Thoughts

Floating Along….

turkeycreekleaves

  • Things started changing around here last week at work so I ended up on the trash crew instead of the drill crew because that section of the project was ending. My technical title is Biologist, but right now we have switched to being monitors for the trash crew that is going back and cleaning up all of the flagging that lined the trails through the woods. There are miles and miles and miles of this. I walked a four mile section with the Mexican worker that I am monitoring last week, and that was only for two hours. We get up even earlier for the safety meeting which is in another town 20 miles away, then drive another 20 minutes back south to another location where the trash crew gets their directives for the day and then we drive 20 more minutes back north to where we are going to work. It’s a lot of driving and early mornings and late evenings now and I am just plain tired. So, that’s why I haven’t been around here. That and we’ve been working on the photo website.
  • The photo website should be up in a couple of days now. We have most of the pages ready but the internet goes up and down here at the motel lately so we are lucky if we can upload anything. We are using Simple Viewer for our galleries and it took some trial and error in getting it to work. I’m glad I learned HTML but whoa, Javascript is beyond me. Maybe I will take a crash course on that one day.
  • We have five days off this week so yesterday we drove down to Big Thicket National Preserve. I’ve had two bouts of deja vu in the past month, one was yesterday and the other was on our way here a month ago. 9 years ago I was in a wetlands course in college and we took a field trip to the Big Thicket but I paid no attention to where we were. On our way we stopped for lunch at a restaurant and when I walked in I knew I’d been there before. Apparently Momma Jack’s is where we had lunch that day. It was weird to show up somewhere that I’d been before. Then, yesterday, I had a feeling when we started down the boardwalk of the pitcher plant trail in Big Thicket that this was the trail we went on and my feelings were confirmed when we turned west and it went onto a cleared path into the woods. Yep, that was one of the trails we’d been on!
  • East Texas is growing on me. It’s such a beautiful place, if only I could get rid of the chicken farms. They reek. The other morning I came down from a hill and saw a nice inversion sitting over the city I was heading to. It reminded me of the trail.
  • Speaking of the trail, I have flashbacks daily. Sometimes something will send me to Vermont, another time to New Jersey. The other day I was transported to our last day in Shenandoah and to a part of the trail that day that I’d forgotten about. Right now I *think* I can remember every single day on the trail, and I know that isn’t really true, but I know one day this will all fade away. I miss the trail a lot. I want to drag the Big Agnes out and blow up my Neo Air and snuggle with my Marmot soon. I miss my other pair of legs, too.
  • Today we went to Caddo Lake, the only natural lake in Texas. It was so beautiful seeing all of the cypress changing colors and losing their needles.
  • Hoping to get some more AT stories up this week, send out some more resumes and rest up.

2 Comments

  • Patrice

    It’s funny to hear you are having flashbacks of the trail because I am dreaming of the trail nearly every single night. It doesn’t help that I’m reading a book about trail life and I tend to read every night before bed! Speaking of which, if you like reading trail books, let me know and I will send you what I’m reading. It’s the Barefoot Sisters’ books–they hiked southbound (and wrote a book), then turned around and hiked northbound. I really enjoy them because they are so descriptive of the trail (like reading your blog entries!). I think you would like just to reminisce.

    Good luck with sending the resumes!! I know you’ve been looking for more permanency, so I hope you can find a job that will secure that.

  • Patrice

    It’s funny to hear you are having flashbacks of the trail because I am dreaming of the trail nearly every single night. It doesn’t help that I’m reading a book about trail life and I tend to read every night before bed! Speaking of which, if you like reading trail books, let me know and I will send you what I’m reading. It’s the Barefoot Sisters’ books–they hiked southbound (and wrote a book), then turned around and hiked northbound (and wrote another book). I really enjoy them because they are so descriptive of the trail (like reading your blog entries!). I think you would like just to reminisce.

    Good luck with sending the resumes!! I know you’ve been looking for more permanency, so I hope you can find a job that will secure that.

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