I'm SOOOOO brave!

This is a picture looking towards the summit of Mt. Hood. Before today, I'd never been up to the mountain.

All summer long, my handsome friend has tried to talk me into an adventure up here. Mind you, what he was proposing, was not an extreme adventure. A nice drive up to Timberline lodge, touching snow, eating lunch, and taking a ski lift up to an observation point on the mountain. I resisted, I thought of other ideas, I let him oversleep, I avoided and all because I'm afraid of heights. Ski lifts scare me. That's super dorky, I know but I can't help it...always have been.

However, our Monday adventures are quickly coming to an end, in fact we've only one left, I had no more good reasons not to go.

(That's not to say that I didn't try. I even suggested laying around in bed all day. Now, this suggestion while one I'm sure he would appreciate doesn't work at all because he knows full well that it's something I am incapable of doing. I might offer, and he might want to take me up on it, but I can't follow through.)

So, we went. Drove up on a mostly cloudy crappy day. He predicted that the clouds would burn off or, even better that from Timberline we would be above the clouds looking over them down into the valley. He was right.

We had lunch, tasty and stately in the heavy feeling rock dining room at Timberline.

Then we walked towards the ski lift. I balked. It looked like a long way to the top. It looked like a long way off the ground. It was dumb, but I was afraid of the ski lift.

"I've got to watch it for a few minutes."
So we did.

It seemed silly not to go.
I couldn't see any sort of safety bar.
I knew he really wanted to go.
I wasn't sure that was a good enough reason for me.

"You convince me to do all sorts of new things," said my handsome friend as he stood behind me with his hands upon my shoulders.

He's right. I do...all the time. And he's such a damn good sport. So, I did. And it was super scary on the way up, and not so bad on the way down. The valley stretched below us, clouds at our feet obscuring our view. There was snow on the ground, skiers flying past us and a funny Japanese couple with self portrait device that looked like a modified golf club. It was sunny and warm and I felt very brave.

Silly.
And loved.
And brave.

Paradigm shift

Two days into our teacher training for the 2011-2012 school year. (That's year NINE for anyone who's counting.) And what amazes me most is the almost instantaneous transition my brain makes from summer to work. The physical day to day takes a little longer, but this is old hat for my brain. I woke up early yesterday, energized, making lists and planning in my head. The nicest part? No stress, just the patterns of mind that go into being a teacher.....like I'd done this job before.

Summer adventures

So...work starts tomorrow and honestly, I'm worried. There are big changes afoot, the type I'm not sure I'll be so great at handling, but after worrying and whining and expressing my concern and getting sick to my stomach at the very thought of it, I've decided it's just about time to put on my big girl panties and deal. A dear friend from work helped me reframe it in my mind and perhaps if I anticipate a difficult task with the promise of significant positive change for my students, then maybe, just maybe it will be okay. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

But, it's my last day of summer. I'm lame but I like to spend the end of break holed up, hunkered down, organizing the parts of my life that I have been neglectful of (what WAS that green slime at the bottom of my fridge?). So, I'm cleaning and reading and organizing. My handsome friend is asleep upstairs and later we're having dinner and making ice cream...he thought of and brought over all the necessary supplies.

This summer has been wonderful.
Here is a top of my head list of some of the cool things I've done: driven through the Redwoods, two day trips to the coast one with friends and one yesterday with my mom, camped two separate times, met babies, kissed babies, sunned, went to the zoo, ate amazing food, organized my basement into a craft space, family beach trip, Columbia River stern wheeler tour, swam in the river, discovered two new close day spending spots, watched two beautiful couples get married, read, then read some more, played with the dogs, bbq-ed, hosted great company and got to spend tons of time with people I love.
Ahhhh.
How lovely.

The Best Ones (or unexpected gifts from the universe)

I'm a lucky girl.

I have an amazing family, a job that makes me happy, a house that's all my own, I live in one of the most beautiful places in the country and I've found a handsome friend who loves me.

Yet, even though these things are never far from my mind, I am sometimes blown over by the beauty and the fact that THIS is MY lot in life. I felt that way on a recent trip to the beach. I convinced my handsome friend to go camping for a night (in the same campground we started our early July trip) and then we headed up the coast and stayed three nights in a house with my family. For the most part, it was a great trip. Not without some family drama, but that's not what this is about.

What this is partly about is the fact that my family genuinely likes each other. We don't get to spend enough time all together but the time we do get, I feel we spend well. We drank beer, walked on the beach, laughed, teased, cooked, played games and sat in the company of one another. The two new additions to our "family vacation" were my nephew-- a fun well adjusted 9-year-old and my handsome friend.

I wasn't nervous about bringing him along, but curious about how it would go. How would they react to them? How would he deal with their brand of crazy? How would I feel with him there? It was better than I would have imagined...as truly most things with him are. (Why am I so worried about everything?) The answers to the questions were as follows:

They did as they always do, made room for one more, listened when he had something to say, talked, gently teased him and passed him their beers to try.

He hardly blinked at their crazy (maybe because he is familiar with mine). He took two naps as breaks and rolled his eyes fewer than four times. He cooked amazing macaroni and cheese that my mom is still talking about. He let me vent, a lot, when my family was frustrating me.

How did I feel about him being there? I didn't question it once. He was supposed to be there.

The other thing this post is about is the beach at Seal Rock. Just south of Newport in Central Oregon is a place that I don't think I've ever been before. Growing up we spent almost every major family vacation on the Oregon Coast, driving up and down hunting agates and spotting seals. We have favorite spots that are totally out of the way and beaches we frequented that were just a few miles from where we almost always stayed. But we'd never spent any time at Seal Rock.

Handsome friend and I stopped on a whim when we had a half hour to kill before meeting up with my family. It was beautiful, but we didn't have time to get close. Just enough time to look and decide that we should come back, preferably at low tide.

Sunday, before we packed up and headed east, my mother, my handsome friend and I did just that. We probably got there about 8...the tide was low and there were more tide pools than I had ever seen. "It's like being underwater." He remarked and as I counted more than 7 types of sea weed...laying down awaiting the return of the water I knew he was right. It was a glimpse into another world. There were waterfalls and starfish (both orange and purple), teeny tiny fish and crabs, green and pink anemones, barnacles, muscles and oysters. There were also people, young and old and even a few not very adventurous looking canines picking their way across this exposed landscape. We were not the only ones up early to bear witness to this gift. Because that's what it felt like, an unexpected present, one that made me nearly giddy.

"Look at this, Look at that." I kept pointing, most likely sounding like an annoying little kid. I felt like Ruby, wanting to wiggle and bounce out of pure excitement and joy. It was totally worth getting up early. (Oh, and you should totally click on the picture so you can get an inkling of how cool this place was, but only from a distance, it was a different sort of cool close up.)