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.