I'm back from Seattle, and I'll tell you all about it... tomorrow. For now, check out photos on Flickr. I've used up my monthly allotment posting them, so at some point in the near future I guess I'll have to stop being cheap and pay for an upgrade.

Willow was sick last night. Of course, being twoandahalf, she couldn't really tell us what was wrong. She woke Jen up at around 2, and spent the next two hours crying and saying, "ow!" At 4, Jen had a feeling that she was going to throw up, so she got up and headed for the bathroom.

She didn't make it.

Imagine a wall, a person, and a floor covered in what looks like the results of an attempt by agitated monkeys to paint with cottage cheese.

I got up to clean the puke. Jen got into the bath with Willow. Poor Willow. She was pale and quieter than usual. When I got her out, though, she insisted on getting her mom a towel and bringing it to her herself. It's moments like this that bring a tear to my eye. She must have been feeling miserable, but she was still helping out. I love her. I'm going to miss her, and Jen, and the other kids when I'm in Seattle this week.

We spent the day at home, trying to get things done, which is hard when all or most of the kids are home too. Lexy (oops, I mean "Alex" - he's decided that "Lexy" isn't cool anymore so now we all have to remember to call him "Alex" which is harder than it should be for some reason) went to his friend's house for awhile, which didn't make too much of a difference really because the girls have been in rare form today. They both have ideas about what they will and won't do, and they're usually the exact opposite of they way we view things. And, to top things off, Jen has had an earache for most of the day.

Tomorrow, I get to go to work for the only day this week, and then it's off to Seattle on Wednesday. Jen is understandably dubious about the prospect of being here alone with the kids until I get back. I wish there were two of me sometimes.

The picture is of a Western Hognose Snake. I've had him for around a decade. He wishes he could eat toads, but I feed him mice because toads are too cute.

I keep stumbling across photos of this curious little event on Flickr. They should have one here. They should have them everywhere.

I can now add carpet-layer and taxidermy-duster to the list of things I've done at work. It's been fun doing odd jobs, but the science camp year looms over us now. Time to finish up.

Speaking of finish (or, more properly, Finnish), I went with M to see Circle, with Merzbow, Earth, and Growing at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco last night. Growing were a decent duo consisting of a guitarist and a bassist playing loud, heavy ambient music. Earth were instrumental sludge metal (some wag in the audience proclaimed, "it's like Lynard Skynard slowed down!"), Merzbow obliterated eardrums with a solid wall of noise (imagine being in a quonset hut caught in a tornado), and Circle were absolutely divine, playing a hypnotic mixture of krautrock, metal, and that indefineable something that elevates a band to a level of greatness not often obtained. They didn't go on until after midnight, and despite the late hour their seventy minute set seemed to fly by in half the time. M is currently on a plane heading south to see them at the Arthur festival in L.A.

Jen got up when we got home and we all stayed up talking until around 4. Today we're being lazy. Jen and Willow are at a get-together at K's house. The other kids are at their dad's place. It's a little cooler outside than it has been over the last week.

Oh, and here's a picture of the Costa Rican Zebra Tarantula. It doesn't like to pose, and more often than not simply runs away. Damn quick for such a big spider.

I sit here typing while half a continent away people have been plunged into a world where basic survival is the only thing that matters. The survivors have had the carpet pulled out from under them. Many of their homes are under water. Gone, just like that. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like. It's like New Orleans has become a set for one of those post-apocalyptic science fiction films, except nobody is acting. It is not a movie. They haven't even begun to tally up the dead. Hard to do that when 80 percent of the city is submerged. Strength be with them.

I was thinking about homes when the new janitor and I set about our task of ripping out a toilet and a septic tank today. There is an employee who lives in one of those old seventies trailers parked on our site. It probably hasn't seen a road in decades, and is hooked into the sewer line like a real house. The only problem is that there's a leak somewhere, which is costing us 1000 gallons of water a day, so we had to get in there and pull everything out. Under one of the beds was the original water tank from back when the trailer was mobile. As I fiddled around trying to hook up the water lines in a way that would drain it, I wondered if the water inside had been there since the seventies. It sure smelled like it. We managed to get a bit of it on the carpet, making the whole trailer smell like chemicals mixed with the vague odor of septic tank (we poured a couple of gallons of bleach into it before we even got started). Then I imagined a whole city drowned underneath water even more toxic than this. I'm sure a lot of the homes there were even more meager and depressing than this trailer, but they were homes nonetheless, full of keepsakes and irreplaceable belongings. The soundbites on the radio today were mostly of people saying things like, "I didn't have much, but I wish I still had it." I wish they still did too. It's hard to think about mundane things right now.

Today was a departure from my normal work schedule. I went to a bland, brick building in San Jose, along with twenty or so other people and spent the day learning the ins and outs of supervising weekend work crews from a woman who could have been a stand-up comedian so I can be an official supervisor this season. I will probably end up supervising the cleaning crew at the site every other Sunday, with the new janitor handling it when I'm not there. We have to go through all of this official training because the work crew people are inmates. They are given a choice of jail time or paying their way into a work program like this one. We've all seen the people in orange vests picking up trash alongside the freeways. Well, some of them luck out and don't have to face the terror of knowing that the people driving by them at high rates of speed might just be drunk like they were when they got caught. Okay, that's not quite fair. I'm sure some of them got busted for reasons other than D.U.I. Anyway, I'll be there, working overtime, supervising a bunch of people who are actually paying to work. Life is funny sometimes. For me, not for them.

It's hot and the crickets are chirping. Willow was grouchy this evening so I took her out to look at the stars. It calmed her down. It's funny how objects trillions of miles away sometimes have to be called upon to help get the kids to bed.

R.I.P. Denis D'Amour. When you create something, part of you lives on after you're gone.

As I write this, a city I've never visited lies partially submerged in a brackish mixture of seawater, chemicals, and waste. The media is using words like, "nightmare," to describe the situation. It's really hard to wrap my mind around the reality of the calamity. Outside my window I see calm darkness. I know an earthquake could strike without warning at any moment, but I accept that. All Californians do. I'm not sure where I'm going with this post, but wherever one chooses to live, there seems to be a trade off. A gamble, if you will. The winning streak never goes on forever. I hope that when the waters recede, there will prove to be fewer casualties (human and otherwise) than the talking heads are predicting. Life is hard enough without having a 100 plus mile-an-hour monkey wrench come crashing down on us. Of course, when these things happen, people prove their resiliency. We bounce back. Maybe those who no longer seem to live, those who merely exist in some twilight of their own making, will find that they are truly alive after all. Maybe some good will come of this for them. As for the rest, my thoughts are with them.

Our own lives are a bit more mundane. The boys started school today. It's almost like summer never was. The Dickens gets to go to her new preschool this week too. Jen took her down to check out the campus today. She's really excited about it. At work, I'm continuing to help get our our site ready for outdoor school. They're going to tear down one of the buildings this Autumn to make way for the new lodge. This means shuffling rooms for the staff and students. I am one of the shufflers, dragging everything from wastebaskets to ceiling tiles from one place to another. It's peaceful this week, with no band camps or symphony camps or any other sort of camp cluttering up the place. There are just a few of us on site. As much as I like working with the kids, this is kind of nice in its own way. I'd better enjoy it while I can...

We took all of the kids plus a friend of the boys to the San Francisco Zoo today, where we met up with this family (who nicely got us in for free), bringing the total number of kids up to eight. We then spent several hours trying to keep all of the kids in sight. This proved nearly impossible, but after all was said and done we hadn't actually lost any of them, so I guess we did something right. The city was nicely foggy, like it almost always is, and the zoo wasn't too crowded. For the most part, the kids had a great time, running and giggling and gaping at the animals. I think I liked the insect zoo best - especially the drawers of arachnid specimens. Remind me to look up Malaysian Forest Scorpions. The damn things are nearly a foot long! There was an immense tailless whipscorpion too, and a tank full of skin beetles busily skeletonizing a rat carcass. The boys were pretty excited by the room as well. At the end of the day, well after the Three Kid Circus crew had left, we rode the little steam train and dragged the protesting girls off to the van, where they promptly fell asleep.

I've got to say, even though I know zoos are at the forefront of many conservation battles, it's still sad to see a lot of the animals behind bars, especially the lions, who just looked defeated and out of their element. A cage, no matter how gilded, is always a cage. It made me think of the movie, Instinct, with Anthony Hopkins (I can't remember who directed it), which had some interesting insight into the nature of captivity.

We didn't really get an opportunity to engage in conversation with our new acquaintances either. We were all too busy keeping the group together. We forgot to put sunscreen on the kids too, so Willow has a bit of a sunburn. So do I.

On a somewhat less serious note, we noticed that Prairie Dogs meditate and Meerkats sometimes faint.

Right now, the kids are resisting sleep on the eve of their first day of school. It's a lot warmer here than it was up in the city. Crickets are singing in the other room. The Floating World is playing in the background, part of an ongoing subscription series of cds released each month on the full moon. An aptly named band too, full of echoey flute. Quite lovely, actually. Released by the good folks at Dark Holler.

It has been hard to get up in the morning every day this week. I've been stubbornly staying up too late in order to do things like have actual, uninterrupted conversations with Jen and well... watch episodes of Six Feet Under. We went to a small get-together up in the hills too, and stayed late enough that the girls both went to sleep there. I was tired enough a couple of mornings ago that I went to work with my shirt on inside out and didn't notice for about 45 minutes. Nobody said anything either. Maybe it wasn't obvious enough.

This morning when I got to work I was greeted by the pungent smell of sewage. It turns out that sometime between when I left yesterday and when I arrived this morning, some meddling soul discovered the control valves for the leach field (our septic system - basically pipes with holes buried under the dirt in a gravel bed so bacteria can break down the waste - sort of an aquifer from hell, really) and shut off the flow. The result was that sewage was finding its way to the surface and forming puddles on the field. Nothing a bit of caution tape and some lime couldn't fix once the valve had been returned to its proper position, but a bit of a nuisance. Don't teenagers have anything better to do with their time than mess with forces they don't understand? Apparently not. They still can't recycle either. I've probably rescued a hundred cans and bottles from the band camp's trash each day this week so far. As I was doing this today, I got to thinking about how plastic bottles are a petroleum product. Petroleum will not be with us forever. People have a knack for using and disposing of things as if there is an endless supply. Everything is created out of sight and mind, and disposed of the same way. We can be so disconnected from this process sometimes. Maybe distracted is a better word, especially when talking about teenagers. Hormones dictate that plastic bottles are not important. One cannot breed with plastic bottles. It's a shame though that the biological impulse to further our species is so narrow in scope. Recycling plastic does indeed have a connection to this goal. We are so dependant on plastic now that I'm sure everything would collapse if it all disappeared tomorrow. How's that for a meandering ramble?

After work, I took the girls to get ice cream while Jen took the boys to get school clothes. The Dickens threw a minor fit when I got her ice cream in a cup instead of a cone, so I got her a cone to put on top. She ate exactly none of it. Willow didn't eat her cone either. I had three cones. On the way home, as we passed behind the grocery store, we stopped so the girls could shout into the ventilation tube leading into some unknown part of the building. They started by shouting, "hello," but quickly moved on to such colorful phrases as, "crocodile butt!" Then, in unison, they both shouted, "butt, butt, butt, butttt!" Willow, after a moment of thought, giggled and yelled, "tinky butt!" (that's, "stinky butt"). I can just picture some hapless grocery store employee back in the storeroom questioning his or her sanity as tiny, disembodied voices babble on in profane glee about general olfactory qualities of posteriors.

That's all for now. Goodnight.

Oh, and check out Pandora. Interesting.

On October 13th, don't forget to celebrate Peel Day, perhaps by playing some music for your neighbors... I think I'll have to get out all of my "Peel Sessions" records and tapes and have a marathon.

Yep. I spent the day filling in for the janitor. While cleaning toilets, I kept having this strange compulsion to march, which I blame on the fact that high school marching band members were practicing their drumming on the field nearby. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do these two things at once, both physically and psychologically.

Later, after spending a good chunk of the money we got for the van on food at Trader Joe's, we came home to find a new snake on the doorstep. It was in the cage that I'd transferred the Bullfrog tadpoles from. I'd left the cage outside because it belongs to the school, and I have yet to return it. Being a procrastinator, I haven't gotten around to actually putting it in my car or anything. Good thing too. After going inside and checking the messages, we, as I suspected, found out that K had gotten a call from her old neighbors about a snake in their yard. She'd gone to check it out and found a California Kingsnake, not her sister's python like she had been expecting. I suspect this particular Kingsnake, native though it is, probably escaped from somebody's house. Some kid probably caught it, and being inexperienced, put it in an improperly secured cage. It would be unusual to find a wild snake that far into suburbia on its own. Unusual, but not impossible, of course. Anyway, I'm going to let it go up in the hills.

Life's little surprises...

Today I got paid for hanging out at a barbeque. Okay, I actually had to drive various barbeque-related items over to the hostel adjacent to our site, and I had to light the grille. Poor me. I also got to eat barbequed veggie burgers and help myself to soda and cookies. Poor, poor me. I am so overworked.

This was the first time I'd been inside the hostel. I've been walking past it for years, but have never before had a reason to go inside. It has a beautiful, log-cabin exterior, and as my co-worker said, "it's kind of like visiting grandma's house." It really takes you back in time. In the trees, a pair of ravens held a long-winded conversation. On the ground, some doofus blocked me in with his SUV. When I asked him to move, he drove to the other end of the parking lot and blocked in the lady who runs the hostel. She called him all sorts of unpleasant names, but not to his face since by that time he was off galavanting around out of earshot. If people still rode horses instead of these steel monsters this sort of thing would never happen.

Then I spent the afternoon being a janitor because the real janitor had hurt his foot. Perhaps he hurt it kicking members of the band camp who don't seem to get the concept of recycling.

After I got home, we went to the park for a birthday celebration for Jen's stepdad. The kids had fun. The cake had inches of frosting. The sunlight slanted through the trees. Night fell. Home again, home again. I don't think the coffee will help much tonight.

This may look like a ghost wearing a lampshade, but it's actually Willow bouncing on the couch, something she does incessantly, giggling all the while.

(Short break while we scramble around trying to find all of the various paperwork and keys for the van so one of the 7 million people who responded within 20 minutes or so to the ad Jen just posted on Craigslist can buy it when he gets here)

I'm tired this week. We've still been staying up too late watching Six Feet Under. I participated in another rehearsal on Saturday, and worked half a day on Sunday, moving shade structures and lugging stuff around. When I got home, Jen went to her friend's birthday party and I hung out with Willow, who stayed up until eleven or so. The weekend passed like a half-seen insect darting past a porchlight.

Today, before we got down to the business of sorting out the summer camp stuff from the outdoor school stuff, the facilities manager took me up to the old Pick estate, which is where our school got it's name. It's been fifty years since the old geologist Vernon Pick occupied it, although I hear tell that the government had some secret doings on the site afterwards. Sounds like a tall-tale, and maybe it is, but it does lend the site a certain mystique. Mysterious past or not, I really love poking around inside dilapidated buildings. The estate is up on a hillside, with stone courtyards and stairways, now overgrown with juniper bushes and littered with leaves. Most of the original stonework is under a healthy layer of duff now, so one can only imagine what it must have looked like when it was in use for something other than a place for park rangers to dump broken or unneeded stuff. The roofs are bowed under half a century of pine needles, and the windows gape blackly. Inside is a darkened jumble of shattered glass, broken wood, and other unidentifiable detritus. Somewhere out back there is a bomb shelter, which is apparently walled off inside, hiding deeper and darker recesses. Lovely. I bet it's full of bats too. I'll have to hike up there with a camera sometime. Trees hide many details. Stone and rotted wood peeks out here and there. Beautiful.

(Oh, and by the way, a guy just stopped by and handed us $500 for our old van. He's picking it up tomorrow. I get to park in the driveway again! We can buy groceries too!)

We also stopped by the water tank, which is fed by a well. The pump was off, indicating that for once it was full. We climbed up on to to see for ourselves. I don't get to do that when I hike up there with kids, so I enjoyed the view from the top for the first time. The tank is important to us because it's where we get all of our water. We share it with the hostel and the ranger station, but their total use amounts to around 15%.
The rest of the day was less interesting, with more cleaning and lugging and sorting. Oh, and helping campers from previous weeks sort through mountains of lost and found items. After some fruitful searching, one mom bought five of our little fundraising packets (for the construction of a new lodge and general site overhaul) for $200. It's great to be appreciated. I'm proud to be a part of something that has this kind of grass roots support (okay, so it also has non-grass roots support, but the little individual gestures are more pure somehow).

Tomorrow is the last day of summer camp for the season. Time to put away all of the craft supplies, sunscreen, and pool equipment. Time to gear up for the Fall.
Tonight it doesn't feel like summer. The fog drifted in before eight, smothering the rising moon as it cleared the trees. Bats flitted here and there, decimating the insect population as they went. The last campfire and barbeque went well. It seems so out of time somehow - the families sitting together on the concrete steps of the amphitheatre, the camp songs, silly skits, and raffle. Like a slice of childhood. Of course, many of the items that get raffled off to unsuspecting campers look like they have been sitting in somebody's garage since my childhood. Well, except maybe for the baby shower sign recently uprooted from the side of the road leading up to camp. People are always forgetting to take their signs down. Have an event at the park? Put up lots of signs so your guests can find the way. Afterwards, conveniently forget about your damn signs. When Jen and I got married nearby, you'd better believe that we remembered to take the signs down. Maybe some sixth sense was telling me that if we left them up they'd end up in a summer camp raffle.

The last couple of days have started out with fog and overcast skies, but by noon the grey blanket has been drawn back, revealing the stark, warm blue of August. It still seems a few degrees cooler than last week though, which makes me happy.

I did some teamwork challenge exercises with my group yesterday, which is always interesting with seven year olds. After one particular challenge, during which the kids were supposed to work as a team to get everybody across some "hot lava" on a Tarzan-style swinging rope, I had a group meeting so the kids could air their grievances. More than half of the kids had complaints, such as, "he pushed me," and, "they weren't letting me help," and, "people were cutting in line!" After everybody had gotten a chance to talk, I asked if anybody was willing to fess up to these crimes. The ensuing silence was the quietest I had gotten the group to be all week.
It's the same thing with most adults too. People are always quick to complain, but it's always much harder to look at our own behavior. In the hope that the next generation will be braver at self evaluation than the current one, I have been trying to emphasize solutions over griping with the kids who enter my circle of influence. Solutions often start with some serious self evaluation. Complaining is so easy. Solutions are sometimes impossible.

Speaking of self evaluation, we finished season two of Six Feet Under. Three more to go.

The little guy in the top picture caused a lot of consternation today when it had the bad judgement to hang out near the door to the girl's shower room. It now resides in the grassy area past the pool.

Finally! A cloudy day! A few errant raindrops even found their way down far enough to mar the dust on my windshield while I was driving to work this morning. At around 11 am, the wind picked up too, which can be a scary thing if you're underneath a bunch of trees bone-dry from lack of rain. Sure enough, we could hear loud cracking and snapping underneath the roar of the wind. Up the hill, I could see large branches plummeting down. I think one of them knocked over a small Tan Oak tree as it fell. I was too busy to look closely. The kids, mostly 7 year olds, were all looking around them in wonder at the sudden snowfall of leaves, making it harder to get them out of the forest quickly. Get them out quickly I did though. Later, I found out that another group had actually been struck a glancing blow from a large branch. Thankfully, nobody was seriously hurt.

It never really did get hot today. I took the three older kids and one of their friends on a hike after dinner, leaving poor Willow behind. It's just too hard to watch both The Dickens and Willow around Poison Oak and other wilderness pitfalls. The other kids had fun though, although I had to carry The Dickens for a large portion of the hike. The boys spent a lot of time pretending to see various animals in the bushes. All we actually saw were a few rodents, some lizards, and a large piece of Rattlesnake skin. Nice hike though. The smell of sage is quite strong up there - much more than it is at work. I love it.

The summer is whipping by so fast that the imminent collision with autumn is likely to result in property damage. In less than a month, G, M, and I, with a little help from some friends, are set to participate in a music festival in Seattle. We managed to rehearse yesterday, which will be helpful. After rehearsal, we went on a mission to Rhythm Fusion in Santa Cruz. I had hoped to buy some more nose flutes, since I keep breaking mine. No luck. I was also on the lookout for jaw harps, since I'm also quite adept at breaking them and I'm down to my last one. They had some expensive ones and some cheap ones. I bought a cheap one. In fact, it was a Snoopy jaw harp. It's actually quite rugged, and looks like it can withstand quite a beating. Lastly, both G and I bought soolings, which are a type of Indonesian wind instrument - basically, a long section of bamboo with finger holes and a tricky little mouthpiece. Very relaxing tone though. We got the big ones, around three feet long. As we walked down the street with them, a guy wished us good luck at the gig he must have thought we were walking to. I guess it's not too odd to see guys with long hair carting around strange instruments on the streets of Santa Cruz. Most of them are downtown, playing them, with hats, baskets, or instrument cases placed hopefully nearby. Busking is alive and well here. I hope they all walked to their favorite spots, because if they drove they'd have to earn a lot of money to break even.

I've always said that we'll never really run out of oil, because nobody will be able to afford the last barrel. Hell, most of us probably won't be able to afford gas decades before it comes to that. Part of me hopes that gas goes up to five dollars a gallon so all of the large, gas-guzzling vehicles will be forced to gather dust and bird poop in their driveways. We really do need to find alternatives, don't we? Drilling in Alaska doesn't count. It's like adding another tablespoonful of broth to the soup that is supposed to feed your family for the next generation or two. And, I might add, a dearly bought spoonful of broth indeed. Let's hear it for hybrids, bio-diesel, and this new innovation called walking.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the final week of summer camp for this year. Today, realizing that I hadn't taken any pictures in awhile, I took out the Trans Pecos Ratsnake and let him climb the big, messy palm tree in our yard. He sure has grown. When we got him, he was not much bigger than a pencil.

If you're sitting there saying to yourself, "well, I could really watch some cool scandinavian folk music videos right about now," then you are in luck. Just follow this link.