Bugs and flowers

I finally went to the Google troubleshooting guide to see why I couldn't download any more pictures, and I did everything they suggested, and sure enough! Now I seem to have fixed the problem by emptying the cache and deleting cookies, but just to be on the safe side, I also downloaded these pictures using another browser (click any to enlarge). These lupine were so profuse on yesterday's hike I couldn't help but admire them and keep them for posterity (as an image; I would never pick a wildflower).

We also saw some very interesting fuzzy things, I have never seen anything like them before. Does anyone know what this is?
My husband thought it looked like an alien. Someone on the hike thought it might be something called "bear (something)" but I looked and could not find anything. Is it even a flower??
We also marveled at this pretty pink flower, wondering also what it is. It is just now getting ready to blossom at the end of July in the Mt. Baker wilderness, at about 6,000 feet altitude. Could it be what they call "monkey flower"?

We had to deal with biting flies and mosquitoes all day long -- until it began to hail, that is. Then all the bugs went away, and nobody would have minded a little rain. Marble-sized hail was a bit much, but believe it or not, it was preferable to the bugs. Some hikers (Marjan and Frank) knew what we would be dealing with and brought head nets. I'm definitely going to have one before the next hike. All this warm and dry weather has made the bugs more intense than I thought possible. I also had some wimpy natural bug repellent, which worked for about two minutes and then needed to be reapplied. Next week, DEET, no apologies!
But you know, it was still so much more fun to be out in the woods with the bugs and the hail and the wildflowers than to be home in the heat, wishing for time to pass. (That's the way I spent Wednesday.) I have a few little welts still left on my scalp where some really big hailstones made contact, and a few sore muscles, but now I am sitting at my beautiful iMac and communing with my new pals in the blogosphere. I can't complain.
:-)

Oh, hail, Yellow Aster Butte!

Well, Yellow Aster Butte is a beautiful place to be, especially on a hot day in the city (click to enlarge picture). It was warm, but not terribly hot, and of course we got to walk across snow fields again today. There were four words that described the Senior Trailblazers hike: sunny, buggy, wildflowers, hail.

Thirteen of us spent our Thursday on a seven- or eight-mile hike (depending on who you asked) and elevation gain of around 2,500 feet. We were immediately accosted by biting flies and mosquitoes as soon as we opened the door at the trailhead. Apply bug spray. Once we started hiking, the clouds of flies and mosquitoes only slowed a little when we moved briskly up the trail. Some of our enterprising hikers had screens to keep the bugs away. (I cannot seem to get blogger to download any of these pictures except the first one, but I'll keep trying.)

On the way back down, we had split into some hikers who wanted to make the ridge and others (like me) who were happy to mosey toward the top and take pictures of flowers. At 2:00 pm, I and six of my friends had begun the journey back down to the cars. The others were behind us somewhere, but they stayed together and we saw them at the end of the hike.

A spit of rain hit my arm. "Hey! I think it's beginning to rain!" I said, but the sky was still bright blue with just one distant dark cloud somewhere in the vicinity. Another large drop. It was beginning to rain, but since it had been so warm, nobody worried too much about it. More drops, but still lots of sun. And then... it happens in the high country: the large drops of rain changed into hail. First a little, then more, then stinging marble-sized hail. We took shelter for awhile, then as it seemed to lessen, began to head down the trail on round marbles. We got wet, we slipped and slid. The hail began again, and I could not see anything through my glasses. As we stopped again under a tree, I found a good spot to groan and lean hard on my trekking poles. Fred, next to me, groaned in what I thought was sympathy. Then he said, "your pole!" and I had been finding a nice secure place on what was actually the top of his foot! We all laughed hard at that one, but I have to say there was a little anxiety mixed into the whole scenario, since we were all soaking wet, an undetermined distance from safety, and in the middle of another hailstorm.

Finally wet to the bone, relieved, and all thirteen accounted for and at the trailhead... all's well that ends well. And this adventure was something we will talk about for a long time. It was a great day!
:-)

Under siege

Well, we have lived here in Bellingham now for a year and four months. Last winter we were completely surprised by the amount of snow we had (which was unusual, I discovered), and now, this heat and humidity. The image above is of the high temperatures for the day from www.probcast.com at the University of Washington, for today, July 28. Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter.

My husband figured out that if we close all the windows except for the bedroom and have our fan turned on high and blowing out the back door, it pulls relatively cool air onto us so we can sleep under a light sheet and stay fairly comfortable. We had day after day of 90+ temperatures in Boulder, but the humidity was in the teens. Here, while we are already in the mid-80s, the humidity is 63%. No wonder I'm feeling so hot.

I awoke at around 5:00am and walked out onto the front porch. The air was still, and the feeling in the early morning twilight was of incipient heat, of something unusual to come. Not one pine needle in our lovely tree was moving. It felt as though the day was holding its breath, not sure what to do. Although the air on the porch was cool in comparison to the air inside, it was just barely comfortable, even at that time of day. When I thought about the title of this post, "under siege" seemed appropriate. We are hunkering down and hoping things will get better soon. Here's a quote from the Cliff Mass Weather Blog:

Anyway, this is a very serious weather event, and the National Weather Service has upped their predictions to the century mark. People don't think about heat waves in the same vein as storms, but heat kills more people around the world. So drink lots of liquids and check on the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable.

My thoughts turned to the older people in my apartment complex, and then it struck me: hey, that means me! I am 66, so don't forget to check on me too, people!

On another topic, Nancy of Life in the Second Half has asked a provocative question: is the blogosphere bringing us together through our intention in order to create something new? I wrote something early in March about Teilhard de Chardin, in which I asked a similar question about what we are creating. What Nancy brought up is tantalizing: we are connected to one another in order to... I am unable to find a word. I just finished reading The Intention Experiment by Lynn McTaggart. This link will take you to a website created to allow interested people to give it a try. I'm still mulling the implications.

And lastly, I want to say thank you again and again to my commenters. I am buoyed by your appreciation and I am excited by the possibilities. My previous post to this one was commented on by so many of my new family. I feel absolutely surrounded by the promise of the future.
:-)

Women's Group

In Boulder, where I spent the last forty years before moving to Bellingham, I had a career and a full life. I started going to a folk dancing group in 1980 and met some women I really liked. We decided to start a group together, and that first night, back in June 1981, seven of us got together in Diane's home. That was the beginning of a more-than-two-decade-long wonderful journey. The only thing we had in common was that all of us enjoyed folk dancing. The cake above was decorated with a picture of the seven of us, twenty years after we started meeting.

We had only one rule: if you had the women to your house, it was your job to provide the entire meal, with the guests providing the wine. You would cook, serve, and clean up, and the others would be treated to an event where they were completely catered to. It worked perfectly. We did this once a month for 26 years, starting with seven of us, and then we were six, and then we were five. We talked about adding others, but we never did. This is about those women.

In 1982, this picture was taken (with Helen missing), with us pretending we were really stuck up. Marilyn is first, the oldest of us, then Peggy. Judy comes next, then me, and with her nose really up in the air, Diane. And Lynn, who "ruined" the picture my smiling, comes last.
We got together once a month so every seventh month you were the host, until Judy moved off to Oregon to begin a bed and breakfast with her sister. For many months we would get an update about how things were going in her part of the world, and then gradually we stopped hearing from her regularly. In 1998, she flew back from Oregon to attend the funeral of Helen, who died suddenly from a brain aneurysm. Helen had gone to school (she was an elementary school teacher) and collapsed after hours. She was gone that very night. We miss her to this day.
This is the earliest picture taken of us, in 1981. In the front row are Lynn and Helen, and the four of us in the back are Peggy, Diane, Marilyn, and me, with long hair and in a skirt. Judy is missing from this picture. We all had family and friends and we would not always make every gathering, but during those years, we got together and talked about our love life, our kids, our jobs, books we were reading, and whatever else was important to us at the time.

Even when we stopped going dancing, we still got together and had a group that never stopped being a vital part of our lives. We had births and deaths, children and grandchildren, weddings and divorces, and everything in between. I couldn't remember exactly when we started getting together, so I called Marilyn just before I started writing this post. We reminisced, I told her I would be writing this, I caught up on the gossip, and we exchanged our latest books for the other to put on her list.

Sometimes there are parts of our lives that continue on, even after the end has come and gone. I will never think of these women as anything other than my sisters of the heart.
:-)

Sisters

Last December I went to Texas to participate in walking a half marathon with some of my family members. My sister Markee (short for Mary Katherine), on the right, lives in Alberta, Canada, and she had the bright idea that we all do this together. My sisters Fia (short for Sofia) and PJ (short for Patricia June) are the two on the left. The third one over is me, with my glasses in my hand and not on my face. PJ didn't participate in the walk because of health issues.

I was blessed to be born the oldest in a family of six. My brother Buz (short for Norman) also lives in Texas and walked the half marathon as well. It was a wonderful event that brought us all together, and I will always be grateful to Markee for instigating our reunion.
My other sister, who wasn't there for the walk, is Norma Jean (not short for anything), here on the left. Today, July 25, is her birthday. The beautiful officer on her right is her daughter Allison, my niece. Norma Jean and I are 2 years, 8 months apart in age, so we were close growing up and remain that way to this day.

My parents had three children in 7 years: me, Norma Jean, and PJ. Then they took a break from having kids and when I was 16, my brother Buz was born, with Markee and Fia following. The "second family" was raised in one place after my father retired from the Air Force, living in a waterfront house on Lake Worth. The first family moved from place to place as we grew up, in typical Air Force fashion.

For some reason I got the bug to make one post every day this month, and I pondered for a while about what would be interesting. I've told a lot about my life, and thinking about Norma Jean's birthday made me realize that there are lots of people who don't have siblings. I no longer have living parents, but I sure see them reflected in all my relatives, and we are connected in a very profound way.

What's it like to be an only child?
:-]

Park Butte

Well, Park Butte was a beaut! (Click any picture to enlarge.) Seventeen Senior Trailblazers hit the trail yesterday morning after a pretty long drive to the Mt. Baker Recreation Area, reached by heading down I-5 to the south of Bellingham. We all remarked on how dry it all is: western Washington is experiencing a significant drought. The period 20 May to 20 July is the driest on record. For us, this meant driving up a dirt road and kicking up enough dust to make everyone cough.

As you can see, it was cloudy and cool for most of the day. Once in a while the skies would clear off and we thought it would suddenly be blue, but it was more like the misty scene above all day long. It made for nice hiking, though. The hike was easy, compared to what we've been doing, a nice leisurely hike of 8 miles or so up about 2,000 feet to this lookout:
This is where we had lunch and enjoyed the view. Mt. Baker pretty much stayed hidden behind the clouds, but I've had plenty of wonderful views on recent hikes, so I didn't feel deprived. This lookout cabin is open to the public (with a box for donations inside).
Here is the view from the deck of the Lookout cabin, looking towards Mt. Baker and the Railroad Grade. That smooth gray area, as I understand it, is the grade, and it functions as access to the glacier on Mt. Baker on the left side of the picture. Ward is enjoying the view and his lunch. If you look closely you can see trails crisscrossing the landscape.
And of course I was forced to take some flower pictures. We saw phlox as above, heather, Indian paintbrush, and lots of lupines on the lower part of the trail. Plus some other flowers I couldn't identify. All in all, it was a day to re-create one's spirit, and enjoy the company of my friends.
:-)

Skydiving accident

This picture, taken last month, is just to say, "I'm still jumping, nine years later." The accident was on June 18, 2000, and I had more than 2,000 skydives at that time. I started jumping when I was 47, and it was just a fluke that I made a tandem, but then I got hooked. That, however, is a story for another time.

I was filming a 4-way group, similar to the last picture in this post, with a camera mounted on my head. After opening, I noticed that the area where I wanted to land was a little far away, but I wasn't too worried. I just headed into the wind and flew that direction. Hmmm. I noticed the wind was pretty strong, shortening up my trajectory across the ground. No worries, though; the landing area was plenty big.

But as I got closer to the ground, the wind became stronger, and I wasn't going to clear the barbed-wire fence below me, as everyone else on the plane had done. I hesitated, not knowing what to do. In my mind I saw myself hitting that fence and becoming entangled in the heavy barbs. When I was about twenty feet off the ground I was sure I would hit the fence, so I made a turn close to the ground, to avoid it.

Any skydiver knows that you should NOT turn close to the ground, because, just as planes do, when you turn you lose altitude, or lift, in order to make that turn. I slammed into the ground, hard, my right hip taking the brunt of the hit. I knew I was hurt and tried to get my parachute under control in the wind while moving as little as possible. People came running towards me. "Are you hurt?"

"Yes. Bad. Call an ambulance."

They did, while my friends took my gear off me and I lay there waiting. When the ambulance team arrived, they told me they would need to move me to a backboard to get me in the ambulance. When they did, I felt the most excruciating pain and was immediately whisked to the hospital. What had happened is that my shattered right sacrum had severed the internal iliac artery. I felt the blood filling my stomach. The ambulance staff put a heavy lead blanket over my hips, which probably saved my life. I learned that an artery will clot if you can immobilize the patient. A Flight for Life helicopter got me to a larger hospital.

I remember the bright lights as I was wheeled into surgery. The doctors told me they would stabilize the bleed and if possible, fix me at the same time. I woke later to my surgeon's face inches from mine, and he said, "We fixed you up; you're going to be just fine." I slept.

When I woke again, I was surrounded by family and friends. My husband stayed with me until he knew for sure I would survive. I had an external fixator drilled into my hip bones, crossing in front. The surgeon had gone into my pelvis through a small incision on my right butt cheek and put in two 7-inch-long pins, needed in order to fix the shattered sacrum. I had six other breaks in my pelvis on top of the sacrum injury. A plug had been placed in the severed artery instead of reattaching it. No artery down that leg any more.

I spent a week in the hospital and another two weeks in a rehab hospital, and then my husband brought me home. I had to go up 15 stairs to get into the apartment, which was accomplished by sitting on the steps facing backwards and pulling myself up, one by one. I didn't leave the apartment for a long time. My husband took wonderful care of me, dressing the holes where the fixator went in several times a day. He cooked, he cleaned, he emptied my porta-potty, he did everything for me.

At Christmastime 2000, we went to Eloy, Arizona, for me to make my first jump back into the sky, almost exactly six months later. Now I can hear you saying, "why in the world would you want to jump again?" Skydivers are the only ones who would understand the reason why. I was 58 years old and terrified, but during that six months, I vowed that I would learn what I had done wrong and teach others how to avoid the same mistake. And that's just what I did. With the coaching of my wonderful husband, I learned how to fly my canopy with much greater confidence and skill.
This is a picture of me in Arizona 2003, flying my canopy. I have made almost 2,000 jumps since June 2000, with (as of today) a total of 4,021. I don't jump as much as I used to, and I no longer teach, but I do enjoy going to Snohomish or Pitt Meadows and making a few jumps for fun, sometimes with my husband, and sometimes with other friends who like to play in the sky with me.
The one in the purple is me. (Click to enlarge and see my big grin.) I am jumping here with the best skydivers in the world, Arizona Airspeed, because I had won a raffle jump during the Christmas holiday event. This is how they raise money to travel all over the world and compete. This was one of the most fun skydives I ever made! I also continue to support them by buying raffle jumps when I'm there, hoping that maybe one day I'll win again.

But to tell you the truth, I feel like I won the best prize of all: being able to run and jump and play again. The rehab was long and hard, but it was worth it. I will never be completely whole again, but I'm good enough. I hiked up 3,500 feet over 9 miles last Thursday, and today I'll play in the mountains with my friends, and Sunday I'll play with my skydiving buddies in Snohomish. I'm good.
:-)

Photo phun

The Retired One has a mishmash of pictures on her site today, and I decided to do the same thing. The first one is the cloud shot for Susan's The Sky's the Limit photo challenge on Ripples of Kindness. The sky here makes me think of flight (it looks a little bit like a rainbow bird). Click on any image to enlarge. Especially this next one:
Today, just by chance I walked by the garden area at the grocery store, and I saw a bunch of bees buzzing around the flowers, and I quickly put my camera on macro and pointed it in the general direction of the bees. I got a few blurry ones, but with a digital camera you just keep on snappin' and delete the unsuccessful ones. In the closeup you can see the pollen on the bee's behind.
At the Farmers' Market I saw this delectable mixture of salad greens (and yellows and orange) that just made me smile. The shadow in the middle at first felt like a mistake, but it bisects the picture and gives it a bit of depth.
This scanned image was one I took in Machu Picchu in Peru (1981). It's a little bit faded, but the picture itself was pretty monochromatic. I thought I might like this picture best of any I've taken, but when I looked at it again, I'm not sure it would qualify for that honor. In the foreground is the "Hitching Post of the Sun" where the Incas made sacrifices to their gods, and in the background is Huayna Picchu, the mountain seen in all the pictures of Machu Picchu, which I climbed later on that day.

That's it for today. Tomorrow I'm going to talk about my skydiving accident, since my brother has asked me to. It happened in 2000 and I came as close to saying goodbye to life as I ever want to again, until it is my time to go.
:-)

Impressions of China

The pictures in this entry are taken from different places I visited in China. The picture above shows you what the air in Beijing looks like much of the time: it's definitely smog, a mixture of fog and pollution. I was told that the air in Beijing is so bad it's the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day on your lungs, and I do believe that. We were visiting the Imperial City and I caught a glimpse of these buildings, thought it looked pretty cool, and snapped the picture.

Other than the air, Beijing is a very exciting city. The first thing I noticed in China is a distinct feeling of becoming. There is an air of dynamic progress (helped along by constant construction everywhere), energy, and optimism. Early in the morning, city dwellers get out of bed and go exercise: some fly kites, play badminton in the square, perform intricate dances with fans or swords. Across from our hotel, a bunch of older citizens brought a boom box and set it up to ballroom dance and waltz. And then it's all packed away, the stores open, and the streets are filled with cars, bicycles, motor scooters. No trace remains of the early morning activities.
In Shanghai, this barber shop on the street appeared weekly. The square was just a block away from our hotel. Dynamic enterprise was everywhere. The food in Shanghai was my favorite, but maybe that was just because Qian (our colleague) grew up there and knew all the best dishes. People are everywhere; China's cities are crowded. Pollution is rampant across the entire country, and people smoke everywhere. Almost everyone had a cellphone and would talk loudly into their phones as if they were deaf, adding to the cacophony.
On our month-long visit in 2007, we took a train to Harbin in the part of China that used to be Manchuria, in northeastern China. This is Harbin from inside my hotel room. As you can see, it's very developed. We were there to attend a conference on climate change. A student from the Harbin Institute of Technology was there, and she was so excited by what she was learning and hearing that she asked Mickey (my boss) to come to HIT and give a talk. There was no time after the meeting, except for Saturday morning. She said she would arrange it if he would do it, and she did! At 8:00 am the next day, more than 200 students came to hear Mickey talk about how to deal with climate change.
Qian is in the black t-shirt, Mickey in the light blue shirt, and my husband in the bright blue shirt. These students were so excited about the possibility of actually doing something positive about the environment that their enthusiasm was infectious. It was truly a wonderful event. We in the USA are in trouble: have we had our day and now China is on the rise? That's the way it feels.
In western China, visiting Urumqi in Xinjiang Province, we were taken on a two-hour bus ride outside of town to visit a yurt village of Tajik nomads. We saw the incredible differences that exist between the Han Chinese and these nomadic Tajiks who are also called Chinese. This village of about 40 yurts picks up and moves on when the seasons change. Urumqi is where the recent unrest began, and you could see some of the reasons when you saw the inequities in treatment. As an outsider, I could only speculate about the reasons, but one sympathetic person told me that Xinjiang Province sees itself as being occupied by China in the same way that Tibet does.

But China is so much more than its government. Its people are the future of our planet, and if they are interested in making a positive difference, I believe it will definitely happen.
:-)