mutantblog

Oh, watch out! I just discovered the hidden powers of blogger. This could get interesting. Stay tuned for some potentially drastic changes...

Buses suck

Well, I had another episode of unexpected-yet-unsurprising culture shock this morning.  I suppose it was only unsurprising because I had forgotten how terrible public transit can be in this country.  I wanted to get from Olympia to Seattle, so I looked up the easiest route online.  Buses leave every two hours, require no less than three transfers (each with a half-hour wait), and the trip is three hours long.  The soonest I could be in Seattle if I left Olympia after eleven thirty am would be five pm.  No, I don't think that will be happening today.  Amtrak costs $20 for a one-way ticket, so that won't be happening today either.  As I was discovering how futile it is to attempt something like this at the drop of a hat, I just kept thinking "Well!  If this were Costa Rica I would already be at the bus station!"  But then I remember that in Costa Rica the roads are so terrible that it takes just as long or longer to travel between cities as it does here.  So it seems I am back at square one.  Maybe I should move to Canada.  But that won't be happening today either, unfortunately.

The weather is still lovely as ever.  The air is a bit chillier today than yesterday, but I came to terms to with that this morning.  I have no work to do and no other obligations so I have been toying with notions of leaving this town, but as yet I haven't even managed to leave this house.  I've been calling and firing off emails to all those people I haven't spoken with in some time but should get in touch with.  My communication court was getting a little uncomfortable with so many message balls bouncing around it, waiting to be kicked back to somebody else.  Now there is some room to think.  Ahh.

Been reading a book called Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder.  I highly recommend it.  It discusses the history of philosophy in more or less layman's terms, but remains fascinating in spite of the raher dry premise.  It's a solid work of fiction about a little girl whose world suddenly becomes very unusual, complete with an enigmatic philosophy teacher with apparently magical powers.  However, the reality of the situation turns out to be much more unusual than your run-of-the-mill, everyday magical powers.  Intrigued?  You should read it.

Humdrum

It's a lovely morning here in Olympia.  Bumblebees are lazily pollinating the flowers of a plant called Hairy Cat's Ear, named for its fuzzy leaves, that has established quite an impressive colony in our front lawn.  The ears of the real hairy cat that lives in this house are pressed back against her head as she naps on the dining room chair, vaguely listening for the opossums that live underneath our house.  No, really.  There really are opossums that live underneath our house.  I saw one yesterday, poking its pointy snout out from an elevated, mysterious shelf in our basement dungeon.

Across the street, the young maple saplings planted along the edge of the field murmur in the cool breeze.  The golden grass tickles my feet as I take a few steps to reach the shade of a maple, then sit down.  The breeze feels pleasantly refreshing after the three days of inferno we've just experienced.  On Saturday, the mercury broke 100 degrees F in some parts of this town.  Fortunately, I spent most of the day floating down the Deschutes river in an inner tube, attempting to counter the sizzling heat.  It worked.  The river's slow steady chill worked into my body and left me shivering in spite of the heat (until I got out of the water, of course).

Last week we moved some rather pathetic looking houseplants from the living room to the front lawn, where they will remain until the temperature drops too steeply.  Among them are two different species of strangler fig and several palm-like plants, all tropical natives.  In our kitchen we have a Monstera (a large, gangly rainforest vine) growing in a pot, and a colossal jade plant which must be over fifty years old.  There are spider plants of various shapes and sizes scattered here and there among the dusty recesses of our living room, and a few strange plants I don't recognize.  There's good houseplant diversity here.

My summer class in grass identification and ecology starts today at six pm.  I feel indifferent.  I think it will be fun once it gets started but I don't know what to expect.  I had thought to work again in the prairies this summer, continuing the process of creating an exhaustive list of plants there, but that plan seems to have fallen through.  My former advisor is unwilling to discuss future work until Fall quarter.  She can be rather difficult at times.  Whatever.  I will find some other way to keep myself occupied.

I still haven't heard pip nor squeak from Canon regarding my camera.  Hopefully soon it will return to me.  The phenomenal weather has presented many fantastic photographic opportunities and I am getting antsy.  But now it is time to go shopping, and so I bid you adieu.

Aneurysm now

I hate Dreamweaver. For the last two hours I have been wrestling with this "industry standard" web design program, attempting to convince it to do my bidding, like good software should. It is not behaving itself. Right at the moment, it refuses to display half of the file I am working on, although I know it is all there. Earlier this afternoon, it completely changed the way it implements a very important feature for no apparent reason whatsoever, thereby making it totally impossible for me to do what I needed to. I am about ready to explode. I'm going outside, and not coming back here until tomorrow. Grrr...

Who said photography?

I am here at work but my boss is in a meeting, and I have nothing to do at the moment, so I thought I would explain the absence of photography here for the past few weeks. Early into my trip to Costa Rica, I dropped my poor camera in a creek. It still functioned afterward, with some significant failures in its autofocus capabilities. So, I lived with a partially malfunctioning camera for the rest of the trip. I got used to it pretty quickly, and dreamed of the day when I could send it back to Canon to get fixed. Immediately upon my return to Washington, I mailed it off to a factory in California, asking the engineers there to restore it to its fully functional, autofocusing glory. I am still waiting to get it back. You can be sure that as soon as that happens, I will once again start posting photos on this blog. Any day now...

Well, here I am back in Olympia, ending the journey where the journey began.  There is a song about that, written by J. R. R. Tolkien for the book 'The Hobbit' and then handed down to the Lord of the Rings.  The road goes ever ever on, he said, and I suppose it does.  I wonder where it will go to next?
 
I started my job today.  How exciting.  Actually, it will be nice to have some purpose back in my life again.  Vacations can get boring when you're stuck in the suburbs without a car.  I did manage to experience some wonderful things in the last few weeks, though.  There was the trip to the tiny tiny town of Paradise on Mt. Ranier, for instance.  I climbed up above the snow line to get a view south that encompassed the snow-capped dome of Mt. Adams, the shaved off cap of Mt. St. Helens, and the pointy spire of Mt. Hood, just barely visible in the distant haze.  The yellow and white glacier lilies bloomed between magenta puffs of mountain heather in the verdant alpine meadows on the lower slopes.  Across the valley the Tatoosh range sawtoothed it's way through a dense green carpet of colossal old-growth trees.  The Carbon river wound a meandering course down the valley.
 
On the fourth of July, I watched dual fireworks displays from the roof of the Casa del Rey, an apartment building on Broadway in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.  The awesome Lake Union pyrostorm completely outdid the dinky little flash in the pan put on by Ivar's at Myrtle Edwards park.  There were fireworks last night here in Olympia, too, but I was too busy recovering from an allergic reaction to the cat that lives in my new house to care much.  Then I woke up at four in the morning with a hacking cough and a sore throat.  Slept all morning and called in late to work, which was ultimately OK, because my boss has been preoccupied with interviews and hiring processes all day, anyway.
 
The weather outside is gorgeous, and I think I am going to go take advantage of that.  Be well.

spin your web of illusion
wind me up in those visions

you don't know yet what it means, but my time has passed
my web is tearing at the nexes, frayed threads flailing

the fog of inevitability shrouds my world
clouding my vision of
that timeless dimension where
every cloud has a silver lining

but

whether you know it or not
your thoughts are my children

your life is my legacy and your time is longer still
than you can yet imagine

so tell me again about the world that left me behind
i will raise up your dreams with my breath
and watch them soar into the future

where every cloud has a silver lining