Post Thanksgiving Hang-over

Just htinking about Thanksgiving in New Zealand. Myself and my other American flatmate cooked up a complete American-Thanksgiving in Kiwiland. Turkey, mashed potatos, homemade cranberry sauce, and she even figured out a way to make Pumpkin Pie, and Pecan Pie - despite the lack of usual resource. For example, they don't sell the pumpikin-pie-in-a-can fixings, so she made it by actually cooking a pumpkin. And there was no corn syrup for the pecan pie, so we found something similar.

Then, after several calls to my grandmother back in New Jersey, about a day and a half either ahead or behind (I can't remember which it is now!) I found out her tricks for green beans, mashed potatos, and of course, the turkey!

This year was a wonderful Thanksgiving too - we spent it at a friends house - it's their new home, that they just bought, right in time for the holidays. Great food, fantastic friends, and bad little boys running up and down the stairs. Plus, more dessert than I'll eat in a year... actually made my teeth hurt. Y.U.M.!!!

Settling In

Organization is the key - I'm learning that I can juggle the different jobs and responsibilities I have, it all comes down to scheduling. I am going to go ahead and put a big "knock on wood" after that statement. We started a new schedule at the radio station last week; my deadlines are now Tuesday and Thursday instead of tuesday and Friday. This would, under any other circumstances, give me all of Monday and Wednesday to gather the pieces for my story. However, I work at two other places, and my Monday's and Wednesdays are divided up between those jobs. But I'm getting efficient at turning around a package in one day and making them sound as if I had extra time to work on them...

The house is great, it generally needs to be clean, but the dust bunnies aren't actually stealing food out of the fridge yet, so I think I've got at least another week before the situation becomes urgent.

The house really looks beautiful - when we come home we walk into a gorgeous little timber framed kitchen with this recycled wood center-island.
It feels more and more important to me every year to be able to come home and shut the door on everything else.

There's the unfinished floor, the food that needs to be cooked, the story to be written, laundry escaping the confines of it's hamper, and a garden in need of harvesting. Sometimes this list is energizing, others, it's... just... endless. There's a wrench in my gut that feels like a fist wringing out a washcloth, I'm working on shaking it out, and hanging it up to dry. Right now, however, I think I'll tackle the garden.

Wow, what a week. What a couple of weeks, and what a couple of weeks ahead... Anyway - I was part of the circus on Tuesday. Media. Circus. Not my favorite, but I don't know if it's anyone's favorite. So here's the picture that ran on the front page of the Daily Interlake, the paper out here.

The Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar came out to the Flathead with Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus of Montana to see the Flathead River - there are several proposed mines at the headwaters of the river, in Canada, and Sec. Salazar is in the position to talk with Canada to... well basically keep the mines from going in at the headwaters of this watershed, next to this International Peace Park (Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park)

Sunny Days

Sometimes my job is particularly awesome. Last Thursday, 5/21, for example: there was a media trip beyond the closed gate up the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park. Got to walk on avalanche debris - and we're talking debris: trees with their limbs wrenched off, dirt, brush, pine needles... The edge of the road was broken away, and the old rock guard walls had been wiped out along a 500 foot section. Then, we were driven up as far as possible, and walked up to where they were still plowing the road. It was a beautiful sunny day following a slew of cold rainy ones.

April 2nd, for real

It's the second of April, and it's been snowing on and off for the past couple days. I had intended to ski today, but decided if I wait till tomorrow. This way I can get all my work done, FAR ahead of deadline, and then head up to the hill with Jake tomorrow - it's nicer to ski with him than just rub it in that I got to go skiing while he got to work.
It's finally stopped snowing here in town, and the sun is threatening to poke through. My brave little crocuses outlasted this mornings snow, and there's a smattering of green grass on one strip of land on the south side of the house.
I love skiing, but am really getting eager for spring time; cutthroat fishing, hiking, boating, leaving my jacket at home...

karma

I broke my streak: I hit a deer. It's karma (no pun intended-pun inevitable). Just the week before I had been smugly grinning on the inside as a roomful of people - of which I was one - was posed a question: how many of you have ever hit a deer? Nearly everyone in the room raised a hand. But not mee, I couldn't help but hold my head a little higher, thinking "I haven't."

3 Days later - WHAM BAM-whatthehellwasthat!!??!? Young deer, solid, ran head first - actually - I think he hopped - over the guard rail, into the front of my car, killing him instantly, and taking out my right turn signal totally.

Now my car is fixed, Jake hammered it out with a sledgehammer and replaced the turn signal. But, the fender is chipped and it, along with the front hood, have that softly crumpled look. Like slightly over-ripe fruit with the skin starting to wrinkle.

The night before, my left front headlight burnt out. So I was a right-eyed car that could only indicate turning left. I avoided driving at night. But - then I had to work, covering a politician's panel on the economy, open to the public, at 7 PM.

I saw the highway patrolman's car, the reflector strips lining the length of his sedan illumiunated by my one headlight, and yep, he pulled me over. My insurance had just run it's annual course, and I hadn't put my new card in the glove compartment yet.

"It's been one of those weeks," I told him. We laughed, I got a verbal warning, and Jake fixed the lights over the next two days. Everything until this last paragraph is the start to a catastrophic series of events in a work of fiction that ends in jail or Jamacia; depending on whether it's tragic, comic, or tragically comic.

Identity

As I'm planning my wedding, there are a lot of Celtic themes and traditions I want to incorporate. As I'm doing this, I'm realizing that's the heritage I most identify with. It's weird, it's really not something I'd thought about much before. I'm just as Slovak, Eastern European, as I am a Celt, if not more so because that side of the family got here in the 19-teens, whereas the Celts got here.... maybe before the American Revolutionary war.
It's the culture; it's the history, music, traditions, tales, religion - as a bridge between Christianity and Paganism, it's that my Mamgu (grandmother) reads Gaelic poetry and prayers at family functions.
Anyway, it's an interesting moment, at 28, to suddenly think about your identity. As a white-bread american, I kind of blend in. The first taste I got of recognizing my identity was while I was in New Zealand. There, it was the first time I really saw myself as an American (I know that sounds weird,) but as Americans, we identify ourselves as our heritage: Polish, German, English, Irish, Chinese, African etc. Outside the "walls" of this country, everyone else just sees us as Americans.
We are the children of the world.
In New Zealand, riding on the bus, I could be a fellow countrywoman; until I opened my mouth to say "thank you" to the bus driver with my American accent, instead of "cheers" in a Kiwi accent.

This is quite belated, but I am VERY busy and important after all... A couple weeks ago the whole Flathead Valley was mired in a soup of fog.
It was thick, gray, and dark on the valley floor, but just a thousand or so feet up, it was blue skies and sunny. So, even though the skiing was less than fabulous, it was sunny and hot, so up to the Big Mountain we went.
From there we went for a skin tour in the back country and got to spend the whole day up in the sunshine, climbing up through the slowly melting snow-ghosted forest and then skiing down in a fraction of the time it took to hike up, of course.
The lines we got to ski were actually pretty good. We did this two days in a row, one short hike, one longer - it was a Monday :)

This is a picture fromt the summit house at Big Mountain; the snow ghosts are the snow-crusted trees, they're melting and huge chunks of snow would just slough off.
In the distance, at the bottom of the picture is the soupy fog.

Here's another picture of the fog-filled valley from the sunny mountain top.

Friday

This could be one of the horsemen of the apocalypse... Hostess, the company who brought us ding dongs, have a fruit cake.
I wonder what the shelf life is...
Ohh! The fog finally lifted, I can see the mountains! Happy Friday!

I have this cold, and can't stop picking at my cuticles! The two are not related, but it is unfortunate.
The cold; coughing, sniffling, wheezing, and a voice that sounds like I smoke 5 packs of cigarettes a day... as sexy as THAT sounds, not so good for a broadcaster..
The weather feels very March, grey, wet, with dirty brown snow - weather which brings on a longing for a beach, sun and sand: Mexico, the Carribean, the south of France...
But at least I'm done with work for the day, and may just curl up with a hot bath, a cup of tea, and a book about Eleanor of Aquitaine, the 1150's were raunchy.
Silver lining

Oh, and some Elk we saw up in the North Fork the other weekend.

On Creativity in the New Year..

I love this poem, I find it one of the best descriptions of the zen of writing. If I were ever to teach a writing class, I would open with this poem.

"The Three Goals"

The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.

No symbolism, please.

The second goal is to see each individual thing

as unified, as one, with all the other

ten thousand things.

In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,

to see the universal and the particular,

simultaneously.

Regarding this one, call me when you get it. - David Budbill

I spoke with my dad this morning, one of the most talented writers I know, and it reminded me to keep plugging away at what I'm doing - Journalism. The work will feed my art - writing, but talking to him also reminded me how much I love fiction and poetry - how much I love words, the way they sound, the way they look on a page, the way you can line up sentences in different ways to describe a sensation, a scene, a wish; that you can create a world or a moment for another person to dive into.