The lee of the stone

Saturday, January 17, 2009

A couple things:

#1. At work the other night, one of the respiratory therapists came in to do some work and saw me reading during a lot of downtime and said "You know, people read books to fall asleep, not to stay awake when things are slow." I told him I read to stay awake. He said he likes to read. Then he qualified that by saying he likes to read news and sports headlines mostly. WHY is it so unusual anymore to see a person reading an actual book?? In college, this one guy would see me occassionally sitting in a chair out on the balcony reading and would always, ALWAYS say "hey, it's the girl who reads a lot" in passing. Certain roommates were always mentioning to me that I read a lot and then they'd say that they like to read too but I never once caught them in the act... People will talk about how tough it was for them to get through a little 200-page grocery store paperback. UGH! Too many literate people are missing out on all the lives and worlds you can experience when reading. I want to boomarang War and Peace at their empty heads. Not that I've read War and Peace either.... but it's on the list.

#2. People work too hard at jobs they don't like. And they're miserable for it. I was talking to a co-worker who mentioned that she worked 48 extra hours of overtime in one pay period. That means she was at that damn hospital for 64 hours a week for two weeks. She said it kills her and she's so tired and worn out but she just loves the money so much that it's worth it. Another co-worker is looking for her third job. Since for whatever reason, being young and very sociable and single and working one full-time job and one part-time job just isn't enough. I think these people are out of their minds. What good is all that money when you're spending every moment of your life either asleep or at work? I hold sacred my free time. Free time = doing the things that make you happy and that you enjoy and that feed your soul. I would rather live in a dump and barely feed myself to have my afternoons free than to spend those hours at an extra job. The French with their 30-35 hour work weeks have it right. They also all get something like 4 weeks of built-in, dedicated vacation time every single year. They know how to do it.

So now that I've got that off my chest, here are some pictures of the little trip my sisters and Dave and my mom and I took to the Washington coast on New Year's Day:

I spotted this concentration camp of an abandoned school at the end of a road on the way to the coast and had Mom stop on the way back for some pictures. Eerie. This must be my future home since I insist on being poor.

It's a really long school, this is the rest of it. What an amazingly beautiful dump. It looks as though it has stood empty for decades. Why haven't they bulldozed it?

The imagined homeless survivalists lurking inside with their bolt-action rifles kept me from getting too close...

N - The happy, bouncing little tennis ball in your soul must be weeping right now.

And here we have the basketball court.

Coastal cities in Washington are like ghost towns. Even in the summer when I went here with KJ, everything was run down and there were few tourists. Even a lot of the pretty summer homes dotting the coast looked abandoned. For some reason the population is sparse and there is very little development in most of this state outside of the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia corridor.

gotta have the sparkly,

Nikki