

View from the top

A deer along the way

Besides, I'd have missed the deer.

After a picnic lunch in an overcrowded picnic area at 2:30 pm on the Newfound Gap road, I took the turnoff to Clingman's Dome, and the half-mile trail to the lookout tower:

The flying saucer lookout at the top of Clingman's Dome

The view from the top

And another

Clingman's Dome, on a day like the one when I was there, is one of those "I swear I can see the curvature of the earth" places.

But see the trees that look burned in that last picture? If only that had been a fire. "Some aphid from Europe destroyed all the Fraser Firs, and the only sure way they have of saving the Smokies variety from extinction is that they've preserved some of the seeds. They're trying to save the few trees that are left, but the only sure way is to let all the trees die off so that the aphid has no food, let the aphids die off, then to plant those seeds." Sad.

"After I got back down from Clingman's Dome, I headed east and back to the Parkway. All of a sudden the traffic melted away. It was delirious."

I spent the night in the town of Maggie Valley, went out to a nice restaurant for dinner, ate too much, found a motel which happened to have a pretty spectacular view:

the view across Maggie Valley from my motel room door

And collapsed in a heap.

60 more miles of Parkway (the part I skipped because of the fog yesterday) tomorrow, then down to Atlanta, to see my friend Harriet again.

11 years ago today, Day 51

2010-10-20T19:28:00.000-07:00

Woke up to hear rain pattering on the roof, but the Parkway looked just as beautiful in gray weather as it did in clear:

This last photo is near Grandfather Mountain

I stopped at the visitor center at Grandfather Mountain and ran into a ranger whose brother lives in Bremerton, about an hour from Tacoma. We ended up discussing Olympic National Park rather than the Blue Ridge, but that was okay.

My next stop was at a folk art center near Asheville, where I indulged in a little early Christmas shopping. Then, because of the fog, mostly:

I decided to get off the Parkway at Asheville, and head straight over to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The hostel I was headed for was on the Tennessee side of the park, so I drove over the Newfound Gap road to Gatlinburg and then turned north to find the hostel. Which was right up there with the hostel in Gary, South Dakota, for out in the middle of nowhere luxury. I had what amounted to a very nice motel room all to myself, with acres and acres of trails in deep woods to wander on. I'm pretty sure I was the elderly lady who ran the place's only guest that night, because she took the better part of an hour to check me in.

I was glad to hear that the weather was supposed to improve again the next day, since it was my day to explore the Smokies.

Repeating History

Montana museums

my first blog interview!

The Mt. Rainier shooting, national parks, and sacred space

A time to reckon, I guess

Twas the night before...

Success, success, I did it, I did it!

progress, and an interesting Yellowstone link

I love the Internet

And it is officially Day 1

plotting

Oh. My.

home again, home again

more redwoods and plenty of ocean

into the redwoods

On our way home again

WorldCon, Day 4

WorldCon, Day 3

WorldCon Day 2

WorldCon 2011, Day 1

Mono Lake and on to Reno

over the pass and down to the desert

in which I climb a lot of stairs -- and I mean a *lot*

big trees, Glacier Point, and more crowds, alas

into Yosemite

more Crater Lake, Mt. Shasta, and a long day on the road

This summer's travels, starting with Crater Lake

tortitude, lesson one

I'm being a proud cat mama

new occasional cats

Mt. Rainier by starlight

aw, shucks

And another small accomplishment

Virtual Exhibits!

what's in a name?

my first hike of the summer

Something I never really thought I'd see

too soon

it's been a long time

This is why I live in the Pacific Northwest

And on a completely different subject...

a finished exhibit

just wondering...

promise

Have you ever swung a wall around?

spring, winter

a sad week

so much

Being a bad correspondent.

Wow

Pineapple Express and NaNoWriMo

I am sorry

11 years ago today, Day 81

11 years ago today, Day 80

11 years ago today, Day 79

11 years ago today, Day 78

11 years ago today, Day 77

11 years ago today, Day 76

11 years ago yesterday, Day 75

11 years ago today, Day 74

11 years ago today, Day 73

11 years ago today, Day 72

11 years ago today, Day 71

11 years ago today, Day 70

11 years ago today, Day 69

11 years ago today, Day 63

11 years ago today, Day 62

11 years ago today, Days 60 and 61

11 years ago today, Day 59

11 years ago today, Day 58

11 years ago today, Day 57

11 years ago today, Day 56

11 years ago, Day 55

11 years ago today, Day 54

11 years ago today, Day 53

11 years ago today, Day 52

11 years ago today, Day 51

in which I climb a lot of stairs -- and I mean a lot