Sitting in a Giant Crane
My new gig doesn’t normally involve sitting a couple hundred feet off the ground looking at containers going to the Far East, but it was certainly a bonus to get to do so over lunch. I have large fear of heights, so clambering about the catwalks was a bit much, but needless to say after [...]
Late Night with Cute
Occasionally, I stay up too late working. Usually, I am trying to write a report, which can be very much like a trip to the dentist for me. Not always, but often. Last year sometime, at the prodding of my boyfriend, I started using a Google home page. It includes a bunch of widgets I [...]
Odd Jobs and Dragons
One thing I like about my paying work is that it often takes me on interesting journeys. I didn’t wear a cloak to this gig, but I could have.
Drive to Eastern Washington
Finally! It made better sense to drive. At four to five hours to get to Spokane, it’s a haul across Washington State, but I’d be hard pressed to number the ecosystems you travel through. From the damp broadleaf in the Puget Sound lowlands, over the snow-covered alpine at the pass, and onto the high deserts [...]
Spokane, Washington
The trains run day and night through the center of Spokane. Elevated, you cross under them to get into the center of the town. On the south side of the tracks, there’s shelters, empty lots, and dive bars. You get the sense that this back side of the station has always been hard living and [...]
Ching Ching! Travel Writing for the Locals
Packing yesterday as Vic walked in the door, he beamed as he handed me my first check for a bit of travel writing. If it wasn’t already spent, I’d say we’d have had a big celebration. Not For Tourists is an actual pocket-size book that you can hide easily while you are hunting for that [...]
A Volcano in a Whirlwind
Mount St. Helens was never one of the the largest of the Cascade volcanoes, but since 1980, is likely the most famous. I’ve been near it a few times, most notably the brutal Tour de Blast, easily the hardest ‘fun’ ride I’ve ever done. After a day of work in Portland, Oregon last week, I [...]
The Inland Empire
Spokane, Washington lies in a large valley dusted with snow. As the center of the agricultural and extraction industries of Eastern Washington, it’s a decent size city, cold as hell in the winter and hot and dry in the summer. A four to five hour drive from Seattle, the Inland Empire could (and probably should) [...]
Traveling for Work
Herein Lie Buried many of the original settlers. The first three ministers, who served 85 years. A number of victims of the great sickness of 1754, during which 53 persons died (1/8th of the population of the town) Captain Eames, early benefactor of the Church, and 5 of his children who died at less than [...]
Litterbugs, Losers and the Lonely
Things have been looking down this week. Obsessions come and go. For no reason, I’ve been picking up things on my walk to and from work that catch my eye. Most of us follow, what they call in advertising, a “goat path.” This is a well-defined pattern of moving through the world, whether literally, as [...]