once

I bought a big blue chevy van off craigslist in Omaha with my last 500$ (actually, I only had 400, I had to beg the rest) and spent a week reupholstering the inside and making it my own: new fitted sheet on the bed, curtains, side panels, it was beautiful. It was October and I was due back on Sunshine Farm in Chelan, WA by the 11th for the wedding/social event of the season. During the course of driving those 1600 miles I blew a tire in South Dakota, I think it was South Dakota, it's always fucking South Dakota, that state goes on forever...and it was cold and night so I just slept in the van and the next morning in the frost I was trying to put the spare on and I didn't have any parts and I was really really tired and ready to go home. A man driving a delivery truck stopped and helped me, he had the parts. I wouldn't have been able to do anything without him, actually, because the spare was practically welded to the rack and I didn't have a jack or anything. He drove me to a nearby town so we could get a big enough wrench and we changed the tire and he recommended that I follow him to the next town because he delivers tires and could get me a deal on a new one. So I did and then they had to call around and try and find a cheap tire and I waited and waited and it snowed and snowed and then they put it on and by the time I was ready to go, the man had gone, but he had already paid for it all, it was nearly 100 dollars. His name was Rex, which coincidentally is my totem animal. A T. Rex.
So back on the road and smoking cigarettes and getting 12 mpg if I'm lucky, just charging it all to my credit card, and listening to my mp3 player with headphones tied to the earflaps of my winter hat as I wind around these mountain passes and there was so much goddamn construction and it was night again and I was terrified driving a van that big while other cars screamed around me. The first time I'd driven mountain passes since the accident, I'm sure. Yeah, because to get to the Seattle airport to get TO Omaha I had had to hitch hike, but it was day and there was no snow.
About 2 hours into Washington, it was very late at night and there was no way I was stopping, this was the 10th and I was so excited to get there and sleep and see Ben and Judy and Juliette. I was on the phone with Amanda and she was sad because her dad died and I was telling her that there was no reason for her to apologize to me, I was happy to talk to her and then my phone cut out, so I was calling her back and not paying attention to the speed limit in the small town I was going through. Was it Wymore? No...some farm kind of name in Douglas county? It was very small and I accelerated back to highway speed before I should have and was pulled over and then it turned out that my license was suspended for some tickets I never paid back in the spring. I got a ticket mailed to me after the accident because I admitted in the emergency room that I hadn't been wearing a seatbelt. Which was bullshit because I asked a dozen times if I was going to be ticketed and said that I wasn't going to tell them anything, but it was very stressful and they had said I wasn't going to get in trouble, they just needed an account of what happened. Regardless, I never paid it because I no longer had a car (not because of the accident) and I didn't care when I got the letter saying my license was suspended. Plus I was broke and taking care of my boyfriend with 2 broken arms and neither of us had any transportation and the ticket was in Wenatchee, we were staying in Chelan and I still was working full time at the school and they wouldn't help me at all on the phone. So the cop who pulled me over in October said that he had to take me to the station, 30 minutes away, so that I couldn't drive anymore on a suspended license. I was 3 hours from home at this point and he drove me in the opposite direction and I didn't bring my coat or anything but cigarettes and a copy of the Plague Dogs by Richard Adams. The whole way there I alternated between crying and moaning and then trying to engage this fucker in a conversation about whether or not the laws always align perfectly with his personal ethics, and what a person is to do when they don't. At the station I was pissed. I was supposed to sleep there because it was, like, 20 degrees out and windy. I was so pissed that I couldn't do it, so I went out and tried to hitch a ride back to my van, where at least I had a bed and my food and my phone charger. It was 1:30 in the morning and so cold that I had to walk back to the station a couple times to warm back up, because no one was stopping to pick me up. Finally, around 3 or 4 a newspaper delivery guy stopped and said he would give me a ride after his route, which sounded fine to me. This guy was hilarious, I've never met a zanier dude. He was ranting about government conspiracies- training the troops in Iraq for combat against civilians, to loose them on us eventually, and how he had seen bigfoot on his delivery, etc. He was swerving all over the road, but it was these dirt backroads, we just seemed to be winding farther and farther away, I had no idea which direction we were facing and we came up on the plateau and the moon was setting and it was so huge and red, I'd never seen it like that before. Then he almost hit a coyote because we were smoking a bowl and he never had his hands on the wheel, he was waving them around or grabbing my arm or shining this flashlight on his map or something. Eventually we got to the town that my car was supposed to be right outside of and the dude was CONVINCED that he was running out of gas and he was pissed. He thought there was a gas station in this town and he couldn't find it and kept driving in circles and finally said that he had just barely enough to make it back to the bigger town he had picked me up in, the one with the station, and he had to do that or be stranded. Since he said we were in the town where my car was I told him to just leave me and I could walk to it. It was so dark and cold and I couldn't find it anywhere. I was terrified. This was probably the moment in my life that I most thought I was really in trouble. It was just so cold and there weren't any cars and nothing was open. I saw headlights finally and flagged them down and tried to tell them the deal and this couple was not hearing it. They definitely thought I was not legit. I swear to God the woman in the passenger seat was a man. But they didn't care where my van was or how cold I was, they kept trying to pull away and I was practically trying to climb in the window. They finally just took me the opposite direction I wanted to go, into the center of the town, where some little diner was opening early. Real early, like 4:45 or something they let me in. I guess hunting season was starting. I was so tired and sick at this point I didn't know what to do. I got a coffee and just sat there like a sad sack of shit for maybe 3 hours until some guy asked if I was waiting on a ride. There wasn't anyone coming for me and my phone wasn't working and none of my friends had cars anyways. He gave me a ride to my van. Now the cops from the night before had sworn up and down that they would arrest me and impound the van if I tried to drive it away, but I didn't know what to do. First I slept. For a few hours, but then I woke up and I still didn't have a working phone or anyone coming to get me so I didn't have anything to do BUT drive on home. I was scared, but no one pulled me over and it was fine. I got home just in time to have a glass of wine at the reception. I was tired. Later Ben and I drove up some mountain to a scenic spot and I was just so exhausted, plus the wine and pot and no food that I just started puking everywhere and thought I was going to die or pass out or something. He had to drive us home and he was scared and we had Judy and Juliette in the car and I puked in a bucket.

This is my living room, the drape to the left is covering my window that faces east across the river. We have mattresses instead of couches. Here are the pets, all sleeping together.

My yard after the big snow this weekend, there was so much! This view is standing on my porch, looking south towards wenatchee.

These are some pumpkins we carved for halloween.

Looking straight across the river from my front porch. Sometimes when I wake up and go outside, it is beautiful!

This is Juliette, asleep with her tongue out.

The other side of my living room, that window faces the sheer rock wall. The blanket looks the same because we did rearranging between those two pictures.

View from almost the road, looking northish, there's my trailer and the landlord's house, the busted cars (edit, I guess all you can see is the tractor, the cars are a little more to the left), the mountain, the dumpster.

My trailer again from the driveway, you can kind of see the door and the thing I call the porch. The window to the right is the kitchen.

The living room window that faces the rock wall. Excellent, eh?

My landlord's goats and that rock they love to stand on.


A sideways picture of my car with some bighorn sheep above it. Can you spot them?

When I walk judy north past the landlord's to the rock quarry and then look across the river


The rock quarry.

The entire Loop Trail!

Yesterday I walked the entire loop trail with Judy and a friend and it is 11 and a half miles long! We just started walking and then we were so far that it seemed to make more sense to keep walking rather than turn around, since it is a loop, and now boy are my feet and legs tired! Judy had a fun time, though, and today she is pooped. Plus, she needed the workout, she stuck her head in the dog food bag again and ate so much while I was out.
In other news, my friend Amanda is going to move into my trailer with me so it will be so much cheaper and more environmentally friendly for both of us! We are excited, but I am also nervous because I need a lot (A LOT) of time alone and Amanda likes a lot of time with other people, so we will have to be careful of each other's feelings and needs.
Also, I'm reading the Joy Luck Club right now. It is pretty good, fast easy reading and very interesting because the characters are so different from me in all of their motives and beliefs.

Make a Difference Day

We had a mandatory day of service on Saturday where we drove out to some camp (camp Zanika) and helped them winterize for the coming...well, winter. When I do these pictures, none of them are mine, btw, we have a shared photobucket where people can put their pictures and first I pick out the ones I want to share with you, and then I think of clever or entertaining captions to accompany them on this site. This picture shows me and steph (hiding in the box), debbie, and our supervisor toby. This, p.s. is the closest picture I have to us actually working. We were moving stuff and decided to hide in the box and then jump out and shout when we passed the other people cutting wood. Fun!

Oh, actually this is of us working. It is me (Huck Finn), Amanda (Huck Finn) and Judy (Tom Sawyer, she didn't speak up or anything, so she got the lame character) They have a long floating dock that is segmented and we helped bring it in for the winter by rowing it to shore once it had been cut free. Fun!

This is our other supervisor, Julie. She is raking the outdoors. Good luck Julie!

here are a couple obligatory pictures of how pretty it was out there

Oops, Judy just walked right into that one! (hehe, I'm lame)

We also had to build a huge bonfire to burn brush in, there was so much brush. Once it had burned down a bit, boys started daring each other to jump over it. Diarmid did so, as shown in this picture. A lot of other guys did too, but no other picture turned out so awesome. P.S. Those are mine and Amanda's shoes by the fire, they got completely soaked with that dock project, when I slipped and fell and my feet went in the water.

So here is me and Amanda, barefoot by the fire, along with Yolanda and Judy

stuff and things

This is at the ocean shores thing that I mentioned before, and these are all of my ameripeeps in costume. I think that is the frowniest I was all night, and I'm not sure how it happened, although I do remember that Grease Lightening was playing when they pulled us out to take pictures.

In other news, my mouse had babies this morning, 10 black eyed little squirmies, I don't know yet how many males and females and coat color/types yet. The story on the mice is that I was going to do an afterschool class on genetics and it was all planned out and I got some mice for the project and then the next day was told that they were going to do the really required stuff first, enrichment would be next semester. Oh well, this way I will have more information on what mice would be good to cross to make an exciting experiment for the kids.

Also, I just found out that one of my kids, the new student who speaks very very little english, got a 96% on her science test that I helped her study for! That is really awesome because I am basically the only person she was getting the information from because she can't understand the lectures, so it was me and Wendy translating who taught her the whole chapter. She's really bright, though, so it makes things easy.

Meat

I am cooking chili now. This is the first time ever in my life that I have really handled and dealt with raw meat, so even though I’ve been planning this chili event for a couple of days now, when I got home and took my 1.16 lbs of steak out of the refrigerator I didn’t know what to do with it; I kept just reading the recipe over and over. Then I read the part in the Techniques section on how to trim the fat off of meat. All I could think about, looking at it in its dinky styrofoam package, (because I had only worked up the courage to slit the plastic wrap all the way down) was Lord of the Flies: “Kill the pig, slit her throat, bash her in, spill her blood!” My kids are working on Lord of the Flies right now in English and I’ve been reading it with them to refresh my memory and less than 30 minutes before now, staring at the meat in its styrofoam tray, was the truly chilling description of the boys killing their second pig, the sow who had been nursing her piglets. It was bloody and visceral and frightening and the ropes of shiny colored guts, Jack laughing as he gets drenched in blood, and the head on the stick, with the blackening liver and the flies and the pig’s cynical conversation with Simon. So here’s me again, in my kitchen, knife in hand, staring at this tray of meat. My knife, btw, is about the length of my index finger; I really don’t have many cooking supplies. And my cutting board is this ridiculous yellow plastic 70’s thing with flowers on the handle, it is a little larger than a postage stamp and looks laughable when I work up the courage to touch the meat and pull it out of the plastic and slap it onto the cheerful little cutting board. My pets are both crowding around me, what is going on? Is this for us? Let us cut it, we will just take off the fat!

I made a quiche!

I did it hardcore, I made the crust myself with no mixer or anything, a delicious mushroom and spinach quiche. I only have two bowls, count ‘em, TWO bowls bigger than cereal bowls, one of which I suspect is an old decorative wash basin and I don’t have a single knife, spoon, spatula or non-stick pan that isn’t from a secondhand store. I don’t know if a quiche is a very sophisticated or difficult thing to make, but it sure felt that way when I was mixing up that pie crust with my hands and prebaking it and everything. Further, I don’t see any point in having more than one cookbook, especially until you’ve used all the recipes from it. I just have one from a goodwill, it is big (but rather thin) and has a lot of pictures, plus basic info on what kinds of tools you need and how to prepare all the ingredients you need for the recipes. Tomorrow I am making chili and I already have my red kidney beans soaking. Losing my cell phone has been great, I have had no interruptions from my interests all weekend. I get up early, read, write, draw, plan, cook, do dishes, hang out with my pets, read more, etc. I don’t think I will ever see the point in a television again, and I am learning that I can do with a lot less internet. Yesterday I read Kurt Vonnegut’s last book, A man without a country and finished Watchmen, which I found incredibly exciting and enlightening. I think it might be the only graphic novel on the Time’s best 100 novels list, but that might not be true. Regardless, if you are thinking of getting into that sort of thing, I highly recommend watchmen, it raises a lot of exciting and thought provoking issues. A man without a country is best if you are thinking about becoming an expatriot because Vonnegut basically just rips us to shreds. Maybe you would like a few quotes? You know I keep a running list of all the things from books I never want to forget.
“A twerp was a guy who stuck a set of false teeth up his butt and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. And I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.”
“Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – with a century of transportation whoopee.”
“Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”
“When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn’t you like to say, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, my soul is not free.”” (p.s. that is my new thing that I say when I get out of bed each morning, get ready for my next visit home, I am more hilariously socialist than ever!)
I guess I’ll conclude this post with just one more delightful tidbit from the late mr. Vonnegut, “The good Earth – we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”