Best Christmas Ever

An Ode

Things are quiet.  There's a pile of dirty dishes across the room, and I'm nursing a jar of our own beer  and a bag of tortilla chips.  It's winter, I guess, in a week.  This has been a week of major life decisions for me, and after a manic few days of productivity, I am crashing.

So, I suppose this is an Ode to Days of Lesser Commitments.  To days of couch-crashing, 1-man tent sleeping, the tropics and the arctic, the lonely and the free.  I'm steeping in nostalgia tonight.

Poor in Money

I wanted to write something about Thanksgiving this year.  It was a quiet day, with Craig and I cooking up a frenzy and Fatty and Lulu (we were dogsitting for a hilarious pomeranian) looking on greedily.  We made a beer can chicken, sweet potatoes baked in a lemon honey sauce, mashed buttercup squash, mashed potatoes galore, stuffing, green beans, gravy, and a key lime pie.  Really, too much food for two people and two dogs (who think they are people).

 If you have found your way to my little egocentric corner of the internet, you know that I live something of a charmed life.  I am lucky - I have found a series of jobs that allow me to travel around the country (and sometimes the world), meet amazing people, and work outside every day.  It's easy to forget how lucky I am.  Something that I always appreciate about Thanksgiving is that it is a day devoted to the reminder that we would not be here (albeit by rape, pillage, small pox blankets, etc.) without the help of others, and we take for granted our everyday luxuries - food, friends, family, health, freedom (if only it weren't such a damn patriotic word...).

I'm not going to list the things that I am thankful for, but I am going to spend the next month basking in them.  Cause I may be poor in money, but I'm rich in love and food.

Carrot Cakes are the best kind

Craig and I both have fall birthdays, which is not that exciting and / or important, other than the terrifying prospect of transitioning into our late twenties and creeping closer to the cusp of the big 3-0.  The important thing is that birthdays, especially ours, are a good excuse to make the best of cakes - carrot, of course.  And I have devoted myself to the smittenkitchen version of carrot cake, with some small modifications: use 2 T of fresh, finely shredded ginger (instead of ground ginger) and 1/2 t of cloves.  I splurge for organic and/or local carrots (because they are so much sweeter and less starchy) and grate them finely, which is a pain in the ass but much better.  I also keep the frosting a la carte, and have no real maple syrup, so just make it a simple cream cheese-butter-powdered sugar frosting.

It's fine

Consuming
copious amounts of pumpkin ice cream
and PBR

Met a truffling dog today
Ran in the rain

spent an hour climbing over logs
and crunching leaves

Trying to learn to be content

Isn't it funny how life can be poetry if you break it up into short lines?

a mantra

looking up at the sky
I vow with all beings
to remember this infinite ceiling
in every room of my life

September is for Baking

The orbiting slows to a revolution

I am leaving the 4 days on-3 days off, the predictable sun and heat, the ceonothus and ernu (bobbing like little white ghosts next to my tent in the morning sun). I descended the curvy pothole-riddled roads for the last time, driving past a landscape that was familiar but more brown than in July. Breaking out of the hills and highways into the pastel townhouse-riddled Bay Area. The walks are paved, and that is the strangest part. My cheeks are ruddy and arms are scratched, and it is abundantly clear that I belong back in the mountains.

Becoming Bogans

I think that I finally found my field work nirvana. I live out of my tent, at a research station an hour drive from the nearest town. I am in the middle of the mountains – and BIG ones too. I live at 7,000 feet, which is high enough that I have to adjust my baking for the altitude. I walk to work. My carhartts are tattered from slipping on granite boulders, and prior to being repaired, really just functioned as assless chaps. I go backpacking every weekend, and climb real mountains, trudge through snow fields in my chacos, summit peaks with registers at the top, and come home at the end of the weekend exhausted and happy.

Our field crew is something of an all-star cast. It is one of those rare combinations of personalities that work perfectly for a 10-week intense live-in job. It took us about a week get comfortable enough around each other to do whiskey (or vodka or rum or water) slaps. No one complains about the dishes, and it seems like we all genuinely like each other.

If all field work were in places this beautiful, with minor annoyances (sunburns, rattlesnakes, thorny whitethorn shrubs up to my neck), I would never tire of swinging my DBH (diameter-at-breast-height) tape ‘round trees 47-55 cm in diameter. I could walk from plot to plot, estimating percent cover of plants like whiskerbrush, manzanita, and pennyroyal for eternity. Give me a mechanical pencil, metal clipboard, and some ripped carhartts, and I will be your field monkey FOREVER.

Summers draw to an end, however, and field budgets desiccate, and soon we will all be unemployed and searching for a way to pay the rent. Some of us (the lucky few) will get winter field jobs, but most of us will go back to indoor jobs, where it isn’t acceptable to shower only twice a week and we’ll be required to brush our hair and teeth every goddamn day. Life is so hard.

California

"What does it mean that those trees and mountains out there are not magic but real?
What does it mean that those trees and mountains aren't real at all, just magic?"

A lot of photos of dogs and flowers

Craig and I have been in Bartlett, New Hampshire for four weeks. We went to Vermont and saw Lauren. Lauren came to New Hampshire and saw us. We skipped over the Maine border to go for a hike. The forests and roadsides were paved with ladyslippers. I drank cheap coffee to not fall asleep while staring at paper towels littered with tiny, dirty roots.

I leave Saturday to drive to California. It is nigh time to leave the comfortable womb of my east coast plant knowledge and embark on a journey westward to the unknown. Evergreens of epic proportion! No biting bugs! No cactus spines! No giant hairy poison ivy vines! I have resolved some things. I am going to go backpacking like before. I am going to eat healthy, cheap food. And I am going to try and have fun even though I'll be missing Craig and Fatty. The three of us will be separated by thousands of miles for the rest of the summer.

But fear not! We will reunite in the end of August to move into the most amazing apartment with a giant kitchen, wood floors, and tons of windows. I am moving back to the Rust Belt, to "settle" for a couple years in the sleepy, creaky city of Syracuse. I intend to study. something. I intend to make a friend or two. Get a job. somewhere.