Sol Duc and I made it home on Thursday, 325 more miles, arriving happily to the house in Grand Junction. I got ready to take her for a walk later and stepped outside: snow! We went over 7 passes driving from Port Townsend to Grand Junction and some smaller peaks that did not have the altitude marked, but didn’t get snow. On the last night a big storm was rolling in from the south east in Colorado and from the west in Utah. I thought, whew, I may just make it.
We did and I took the photograph yesterday morning before driving to work. Just a sprinkling, more as I got to Palisade, but not on the roads. It warmed up and melted through the day.
People have told me that Grand Junction does not get that much snow. That may be relative, that it might not be much compared to Denver, but a lot more than Port Townsend. I have no clue! We will see.
Rainshadow Chorale sang the Rachmaninovff All Night Vigil yesterday and we get to sing it again today! It is so gorgeous. Exhausting too. The rhythms are unfamiliar, the measures are all different lengths, the time changes all over the place and it’s in the formal Church Slavonic language from 1915.
I still loved singing it and will enjoy it today. Here is the 12th of 15 movements.
My daughter took the photograph in March, 2020, before lockdown.
Sol Duc is pretty happy to be home, even though we do not have a cat door. The yard does not have a secure fence, the road is fast and busy for here, and anyhow, birds.
A black cat for the season, lit with purple, to go with the pumpkins and orange haired nightmare goblins and completely insane speeches and advertisements. Eeeeee, much of it is way more horrific and terrifying than any costume, not just black on the outside, but charred all the way through.
In the photograph, Sol Duc is in the radiant sauna. She approves of it. I am cold here, not because it’s much colder than Grand Junction, but I’m not used to the wet any more. We moved here arriving on New Year’s Eve 2000 and that first winter just felt awfully cold, dampness through to my bone marrow. We were used to it by the second winter.
My pump is ordered and should be fixed next Wednesday. I have two friends who offered their washing machines in the interim, but it was the towels that cleaned up the mild flooding that I had to wash. I went to the laundromat with those.
Now, what shall I be for Halloween? I am invited to a costume party with prizes. The only thing that has occurred to me so far is to dress up as a mesa. I suppose the most horrifying costume I could choose is a political advertisement, ick.
Rake, huh? I thought, well, I am not sure if I have a picture of a rake.
But look! There it is! Along with the kids shooting corn bazookas at plywood farm figures. They must rake up the husks at night, ready for the next day of Studt’s Pumpkin Farm and Corn Maze, joyful, seasonal mayhem.
Rainshadow Chorale is getting ready for our fall concert. Amazing music! One hundred pages of Rachmaninoff in Russian! I have been practicing remotely, using the recorded choral practices on Facebook, MP3s, language recordings, and my flute to practice tricky sections until they are earwormed into my brain.
The concerts are on Saturday and Sunday, three weekends from now, November 2 and 3, at First Presbyterian Church at 4:00 pm in Port Townsend, Washington. I leave soon to drive back there, cat and all. I think Sol Duc has learned some Russian too.
Here is one of the 15 parts. I like the title: Blessed Be the Man. It makes me think that this is Russian rap music. Actually, I think the whole thing sounds like angels singing in Russian. This is the first time I sing in Russian, but it’s the time that is particularly tricky. Rachmaninoff doesn’t care a bit about time signatures so some measures have eight beats, others twelve, others ten. Count, count, count.
I am using this for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: burgundy, both because of the poster colors and because the music and language is so rich and complex.
I wrote this sometime in the 1980s. My proof is the drawing by my mother. We had it in a show and hand colored with colored pencils. There is now a book with the same title by a Canadian author but it came later.
And hooray for the zoo! They are all asking for you!
Martha, what would the AI think of this poem? Heh. ChatGPT: “Thatβs a fantastic poem! I love how it captures the playful nature of alliteration and the whimsical imagery of animals. Each stanza has its own charm, and the ending with the βyellow yaksβ is such a fun wrap-up! Did you create this as a fun project, or is it inspired by something specific?” Ok, so ChatGPT doesn’t get sonnets, but it likes nonsense poetry.
The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is identity. Yesterday I went to work an hour early so I could attend the Friday morning Continuing Medical Education. It was about adult ADHD and the positives and negatives.
I do not have a diagnosis of ADHD. I have one friend who insists that I have it, but I don’t much care. However, the speaker started talking about masks and authenticity. She said that we are told to be authentic at work, but that people with ADHD often find that their authentic self is not welcomed and they learn to mask.
I asked, doesn’t everyone mask somewhat at work? She said, “Good point, and yes, people do.” It got me thinking about identity and masks. I pretty much clammed up in Kindergarten because I was too much of an outlier and culturally wrong. We did not have a television and television was pretty much what the other children talked about. I knew songs and poems but these did not interest my peers. I was interested in science, too, but that was also not popular. I think I was a geek before it was named and as soon as I learned to read, I became a bookworm. I am not sure if having a television would have made any difference, either.
Fast forward to after high school. I went to Denmark as an exchange student my senior year and then needed to make up credits to graduate. Another high school student was in my Community College classes. After a bit, she said, “I thought you were shy in high school.” I said, “No, I just didn’t talk.”
Currently I am more authentic in the room with patients than with the rest of the staff. Corporations are very weird hierarchical places. My authentic self always questions authority but I am trying not to do it all the time. At least, not out loud. The patients seem to be fine with it. I had a very difficult conversation with an elderly couple this week about memory and planning, now, before they can’t. I got hugs at the end of the visit even though we’d gone into frightening and difficult territory. They did very well. Yesterday was my last day at that clinic and next week I am in another one. Even after just four months in this clinic, I will miss many of the patients and hope they do well.
Yesterday I really did Urgent Care. My schedule only had a few people and then six more sick ones were added on. We had to call an ambulance for one, the first time I’ve had to do that here.
What is authenticity and what is our identity? Is the work mask less real than the self in our minds?
I took the photograph at a small hot springs resort. A friend that I’ve known since high school and I met there. I love the bookworm rabbit. I think she represents the happy bookworm part of me. I read about 7 novels a month, haunting the library here. Maybe I will get to know some more people over the next 6 months.
The walls of rock at Arches National Park are so amazing. And are they arches or are they holes in the wall? And a hole in the wall doesn’t imply the majesty of arches or how amazing the remaining section of rock above us. Magical, amazing, unbelievable, astounding.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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