We were on our way home from another meeting up in Seattle – although this one started late enough in the morning that we could fly up and fly home in the same day. There was enough time between when the meeting finished and when our flight was to leave that we could take our time; relax in the huge open area in the central terminal at the airport and even get something to eat.

It’s one of the nicer central terminal areas I’ve seen in my years of traveling. There are a few shops and food vendors ringing the perimeter, but the bulk of it is a huge open space, fronted by an entire, vast wall of windows that look out onto the runway. It was uniquely designed so that even though the area was crowded, the noise was muffled, so much so that we could converse in normal tones of voice.

I’m not sure which of us noticed it first, but eventually it caught us both. Hanging from the ceiling, suspended from nearly invisible wires, were hundreds of glass and metal objects, most of them appearing as if they were only a few inches across. In the bottom half of the midair sculpture the objects were fish, dolphins, surfboards, flotation rings, and other objects in a pale silvery blue. The arrangement was intersected at the center with a series of thin metal rings, and above it the shape of a huge bird was visible, composed entirely of hundreds of tiny brown and gold glass birds.

It took us a while, staring up at the sculpture, to realize that the bottom piece was actually the bird in reverse; in fact, it was the bird’s reflection. And then we could see that the metal rings were meant to represent the surface of the water, disturbed by the bird’s feet as they hit the water, and further emphasized by the tiny crystals – representing the spray of water flying upward from the impact – which hung just above the ‘water’, noticeable only once we started to look more closely. The longer we stared, craning our heads upward to catch all the details, the more we saw – the way the wires blended into the criss-cross patchwork of the ceiling so far above that they looked as if they just stopped in midair; the way the two images mirrored each other, one made of hundreds of tiny shimmering fish, and the other of hundreds of tiny soaring birds.

I am not normally a person who notices art, except to note that perhaps the colors are pretty together, or the image is nice, or disturbing, or funny. But very rarely does a piece make me stop and stare and want to see more.

I did not pull out my camera because I had a feeling I would be unable to capture the full impact of the sculpture that hung so high above our heads. The only pictures I’ve found online also fail to do the whole thing justice – they show only a collection of tiny dots that make up a shape, without expressing just how diverse and detailed each of those invididual pieces are. Maybe this is just something that isn’t meant to be photographed; that you have to see in person. And I wonder how many thousands of people pass through that terminal each day, in a rush to get to their flight, too busy or too tired, or too stressed to appreciate the openness of that area; the wide expanse of windows; the bird soaring overhead, forever just touching down on the surface of some nearly invisible lake, wings outspread, made up of a myriad of tiny objects hung in so precise a manner that it makes my head spin just thinking of how someone could actually assemble it without going just the slightest bit mad.

It occurred to me, at some point this evening, that when my older sister called earlier today I should have suggested meeting her at the mall. She was off on a solo shopping trip to find shoes and pants, and I too need shoes and pants, and lately it seems as if I rarely ever see her anymore, and this would have been a perfect opportunity. But when she called I’d been home less than an hour. I was tired from my most recent trip; tired of driving and being stuck in a car, and I surrounded by a small cluster of cats who were doing their best to convey just how glad they were to see me again, since I had gone away and left them for years and years during the past 72 hours and for even longer during that three day workshop earlier in the week. So the last thing my mind was capable of was pondering getting back in the car so soon. I have a little regret for not considering it sooner, and maybe next time I will remember this and it will click in my head that meeting my sister at the mall to look for shoes and try on pants and commiserate with each other in the dressing room, and possibly also stop for ice cream or at least share a side of fries in the food court would be a far better use of my time than collapsing into a chair in front of my computer and plowing through 72 hours worth of email which turned out to be mostly spam anyway. Oh well.

But the reason I was so tired was at least a good one. A friend at one of the knitting groups I attend had mentioned in passing several months ago that there was a knitting retreat being planned up in the Medford / Ashland area, and after a very short time of considering it, I decided it sounded like too much fun to pass up. I also tossed the idea past my knitting mom, and so the two of us made plans to drive up together, share a hotel room, and spend a weekend with a bunch of other women doing one of our favorite things – playing with sticks and yarn.

There were a few bumps in the process over the past few weeks. The trip to Red Bluff last week was originally supposed to be from Wednesday through Friday, which meant we started working out to get her up to Red Bluff so that the two of us could then continue on to Medford together (since Red Bluff’s about halfway there), but then the workshop dates changed, so I came home Thursday instead of finishing Friday, and even though I was home less than 24 hours, still it was vastly preferrable not getting to come home in between at all.

It was grey and cloudy most of the weekend in southern Oregon, but it really didn’t matter. There were 30 or 35 of us gathered into one hotel in Medford, and we all crowded together into the too-small conference room above the lobby the first night to knit and get acquainted and take a class, and knit some more. I found it pretty amusing that the Solano County contingent was the largest one there – I think there were likely a dozen of us from that area. The rest of the attendees came from Washington, Oregon, other parts of California, and there was even one woman who flew down from Juneau, Alaska.

We had a wonderful time. There was an incredible dinner at a steak place in downtown Medford for a small group of us who already knew each other. There were field trips planned to knitting stores in Medford and Ashland, and the stores greeted us with smiles and hot drinks snacks, since we were, after all, 30+ women descending on their stores with the sole purpose of buying great quantities of nothing but yarn, yarn, and more yarn. There was a class in shadow knitting on Friday night, and a class in Continental knitting on Saturday. A small group of us skipped the Saturday class since we already knew how to knit that way, so instead we sat in the lobby in the couches by the fireplace and talked and knit and talked some more. In fact, that was pretty much most of the weekend – knitting and talking and a lot of laughter and sharing of stories, some to do with yarn and some having nothing to do with knitting at all. There was enough time left between yarn shop field trips and classes for those who wanted to to explore the area (and in fact some of the attendees discovered yet another yarn shop in Jacksonville and did even more yarn acquisition).

My knitting mom and I were, for the most part, quite restrained during the weekend when it came to buying yarn. I’ve been trying to be good about only buying yarn for specific projects, but when faced with the giant display of sock yarns in both store – colors and brands and patterns that I’ve never seen before – well, there is only so much restraint a knitter can take. So aside from picking up six balls of cream and black wool blend (for a specific project), I did allow myself to splurge a little. In Medford I picked up some Wildfoote sock yarn in gorgeous bold red colors, and when we left the store in Ashland I came away with three more skeins of sock yarn that simply could not be left behind, plus a few free patterns from their stash in the back, and a list of books that I think I may eventually need to buy.

I learned a nifty new technique – shadow (or illusion) knitting – during this past weekend (go see Knit One, Purr Too if you want pictures) which was cool because it was something I’d wanted to learn anyway. I got to know a few of the others from some of our knitting groups better (and yes, I do appreciate the irony that it took driving over 500 miles away from home to be able to bond with people who live in just the next town over). And I got to spend a deliciously relaxing weekend hanging out with my knitting mom, and a whole group of other women who, while they are all different ages and come from all different backgrounds and locales, were instant friends just because of a not-so-crazy addiction to sticks and yarn.

The meeting yesterday morning was surprisingly short – at least the part we were required to attend. Outside the little building we were in, a series of busses drove up and deposited load after load of high school children in the parking lot, so there was a constant level of noise in the background most of the morning. But eventually they dispersed to whatever it was that brought them to the fairgrounds on a Thursday morning, and by the time we headed out the only sign of their presence were two rather tattered looking bunches of balloons tied to the perimeter fence.

It was nice to be home, even if it’s only been for such a short time – barely even 24 hours. Sebastian came up to me, his fur coarse, as if he wasn’t washing himself very well, but the second I picked him up he started purring at top volume, and then settled himself on his lap and immediately began to bathe. I guess he missed me. Azzie’s been following me around beeping pathetically and acting very clingy, and I am finding it a little endearing, but also a bit ridiculous because for crying out loud, I was only gone 3 days, and it’s not as if there wasn’t anyone else here!

I’ve packed up my bags again and am just about to head back up I-5 – although this time we’ll go twice as far up the road, to Medford. My knitting mom and I are off to a knitting retreat. I have a can of cookies I made yesterday afternoon, in between napping and doing laundry and going to choir practice, where I discovered that singing when ones sinuses are seriously congested can create a rather unpleasant vibration in one’s head. My suitcase of yarn and knitting paraphanelia is larger than the bag containing my clothes, but I suspect that this will likely be the case for most of the attendees. All I have left to do is pack a lunch for the trip, toss my bags into the car, and go, which I think I shall do as soon as I post this.

It was a quiet Halloween. I’m still sick and I had to leave for my business trip that evening anyway, so we didn’t really have time to watch a horror movie or do much of anything else besides eat dinner and toss candy at little kids in costume. So we made mummy dogs for dinner – hot dogs wrapped in strips of crescent roll dough (the type that comes in the can). It’s something we’d seen in a little recipe book my mom picked up a few weeks ago, and it amused us so much we had to try them. They were easy and fun, and turned out pretty tasty. Not exactly the healthiest dinner for two grown adults, but it’s Halloween, and since we deliberately chose candy that neither of us likes to hand out to the trick-or-treaters, so we figured we were entitled to at least some kind of treat.

My coworker and I headed out to Red Bluff late Halloween night – coincidently just about the time we ran out of candy and shut off all the lights. Driving down I-5, whether north or south, is never much more than a bleak experience, because it’s a freeway whose designers seemed determined to lay it out through the ugliest, dullest parts of the state. Driving north on I-5 at night is even worse, because when it is dark, there is nothing to see at all, and you only know you’ve gone somewhere because eventually you come upon yet another truck stop with a different name and configuration than the last one you saw a millennium ago.

We have spent the past two days in meetings in a tiny little room on the Tehama county fairgrounds, and we’ll do it tomorrow too, although for only a few hours instead of the entire day. My role in all of this is, as usual, to lurk in the back and take copious notes so that I can produce a decent draft of the report that is the outcome of these sorts of workshops. And when I am not taking notes, I have been either trying very hard not to hack up a lung (stupid winter cold) or else killing the wasps which keep sneaking in from who knows where, and hovering around the window that is right next to the little table where I’ve been sitting. I’ve tried to be rather discreet about it, but it’s starting to creep me out a little because even when the doors and windows are shut they still keep showing up.

Aside from being sick, the workshop itself feels as if it’s gone rather well. Plus, it has the benefit of an architect who has been madly sketching out design alternatives on the fly over the past two days, to the point where his little section of the table has slowly been buried under a great mount of that thin, almost translucent paper that architects use, and occasionally the woman sitting next to him had to rummage underneath the mess to find something of hers. His enthusiasm and tireless ability to keep rolling with all the suggestions and changes has been something marvelous to watch.

I’m back in my hotel room now, tired and wishing that when I wake up tomorrow I won’t be coughing all the time, and also wondering if combining cold medication and some serious decongestants would be okay because to be honest, I’m starting to get a little desperate here. So instead of mixing drugs at random in the hopes of being able to breathe again, I shall tell you about Red Bluff – at least what I have seen of it so far.

Red Bluff is not, so far, a very exciting sort of place. Everything we’ve seen, while wandering aimlessly in the hope of tracking down someplace to go for lunch, suggests that this is not the sort of place people come to unless they have a really good reason. The few people in the meetings who are actually from around here have only confirmed this perception.

At dinner we sat beside a table of people who were talking about their trucks and their guns. And last night while watching TV I saw a commercial for a tattoo parlor during a prime time show. I realize that my being sick and feeling so crummy certainly colors how I feel about this place, so I am trying to maintain some optimism that Red Bluff really is not the hick sort of town it seems to be, but so far everything we’ve experienced certainly hasn’t helped.

We did more yesterday than carve pumpkins, by the way. We went to the hardware store because the garbage disposal Richard installed a few months ago had suddenly sprung a slow and insidious leak, which required we get a new, slightly longer, section of piping. While we were there, we also picked up two little sample packets of wood stain, because a while back my dad built me a tall, narrow bookcase to stand beside the piano so I have somewhere to put all the music instead of on top of the piano, where it has the unfortunate tendency to slide onto the floor, taking any bookends with it. The shelves are built; all I have needed to do is to stain it, and now that the weather is nice enough that being stuck out in the garage with chunks of wood and some stain is not as uncomfortable an idea as it was back when it was still over 90 degrees in the shade. So now we have two tiny little packets of stain to try out, to see which one we prefer, and perhaps before the year ends I’ll have made my decision on the color and gotten around to doing the actually work. Ha. We shall see.

We also picked up a new laptop bag for me, since my laptop does not fit in the old bag and I’m headed off for another business trip – this one three days – I really need something in which to carry it that doesn’t involve borrowing Richard’s. And we successfully avoided buying any new computer games, although I admit I did check to see if they have the latest incarnation of Civilization, since the pre-release of Civ IV is out. Not, mind you, that I really *need* this game, because I have aleady spent the past few weeks in full on Civ mode, and I really ought to be doing something more productive in the evenings than camping out at my computer, but the lure of the game, it is strong.

Anyway. I woke up this morning with a sore throat, and it has slowly gotten worse over the course of the day. I took some cold medicine this morning in order to make it through church (and choir) without coughing or sneezing, but it was apparently *not* a non-drowsy formulation, because I spent a majority of the morning and most of the afternoon feeling as if, while my brain was perfectly fine, my body was off it its own little world. I also decided that maybe driving while feeling that way was not necessarily the best thing to do. I am crossing my fingers that this is just a little 24 hour sort of thing, because I have a very busy week coming up and I really do not have time to be sick. Ugh.

Richard’s extended department does a Halloween potluck every year, so this year we’re sending him with cat poop cookies, going on how well the litter box cake went over last year. So this evening, after dinner, the two of us rolled chocolate dough into little logs and rolled them in Grapenuts and baked up a double batch of disturbingly realistic looking little logs. We’ll see tomorrow how it goes.

Last Sunday we went to the pumpkin patch for two reasons. The first was to pick out pumpkins, and we did that at the start of our visit. First Richard tracked down a huge orange one all covered in scars, and then I found one that looked as if it had been punched in the side, and there was quite the ordeal getting both pumpkins onto a cart – especially since we had to swap out carts with someone else because our super large pumpkins would not fit in the cart with sides, and the other people had only tiny little pumpkins and squash for their flat bed cart.

In the end, however, my side-punched pumpkin was significantly large enough that it was going to cost an arm and a leg, so after all that hassle, we left it by the side of aisle and found me a slightly smaller one, which I liked even better because this year I was taken with the white pumpkins instead of the orange ones.

The second reason for going to the pumpkin patch is, of course, the corn maze. In previous years we have either been in a hurry, or else have had other people with us – specifically other people with small children – so we have not been able to just wander aimlessly as we would have liked. This year, however, the only other members of our group decided to forego the corn maze in favor of picking out their own pumpkins. So we decided to do the right turn method of navigating – you turn right at each intersection with the theory that eventually this will lead you out. I did point out that this would only work if there were no squares in the maze made of intersecting perpendicular paths, but the chances of that being in a corn maze were fairly slim so we weren’t too worried.

It’s kind of fun to wander around in a corn maze, especially this year when the corn was so very tall and all you could see all around you were stalks and the path stretching forward and behind. We wandered aimlessly for quite a while, but eventually thirst got the better of us and we finally broke down and consulted the map.

The pumpkins (along with a few warty gourds) have been sitting on our front porch all week. This afternoon, we finally took care of that, and when it got dark out, we put in candles just to make sure they would look okay.

The one on the left is mine; the one on the right is Richard’s. They both stand a few feet tall and removing the slimy innards did not noticeably change how heavy they are.

Because I’m not at all familiar with the city, my brother-in-law very nicely walked over from his office yesterday evening and met me at the Starbucks that’s nestled in the corner of the building where our Seattle office is located. I settled myself onto an outdoor table and pulled out my latest sock project (because what else does the obsessed knitter bring on a business trip but socks?), just as a horse (carrying a policeman and waiting for the crossing sign to change) relieved itself on the sidewalk. The policeman looked around, saw the mess, and then, with a weary smile, rummaged around until he pulled out an extremely large pooper scooper, with which he dispatched the still steaming pile of horse poop before anyone could step in it. The entire thing was done in complete silence, while the horse stood there patiently the whole time, seemingly not even aware that it had created the mess in the first place.

I had a wonderful visit with my little sister and her family. My brother-in-law and I took the train out to Tukwila and met my little sister and my niece there (since it was a good halfway point for all of us, and then we all piled into the car and went to dinner. My niece started kindergarten this year, and she looked every inch the school girl (“I’m five now!” she reminded me, when I commented how much she has grown). In the car after dinner she sang me her collection of color and spelling songs, and when it was time to go she gave me a huge hug. My little sister drove me back to my hotel in Seattle, with a detour for lattes and chai on the way because we were both tired and in need of something a little sweet. She’s in her last semester at school, and just recently started a new job, so she’s stressed and too busy and I won’t get to see them again until Christmas, which seems impossibly far away. So it was lovely to get this unexpected chance to visit with them, even for only a few hours.

The hotel room was large and comfortable, and had free high-speed internet. I didn’t sleep well, but then I rarely do in strange places, especially when I have an early morning meeting the next day and am paranoid that the wake up call will not come through, or the alarm clock will not work. A coworker from the Seattle office picked us up this morning and we arrived on the University of Washington campus just as the sun started to rise. As we unloaded the car and walked toward the building where the meeting was to be held I could smell rain and autumn and pine.

The flight home was uneventful. I amused myself by flipping through the Skymall catalog and looking for things that I surely could not live without (and the number of iPod accessories now available is mind boggling. Did you know, for example, that you can get a full sized massaging, reclining *chair* that comes complete with speakers and a charging station for your iPod?), and tried very hard to convince my sinuses not to implode. By the time we landed it was dark outside, and I felt as if that is how I spent the past two days, going to and from places in the dark, and only catches glimpses of daylight through windows in offices and taxis and cars.

This morning I flew up to Seattle. It�s a business trip, of course, since we�ll only be up here for two days, and both will be full of meetings. But I�m taking advantage of the location to work in a quick visit to see my little sister and her husband, and of course my very favorite little girl in the world (that would be my niece).

It�s very different being here. Our office in Sacramento is in an old building with a somewhat funky layout, and sits right beside the river. So when I look up from my computer in my office in Sacramento, through the huge picture window directly next to me,I can see docks and boats and trees and water, and sometimes a river otter or a pair of coyote puppies or a tree vibrantly alive with an entire flock of tiny sparrows. In Seattle, the office is in the heart of downtown, only a block away from the eclectic new library building (which in itself takes up an entire city block). When I look out the plate glass windows here, I can still see water, but it�s off in the distance, and the view is instead mostly buildings � an assortment of architectural styles and sizes. Directly across the street there is a man swinging from ropes as he washes the windows. Considering that I am currently in an office on the 17th floor, and that as we left to go get sandwiches for lunch he had reached our level, and that the building he is attached to goes up many floors further than ours, I imagine that this is a task which takes days to complete. Assuming, of course, that a person can actually handle the thought of dangling from ropes down the side of a 17+-story building (definitely not something I would volunteer to do).

I wandered the office a little bit, before settling in to do actual work, just to check out the views from all three sides. The view that was the most distracting was toward the bay, because a few blocks from the office they are building the new extension for the art museum, atop which is a high rise office building. It was sometimes very hard to remain focused on the person talking to me when over their shoulder I could see building materials being slowly raised 20 stories above ground, or watch the tiny little blue construction elevators slipping up and down the side of the building, tiny figures of people visible through their steel mesh walls. I asked someone how he managed to not be constantly distracted by everything going on � the crane, the building, the window washer � and he shrugged and said that after a while it�s no longer interesting. Still, even though I see the same old scenery out my office window back in Sacramento, I can still be momentarily arrested by the site of the blue heron gliding down to land in the tangle of downed trees across the river, and the entire office will come to a complete stop every time someone spots the turtles on the bank below our balcony. So maybe, even here, occasionally someone pauses mid-sentence as the window washer hoists himself ever upward, or the crane hoists another load of mirrored wall panels to its destination somewhere within a high-rise-to-be, and sometimes, once in a while, someone pauses on their way to pick up sandwiches for lunch, and looks up at the amazing buildings that surround them, and is reminded of just how beautiful a place it is to be.

I have been toying with this idea for a while, and I finally realized that if I am ever going to get back into writing on a regular basis, I needed to revamp the format of this journal into something that lets me be more flexible when I write. I’m not going to turn this into a snippet blog, because I cannot stand them myself. But this format has been working far better for me over at Knit One, Purr Too for over a year and I guess it just took me longer to accept that I needed to make a few changes over here too. Hence the brand new look – at least for the main page. The individual entry pages will remain as they are for now, since I am picky enough to prefer to leave entries from each incarnation of the journal just as they were when I wrote them. I am hoping to eventually figure out a way to ‘freeze’ the last few years, yet still use Movable Type. I suspect this is going to require me learning certain code languages I have heretofor avoided.

Anyway, I like this new format. It’s less colorful than anything I’ve used before, and there are certainly fewer graphics, but I think that somehow it suits me.

Welcome to the new look.

In preparation for the upcoming season premier next Wednesday, Richard and I have been watching one or more episodes of the first season of Lost the past few days. And with each episode we watch I am reminded not only how much I really do like this show, but also how truly weird some of those characters are. I think it’s safe to say that every single one of the people they’ve profiled so far have some serious issues, but there are some that are more ‘off’ than others. Locke, in particular, is one creepy, seriously weird guy. I just hope that they spend some time focusing on some of the other characters who only got a brief nod, or who have only shown up peripherally here and there, because really, is there anyone out there who is not yet so sick of episodes about poor, misunderstood Kate that they will not yell and throw things at the TV if the series inflicts yet more on us this year?

It is at least good knitting television because even though I am paying attention and looking for details I might have missed the first time around, we have still seen all of these before. Plus earlier this week the yarn arrived for the felted messenger bag I’m going to make for Richard (he asked for one) so I immediately cast on and managed to plow through a significant chunk of it during three episodes of slightly creepy TV.

Another premier is coming soon � on September 30th, to be exact � but this one we�ve actually managed to already see. One of the leaders of the writers� group Richard attends is heavily involved in the local Browncoats organization, and got wind of a sneak preview of Serenity, mere days before it happened. Last Wednesday night we drove out to Roseville, tracked down the theater, and got our number assignments for the free screening. Luckily we got there early, mainly because we wanted to make sure there was time to get some dinner first, because by the time we got back to the theater the line had grown exponentially. For barely two days notice, word spread fast enough to pack the theater by the time the movie began.

I have become less and less enamored of going to movies in the past few years because it seems that more often than not there is some idiot with a loud cell phone who feels the need to not only answer it during the movie, but carry on a conversation, or there is someone who lets their kids run around the theater being obnoxious, or a cluster of people who feel the need to talk loudly or make rude noises or comments during all the intense parts. But there was something amazing about being in that theater that night. We knew we were surrounded by a few hundred other people who were just as crazy about Firefly as we were. It�s the first movie I�ve been to in a long time where no one had to go track down an employee to fix the damn tracking, or plot mental murder for the jerks throwing popcorn or talking or answering their cell phones.

And the movie itself was amazing. Joss Whedon is a genius at gathering together casts who mesh seamlessly. He proved it with Buffy and with Angel, and also with the very short-lived Firefly, and he proved it even more so by transferring Firefly to the big screen. It�s a space movie, yes, and you could even call it a space cowboy movie, but one of the biggest plusses about it is that it is a space movie with no aliens, and even though the whole thing takes place in the future it still feels very human throughout. Things were explained, there was laughing and shocked gasps and reminders that in any Whedonverse, no one is safe and nothing is ever formulaic because in reality no one is safe either, and things do not always go according to plan.

We will be going back on September 30th (or shortly thereafter), not only to support the movie when it�s officially released (because if things go well, there will be two more sequels) but also because it is a damn good movie, and those sorts of films are few and far between.