Wearing...

...my designated job-interview outfit. Of course, the resumé isn't ready, and I haven't been cruising the job sites lately. Last day in present job is July 6; it's a little too soon to jobhunt seriously. Besides, if I think about it I become painfully disengaged from the present moment at work. Like right now. Just wanna go home and hide under the bed.

Pertinent horror story from library patron. They are trying to identify pueblo pots they used to own: moving van burned up between here and California and they lost everything...

Done, Done, Done With The Desert

High tide at First Beach, Quileute Reservation, on Saturday.
Turn your volume down before you click. What I wanted to catch was the rattling thunder of the backrush pulling cobbles down the foreshore, but the little camera's audio pickup was overwhelmed.

By August, I will be living out there somewhere within reach of Ocean. For now, back to work here in the high desert.

Seeing The Thirteenth Redd

On Thursday M and her friend counted 12 steelhead redds in their assigned stretch of creek. Last night at dusk we walked down into the nearby stretch, and she showed me how to recognize the disturbed gravel patch which means it's a place where a fish dug a hole and buried eggs. I put on her waders and pretended to see what she was pointing out. Maybe I saw. I certainly got to experience the bliss of standing in the middle of the creek...

I Never Met a Tide Table I Didn't Love

Now there are three: in my shirt pocket the one I tore out of the newspaper the day I arrived—and isn't it DIVINE to be someplace where there's a tide table in the newspaper— and the one for April we got at the lodge in Kalaloch; and in the pocket of my pack the elaborate one with conversion tables and suns and moons and whatnot for the whole year for the whole northwest that came from the all-in-one store in Forks.

Yesterday and today drove out to La Push. Beautiful capital-O-Ocean. No whales, though other people were seeing them. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean. No rain yesterday, some rain today. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean.

Um, yeah, I also talked to a storage place about where to put my stuff when I get here, and bought a county street map, and found out what I will need to get a library card when I get here,

and bought my hostess a big Stanley thermos for a bread-and-butter present. Haven't seen her all day, she got a call early this morning from a volunteer biologist who needed help counting redds in Siebert Creek (?? wikipedia says 'a salmon redd is the space at the bottom of a stream that a spawning salmon makes for its eggs'). She crashed around assembling her waders and daypack and rushing-away breakfast and (not very good) thermos and so on, and was gone. By the time I got back from the Ocean, she had gone off to Port Townsend to hear a naturalist talk about newt migrations. Or something equally entrancing.

Did, Might

M loves Beach Four on the Olympic Coast the best, because it has tidepools. We walked, and got rained on. She took a longer walk, to further tidepools. I got my book and myself pervasively damp, mismanaging raingear. Coming home we were chasing a rainbow for almost an hour. Caught it at Crescent Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

M is planning a trip to Bhutan for next month, so she can finish her book. Yesterday's expedition was by way of playing hookey from preparations. Today she is making phone calls about immunizations, and such. I might go out to La Push. The gray whale migration is passing.

Beach Four
Crescent Bay

Closer To The Ocean

The maples have their catkins blooming, and leaves beginning to leaf out. I dreamed last night the tide was full in the bays and inland waters I drove past yesterday. There's a cherry tree out the window in fullest dress.

I'm in my friend M's cabin in the woods behind Port Angeles. An agenda-less spy trip. Look at places to rent, poke around town. Go out to the ocean. The real ocean. I read the apartment ads in the paper yesterday. M tells me I can stay with her as much as I want, and that she might go away next winter and I could sublet. We'll see.

Day rose beautiful. There will be pictures later, but around here you go when the weather says go.

Migrating Northwest

Ever so slowly.

By the fall, I will be closer to the ocean. Meanwhile, nearly comatose with fear of change; and thinking nearly every minute about work, as I have done for about the past 20 years... that work which will no longer be in the center of my life beginning about the middle of July. The center of my life will be the sound of waves on the shore. And if it's not enough, whew, then what.

Since I offered to make this blog, I have been north to meet with my teacher; and south, to meet with sandhill cranes; and have weathered (ha ha, inadvertent pun) about six weeks of unlikely unlocal deep snow winter; and for the first time, after 22 years, am having anxiety dreams about the workplace every night.

Boy, I really don't know about this. But ok. Here is a place for the community of people who kept in touch with Bookinista to keep in touch with each other.

Hello out there.