2008 retrospective-introspective
Here we are again, at the close of another year. I’m turning 45, and happy to be here! My brother sent me a birthday card where he traps and vanishes the “aging fairy” – he has a long tradition of sending us truly hilarious cards, for which he shops assiduously – and I thank him for it! I truly expect to get younger over the next year :) in body, mind, and spirit. My age is a good thing – it sends me wisdom and life experience, which I can finally feel all through my spirit.
2008 was a good year in so many ways – most of which I’ll really get to enjoy the benefits of next year. This time last year, I had just given myself permission to move from a house that was unsustainable and a neighborhood I didn’t enjoy to what has to be my favorite city – Olympia, WA. After 7 long months of searching, moving to Olympia and living above a garage all the better to search, learning every street and finding every bakery and coffee house in the city ;), I found the one. Just the right house, in a wonderful, quiet neighborhood with forest, wildlife, and fabulous neighbors – whom I actually know! From the college kids to the 85-year-old next door. Perfect. And boy was that the right time to do it – I got a great mortgage, a good price, and no trouble with the sale. A few months later and things could have been different.
That did occupy a lot of time and energy. Meanwhile, I was working on closing out several 5-10 year consulting projects and an entire technical career, in favor of working with people. Always, I am in service to the environment, but now I am helping people put aside their differences on large-scale environmental issues rather than crunching numbers. Now and then I work on mediating an amicable divorce or do communication training locally as well. This January 1 I will have all the technical work done on all my old projects and will just have the writing and some public review left to do. The fish and wildlife will have some new cleanup standards and I will be free of spreadsheets and databases forever more. Woohoo~!
Last year, my trip to Guatemala was probably the highlight of my spare time, which as you can guess from the above was pretty limited. This was my first international trip alone since college, and it was fabulous. I was happy to find my Spanish coming back partway through the trip, as negligent as I have been in really learning it properly. I had a great time, walked everywhere, went birdwatching, enjoyed the incredible scenery of Lake Atitlan and the colonial architecture, fabulous food and markets of Antigua. Jade, yes, I bought jade, along with textiles, hand-made leathers, the craftsmanship was too good to resist. Had I been able to buy the fanciful wrought-iron candle sconces that are everywhere in Antigua I would have brought a few of those home as well ;) Odd impulses for me, the anti-shopper.
Next year I expect I’ll be doing more traveling – I’ve got to present some of my work in Florida in Feb, so that’s going to get turned into a mini-vacation – the swamps and wildlife preserves are only a short drive away and my binoculars haven’t had much use lately. I hope to take a long walking vacation through England, maybe the month of September, something that’s been on my mind and my feet for a while. I got bitten by the kayaking bug late last summer, so hope to work that in on the exercise/enjoyment front, along with Tai Chi (Olympia is great – have I mentioned Olympia is great? All these wonderful things to do, so easily available).
There are still some restaurants in Olympia I haven’t found yet and I have season tickets to the Performing Arts Center! A bit of upgrading to my new home is in order to improve the energy efficiency of the appliances, not to mention a gas stove, which I seriously miss. It’s hard to cook well on this electric. The house is all unpacked, and January will be the time to get rid of all the remaining items in the garage remaining from the move that I don’t need in the new home. Gotta love Freecycle! Last but not least – I’ll get an earlier start on my vegetable garden this year and hopefully start working on the rest of the garden. It’s small, but it’s not quite me at the moment and there are some changes I want to make.
Happy New Year, everyone!
It’s snowing again, and I’d rather be…
1) visiting my friend Lisa in California
2) going clothes shopping (those of you who know me will know how crazy that is)
3) having Christmas tomorrow with my family (not too likely – they’re even more snowed in)
4) grocery shopping and making treats for Christmas family
5) shoveling the driveway (no point)
6) spending the holidays in little coffee shops or with friends
7) doing anything but sitting here!!
More pics (actually it’s deeper than this now, by about 6 inches; this was a few days ago):
Be careful what you wish for…
Yep, we’re talking snow. I’m looking at my previous post wistfully wishing for snow… well, we’ve had it since Tuesday, in piles! It fell continuously for 3 days, and then Friday morning dawned clear and beautiful. In the meantime I had missed my flight to visit a best friend in Santa Cruz, due to lack of airport transportation (and general fears of icy, snow-covered streets and freeways). :(
But Friday was a gorgeous a day as any you could wish for, with fluffly sparkling snow a foot deep in our driveway, trees holding more of it than usual (more on that later), and that wintry, sunny sky with a few white clouds, sun sparkling on the not-even-pretending-to-melt snow. I should have taken pictures then, it was so beautiful – but I was busy shoveling. Between my neighbor and I, we managed to clear our shared driveway, which is no small feat. It’s not as pretty now, with the piles of snow all around… but no fear, it’s snowing again…
This morning I noticed the neighbor’s tree had come uprooted and fallen onto the fence, presumably due to the heavy weight of snow. I think it probably was not real healthy to start with, since it used to drop leaves year-round. It was pretty, on the other hand, my vegetable garden will have a lot more sun now. We’ve got a bit of work ahead of us to get it out and shore up the fence, since she can’t afford the insurance deductable. Chain-saw, anyone??
Now there is a snow and ice storm coming in for another two days, supposed to be larger than the last. All I care about is that the power stays on… cause it’s going to get awfully cold around here if it doesn’t. My neighbor and I were joking about that tree becoming firewood for her wood-burning stove – not that that’s going to happen anytime soon.
I DID wish for this. Just keep telling myself that :D
Magical weather
The other night I was returning home through downtown Olympia and they had beautiful (tasteful) lighted snowflake decorations up in the streets. I had a sudden urge to be sitting downtown in a dusky coffeeshop by the fire, drinking a latte and watching the snow fall outside. It’s December, so it could happen :) It got me thinking about the magical nature of snow. It transforms the landscape, making even the dingiest, coldest city streets beautiful. It seems to transform our lives, bringing back the wonder of childhood. Perhaps it’s the sheer magnitude and completeness of the transformation, that along with its beauty, makes it so wonderful. That thrill of going to bed on Christmas Eve as a child, wondering if the world would be white when you woke up. Or maybe the reprieve of snow on a schoolday, or a good-excuse-to-stay-home-from-work day, since everyone knows Seattleites are hopeless in the snow.
I got to musing about other weather that has magical effects on me, that makes me stop and look, experience. There’s an early fall thing that has always held a strange electric excitement for me – at the end of September or early October, when the nights are not yet freezing, there comes a night when the wind is whipping up but strangely warm, when the dry leaves are circling in the air and the trees are swaying and rustling, the night sky clear and bright, the moon rising. Every year it comes, and every year I have a tremor, a sense that anything could happen, my life could change tonight. I know where that comes from – those teenage years when I was out late at night and anything was possible.
Also fall, when the colors of the leaves sear themselves into your eyes, and it’s all you can do to keep driving and not looking. You could lose yourself in those leaves, and never get where you are going. Too bad there’s somewhere to go, but into the forest.
The Moon… it never fails to hold my attention. Whether glowing through fog or wispy through clouds, silver, gold, blue or orange, full and bright or the barest sliver, any time I see the moon I watch, and wait, and contemplate the night.
I wish I could say I have the same love for the sun, but it doesn’t love me. In any day of not-summer, there are times when the sun has its glories – usually in spring or summer when the sky is washed clean and a deep blue, crystalline against the bright green of the trees. Sometimes I may walk down the street and just marvel at the livingness of it. There’s a particular quality that this has due to the auras in my vision that make this especially brilliant for me, I think…
And yours?
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