My excellent friend Knox, a guy not known for his restraint, ordered way to many bulbs for his garden and gave the excess to me. I planted about half of them before our ridiculous second snow arrived. Yesterday, when I went to take the dog out, I noticed my lawn was dotted with bright yellow crocuses, like little golden suns.
There should be more of them, but the squirrels must have their share. Daily, I would tuck them back in the ground, daily, I would find them slightly chewed on and rejected, above ground. Since they are gifts, I should not be stingy about further sharing them, but I am a person who is solar powered; the more sunshine, the better, and squirrels are ungrateful jerks.
It’s great to travel with people you like. Andy, a former Lonely Planet editor and current friend, and I went to the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, Nevada, and we spent about as much time drinking coffee and talking about travel as we did listening to poetry, maybe more. As a direct result of that trip — and a general itchiness to do something cool and new in travel — we have launched The Statesider. I hope you’ll check it out and if you like what you see, sign up. We have some modest ambitions, but mostly, we would like to make American travel interesting again. (Sorry. Not sorry.) Go poke around, please.
I have had a near perfect anchor gig since late summer last year. Fellow freelancers understand the inestimable value of work that pays you well without taking all your time and how that frees you to work on the creative stuff that makes your brain light up. In addition to have a foundation that’s serving me oh so well, I’ve been working on some interesting other stories, too.
I visited a goat dairy out on the Kitsap Peninsula where I stomped around in the mud with the photographer assigned to the story, got to pet some goats who have funny Yiddish names, and eat some excellent cheese. Any day you get to take a ferry is a good day, and if that day includes goats and interesting people and cheese and a good drive, well, yeah.
I also ended up in the laundry room of The Martin, the apartment building in Olympia, Washington that was, go figure, the inaugural stage for a bunch of famous PNW bands. No, really, and later, I talked with the historian at MoPop and he was all, “Oh, yeah, The Martin laundry room. Of course.” My guide for the day was David Scherer Waters, the author of Making Sense of Olympia, a self directed historian of that city’s music history, among other things. It was a weird day out in the best possible way, a day I still need to process enough to write a real story. The Castaways drummer joined me and I was grateful for the company because, as I said in the car on the way home, “If I’d told you about this, you wouldn’t have believed me.” He disagreed. “Nope, that’s exactly the kind of insanity I’d expect from you.”
If you don’t see so much work from me right here, it’s because I have a lot of work elsewhere, not because I’m not working. That’s a good thing. (Though I *still* do not have an agent. Frustration emoji.)
I went with Sarah and a friend of hers to see Billy Bragg, and there we were before the show, three women who had been to Antarctica, eating pie for dinner. Anne came to town, and David, and Alex has been multiples times, and it is so good to live in a place people want to visit. I played solo open mic without flubbing either the chords or the lyrics, and today the sky is so very blue. I baked bread and bundt and babka and they were all successful and the bundt totally came out of the pan.
There’s lots going on and so much of it is good. It’s nice to be out in the world again.
It’s nice to read about it. Somedays, just know there is a woman baking bread, bundt and babka gives me faith that things will work out.
The Martin! There must have been something in the walls that made people form bands. I want to hear about the laundry room.
Your open mic was terrific.
And squirrels are totally jerks.
What Angela said.