I’m staying with my sister for most of the summer so I don’t have to commute several hours a day. Today was my first day here in Seattle, and here are a few shots from my walk around the new ‘hood.

Things I Learned Today:

• The best way to keep from getting ocean water in your lungs is to just go ahead and fill your mouth and sinuses with water. No more can get in, so as long as you don’t breathe in, you’re fine. This is very easy to do while you’re upside down underneath a crashing wave.
• Even though I always plug my nose underwater, it turns out that when you’re underneath a crashing wave, and you’ve lost track of your board (which is heavier than you think, and made of fiberglass which is very hard when it comes in contact with your face with any momentum at all) it turns out that it’s really instinctive to get your forearms in front of your face while you tumble blindly, even if it means that you can’t plug your nose. This is good.
• My body is totally shaped like an inverted ramp. So if I’m standing in waist deep water, a wave hits my belly, ramps up the underside of my breasts and splashes full-force directly into my eyes. Every time.
• Catching one wave means doing approximately 30 pushups, one for each wave you don’t catch on your way out.
• It’s totally worth it.

Caution: Boring post ahead. Topics covered include summer scheduling, garden planning, and maybe some excuses for why I’m not posting more often (if I can come up with any good ones).

Summer Schedule:

June 18-22 - Summer Camp Training in Seattle

June 23-27(?) - Quilting in McCall

July 2-13 - Full-time Summer Camps in Seattle (where will I live? I don’t know yet.)

July 16-20 - Part time photographer for Summer Camp in Seattle

July 23-August 10 - Full Time Summer Camps in Seattle

July 28, August 2 - Fairy Godmother for first and last day of a Queer/Questioning Youth trip through PassagesNW

August 13-17 - Part Time photographer for Summer Camp in Seattle

August 19-25 - Part Time photographer and full-time participant in an Art of Mentoring workshop

September 27-30 Part time photographer and full-time participant in a Tracking Expedition to the Oregon Dunes

So, you might note that between now and October, my only unscheduled time is the first couple weeks of September. It’s going to be a busy summer. I’m going to try to keep posting here, but I might go back to what I did last summer: aiming for one post per week. Amidst all the scheduled stuff, I’ve also committed to a certain amount of time doing contract web design for Wilderness Awareness School.

I’ll be doing a combination of crashing at people’s houses in Seattle and commuting from Olympia for most of the summer. Hopefully Preston will be able to pick up some of the slack on the garden maintenance. He did a great job of watering while I was gone last weekend for the PassagesNW Field Staff Retreat. I’ll be back here on most weekends, and the occasional weeknight, so I should be able to keep up with the harvest. A week or two ago, I got the other two beds planted. Here are the pictures:

There’s sweet marjoram, cilantro, cinnamon basil, lemon basil, greek basil, Legend tomato, peacevine tomato, and some sort of little yellow tomato.

There’s sweet corn, bush beans, cucumber, radicchio, cantaloupe, broom corn, marigolds around the perimeter, and something else along the back that I’ve already forgotten what it was even though I took a picture.

I also have several very good posts writing in my head. One is about my Field Staff Retreat with PassagesNW, where I learned a lot of really important things, but I need to get them all processed before I can turn them into a coherent linear story. The other is about a story I read about a Mennonite farmer. Unfortunately, I read the story in a magazine that I proofread, which means that it hasn’t been published yet, so I can’t tell you my story about the story until after it’s been published. Maybe while I’m waiting for publication, I can figure out a way to combine the two stories (PassagesNW and the Mennonite farmer) into one.