On my way home from British Columbia I crossed Rainy Pass. That’s were the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the road in the North Cascades. It looked cold, wet, and a little snowy. There aren’t many times I’m happy to not be on the tail but this was one of them.
Blog posts should be more regular now.
It has come to my attention that people have been having a hard time leaving comments…. I think it might work now. Try it and see.
You probably know about Google Books; you can type in any word or phrase and they will show you a bunch of books with that word or phrase and then you can preview the books.
It’s supposed to be like browsing at a book store but there are also books and magazines in their entirety for download.
Here is something Laen turned me on to. It’s called Google Book Downloader ; it finds all the pages it can of a book and downloads them. Then you can save it as a pdf and read it.
It’s a program you have to download. Once you download it you need to read the instructions because it’s not that intuitive.
Then you put in the link for the book from Google Books or the ISBN and it starts finding your book, one page at a time.
On a dial up it is pretty slow, but eventually, I end up with almost the entire book.
I had to drive down to the little store to pick up my new bag. While going there I met my neighbor on the road and stopped to talk to him.
He said that a bear had tipped over his porta-potty, ripped his tent, and knocked over his wood pile.
Then at the little store, there where all these stories flying around about bears crawling in through peoples open windows and trashing their cabins.
For some reason there are a lot of bears in the area this summer.
Probably a baby boom of bears a couple years ago and now we have a bunch of adolescent bears wrecking havoc.
The bear was trying to disconnect my phone service.
Strange that the same day I get the phone connected a bear comes and attacks it. The bear might be trying to tell me something.
Yesterday, I got the phone turned on at my cabin, so, I can now report things like, a bear just tried to jump into my open window.
At around midnight, the witching hour for bears, I hear something jumping up and hitting my cabin. I went out to investigate; it was a black bear; it ran away.
Every bear I have seen at night, I have seen at midnight.
I should be in my cabin in BC; I should be trying to sell it, but instead, I’m hanging out in my Washington cabin listening to Colman Barks reading his interpretation of Rumi poems and enjoying the spring. 
It’s warmer now, everything is green, the wild flowers are blooming, and it’s hard to leave.
I spent a little bit of time improving a cave and thinking about moving into it. I can sit up in it and lie down it it. It has a great southwesterly view so it should get good sun. 
I hiked with this fellow for a while in 2007. He is the only person I have met, besides me, that can go from sleep to trail in under 4 minutes. He should have lots of good trail tested advice to offer.
He e-mailed me saying that hiking season has begun. If I’m not hiking, I really would like it if no one else would.
Although…it’s not too late to order some new gear and hit a trail. Heck it’s not even too late to start the PCT again.
I have fallen to a human disease. That’s the down side to hermit life–you can end up with an immune system of an extraterrestrial.
I have been sleeping for 9 days now. I made it home to my cabin, but after a week of laying there in the cold, I came to town and got a room for a couple of days. Tomorrow I resume cabin life.
This was an odd winter. Usually I reel for awhile and then I settle into stillness. This winter I kept reeling. After awhile I just excepted my thoughts as something I need to look at and deal with. Everyday I wrote about what I had discovered in my reeling and I started to remember big events in my life that I had forgotten.
It seemed like a waste of a winter, just reliving the past, but I feel like I have grown from the experience. That’s the thing about not having any distractions like movies or Internet, you have to deal with you.
So what I would do is go back to the past, in my mind, and fix stuff. And If I couldn’t figure out a way to fix it in the past, I would think about ways that I could fix things now.
Because I feel strongly that if you are going to hole away in cabin all by yourself for 6 months, you have to have rules, these were the things I made myself do everyday:
For inspiration I had:
Often I listened to music that I had stored on my computer. Sometimes I would pick out 3 songs and listen to them over and over. Eventually I would come to believe that they were the most beautiful songs ever written. Then one day I would change what three songs I was listening to. I felt they helped me to think.
Somehow, that would fill my day….that and a lot of games of Spider Solitaire…because it also helped me to think.
So a great winter…one I hope I don’t need to repeat but still a great winter.
Thanks to a 6.89 dress from Salvation Army, a set of fake pearls, and a package of razors, I think I pulled off the wedding thing.
After months of peace and solitude, all the wedding activities made my brain buzz; glad it’s just a one time thing.
Now to resume my previous scheduled serenity……
Hey from town. I spent half a day digging my truck out of the snow and trying to unfreeze the lock on my gate but I have a wedding to go to so out I must go.
What a great winter it has been. Not having a phone and Internet was a good move for my growth.
Not having the spring running was so eaisily solved by melting the snow that was right outside my door. Once you give up wanting things a certain way, it’s amazing how easy life is.
I had plenty of heat thanks to a load of tamarack rounds I had dropped off right outside of my cabin at the 11th hour.
I wasn’t really worried..
