The Storm Clouds Gather

We are having a long, leisurely early summer.  The kind that doesn't get too hot because every time the thermometer approaches eighty, billowing thunderstorms gather and team up and become angry.  They thunder and shoot spectacular bolts of lightning in all directions.  The wind gets stirred up in the mix, the temperature drops, and before you know it, the rain descends.  Not the gentle, baptismal rain,  but pounding, cold, mixed with hail rain.  It is nearly the first of July, and I have yet to water the lawns.  I should be mowing twice a week, but I seem to put if off, and then the rain falls and the grass is wet.  Our backyard is looking almost lawnlike, after a few years of just weeds.  I seem to be winning against the curly dock and dandelions.  This week the yard burst into bloom with bindweed.  Bindweed is a pretty plant (wild morning glory), and I don't mind it growing, but it chokes out everything else and grows into places it is not welcome.  Like the central air unit. Deceptive.  Beautiful, but intrusive, and not willing to be trained.

 I love the rainy, stormy afternoons. They refresh everything, wash the dust off, show off the most brilliant fireworks, and make the air smell pure.  I love sitting on the front porch thinking about the mowing and painting that isn't getting done, and breathing in the freshness.  The rain bounces off the pavement, and when the wind accompanies the storm, one can watch the sheets of rainwater spray across the hard surfaces like a rogue wave.  The sky gets very angry and boils with black rage, cut occasionally by the pink neon lightning.  The thunder rumbles like a bowling alley, sometimes non-stop.

  Then, as suddenly as it comes, the sun breaks through, wins the battle with the clouds, and beams through brightly, warming everything up again.  As if it never happened, the sky is suddenly clear blue, and the heat radiates from above.

Storms are beneficial in so many ways.  The biblical tale of the flood resulted in a whole new start for humanity.  And flora and fauna.  A total cleansing.  A baptism for the earth, all the bad washed away and the good allowed to try again.  Thunderstorms have a similar regenerative effect.  Lightning replaces nitrogen in the soil.  Rain waters and nurtures the parched earth and even if fire starts, fire has its own cleansing value.  Man has learned some tough lessons about trying to control natural fires.  A certain amount of baptism is necessary in nature.  Bad stuff cleared out to make room for the good stuff.  Man is such a small and insignificant part of that huge picture.  But somehow we manage to make storms always about us.  100 year floods come and deposit lovely layers of fertile soil to ensure the lands continued productivity and all we see is the damage done to the houses we built in the floodplain.

There is a storm on my horizon.  I am having a hard time accepting that the storms I've already endured were just the first wave.  I know that on the other side the sun will shine, and growth will occur and life will be rosy once again, but right now the storm is just lurking there, and I am not sure what kind of storm to expect.  Hail?  Pounding holes in my life and denting up my well-being?  Thunder and lightning that looks and sounds scary but can actually be beautiful to watch?  Fire; consuming everything in its path in order to create a clean slate?  Flood.  Floods can happen slowly and inch by inch the water invades.  It absorbs all in its path, almost passively, but so pervasively no force can stop it. Floods can also be nearly instantaneous washing away all that dare to be in the path.  Either way, floods cleanse and restore, but it is not fast nor beautiful.  Slow, smelly, long lasting, disease bearing, disgusting.  A flood can take generations to restore.  But it isn't always about us.  I pray that my storms will continue to be rain and even hail.  Fast recovery.  I am a coward that does not want to face years of restoration.

When you watch a storm gather, there is often an intense and beautiful glow behind the roiling clouds.  That "silver lining" is the hope that lies behind damage and devastation.  The promise that the sun will prevail and that the results of the storm will be good in the long term.  Many see the rainbow that follows the storm as God's promise not to destroy again.  I can't be certain of the correctness of that, considering that destruction seems to be a regular theme, but it is not in this promise that I find hope.  It is in the realization that throughout forty days and nights of rain and months of floodwaters, the rainbow shines in the sun and we know that for now, the storm is over.  For now, good can be restored.  For now, beauty awaits in new growth.

I know that once this storm passes there will likely be another, and another.  But in between there is the "for now."  And for now, that is a beautiful thing.  And when the silver lining comes at sunset, it is even better, for not only have you completed the day, the storm is over.  This lovely picture is by Walter Berling, Wilson,Wyoming.

No sense of direction

The last couple of "wanderings"  have included the ghost town of Lynch where my parents lived before they had children; Kaycee, home to Chris LeDoux and more importantly, Kerry's Nana; the beautiful little town of Buffalo; and Castle Gardens Petroglyph site. This covers a huge chunk of central Wyoming, and did not all take place during the same "wander".  Wyoming is having its pay-off for a brutal winter and a cold, wet spring.  The prairie is covered in sweet green and decorated prolifically with wildflowers.

  Places that are never even damp such as the aptly named Powder River, are flowing with melted snow and rainfall.  Grass ripples luminescently in the sunlight and the sweet, sweet smell of sweet clover and alfalfa wafts through the air.  There are few places more heart-achingly beautiful than a green prairie surrounded by blue mountains.  In a few places the bright red clay peeps through and the occasional "break" of jutting rocks interrupts the ocean of verdant grasslands.

During the long, cold winter, when the thermometer refuses to rise above zero and the wind howls and bangs at all the windows like it, too, wants in out of the cold, I often wonder why on earth my ancestors stopped here.  Why didn't they travel on to the lush productive lands of Oregon and Washington?  Or head to the mountains of California?  Someplace where mother nature doesn't go on a rampage for months on end....  And then spring comes.  And the stormy skies "aren't cloudy all day".  Wildlife teems like this is their own personal Eden, the breezes soften and smell sweet and suddenly you are surrounded by the world's largest estate lawn.  That's when I know why they stopped.  And that's why they stayed.  The wild rolling prairie comforts the winter weary like a blanket from God.  The fresh prairie air revitalizes and recreates life within your soul.

I love to wander through the back road byways of Wyoming.  So much to see and experience.  So much history right beneath your feet.  Thousands of pioneer feet pounded their way across this land.  Some didn't make it and occasionally you find a sad, lonely marker to give memorial.  Some scraped and pounded their mark into the sandstone bluffs, so that others might know of their journey.  Some stayed, staked out claims either for the land or the minerals and fought a hardscrabble existence.  They might have taken lessons from their more indigenous brothers, who, instead of fighting to tame the wild land, just lived in harmony upon it.  They roamed like the buffalo, moving along to another spot when one was unproductive.  They left their mark as well.  Amazing and fascinating carvings on cliffs and bluffs, odd rock features on the ground, their tools and artifacts of their daily lives lend proof to the myriads that came before.  If you are lucky and blessed, you may find a left over from another era.

I am often left amazed when I consider the nomad, the pioneer, the explorer..  Surrounded by a sea of grass and sage dotted with huge bison,  and yet they somehow knew where they were going.  They had an objective to reach for, a destination in mind, or a familiar route to follow.  I am lost in the moment when I seek solace in nature.  Don't know where I am going, and usually don't care much.  In this odd land, the mountains aren't always reliably north-south ranges, rivers and streams meander around like lost sheep, and the sky seems endless.  I have a reasonable sense of direction when I'm someplace that cooperates.  Someplace where the landmarks are plain and obvious and where the mountains are always on the west....  but set me down in a rugged badland or on the prairie?  Well, it's a good thing I know the sun sets in the west.  Which also isn't totally reliable this time of year....

When I try to decide what I am to do with my future, I feel as though I'm lost in the prairie on a cloudy day.  Comfortable, surrounded by beauty, and absolutely clueless about what direction to turn, and not really sure I care. I am rapidly approaching the mid century mark and I still am not sure what I want to be when I grow up.  I just want to think "que sera".  So, I'm just going to wander a bit longer and relish the wonderful world, and if anybody wants me I'm lost in an ocean of sweet, blooming prairie,,,

PS...  I am still looking for a job, so even if I'm wandering out of service, please leave me a message!  I may not have a sense of direction, but I do have a sense of responsibility!

Elixir of Life

Omnipotence is a word reserved for the description of God.  All powerful.  If there is a physical presence that one could describe as omnipotent, it would have to be water.  Water nourishes the plants and animals that feed us.  Water nourishes us.  Water is more necessary to life than food.  One dies more quickly from dehydration that starvation.  Water vapor in the air controls the weather.  Slight shifts in water temperature can spawn huge hurricanes, shifts in water level change currents which can then alter global weather patterns.  Those changes effect agriculture, industry, and nearly every economic arena. Water is the substance determined by scientists to be the one necessary feature to support life.  Water is nearly an unstoppable force.  Floods can slowly swallow a community and tsunamis can wipe one out in a few moments.  Water washes away precious topsoil, only to redeposit it elsewhere. Water washes us clean, warms us when we are cold, cools us when we are too warm, entertains us, awes us with it's majesty, frustrates us in the basement, is refreshing and pure or stagnant and germ-infested.  Water spread and isolated civilizations. A baptism of water restores your soul.

Saturday, the sister, the dog, and I went on an excursion to look at water.  We have had one of the wettest springs on record.  The weather has been cool, overcast and drizzly for weeks it seems.  And although the verdant green that has carpeted our prairies is lovely to behold, I crave sunshine and warmth.  An abundance of water is a relatively rare thing in our prairie state, and a wonder to gaze at when it happens.  The North Platte River is historically a lazy, meandering stream dammed up in a series of reservoirs utilized for flood control, power generation, and agriculture.  Not to mention the recreational value of lakes full of fish and fun.  But all those dams have calmed and domesticated the Platte.  Whereas she used to spread out "a mile wide and three inches deep", she generally flows like a placid, well mannered lady through eastern Wyoming and across the farmlands of Nebraska.  Occasionally, she asserts her place as the mighty bearer of water, that omnipotent force that man both worships and fears.  The dams to the west of Casper almost never reach capacity.  The elegant spillways have been dry nearly every year of my life.  Alcova, that gorgeous body of intense blue, fingering its way into canyons and crevices of equally improbable red, has a conventional concrete spillway, resembling a large water slide. Most years it has a trickle of green tinged, mossy water sliding down the very center into a calm pool clogged with water plants.  Great place for frogs.  A bit further upstream is the behemoth of early dam technology, Pathfinder.  Pathfinder dams the mouth of an incredible sheer cliff wall canyon and created a sprawling reservoir of water whose surface is whitecapped always from the constant, wild, Wyoming wind.  Instead of the deep red and azure blue of Alcova, the waters of Pathfinder are constant swirling darkness among stark, rugged, rocky terrain that changes color with the changing weather and direction of sunlight.  Only a few miles apart, the two artificial lakes are as different as day and night.

We drove up to the dam at Alcova first.  When we were children, one could drive or walk across the dam seeing lake on one side and the spillway on the other.  Now, due to security concerns, you can only drive to the bottom of the spillway.  The water rushed over, sounding like the hiss of a waterfall.  Mist and foam rise from the surface, and the spillway is full from side to side.  Orderly, modern, and completely controlled by man, this water is our servant.  Thousands of swallows build nests along the sides of the dam and spillway, and we were lucky enough to watch a small flock gathering the bright red mud from a puddle to build and repair their nests.  

Curiosity appeased, we took the route around the fringe of the lake and one little diversionary side trip to the site of the Cottonwood Creek Dinosaur Find.

 So interesting.  The rocks that contain fossils of all sorts vary from mud shale that looks as smooth as a tile floor to an conglomerate that looks like an over graveled concrete mixture, and is indeed a natural version of that.

 The trail goes in switchbacks up the steep, mostly barren, hillside.  But the miracle of water has had an effect here as well, and there was a significant variety of wildflowers growing from the most precarious and improbable locations imaginable.  Out of solid granite, up from cracks, a lone tuft from an otherwise completely bare hillside, their fragile beauty proclaimed a dominance over the stone that only comes with water.

 The sister is wearing sandals, so our climb was halted about halfway up.  Of course, I spotted a 'shortcut' on the way down which took us through a narrow passage between a couple of huge boulders, and across a crevice that looked like broken ankle makings.  The sky was threatening to lose the rain that had been building up all day, so we hurried a bit.  That trail was no place to be when it got muddy.

We resumed our quest for adventure with the next stop at Fremont Canyon.  Fremont Canyon is a remarkable, narrow, sheer walled passage that is named for John C. Fremont, the explorer.  Our mother had once read that the Louis and Clark expedition suffered a capsized boat in this canyon, losing surveying equipment and other goods in the process.  True to her irrepressible urge to explore and investigate, we spent many summers climbing in and out of the shallow end of the canyon, and wading the always swift river in pursuit of that lost treasure.  We never found anything, of course, but the memories are much more valuable than any artifacts we may have discovered.  We always took a picnic, and honestly, we probably forgot that we were looking for "artifacts" the first chokecherry bush, wild raspberry, lizard or frog we spotted.  I'm certain that mom looked.  Us kids were just along for the ride!  I have a scar on my left ankle to attest to our adventures there, due to my extreme sensitivity to poison ivy.  

The canyon bridge was the scene of a horrific crime the summer I turned thirteen.  Two young girls, sisters, driving to their neighborhood market, came out of the store to find they had a flat tire.  Of course, there were two helpful men waiting to give them aid.  The girls were kidnapped, raped, and tossed like thrown back fish into the swirling water beneath the Fremont Canyon bridge.  One survived that ordeal, but paid dearly for the terror the remainder of her life.  She finally succumbed to the damage and took her own life many years after her young sister's tragic death.  The site has become tainted by that event for many.  I, myself, cannot peer off that bridge without feeling the oppressive evil that happened there.  There is a coldness on the bridge that I am certain didn't exist before it lost its innocence.  I stare with rapt attention at the turbulent green water beneath, and I wonder which of those girls experienced the least torment.  I am certain that it wasn't the one that survived.  

A short distance down the road from the bridge, a roaring becomes louder and louder.  If the dam wasn't known to you, you would think a tornado or freight train was upon you.  Park, and then either scramble over the surface of solid granite, or follow the trail if you are inclined to not break rules.  I chose the rocks.  There were many puddles formed in the rock platform's lower places and the dog enjoyed a wade through.  The roaring grows louder, and now you can see mist rising from an unseen crack in the earth.  Once you approach the canyon's edge the sound is nearly deafening, and the mist surrounds you.  Pathfinder is not a sedate, domesticated dam like Alcova.  It is hewn of huge blocks of locally quarried granite, narrow at the bottom of the canyon and widening in the natural opening.  Some of the original buckets, cables and other works are still standing after nearly a century.  The work was an immense engineering feat for its era.  Many lives were lost, and the magnitude of its impact is apparent.  Pathfinder does not have spillway in the conventional sense.  There are two tunnels through the solid rock that water is released from and from which the power is generated.  However, when the water exceeds the reservoir's capacity, it simply overflows, sidesteps the dam and comes crashing over the side of the canyon with a power that takes one's breath away.  The incredible sight is something most residents witness only a few times in a lifetime.  This year makes my third view of this spectacular event.  It spilled in 2010, as well, and I'm certain two years in a row is some kind of record.  I was not here in 2010, but I saw the previous spill in 1984.  And one other time, I believe about 1973(?).  

The water, as it hits the bottom of the canyon is stirred up into a marbled white and green that looks exactly like Wyoming jade.  Its beauty is frightening and soothing at the same time.  There will be no fear of drought this year.  Crops will be well watered.  The prairie will be green and blooming.  And yet, there is a fragility to our control of the water.  It could assume its power over humanity any time it wants to.  And we would be helpless in its omnipotence.

Life is full of natural phenomenon.  Life washes over us like water.  Cleansing, purifying, suffocating, destructive.  Sometimes we have spiritual floods.  Sometimes we have spiritual drought. But true to an omnipotent force, we can pretend to control it, but life has, so to speak, a life of its own.  And nearly always, we are better for the flood, stronger for the drought, and welcoming of the soothing baptism that will come.

The Making of Heroes

Ding dong! Osama's dead.  Ding dong the terr- or- ist is dead Dead DEAD!

That is the morning hue and cry.  I am surprisingly ambivalent.  He needed killin'.  We (the US) needed to do it.  It would have been more effective and more jubilant if it had happened in October 2001.  That date would have made George W into a hero. But Osama Bin Laden seemed to just disappear into a puff of smoke any time we had any intelligence on where he might be hiding.  The media kept us well informed on all that 'intelligence' so Bush supporters had a lot of evidence to laud how hard their hero was trying to bring about justice.  Obama will never be allowed to claim 'hero' status because his administration caught up with a man that evaded discovery for nearly ten years.  The Obama-haters will still hate.  They will question why he waited so long if the intelligence pinpointed Bin Laden in August 2010.  The May 21 Rapturites will claim this was prophesied and that Osama must be the anti-Christ.  Or perhaps Obama is the anti-Christ and this is just part of Satan's plan to make him a hero. The Bush-haters will comment on Obama accomplishing in two years what Bush couldn't do in seven.   But the truth of the matter is;  eventually he was going to get caught.  Eventually, the CIA, the military, the FBI, MI5, Interpol...  SOMEBODY was going to find him.  Our world is no longer a place one can hide forever.  The most amazing fact is that the operation remained secret for so many months.  Our hungry shark media never breathed a word about the intelligence or the operation.  The Obama-haters will claim it's the liberal media trying to create a hero.  The Bush-haters will claim he deliberately leaked every bit of intelligence to make himself look better.  We won't know the truth.  Hopefully, both our leaders and the media have re-learned that old World War II adage. "Loose lips sink ships"  And that was WAY before twitter.

I find myself amused with the media frenzy...  Bin Laden was hiding out in a mansion.  Mansion?  Really?  It sort of reminded me of the "compound" at Waco.  An attempt by the ATF to serve a warrant there in February 1993, ended up in a fiery confrontation ending fifty days later on April 19.  Seventy-six people, including more than twenty children and two pregnant woman, died.  I don't remember any jubilation.  Just an overpowering sense of horror at what other people can believe, and what our government is capable of doing.
We have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in the "war on terror" and yet some seem naive enough to believe that this is the end of the war.  And that killing Osama somehow washed the blood from our own hands.  

The history behind the invasion at Waco was not an immediate "fools rush in" event, even if that is what it appeared to be.  The cult itself was launched in 1959 when Florence Houteff announced that the coming of Christ was imminent.  They had many legal troubles over the years including a fight for leadership that included digging up poor Florence (whose prediction we are still awaiting) and having a "resurrection contest."  Is that some kind of cult pissing match?  It culminated in the opponent accusing the resurrector of "corpse abuse".  Anyway, the person that won on that point was the man that eventually changed his name to David Koresh.  aka Jesus.  He practiced polygamy and made having sex with underage girls a sacred event (Texas....).  He claimed God ordered him to procreate with the women of his cult in order to create his following of  "special" people.  His wives, lovers, and other "special" people died.  But that was a situation that was thirty-odd years in the making.

The passage of time has very little to do with evil.  Or the extermination of evil.  And generally there's not any one certain evil person or one certain hero.  Evil, as well as good, is a group effort.  And sometimes the line gets blurred between the two.

The moral of this story is:
1.  Bin Laden may be dead, but there's some other evil bastard just waiting to take his place.
2.  You don't have to be Muslim, or foreign, to be a complete nutjob.
3.  Justice moves at its own pace.
4.  Jesus may be coming, but I'm not claiming to be "special" enough to know when!

The Bottom of the Heap

Spring is taking its sweet, slow time making new plants, new leaves, new plans.  The lawn grass is all very, very green now.  The trees are heavy with promised leaves, although no leaves showing yet.  The older, wiser trees are still in their winter drabs.  Snowdrifts have melted, leaving behind the detritus of winter.  Trash, old leaves, piles of mud and gravel.  Nasty looking, really.  The wind in Wyoming blows so strongly that any hope of fall yard clean up providing a clean slate for spring gardening is picked up by a gale and dropped elsewhere.  Probably Omaha.

It's a true pleasure though to watch the struggle of tiny blades of wheat grass try and push their way through the fallen over, matted, weighed down, thigh high grasses of last fall.  Eventually they will prevail, bloom, ripen and be the grass that falls over under the weight of snow banks.  Sometimes the baby plants will seek a beam of sunshine seeping through a crack in the sludge weighing them down and take a sideways path into the light.  They get there.  They grow and mature, but their roots are never as strong and sturdy as the plant that struggled longer and grew straight up to the sunshine.  If the sideways plant is knocked over, often you will find a long, undernourished stem, pale from lack of sun, and too weak to hold a plant up straight.  There also those that just can't seem to make their way from the bottom of the heap.  They slowly suffocate and die.

My quest for a answer to the age-old question "what do I want to be when I grow up?" seems elusive on the best days, and completely unanswerable on the worst.  I have had a tendency to follow the easy path, always bearing in mind that sometime in the future I could be a mighty oak.  Or at least a beautiful flowering wisteria. I had a mighty oak in mind in my youth.  I chose a different path than the developing perennial.  I had children, helped them mature, and kept my acorn buried deep.  Now that I have to bring my life out of the heap and into the sun, I am having a hard time finding the acorn, let alone the oak.  My tendency has been to seek the quick way to the sunshine, the easy path that has some familiarity on the way.  I must have grown sideways.  I accepted a job in the arena I was most familiar with, not even considering for a moment that this job was the bottom of the heap.  I struggled, plastered on my cheery face, volunteered for extra hours, put in time, and yet, I never quite made it off the bottom.  Not enough nourishment or sunshine or water. And an annual at that.  I would have to make the same struggle each season.  I got knocked down fairly fast.  When confronted with my mistakes, I felt true regret and shame for the errors I made.  The humiliation of the long list of petty complaints waged against me in addition to my confessed mistakes truly emphasized to me that this was never going to be an oak tree.  It was a pale zygote under a huge heap of trash, rotting leaves, sludge and the previous green of seasons prior.  If I am to grow, I must struggle through the detritus of my life, push straight up, although the path will be more difficult, and seek my sun in another way.  Be it a mighty oak, a stately spruce or a beautiful flowering wisteria, the perennial retains its previous growth and becomes stronger and better with each season.

Life is too precious to volunteer for the bottom of the heap.

Observations from the frozen north

I have, for some time, wanted to jot down some of the strange sights and idiosyncrasies of my home town and state, but I never seemed to have the right forum. Well, dear blog followers, you are my chosen audience.

Since my return to the frozen north last fall, I  have been, at times amused, at times frustrated, and at times awed by my home.

One can determine some details of the area by simple observation of the retail marketing and habits of the merchants.  One of the first things you notice... carts are rarely stored outside.  One must enter the market to get a cart.  Considering how many days are inclement or WINDY, that makes sense.  Also due to the wind....  automatic doors here generally slide open rather than swinging open.  Free papers are never stored in racks just inside doors.  There is almost always a breezeway entrance with two sets of doors, the first set closing before the second opens.  And stoplights are supported by GINORMOUS metal structures akin to steel bridgeworks.
Then you notice that outside is often storage for huge bags of water softener salt, livestock licks, ice melt...  notably missing...  boxes of firewood or bags of pellets.  I am presuming that pellet stoves have never really hit a market here, airtight stoves putting out much more heat and there being no environmental restrictions.  And a box of firewood is just plain silly.  What you do see is cord upon cord of wood stacked in yards.

My next observation has to do with dining out.  There isn't a fast food restaurant on every corner here.  In fact , for a city of this size the fast food selection is fairly limited.  That's okay with me.  I think people eat at home more.  What there is to eat here is beef.  The best steak you will ever put in your mouth.  Truly wonderful, flavorful, melt in your mouth beef.  Like no other place on earth.  Who on earth needs a Popeye's Fried Chicken when you have big, well-marbled slabs of grass fed local beef?  The other thing you notice is every Friday and Saturday night those wonderful steak serving restaurants all sport overflowing parking lots and long waits.  The overflowing parking lot...  inevitably full of BIG four wheel drive, double or extended cab trucks.  Not so many SUVs.  Can't haul hay, calves, fencing, etc. in an SUV.  My little economy car is dwarfed regularly on all sides by trucks.

Dressed up?  You'll fit in.  But you'll fit in better in Wranglers or 501 Levis, cowboy boots, flannel or Pendleton shirt, and a big rodeo belt buckle.  If you've come to town for dinner, those boots will be dressy and polished, not covered in mud and other substances.  It's interesting to watch as the generations mature.  I have seen some peculiar fashion statements here.  A young man in skinny skater jeans, Hot Topic t-shirt, facial piercings.  Boxers in the obligatory six inch exposure on the behind (which, by the way, looks dumb enough with big baggy jeans, but with skinny jeans it is truly absurd).  The Wyoming touch?  A big shiny jr. rodeo champion belt buckle.  Skater?  Bullrider?  Not really a ridiculous stretch.  Risk taker that doesn't mind pain in exchange for glory.

Girls here have a fashion quirk all their own.  Fifty degrees?  Sunny?  That's a good enough excuse for the daisy dukes, halter top and flip flops.  I think blue patches and goosebumps are considered a small price for an early start on the tan.  People here begin to shed their coats at the first sign of a thaw.  Forty degrees is good enough to leave the coat behind.  And on the first day of seventy in the spring?  Car air conditioners come on and complaints about the heat begin.

Politics here are equally as uniquely Wyoming as the weather and the fashion.  This is a REPUBLICAN state.  Red as red gets.  In fact, Wyoming has the most Republican legislature in the US.  Oddly enough, this session the proposal for a ban on gay marriage was voted down.  The majority speaker defended his "nay" vote by reading the definition of conservatism and the credo of the Republican party.  Individual rights should remain with the individual and should not be determined by the government.  Good job.  I can respect that.  No moralistic speeches about the undermining of traditional marriage or the endangerment of our children.  Just simply a statement that one's marriage is, quite frankly, none of the government's business.  I was proud to be from Wyoming that day.

I rarely agree with the politics here. I still proudly display my Obama sticker on the bumper of my car.  I will soon replace it with Obama 2012.  I will always wear a coat when it's chilly.  I don't own cowboy boots.  I drive a little car.  But I proudly claim this as my home.  And those rodeo cowboy, skateboarding, truck driving Republicans are my friends and neighbors.  Although I do wish I didn't need a water softener....

Peace....

Many times I've thought of peace as the quietness that surrounds you when you have nothing on your mind, nobody distracting you, no pending chore...

I've nearly finished my first week of training at my new job.  It's been challenging and fun.  I am enjoying my co-workers, clients, and the general atmosphere.  Although for "training" I'm working six days in a row on two different shifts and have been hired in the middle of a joint commission visit and a completely full census, I am finding a nice fit.  The days are busy and I don't stay in a chair all day, nor am I running a marathon all day.  There is a generous variety of tasks to be completed each shift, and always something extra.  I'm nearly through my checklist of competencies with exception to two areas.  I have yet to orient on emergency procedures for power outage, tornado, blizzard, national emergency, etc.  AND I have yet to be given my driving test on the patient transport van.  This is a tall, fourteen passenger plus two wheelchair bus sort of like an airport shuttle.  I have driven the regular fifteen passenger van a few times.  It's not that much different than the suburban.  This one has me intimidated.  For one thing, the instructions say clearly "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BACK UP".  Oh dear. What if I have to?  We don't go anywhere we have to parallel park, thank Heaven!!!!  There is also a sticker on the back that is obviously faded to only the black letters.  It proclaims in bold black "THIS VEHICLE DOES NOT".  Does not what?  Back up?  Parallel park?  Stop?  It's a little scary.

The other area I'm not signed off on yet is anything I have to be trained on by the staff PA C.  He has been out sick.  Therefore, all first aid related stuff and other "not so pertinent" medical areas have been delayed.  For the most part I've had to pick up medication procedures from someone else.  Documentation, med counts, urine and breath tests, lab orders etc., are so much a part of every day that by the time the PA C returns, I will be completely competent without his input!

The dog has not been all that happy about me being gone all day every day.  He's had several seizures.  Poor baby.  He will have to adjust.  The house looks neglected.  And after day one, I was exhausted.  That has eased somewhat, I am picking up the pace quickly. Meals have been a bit off, shopping will be a challenge, laundry is piling up.

It's very strange to go from a completely 'home-centered' life into a 'work-centered' life.  I hope to achieve a balance there.  At some point I will transition into part time hours (24 per week) and start classes next fall.  It is very good.

Despite the tiredness, the full brain, the worry over the dog, the home chores being neglected, what I feel is peace.  Peace that I haven't felt in many, many months.  I am coming to learn that peace does not equal solitude and quiet.  Peace equals contentment and security.  All is well with my soul.