Not Again . . .

Well, maybe not. But something's going on. Read all about it on my new blog, I Thought I Was Done With This. Not quite so fun as travel, most likely. But even travel is sometimes just a valuable experience.

A Spot of Nature

We were up on Orcas this weekend, Ian, me, Spackle, and our friend E and his dog KD. Hoover went to the dog spa for the weekend, and he literally screamed and pulled against me, trying to get back into the playground with the other dogs, when we went to pick him up today. Of course, once we were outside and he saw his car and his big dog, he had a complete reversal of attitude and tried to jump in. Even though his legs grew something like four inches in length in the three nights he was gone though, he didn’t make it and crashed back to the ground. He’ll make it soon, though, and then watch out.

Anyway, we went up because E had the brilliant idea to plant some nut trees on our land, and we thought we’d maybe add a couple tasty tidbits of our own. We ended up with two walnuts, three chestnuts (one called “Colossus”, which is just a cool name for a tree. Except if you’ve planted it in your city back yard.), and two cherries, to add to our plum, pear, and maybe apple that seem to have lived through a previous tenancy. I left the boys to dig the holes—seemed like a manly job—and I hiked almost ½ mile away to the stand of invasive Scotch broom and worked on pulling that out. Note: even with the brilliantly designed Weed Wrench (hard not to call it the “Weed Wench”), Scotch broom takes a long time to remove. I worked for maybe three hours, and took out one garbage bag-sized pile of plants. If only this were even remotely how much Scotch broom is living on that hillside. It’s not in bloom yet, though, so that’s good.

We stayed at the North Beach Inn, which accepts dogs (only two—another reason to send Hoover to the spa), and has a spectacular view of Patos, Sucia and Matia Islands. Our little cabin was about 50 yards from the water and a long, quiet, stony beach with lots of driftwood logs. Not surprisingly, Spackle was either damp or soaking wet most of the weekend. KD stayed dry except when she rolled in something S M E L L Y, and had to be forced into a bog to clean off. Which actually helped.

Ian and I forgot our cameras but E had his, so I’ll try to post some pics in a couple days when I get them. In the meantime, I leave you with a view from Turtleback Mountain onto our outhouse, snapped by friends of friends taking advantage of the new public trails on the new conservation land.

And, unrelated to Palm Springs, Mom and Dog on the lake.

Stone, water, palms.

Can't beat hidden waterfalls in the desert.

Theoretically, this would've been an awesome vacation spot. You can't smell the sulfur, however, or see the rotting fish carcasses.

On a North Shore beach. With facial hair.

Salvation Mountain

On the shores at Salton City. Looks real nice.

Palm Springs

A couple weeks ago, we took a brief vacation from the cold and rain and snowy misery of Northwest Puppy Ownership and went off to Palm Springs for six days. Of course, since we’ve been back, we’ve been plunged, flailing and gasping, into Puppy Ownership again and so I haven’t had a moment to write about our trip. But Hoover seems to have figured out how to piddle outside (my sing-songy “good piddle, Hoover! Good piddle!” throughout the duration of each appropriate outdoor urination must’ve done the trick), and so all the time I’ve spent wiping up the floor is now available for much more attractive tasks. Which includes pretty much everything.

Anyway, once we got there, Palm Springs was lovely (we were stuck in the snow on the tarmac in Seattle for 1 ½ hours because they were trying to get the deicer to us . . . which had been put away for the summer . . . ). My uncle owns a house there but is abroad for the year, so he’s invited all and sundry friends and relatives to stay in his place. Mom and Marsh went a couple weeks before us, meeting yet another uncle (and the homeowning uncle’s ex-wife, for a twist) there for a long weekend. We went with L&S, two dear friends.

Three of us were recovering from illnesses over and above Puppy Ownership and so were predisposed to lie around a lot in the warmth, which we did for the first couple days. Really, I don’t at all remember what we did. We had Mexican food a couple times (my uncle’s friend got reservations for us at a fantastic place where we ate the next day too), visited a museum of dry goods from the 30s (not that I wasn’t interested, but the sun—the sun! was so awesome that I sat outside the whole time, on the edge of a courtyard fountain), shopped for sunglasses (successfully) and visors (unsuccessfully) and books (successfully), watched some videos, made some food at home, and in general hung out.

The most ambitious day, we drove entirely around the Salton Sea. If you don’t know anything about the Salton Sea, you are MISSING OUT. I am FASCINATED by the Salton Sea. In a nutshell, here’s the story: There’s a huge sunken desert in eastern California, somewhat between LA and San Diego. Someone came up with an irrigation project on the Colorado River back a little over 100 years ago. Something went very, very wrong, and suddenly the entire flow of the Colorado River poured into the huge sunken desert. It took 18 months to fix the breach and send the Colorado back where it belonged. By the end of 18 months, though, the desert was now a huge inland lake. A few decades after it formed, maybe in the 50s, people suddenly started to see the recreational possibilities on the Salton Sea, and many towns were platted, hotels and resorts opened, and people started to move to the former desert. The lake was seeded with tilapia and it appeared that a new California Riviera was actually in the making.

But! There isn’t an outflow from the Salton Sea. It’s a big depression in the ground, formerly known as the Salton Sink, and the water got saltier and saltier and more and more polluted. Agriculture started up on the north and south ends of the sea, and petrochemical runoff added to the salinity. Tilapia is pretty sturdy, and has learned to live through most of the changes to its environment, but periodically there are huge algae blooms and 100,000 fish will die at a time, to wash up on the shores and rot in the sun. Also, this is the only water around for 100 miles, so sea birds have adopted the Salton Sea as a nice warm weather home, and when you get out of your car you’re blasted by a furnace of chicken shit air. Yes, the Salton Sea hasn’t changed the climate in the area completely, and the temperature is still in the low 100s at certain times of year.

Virtually all the infrastructure built to take advantage of the tourist boom has crumbled into nothing, but you can still see some of it—boarded up motels, half-buried rusty playground equipment, little boat basins or swimming beaches defined by pock-marked cement balusters. One town—Salton City—has a large new marigold-colored high school and hardly any homes or roads, but the map of the town (even the version on S’s GPS) shows all the roads ever designed. It’s eerie. Another town—Bombay Beach—sits behind a huge dike, which completely separates the homes from the water. You can’t even see the source of the chicken-shit smell, and it is beautiful if you clog your nostrils.

Not surprisingly, the Salton Sea is a pretty good place to disappear these days. After a tasty meal at a Mexican place in Niland, we drove up into the hills and saw Salvation Mountain (now an official Folk Art site, although I don’t know what that means), then went on to Slab City.

Slab City is, as L says, very much how one might expect a perpetual Burning Man to be. It’s a former WWII naval base, Camp Dunlap, and all buildings have been removed leaving only a series of cement slabs. The slabs make a nice, level foundation for trailers and RVs, though, so the place has become somewhat popular. There’s no charge to stay, and no infrastructure (although water and dumping is available back in Niland). Chris McCandless, of Into the Wild fame, stayed in Slab City for some time during his explorations of under-the-radar US culture. There is a community bulletin board, something that passes for a library, and it’s a tidy place. And Peter Fonda was shooting a remake of Easy Rider (so we were told, but imdb doesn’t seem to know anything about it) while we were there, and we got to see him. He’s very tall. And was wearing very hot-looking clothes (and by this I mean temperature hot, as black leather pants don’t really do it for me). And spurs.

After Niland we stopped by the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge and looked at some cows and birds (not sure that the cows were actually being protected), and then headed back home (stopping at Salton City along the way to marvel at the occasional insanity of city planners).

The last full day we were in the area, we drove into Palm Canyon in the reservation for the Agua Caliente Cahuilla Indians and took a leisurely hike up the river that runs down the canyon. It’s evidently the largest palm tree oasis in the world (or something like that). We loved meandering up the river, barefoot, wading in pools and through rushing, glinting shallows, being startled by ½ dollar-sized pale frogs, rubbing off all our nasty winter foot skin on the rough rocks we crossed. A few horseback riders passed us before we plunged into the water, and I thought, briefly, what a perfect place that would be for a trail ride.

Our last evening we finally rode the Palm Springs Tramway up to the top of some mountain behind town, like the good tourists we were. I have to say, I enjoyed the ride, but it’s also really freaky. After all, if the engine dies in a plane, the plane’s still designed to fly. But if the cable snaps on a tramway, that’s it. It’s gone. Smashed into the rocks hundreds of feet below.

A Whole New Category of Getting Away

Yesterday we picked up our new boat. Yes, it’s a ski boat. Yes, it runs on blood sucked from the veins of small Middle Eastern children. Yes, I do feel some ambivalence about that. What I don’t feel any ambivalence about is how fucking awesome it is to be out on the water, wind and waves buffeting me, cruising around Lake Union, racing around Lake Washington—whenever I feel like it. I have wanted a boat since moving to our house eight years ago, a mere six blocks up the street from Gasworks Park. I can’t go outside without seeing some of the water that makes Seattle such a superbly beautiful place to live—and now I can go on it, whenever I want. And I can go fast, which fills my soul with joy.

Don’t get me wrong—I love kayaking, with the hybrid human/duck feeling of it, the intense physical effort of paddling, the ability to explore the multitude of rock shores and teeny coves that are too small for any sort of power boat. There’s a unique satisfaction in being your own impulsion.

But I also love getting from one place to another in less than a day and a half. We’re looking forward to a summer in the San Juans, where most of the 450 islands aren’t accessible by ferry, and where we can now, finally, visit some of my favorite childhood state parks. Sucia, for instance, or James, or even tiny Clark.

I had another interesting insight into my psyche last night, as we took our new boat trailer from Seattle out to Maple Valley where M&M are kindly storing it for us at their place (the boat’s in a dry-stack storage facility on Lake Union, blocks from home, but they didn’t have room for the trailer). I was driving along I-5 through downtown Seattle, in traffic (of course, even though it was 7:30 pm), glancing at my mirrors periodically to make sure the trailer was centered in the lane behind me, and I suddenly, out of the blue, got all choked up. And I realized that, for some reason, I have equated owning your own trailer with adulthood. I’m sure we have more trailers in our future—at least a horse trailer, and perhaps some sort of flatbed or utility trailer as well. But this, our boat trailer, is our first trailer, and as such it represents this new phase of life into which we’ve entered. New skills, new opportunities, new challenges, new responsibilities. And, of course, new fun.

Hey—anyone wanna go skiing?

New Addition

For a while now Ian and I have talked about getting another puppy, in part so that Spackle would have a friend, but mostly because puppies are really cute and we’ve always known that we eventually wanted two dogs and we definitely wanted Spackle to help the puppy understand what we expect from a dog.

So: meet Hoover! He’s a lab mix (we’re trying to avoid the huge potential costs—actual in our case—associated with the dodgy hips of the purebred Lab) whom we adopted last week from the Humane Society in Longview, Washington (puppies in our home city of Seattle seem to be primarily pit bulls, and we just didn’t want to go there, regardless of the fact that it’s the training that makes the dog, blah blah blah.) I suppose it’s fortunate that a “friend for Spackle” wasn’t, in fact, our primary motivation in getting Hoover, because we would be sad failures.

Spackle hates Hoover. All Hoover needs to do is look at him and an almost subsonic, Mack-truck-downshifting-on-a-distant-I-5 growl issues from deep in his throat, his lips curl back, and his whole body tenses. This does not, in fact, deter Hoover one bit, so he races over, in his galumphing puppy way, right on to Spackle’s bed. This drives Spackle mad, and he lets out an infuriated, giant-dog bark, and lunges. Hoover dances out of the way, and approaches, maybe the slightest bit more cautiously, again.

We’ve ended up spending a lot of time with Spackle shut out of the kitchen simply so he can have a break from the endless prickly fawning adoration. Also, if Hoover is shut into the kitchen, we can monitor his chewing and piddling activities moderately well. His bed looks like a toddler’s favorite place to play—five or six different chew toys that he’s collected all over it, him (frequently, blessedly) conked out in the middle.

He’s been okay at nights—if one of us takes him out once (usually me, usually around 3am) he’ll piddle and poop and then sleep for several more hours until about 7:30 when one of us (so far exclusively Ian, bless his heart) gets up and feeds him and Spackle. Ian then lets Spackle back into the bedroom where he and I sleep for another two hours.

We’re starting puppy manners classes next week, which I’m hoping will appease my mother, who was a bit peeved that we decided to get a puppy knowing that she’s going to be stuck taking care of him when Spackle comes for his 2 ½ week summer vacation while we’re in Cabo Verde. But Hoover’ll be about six months old by then, and his bladder will have grown to grapefruit-size instead of lentil-size, and the needle teeth will be replaced, and he’ll be a perfect, farm-dog angel.

Not Technically Travel

Ian and I went skiing today at Crystal Mountain, a couple hours south of Seattle. With surgery and our intended—I mean actual although not to our intended destination—move last year, we didn’t make it to the snow at all. So today was our first trip to any mountains in 2 years.

It was spectacular. Perfectly clear, lots of snow, hardly any people, and a whole new steep bowl area opened up with a new lift since last we were there. I told multiple strangers that it was our first time up in two years . . . not that they cared. Our only notable conversation with a stranger on the lift was about this video, so that’s at least about travel.

We were smugly impressed with ourselves for looking at the map of the new section, seeing a sea of black diamonds and double black diamonds, and agreeing yes, we should totally check that out. Two years off? Nothin’.

On a Clear Day

One of our blessings in the Pacific Northwest, in addition to all the natural beauty of water and evergreen hill and snow-capped, rocky mountaintop, is a small fleet of seaplanes to jump us from one exquisite vista to the next. The Kenmore Air seaplanes fly out of either south Lake Union or north Lake Washington, to all the destinations you really want to go up Puget Sound and into the Strait of Georgia in Canada (with the notable, and peculiar, exception of Port Townsend, which would be the perfect 40-minute jaunt).

I visited Victoria with my cousin last weekend, and had two clear-day opportunities to fly on one of the ten-passenger Turbine Single Otters for my round trip.

It was spectacular.

Some of you may remember from long, long ago that I was afraid of flying on big commercial planes. Fortunately, I mostly got over that, particularly considering all the flying we did last summer. But even at the height of my fears, the small planes didn’t really bother me. It probably has something to do with scale, I’m sure.

For one thing, although I know this isn’t true, it looks like I could probably figure out the controls in a pinch and land the thing if I had to. After all, there’s a lot of water around, so finding a flat runway won’t be a problem. (I conveniently forget the front page photo in the paper several years ago of a Kenmore Air plane floating upside down just off-shore from Gasworks Park . . . turns out it was a training flight and no one was injured, but still. The pontoons are meant to be under the plane.)

For another thing, we only fly at about 1,000 feet, and although again I know I’m wrong, it feels like I could pretty easily live through plummeting such a slight distance. So anyway, I accept that I’m deluding myself, and I enjoy the ride.

A nice feature of the Otter is that the windows are convex, so you can get an excellent view of the countryside trailing away under you. I spent both my one-hour flights with my pate glued to the deepest part of my window, staring straight down at the ground. Did you know trees are star-shaped from the top? Well, they are. And tide flats look like elephant skin. And much of Puget Sound is surprisingly clear. And much of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, right outside Victoria Harbour, really isn’t (although we’ve heard that, with the Olympics coming to Whistler in a couple years, Victoria is finally going to have to do something with municipal sewage other than pump it straight into the drink. Although the local fishing is good.)

My cousin S and I enjoyed our stay in a foreign country, even though with the dollars at virtual parity it wasn’t like being able to spend play money anymore, and we look forward to other getaways in the future.

And I cannot recommend the seaplane adventure highly enough.

It’s Fun to Plan Ahead

We’re still enjoying being back in our house, but there’s so much of the world to see, you know. Fortunately, we’ve had some friends recently give us the excuses we needed to make some more overseas plans. They’re all kind of crammed together, but one of the things we learned last summer was that we can jump from one thing to another fairly quickly.

So first we have a wedding to attend in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in June, and we’ve started planning when to go and where to stay (and who to stay with, since we know several people attending this ceremony), and how long to stay. We probably would’ve given Mexico more of our time—we’ve never been (since I’m not counting Tijuana with my parents when I was in seventh grade) and it looks lovely—except for reason number 2 to travel.

Our second reason to travel is another June wedding, this one in London (you may remember from last summer that our friends, J&C, got engaged between two of our visits? Yep, it’s them!). Now, getting to London, even on British Airways’s comfortable and convenient 9-hour non-stop flight, is more of a haul then getting to Puerto Vallarta on Alaska Air’s direct flight. The time zone change is also more significant, of course, so we decided that, given the choice, we’d rather spend more time on the other side of the Atlantic than just down the coast from home.

Of course, we traveled around Europe all last summer . . . so this summer we’re finally going to take a trip we’ve been dreaming about for years: Cabo Verde!

Cabo Verde, or Cape Verde, is a small island country off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. It’s a former Portuguese colony and the official language is Portuguese, although most people speak a Portuguese/West African criole called Crioulu, which appeared late in the 15^th century because of the slave trade. Culturally, Cabo Verde is considered to be more Latin American than African; geographically it’s unique. There is one island that’s still an active volcano—Fogo—some barren islands, some “greener” islands. And it’s in the middle of the Atlantic. It was uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered it (as were the Açores), and the people now are a beautiful blend of Portuguese and African.

Cabo Verde is known (if it’s known for anything) for its music; Cesária Évora is probably their most widely known musician. Ian’s excited about funaná, a style of music that originated on Santiago, one of the islands in the archipelago, and is accordion-based.

The accordion is everywhere.

Home at Last

Ian and I moved back into our house 14 days ago, and boy are we glad to be here. Our house, making sure that the renters wouldn’t feel bad at all to be moving to their new place (they bought a condo—they seem quite happy about it), let a little river flow through the basement six days before they left. Those of you who know us and our house know that rivers have run through it periodically over the last almost eight years, and we thought we’d taken care of them all with French drains and the judicious use of sump pumps and exterior water-seepage-blocking spray stuff on the outside of the basement walls (exposed, of course, due to a great deal of hired sweat). But, it turns out not putting a drain by the crawl space meant that the water had one last way in.

As floodings go, this one was minor (it happened the same day that I-5 closed in Chehalis and some relatives had to be rescued from the attic of their house by boat). It didn’t get anyone’s belongings wet, and only soaked a little bit of the carpet on the bottom stair. But it was enough to convince G&E, the former tenants, that their new 2^nd floor condo was a step up (and not just literally).

Anyway, they were willing to let us not do anything, as any work in the yard would only seriously inconvenience everyone involved and not, in fact, solve anything before they left. As of yet, we still haven’t done anything, but rains have been more moderately usual, and the basement has stayed dry through our moving process.

I really think the house missed us. We’d lived here for seven years straight, and had, aside from the river, no problems with anything. We feel warmed and well-protected by our house, and we feel that our friends and family are also comfortable here. When we moved out, though, I don’t think I let the house know how much we really appreciate it. We talked a lot about going away for a couple years, having strangers live within its walls, then building a new house and moving away when we returned to the US. And I think our house here was sad.

I may have the order of events wrong, but here are some of the problems G&E encountered, most of them within the first two months:

The drain for the clawfoot tub disconnected.
After it had been reconnected, one clawfoot fell off the tub while G was showering, pitching him to the floor. And the drain disconnected again.
The bathroom fan went out.
The sewer went out, or rather stopped going out, which turned out to be because the line from the house to the street was completely clogged up with debris and a huge root system.

I believe that’s it—at least, that’s all G&E let us (read: Deane) know about. We found a couple days ago, however, that the oven doesn’t work very well. I turned it up as high as it would go and still, after about 3 hours, it had only reached 377 degrees, where it seemed to have stalled out. Clearly not acceptable. I hope G&E were simply not bakers rather than they just didn’t want to complain about another issue.

We received our keys on the evening of December 9, and immediately, throughout the house, burned some sage that we’d harvested from our front stoop and banged two grills from the stove together to produce a purifying clanging sound. We weren’t so much getting rid of energy—as I’ve said, G&E were great tenants, and all-around good people—but rather letting the house know that we were back.

I had two rooms that I wanted to repaint before we moved in our belongings, so we went into those rooms (our bedroom and our former guest room which is now my study) with pencils and wrote prayers on the walls that were about to be covered up. A friend gave me this idea, and I love it. Basically, you write things that you are grateful for (past, present or future, but as if they have already happened), and infuse your room with good energy.

It seems to have worked—I’ve been sleeping well in our bedroom, and I’m looking forward to creating in my office (by the way, the bedroom had been light blue with a green wall and it’s now a warm, caramely brown; and the study-as-guest-room was peach, and it’s now a rich pumpkin.)

We’ve replaced a lot of things. We decided when we moved out that the futons had to go—they’re convenient, yes, but I’d bought them ten years before in graduate school and we thought it was time to join the adult world with adult furniture. So we now own a sleeper-sofa in the TV room and we have on order a classic cigars-at-the-men’s-club sofa from North Carolina. We also replaced both our mattresses with organic latex, wool and cotton mattresses that. we. love. I’ve been having a nap every day just to appreciate the guest bed as well as our own.

We’ve entered the world of grown-up entertainment systems . . . sort of . . . with a flat screen plasma TV that had to be installed by the Geek Squad. I say sort of because we did get an HD DVD player, but we did not get cable TV, regardless of the fact that our internet and phone are now from Comcast. We really just don’t watch TV, and if we do decide we need to continue with the Gossip Girl habit we started while staying at L&S’s place, we can probably find some rabbit ears in a dumpster or in a piece of retro art somewhere.

Spackle has inserted himself seamlessly back into our lives, resurrected, as it were, from the “doggy heaven” that Ian kept claiming he was staying at. His first bath in 8 months yielded a lot of hair. Like, enough for another dog. He still snores at night if we let him sleep in the bed with the sides, because he rests his chin and cuts off his air, evidently. And keeps us awake.

Today we’ve been finishing up collating the last few belongings into their appropriate order and hanging the last few bits of art on the walls, then I think we’re both ready to take a breather and see about getting back into the semblance of a routine after almost nine months.

For several weeks I had been ready for the adventures to end, so that I could have a place to call my own again, a place to get back into my schedule, and use the things that I have collected to live my life the way I want to live it. So that I could be settled again. And when we were given our keys, back in mid-December, the first thing I felt wasn’t joy, it wasn’t freedom, it wasn’t relief. The first thing I felt was . . . settled. And a twinge of regret that we hadn’t managed to make it to New Zealand. And that we weren’t free to go traipsing around the world again at the moment, maybe South America this time. And that we were, as we’d been wishing, the only ones in charge of all the issues and responsibilities of home ownership. I quickly recovered, and I have loved being back in my space again, where Ian is the only other person I have to worry about.

It’s been a crazy year, certainly. One year ago, Ian was offered the job in Wellington. In January, I had a mastectomy. In April we moved out of our house, expecting to alight again in Southern climes. In May we left for Europe, and after four months of nomadism, arrived back in Seattle at the end of August. We stayed with friends for 3 months, then suddenly here we are, back in our house, one year later, as if nothing had happened. But everything is different.

So . . . where to next?

A Confession

I went to New York City over the first weekend in December, to attend a baby shower for the first baby of one of my college friends. A. was actually one of the first people I met in college—she was my RA, and signed me in when Dad dropped me off. It was a growing experience for both of us—me and Dad, that is—because I found myself installed on a co-ed floor (shared bathroom!) and Dad found himself needing to be polite to someone who, well within her rights, was chewing gum in his presence. Dad had some idiosyncrasies, and expecting the world to not make small repetitive noises just because they irritated him was one of them. I remember being impressed that he didn’t even glare at her, leaving her to wonder why this complete stranger was judging her for some mysterious reason. No, he tucked away his irritation in a way that some might even have interpreted as a lack of concern.

Anyway, A. and her husband J. are expecting a little girl at the end of January, and I was thrilled, in the midst of our busy fall of sitting around waiting to move back into our house, to have the time to visit and attend the shower. I was only able to stay two nights, however, and so (and here is the confession) I didn’t contact any other of my NYC friends.

This was a difficult choice to make, and I felt bad about it for awhile, but it was ultimately the only thing I could’ve done. I had not gone to NYC alone—two other college friends, L. and C., also came, and between the four of us (five if you count baby Ribbet, her in-utero name; six if you count J.) we had plenty to do to keep us busy.

So, if you live in NYC and you missed me December 1^st, I do apologize, and I’ll plan many more days for my next trip.

Here We Stay

Ian and I came to the decision about 10 days ago that we would rather stay in Seattle than continue to jump through the hoops set out for us by New Zealand Immigration. They were getting ridiculous. One requirement was that Ian submit a certified copy of his undergraduate diploma even though they already had an official transcript. Finding the diploma, which Ian had never considered to be that important, involved him digging through my brother’s basement, where many of our belongings are stored, for most of an afternoon (I happened to be out of town, and was thus, unfortunately, unable to assist).

They were sticklers on relationship evidence as well. Our marriage certificate wasn’t enough, and photos we sent (digital print-outs) illustrating several years of relationship were deemed to be “photocopies, not originals,” as were the digital print-outs of some bank statements. It’s not as if Ian were a New Zealand citizen trying to sneak in a “wife”; he would’ve been there last April if it weren’t for me. We joked all summer that this was his chance to get rid of me. But no, he insisted on keeping me on, as the “anchor weighing him down.” (his words or mine? we can’t remember.).

My health history eventually reared its head too, with a request from the medical consultants for “more specific information from her surgeon, including her prognosis (figures if possible), and future surgical and/or medical needs.” I’m sorry—my surgeon isn’t any more of a clairvoyant than you are, Dr. New Zealand Medical Consultant. I’m afraid she, also, has no idea what my expiration date is.

We spent thousands of dollars on the process too, including the application fees, the medical exam fees, the certification fees, and the shipping fees.

All of those things were irritations, yes, but strangely, the benefit of them was that they took so much time. We started thinking about New Zealand ten months ago, last year, Christmas 2006. I’m sure we would’ve loved Wellington if we’d gotten there in April as we’d originally expected . . . but the longer we spent not there the more we thought about Seattle and how much we already love it here. We really do. We have dear friends here, we have family here, we have a dog here. We have a house that we love, and that appeals to us in location and character. We can ski here, we can ride here, we can kayak here. We can eat exclusively organic food here, even if we go out. Ian can even get a job here, and one that he’ll probably love. If Wellington was expected to offer a significantly different, and significantly better (at least as far as we are concerned) environment, we maybe would’ve stuck it out to the bitter end. But aside from the traffic (which doesn’t directly affect us, fortunately), pretty much everything is at least slightly better here.

And so, thank you New Zealand Immigration, for doing such a brilliant job of petty bureaucracy. If you’d actually seen the value of us as potential Kiwis, we would’ve made the mistake of leaving this land that we love, and giving our considerable skills and strengths to you.

Phew.

Southern California Fires—Not Our Fault

Ian and I were in La Jolla a few weeks ago, for him to attend a dork conference and for me to, as it turned out, sleep a lot in the lovely and unpeopled apartment of his friend and former UW office-mate, A (for those of you who followed along this summer, A’s parents were the generous ones with the Alentejan beach house in Portugal). Five days in Southern California were enough to make us very, very happy that Ian decided not to look into jobs there. The surface streets are six lanes wide, for crying out loud. Ian did skip out on the last day of his conference and we drove to the Salton Sea. If you know nothing (or even if you do) about the Salton Sea, then you should totally watch this documentary. It’s a bizarre, fascinating place. And it smells.

Probably much of the reason I slept so much was the Valium I was taking for my jaw—turns out I had three cavities that needed filling when I got home from the Summer of Self-Indulgence, so I spent a couple hours with my mouth wide open and as a result it was very sore. I was supposed to take the Valium right before I went to bed, so that I’d sleep well and not be dopey the next day, but it kind of had a time-release effect with me. No matter what time I took it, I finally woke up the next day about 12 hours after I’d gone to sleep (i.e. take Valium and 9:00pm. Go to bed at 11:30pm. Wake up next day at noon.).

We also ate some good Mexican food (I was careful with the chips) in Old Town and the Gas Lamp District, and I finished one night on the town with a chocolate shake from Ghirardelli (yum!).

On our way from the Salton Sea we drove through the town of Ramona, from which 30,000 people were evacuated less than a week later. But we were long gone by then.

Pictures from Jerome Creek

I've put more pictures up on a google web album. I think a lot of them are better than my usual pictures, courtesy of my friend E's SLR camera. It didn't go on any rides with me, since it doesn't fit in my pocket, so all of these pics are from walks I took. With dogs and horses. Enjoy!

http://picasaweb.google.com/nilact/JeromeCreekOctober2007