Picnic

I've had a couple of small panic attacks in the past 24 hours. I woke up at 3:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep what with all the racing my mind was doing, worries about money, whether I'm making myself unemployable by being out of the job market so long, etc. rumbling and tumbling in my head. And then today I made the horrible mistake of looking at my law school's online job postings. Oh my was that a really really bad idea. I saw a posting for the job that had sort of been my ideal escape plan back when I was working - pre year-off brainstorm. And what with the new car, and the sudden hit that my savings account has taken, and just general anxiety that is setting in as I get close to the 6 month mark, it sent me spinning. Maybe I should apply? Maybe that would be the right and responsible thing to do? The two people I was IMing with when I saw the posting sure thought so.

But it doesn't feel right. Stop, I'm not going to start thinking about all the pros and cons again because I'll undo all the good that was done by the intended subject of this post. With me completely freaking out at him by IM, my dear friend Zach suggested I come over to his house and he'd feed me tuna salad and we could go for a walk on the beach. When I showed up it was to see this lovely picnic lunch, complete with tablecloth and linen napkins set up in his beautiful overgrown yard full of wildflowers. It was so perfect. We talked about the snobs you have to deal with working in retail, insurance, ugly babies, and other inocuous subjects and when the shadows covered the table we retired to the beach where a little light exercise on a clear day in beautiful surroundings cleared the remnants of clutter from my head and left me calm and still. This kind of afternoon is why I'm not ready to go back to work, and, perhaps as importantly, this kind of beauty is why I'm not ready to move back to the big city. Any big city.

What Have I Done!?!?

Remember all that ridiculous and inexplicable car trouble I was having? Well, the dealership called on Saturday and said my car was FINALLY fixed, over a week after it had been allegedly fixed the first time. So on Monday I made the 100+ mile drive to pick it up, and couldn't get it out of the parking lot. They hadn't fixed it. It was doing the exact same things it had been doing when I dropped it off (i.e. not moving). In disgust, while they were "fixing" it again, I decided I might as well look at their used cars, I mean, I need a 4WD eventually anyway, so maybe the universe was telling me this was the place to buy it. Fuck the universe. Instead of buying a nice, modest, reasonable used car that fit into my very stingy year-off budget, I drove off the lot in a brand new Subaru Forrester. Yeah, I'm still not sure how that happened. I feel stupid, and more than a bit irresponsible. But the car is really pretty (it's one of the newer "sport" models, so isn't quite as boxy and dull as they've been in the past.)

On a (now quite) related note, I've actually been working a little bit. My mother manages a gallery/jewelry store and she's lost almost all of her employees right before the summer season, so I'm filling in once in awhile to give her a little bit of slack. It's . . . not completely awful. I mean, standing on my feet for hours at a time isn't the greatest thing in the world (thank god for my ugly-ass Mephistos), but I've got a car payment again, so even a few extra dollars coming in makes a difference. Very few. I've gone from a ridiculous law firm salary to living in my parents' guest room making barely over minimum wage. On the plus side I do have a shiny new car, tons of lovely, lovely free time and very little stress. So all in all, I still think I've made a good bargain. Right? RIGHT?

Loyalty Days

I drove into town this morning to deliver a canelet picked up in Portland to my friend Zach and saw lawn chairs beginning to line highway 101 and sheriff's deputies directing traffic. Oh crap, I forgot this weekend is Loyalty Days. While I have no interest whatsoever in watching a parade of classic corvettes and logging trucks (yes, seriously, the parades I went to in highschool featured fully loaded logging trucks and I can't imagine that has changed) wind its way through the middle of town, I do find the tradition kind of fascinating, in a sick, cold war holdout, kind of way.

In the 1950s and 60s, lots of small towns around America had "Loyalty Day" festivals or parades on May 1 as a sort of counter to the totally communist May Day worker's celebrations. Eisenhower officially declared it a holiday in the 1950s, and according to Wikipedia, George Bush proclaimed it as a holiday again this year. I found that rather amusing. The old communist threat is gone, so the reasoning behind holding an anti-holiday on May 1 (or thereabouts) is gone too, but . . . the parade lives on.

The car that refuses to be fixed

Well, I finished the 8 hour drive from Boise, Idaho to Newport, Oregon oh, about 30 hours behind schedule. And I did the last 150 miles without my car. Yeah, the lovely folks in The Dalles did not actually FIX my car. They replaced some parts, drove it around the block a few times, said it was fixed, and sent me on my merry way. Twenty miles later my car started sputtering and died, on the interstate, AGAIN. By the time I got AAA to tow me to yet another dealership's service department, it was 4:00 on a Friday and the nice young man behind the counter told me they wouldn't even be able to look at it until Monday. MONDAY. When my panic started leaking through because I was still 150 miles from home and I was tired, out of clean clothes, and feeling too poor to spend three days in a crappy hotel in Gresham, the nice young man talked to some other nice man, and they decided to give me a loaner for the weekend so I could get the hell home. Finally. So, for the moment I'm happy enough tooling around Newport in my nice shiny loaner car that has all the power it needs, but in the back of my mind is this gnawing fear that my car is never going to be whole and functional again. I've lost faith in my car. As Zach says, maybe this is the universe telling me not to procrastinate on getting that 4-wheel drive.

Plans

The summer I turned 4 years old, my parents and I lived in a teepee on 10 acres of land they bought on a hillside in Valley County Idaho while they built a house. It was solid enough for us to live in by the time winter rolled around, but 26 years later it's nowhere near "finished". And when I say it's incomplete, I don't mean that nobody's gotten around to painting the drywall in the basement (because there is no basement). I mean that three sides of the house don't have siding - they're just bare plywood. I mean that the second story loft HAS no drywall - puffy yellow insulation is visible between the studs and some long ago renter stuffed a patchwork quilt into a hole in the wall where a fan used to be to keep out the bats. For a house that's more than a quarter of a century old, it's still pretty raw. And I'm planning to move in at the end of June.

I haven't really mentioned my immediate plans here, mostly because I'm still not sure if what I'm doing is completely insane, or beautifully and cosmically right. Ok, that's not true, I am absolutely sure that this is completely insane, I'm just hoping with all my might that it's also right. Did I mention that the house's sole source of heat is a wood stove? And that Valley County winters can get down to 40 below?

The little piece of Idaho I'm moving to is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. It's a lovely green valley of farm land and ranches interspersed with cat-tailed wetlands and surrounded by pine scented mountains. At least that's what it is in my fond and fuzzy memory, and based on a quick trip this week, my first in 20 years, that's still what it is. But a four season resort recently opened across the valley from my childhood home, land prices have skyrocketed, and every substantial acreage I drove past had a "for sale" sign fronting the road and little white tubes sticking out of the ground - test holes for future housing sites, subdivisions and lawns replacing the open space. In fact, a 50 house subdivision is being planned on 150 acres bordering my parents' land. So this might be the last year that the land looks more or less like it did when I was a child, the last year I can put on cross country skis at my back door and ski for hours without running into somebody's else's back yard, and my hope is to experience a little bit of the beautiful life I remember before it's gobbeld up and gone forever.

Of course, I've been living in cities in apartments for my entire adult life. Even nine months of keeping the wild grasses from becoming a fire hazard, and chopping firewood and keeping the house from falling down around my ears could very well turn me into a raving lunatic. I'll keep you updated.

Stranded

Oh my god I actually have TONS to write about, but it all has to wait while I share the complete horror of the fact that I am currently stranded in The Dalles, Oregon at a Motel 6 awaiting a new "cam sensor" for my car. My car (5 years old, less than 30,000 miles) decided it had had enough of this whole "moving forward when the gas pedal is pressed" business this afternoon. On the interstate. On a shoulderless bridge on the interstate. While I was travelling 70 miles an hour. Here's what I was thinking: "OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO DIE!" and "Why did I spend all day yesterday talking about how much I needed a 4-wheel drive, the car obviously heard me and this is it's punishment for not appreciating it enough. I LOVE YOU CAR!"

Luckily a bunch of little things went right to balance out the incredibly awful wrongness of my beloved and until now exceedingly trustworthy car ceasing to function. For instance, even though there was no shoulder when the power went out, I was able to coast to a place with a shoulder. My stepdad bought me a AAA membership for Christmas and I'd actually remembered to put the card in my wallet before driving across a really big western state. In the 300 miles of nowhere my car crossed today, I'd guess about 200 miles were without cell phone reception but my car died in a coverage zone. Oh, and the "cam sensor" is covered by a recall so the repair is free (except for the $50 I'm paying to have a roof over my head tonight). I'm still a little shaky. The car not working wasn't nearly as scary as sitting in the car on a very narrow shoulder as semis zoomed around a corner while I waited for the tow truck.