One week done!

February showers bring spring flowers...

... and what do spring flowers bring?

Banana slugs!

I've officially put in my first week of work, and I'm starting to feel a bit more settled in. Thanks to the holiday weekend, I actually checked in seven campsites today. Over the course of ten hours. Yeah... still pretty slow. But it is a job.

In my desperate search for something to do with myself, I turned around and noticed a bulletin board in the kiosk full of information: numbers for other parks, service times for local churches, prices for private campgrounds in the area, and the like. It was a huge, jumbled, wrinkled mess. Not to mention that more than one of the papers looked yellow with age. So I took them all down and brought them over to the office, where I spent the rest of the day retyping, consolidating, verifying, making phone calls, and finally printing a much more concise and extremely more accurate set of papers which I returned to the kiosk with and which I tacked up on the bulletin board in a mess-free, streamlined manner.

And then this morning I wondered what to do again.

Yesterday it rained heavily for the majority of the day, and today there was actually sunshine. I shamelessly stood outside and basked in it while I ate my lunch. There wasn't anyone around to see me, anyhow. Now I'm on to my weekend for a few days of busyness: laundry, finishing the unpacking/organizing/decorating process, doing my taxes, and other fun things. Next weekend Jack and I are supposed to meet up to celebrate Valentine's Day, so I better have things looking nice!

Until next time!

Turn my collar to the cold and damp

 The lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel are being consistently played out up here in the Redwoods. It rained for four days straight this past week, and while yesterday and today seem to be a break in the weather, there's more consecutive days of rain in the forecast. The area needs it - when I arrived the Eel River looked about as bad as the Rio Grande, but with four days of rainwater swelling its banks it's now a much healthier flow, albeit a bit like a frappuccino in color.

So far my time at Humboldt Redwoods State Park has been pretty hum-drum. I've worked two days so far, mostly orientation stuff: getting driven around, having things pointed out to me and explained, learning about the kiosk operations. Even so, I kind of feel like I don't know anything about the place. It'll be interesting to see what happens on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, when I'm supposed to be running the kiosk by myself.

Overall it seems like a nice place, but I'm not sure that I'd like to live here. As it is, I've already firmly decided that I don't want to stay here any longer than the three months I initially committed to. I'm just to far from the people I love, I feel, and I don't like that. That sense of community is lost on this park - everyone just seems to go home and do their own thing. Aside from taking care of projects that I've neglected and getting a lot of "me" time to work on exercising or reading or devotions or things like that, I get the feeling that this is going to be a bit of a lonesome set of three months.

But on weekends, I hope to do a fair amount of visiting. My cousin Mike and his wife are just a couple hours north of here, Aunt Barbara and Uncle Paul are just a few hours south, my friend Jenna is about a 7-hour drive over in the beautiful (or so I've heard) Lake Tahoe area, and Jack will be coming up to visit a couple times at least. I think the weekend adventures will help to make the time go by faster. I suppose I really am starting to get in that "settling down" sort of mindset - my last two moves now have been increasingly difficult for me. As it is, I've got a mere 78 days remaining here, more or less, depending on how things pan out for summer employment, and that's a comforting thought. I'm merely passing the time, adding to my resume, and building up my bank account again before I go to where I really want to be.

Way up North!

 What have I been up to lately? All sorts of things, and in all sorts of places. In the last couple weeks I was bumming around the suburbs of Chicago, then on a train to California, unloading in Hesperia, CA, chilling out in Simi Valley, relaxing up at Cerro Gordo, and now: packing to go up north. In just a few days I'm supposed to start my position at Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and I couldn't be more excited. The car is all packed and ready to go, and I'll be starting my journey first thing tomorrow morning. Well, after breakfast and see-you-laters with Jack, anyhow. I'll probably post again once I get settled, but for now, I'll leave you with a few more shots from our week in the ghost town. And just a reminder: if you click on the photo, it will get bigger on your screen. This is especially helpful for the last photo I've got on here today.