26 March 2014

Hip, hip, hooray!

My birthday weekend was a phenomenal success!
Birthday wildflowers from Jack!
Jack took me out to dinner at Brick and Fire bistro in Eureka - very good food, AMAZING truffles, but very small portions. I left full, but Jack was definitely having the munchies by the time we got home. The man showered me with presents (he promises that this won't happen again and that it's just because it's our first birthday together) - I've got lots of tights to wear for our Iceland trip now! Not to mention a sweet banjo ukulele! On St. Patty's day we made delicious Irish food - corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes! - then we packed our things and drove out to Sinkyone Wilderness in the Lost Coast on Tuesday. This was our campsite:
Needless to say we were feeling very spoiled for the next couple days. The weather was lovely during the day, but the wind picked up quite a bit after sunset on both evenings, making the campfire not-so cozy, and making the tent a little TOO cozy. (I woke up and had to practically tunnel my way out because it had come un-staked and virtually flattened on top of us! Hopefully I've learned my lesson about staking my tent securely.)
Follow my finger, and you'll see a bunch of little dots at the base of the tree line in the distance - a herd of elk!
I also got to go to the bead store in Arcata and spend a couple hours picking out materials to make my shell necklaces and earrings, which I'm thinking I will try to sell on Etsy if I get around to it. We'll see. I'll be sure to post them on here if I ever do! And another thing that happened while we were in town: Jack and I got on a cell phone plan together. So if you haven't gotten my new cell number yet, please send me a message and I will email it to you or give you a call or something. Or you can just call my old number and it gives my new number in the voicemail. I still own my old number, and probably won't deactivate it for awhile, just to make sure if anyone calls me they get forwarded to my new number.
All of these photos, by the way (with the exception of the flowers) were taken on my new camera! That was my little birthday present to myself, and I would say it does a pretty darn good job of photographing.
But a fantasmargonical birthday weekend doesn't necessarily elicit a hip, hip, hooray, so I'm sure you're wondering what that is about. Let me tell you: I got a job offer from Sequoia National Park! Two, actually, but I had to turn one down and choose between them, obviously. Assuming nothing goes wrong, I should be working as a Park Ranger Interpreter at Lodgepole Visitor Center (and a couple other places) in Sequoia National Park, a mere 2 hours drive from my Love, and right in the bustling heart of the park. It's a pretty good spot to have on my resume, for sure, and it will likely open a lot of doors for the future. Jack and I are celebrating right now - so you might as well join in too!

Until next time!

16 March 2014

Birthday Weekend Kick-off!

Well, it's another beautiful birthday, and my birthday weekend is off to a great start!

Jack came up late last night, and this morning wished me my first happy birthday of the day and gave me my first birthday kiss - because he didn't want anyone to beat him to it. Haha. I opened a package from my folks - a beautiful "African Watercolors" book that I think I will get lots of inspiration from in the weeks to come. I also got my camera that I ordered for myself for my birthday. It's one of those life-proof cameras I've been wanting for a few years now. I was playing around with it this morning: the operating system is totally different from my old camera, but I think I'll be able to get used to it with a little practice. This morning I was playing around with the panorama feature... a bit tricky, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. Expect some photographs when I get a chance to get everything figured out between my computer and my camera. Then Jack gave me some pretty purple-flowered branches he'd picked for me on the drive up, and I was off to work!

Now I'm sitting in the kiosk, but I got some good news from my boss: today is one of the days when there's not full ranger coverage for the entire day, so I get to go home early! Jack is taking me to Eureka/Arcata for an evening of surprises (which he's currently up there setting up!) and then we'll be back here for St. Patrick's Day to cook up some good Irish grub, and Tuesday we'll be off to the Sinkyone Wilderness to do a little camping/hiking for a night or two. I've got Thursday off as well this week, so we'll have plenty of time to do some exploring and take our time. Somewhere in there I'll have to swing by the post office and pick up my mail - I know of at least three things that are supposed to be there for me! It's times like this I wish I had a p.o. box so I could check it on my schedule. Oh well. General Delivery is free, and I'm fine with free for right now.

So that's the plan - expect some pictures (on my new camera!) to follow!

Until next time!

12 March 2014

McKinleyville Cousins!

With 48 days remaining, I'm busy doing laundry and recovering from a whirlwind just-over-24-hour visit with my cousin Mike's family up in McKinleyville. They took me for a few little hikes in the area, introducing me to a couple state parks on the coastline, and further cementing the love affair I feel that I'm having with the Pacific Coast. What would my mountains say?
The trip started with a 6am alarm clock, hopping out of bed and into my clothes, throwing some food down my gullet and my things (already laid out the night before) into my bag. Shortly after 6:30 I was out the door attempting, just at the very butt-crack of dawn, to locate the trailhead without a flashlight and very little ambient lighting. After a little hesitance I was on the trail and headed for Weott, my way growing clearer by the minute as my eyes adjusted and daylight slowly seeped into my surroundings. I made it to the bus stop with at least ten minutes to spare. An hour on the bus brought me to Eureka, and another fourty-five to McKinleyville, where cousin Mike and his 1-1/2-year-old son Jasper were waiting to meet me. It was a short walk to their house, and a short distance from their house to the coast and all sorts of public lands up and down it.
Jasper, who reminded me so much of my nephew Cade, was a highly entertaining fellow during my visit! :)
Mike, his wife Susanna, and I had a lot of catching up to do since, we realized, we hadn't actually seen each other since 2006... eight years! That's almost a decade, and it's crazy to think that I can say that sort of thing. They've done lots of traveling, in the U.S. and abroad, and it was inspiring to look at their photos and hear their stories of adventures. We also had lots of good conversations about work and jobs and hiring and the like... it was information from Mike and Susanna that first helped me to get my foot in the door working for parks, and their stories as well as their advice are a great encouragement as I continue to try to land seasonal work with the National Park Service.
 This morning we went to Patrick's Point State Park, where I became obsessed with snagging photos of seaspray on rocks. I think this was my most successful shot where that is concerned, though I'm not too keen on the positioning of everything in the shot... definitely not very well aligned in my photo. We got back home in time for lunch, some conversation, and then it was back to the bus stop by 1 o'clock to catch the bus back down to Eureka. I spent a little under an hour picking up some groceries before the Southern Humboldt bus came around to take me back to Weott, where I soldiered out onto the trail once more to hike back to my humble abode. It was an amazing weekend, full of beautiful sights and good conversation (and good food!), and insanely summer-like weather to boot! (Although this latter bit proved to be my undoing, since I had packed for cooler weather and as a result was forced to fill my bag to bursting with my cooler weather clothes and wear what was left in spite of the heat.) Now it's back to work tomorrow, and as soon as next weekend starts, Jack will be up here to celebrate my birthday with me and we'll be off on another adventure.
Baby Banana Slug! (if you're in my immediate family, please read that with the same voice as "Baby Buffalo" or "Baby Banana";)
On the job front, there are developments, more or less. I've gotten multiple inquiries for "interest and availability", to which I have responded promptly that I am both interested and readily available. Word is that the trailhead positions I want SO BADLY to work are going to be interviewing next week, so please keep me in your thoughts and prayers that I will get some good news very soon. I will have to tell my boss here sometime in the next week whether or not I intend to stay on through the whole summer, so it'd be really nice if I had something definite when that conversation comes up. Hopefully the next time I post on here I will have some (good) news to share with regards to that!

Until next time!

07 March 2014

Creativity

With 53 days, more or less, to go, I thought I'd post on some of the creative things I've been up to in my umpteen hours of spare time. One of my major activities this week was baking:
Homemade cereal flakes - my usual yellow corn and blue corn batches, with a buckwheat batch as my third (the latter being amazingly sticky - no wonder they say buckwheat pancakes stick to your insides!).


Above are two pictures (with and without the flash) of the nutty shortbread cookies I made as well. You might notice that there's a color theme... that's right, everything is brown! This is because I decided to try swapping out all my sugar for blackstrap molasses. I would say the results were pretty good. While you can definitely taste the molasses, I think the heavy flavor rap molasses gets is just because of the over-spicing of "molasses cookies". These all turned out quite tasty.
My casserole creation: Sweet Potato Chicken Apple Casserole!

The layers are (from bottom to top): pie crust, pre-cooked black rice, sweet potato/egg/broccoli bits, chicken, a sprinkling of more black rice, diced apple, country herbs, slivered almonds. I think that's everything.

And in the bowl... ok, I little messy, and I definitely have to work on my food photography skills, but isn't the color amazing!?
The casserole came as an idea from Jack, who informed me upon leaving last week that I had to use up the black rice, and not to forget about those sweet potatoes in my cupboard, and that I had the beginnings of a good casserole there... so I thought about it for a few days and thus this creation was born. It actually turned out pretty tasty, and I daresay I may make it again. The only thing I think I may leave out is the broccoli - too strong a flavor for the dish (I only added it because it was getting flimsy in my fridge); and the only thing I would add is cheese - I cut up some chunks of Manchego in my first serving and felt like it was a great rounding out of the flavors.

There's also been plenty of time for creating art in the more traditional sense. Aside from other various projects, I've got a couple paintings that I recently completed:
I painted this large piece (12" by 18" or so) for my friend Daisy in Texas. She was complaining that the white walls of her apartment that she's currently living in were too bare, so I promised her some art to help brighten things up a bit. She loved it, and sent me a photo of it on the wall by her bed - apparently it's the last thing she sees before going to bed each night. What an honor! :)
I painted the above painting this week. It was inspired by the slough (at least, I think that's what it is) along the highway between Arcata and Eureka. The real body of water is much wider, but I wanted to capture the invasive eucalyptus trees that surround everything, so think of this as a wide-angle shot squished into a short frame. In case you're wondering, the biggest, closest bird is supposed to be a heron of some sort. I was just going to do a grey winter sky for the backdrop, but at the last second I decided I wanted a sunset instead, and I think it really brought the painting to life color-wise.

So that's what I've been working on lately. But before I sign off, I wanted to share a few other paintings that I did in January before I came up here.
Call it unfinished or art nouveau or whatever. I meant to put a firewood salesman in the painting, but I couldn't decide where I wanted him. This is based on a scene that struck me while we were driving around in the high desert.

I think this is quite possibly the only portrait oriented painting I've done so far. The idea came to me randomly, and I played around with it a bit before sketching (which I rarely do) and then painting and salting the background, and finally working on the three foreground sections of this piece. The sheer look of the skirt happened quite by accident when I tried to make it look more woven and the paint was too wet. The shoes are my favorite (though I'm not 100% satisfied with their shape) because the color is an insanely dark midnight blue. It was a simple painting, but very beautiful and elegant and I'm very proud of it.
This one was an experiment in layered painting - something Jack tends to do when he paints. Obviously I wasn't quite fully committed to it, but I like how it turned out. First there's the background - swirly designs in various purple hues; second is the middle ground which was yellows and reds mixed on the page with my hake brush going swish swish over them; third was the cat, in a watered-down shade of dark indigo combined from the skirt and shoes above. I think he would've looked better if I had used more paint and less water, a problem I have quite frequently.

Well, I hope you enjoyed looking at my creations - and maybe they've inspired you to create something yourself! Any comments or tips or whatnot on the artwork is always appreciated as I'm still very much in the learning stages with my watercolors (and probably will consider myself to be so for many, many years to come).

Until next time!

03 March 2014

One month done!

Fifty-eight days to go!

I've successfully completed my first month of work, and I still don't like the job. In fact, as I've ticked item after item off my list of things to do, I have slowly come to dislike it more because it's gotten increasingly dull. Now other park aides are coming back and, while their company does add a bit to the socialization (and thus the speed) of the work day, they're broken-in presence means that they are going about their many projects while I get to sit at the kiosk desk and hope for visitors day in and day out. And this week, I had no campers whatsoever on Saturday and only one on Sunday. Talk about dull. C'est la vie.
The biggest, bestest squash ever, that made the best squash soup ever, courtesy of Jack's friend Jordan
But this past week I also had the company of Jack to keep me entertained! He came up on Sunday night and surprised me - we were going to meet in Ft. Bragg on Monday, but he figured that there wasn't any point in spending any more time apart than we had to. :) So he came up on Sunday and bought tickets for us to see "American Hustle" in the old theater (super cool!) in Garberville. Monday we were able to take our time unpacking, sorting, and repacking into my car for the trip. We were in Ft. Bragg in the afternoon after I drove the long and twisty road to the coast, during which I thoroughly enjoyed watching Jack get excited about things he saw out the window. Since he tends to drive his truck the majority of the time on our past trips, I wanted him to have the opportunity to enjoy the ride, and he most certainly did, all week!
My Valentine's Day present to Jack - hand-embroidered, handmade hankies!
Three days in Fort Bragg were spent "wining and dining" - only more like "cidering and dining" on our part. It was beautiful while we were there: a touch warm the first day, cool and foggy the next, and windy with an edge of rain on the last so that as we drove that coastal stretch north of town on our way back to the 101 we had to stop and watch the massive waves crashing into the shore.
During the work week, Jack made me lunch, cleaned house, and made me dinner, while I sat on my bum for 10 hours a day. We watched a couple movies, went up to Eureka and Arcata to get groceries and dinner one night, and generally enjoyed each other's company for the partial seven days. On Saturday morning he was off to the south again, and I was left to my own devices once more, though to his credit he did a great job of cleaning up the mess we had made of the kitchen so that I didn't have to after he'd gone.

Next weekend I'm planning a visit to my first cousin once removed in McKinleyville, just a couple hours north of here, and the weekend after that will be my birthday weekend and Jack will be up again, though I've heard next to nothing about the surprises he has in mind for the weekend. I think this is the first time in years that I haven't been the one to plan my birthday weekend adventures.

So that's what I have to look forward to for the next couple weeks, and after both those March will already be more than half over! This weekend is mostly errands and cleaning up the house and whatnot. There's duff everywhere - even in my bed... probably because I have a tendency to wear my shoes on it and use it as a couch....

Until next time!