Default: Procrastinate

Before I rant, have a bird or two. I haven't taken the time to figure out what they are yet.

You may not know this important tidbit yet, but the internship I currently have ends in a little over a month. That means the hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing frustrating process has come to the fore full force: Hunt the jobs! Finding jobs isn't hard, its true. Finding jobs for which you are qualified, have a sliver of interest in and fall in the geographically desirable area however... are few and precious. I managed to get one letter of interest completed and another started (and what a miserable woeful start it is) before the old beast reared its fuzzy reassuring head. Procrastination always tells me I'm intelligent and resourceful enough to get what I need to do done just under the shaving wire of time deadlines. Its generally true, but it always leaves me wondering what I might accomplish if I actually applied myself. Enough pondering my psyche. Lets talk instead about thrift stores, the Elwha and food.

There's a surprisingly fruitful Goodwill in Port Angeles which has provided me with several hours of entertainment, some clothes, kitchen tools and decorative items. I'm most proud of the posters and paintings I've managed to scrounge up at Port Angeles thrift stores, there was a sample earlier with the Yosemite painting Otherwise I've found these pretty little abandoned things.

Is it obvious yet that I like plants? And insects? I don't have a  mushroom one (with me) though.
That's sort of surprising.

As usual I've spent a little time making things.

A year or so ago I got really enamored with the idea of making my own deodorant. I finally did that last summer, it wasn't that great. I'm just too stinky I guess. I did however make some lotion and chapstick I like. So I made another round this weekend.
I owe my success to this blog right here:  http://asonomagarden.wordpress.com/
I stumbled across it and decided, hey, why not?
 

Made some cornmeal blueberry muffins for breakfast this week from one of my delightful baking books. The texture probably would be better if I had the finely ground cornmeal the recipe called for, but they're pretty good as they are. 

Also have been craving red meat, so I quelled the desire to fill my craving with fatty fast food and made my own less fatty slower food. Finger licking goodness! 

The nursery has had bouts of extreme productivity intermixed with pot washing. I thought you should experience that  glory so here. This is Leonie rinsing pots. Leonie is having fun. See how excited she is?

We have also been taking cuttings willy nilly of things like cottonwood, snowberry, nootka and baldhip rose, red flowering currant, red osier dogwood, scoulers and sitka willow, more snowberry and so on and so forth. The end result is dozens of trays full of sticks that have been chopped, bleached, dipped in rooting hormone and shoved in tubes.

I don't know how many thousand we're supposed to end up with, but we ran out of trays yesterday and a personal supply had to be utilized (not mine, my boss's) to meet demand.






Today was a hauling and planting day. We loaded up Thor (the silly superduty F250 beast), and off we go to the Mills no-longer-reservoir site that everyone still calls a reservoir. Or lake. We hiked in to where a zip line had been set up to move plants down a slope.

The hope was it would be less destructive to hike the plants in on an established trail and zipline them closer and then hike them the last hundred or so yards over the reservoir sediment than hiking them all in across the terraces and slopes. Safer and less treacherous too. 

The zipline in action. The two WCC crews built this whole thing, which I find pretty impressive, considering I wouldn't have a clue where to start.

Maybe you'll recall me writing about a helicopter moving logs down off the slope onto the terraces. If you have a moment you should go back and look at those pictures of the valley floor in comparison to this one. You can see the massive volume of sediment that has been moved out of the system in just a few months. If you look closely in this picture you'll see some yellow dots. Those are people and a nice scale to consider.

 The seeding also seems to have worked well in some areas. In the site we planted today there were oodles of these little guys popping up.There is hope yet!

The daffodils are actually daffodils!

Tootle pip, have a simply splendid week!