Passion

 Yay, I'm writing something!

Is it too late to do a Rhinebeck wrap-up?  Maybe it is, because my memory is foggy. All I remember is alpaca, alpaca, alpaca. And some really amazing people.

( Yeah, this entry got long. Really, really long. Click here. )

Wow, Maine is awesome.

In fact, I've pretty much determined that I like EVERY state in New England except Connecticut. This is unfortunate. However, since you only have to drive 45 minutes in any direction to get out of Connecticut, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

Anyway, Maine. It was all snowy and fluffy and beautiful--you know, not the kind of snow you find in the middle of a city that's all churned and grey and evil-looking. It was the soft white untouched kind, piled up in mounds all over the state. It was gorgeous. The first day I stopped at a lighthouse near... York, I think. (I'll post disposable pictures and better descriptions later.) I think I pretty much fell in love with Maine the second I saw that lighthouse. I think I've developed a strange new love for lighthouses. I suddenly have the desire to collect lighthouse paraphernalia....

The beaches in Maine are really nice. They have the requisite amount of sand, so they're REAL beaches, but they also have neat scraggly cliffs and rocks. They reminded me of some of the beaches up Hwy 1 in California. In fact, almost everything in Maine reminded me of California. Maine is like a much smaller, snowier, lobsterier version of California. I wonder if it's cheaper to live there...
The biggest city in Maine (Portland) has 230,000 people, a quarter of the state's entire population. That blew me away. New England is just SO SMALL. I will never get over that. The whole region is just SO SMALL (it only takes four hours to drive from New Haven to Maine! Absurd!). Anyway, I stayed in a Motel 6 in Portland, and got dinner at an Applebee's (I know, the shame... but there HONESTLY wasn't anywhere else to get food, and I'd been looking for a restaurant for like three hours; NOTHING is open in Maine in winter), where the guy tending the bar noticed I was reading a guide book and came over to give me some tips and directions. He was chatty and helpful and gave me clear directions on driving in downtown Porland. This resulted in one of the nicest mornings I've had in a long time. I went to a bakery and bought a hot cross bun from a lady with an awesome accent, then, on the Applebee's guy's directions, drove to Cape Elizabeth (near Portland) to see the Portland Head Light, where I sat and ate my hot cross bun in the exact same place that Longfellow used to sit. THAT was awesome.

I drove up the coast a bit farther to Pemaquid Point, which in retrospect was sort of unnecessary. But on the way through Wiscasset I passed an alpaca farm, so I stopped and bought some yarn (OH MY GOD THE YARN) and got to meet the alpaca (alpacas?). I know this sounds dumb, but I was amazed to realize that the animals are just as soft as the yarn. Why had that never occurred to me before? Anyway, after that I became seized by the desire to move to Cape Elizabeth, buy an alpaca farm and a sailboat, and eat breakfast under the lighthouse every day for the rest of my life. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I'm gonna go try to scan my yarn, since I don't have a real camera. More later. :-D

First off, I LOVE the new lj layout. Okay, moving on.

Tuesday I took off and left lab as soon as I could. It was cool to learn HPLC and sort of purify proteins Tuesday morning, but I was totally ready to end that rotation. I think I just really, REALLY need spring break. And suddenly I have a week and a half at my complete and utter disposal! Anyway. I took off Tuesday afternoon and drove to Falmouth, Massachusetts (near Woods Hole) to visit Ann, who was interviewing with the MIT/Woods Hole joint marine biology program. I met up with her at a pub in Falmouth and we drank beer on MIT's tab and talked and caught up. She loved the slug I knit for her (pictures are coming!) and I swear, every single person in the bar came over to ask us, "What IS that??!!" And each time we had to explain that it was a banana slug, followed by WHY it was a banana slug.

Yesterday morning we got up super early and drove into Woods Hole to buy breakfast and coffee, and to find a suitable place for Ann to touch the Atlantic. It was a gorgeous morning in Cape Cod. I think it was showing off for her. It was warm (okay, we were shivering) and sunny and the ocean was just the right shade of Cape Cod blue (not Santa Cruz blue, mind you, but still very pretty). We drove around the town a little bit before heading north toward Boston. My Google directions failed to tell us that our highway changed names, so we freaked out and stopped to buy maps, and then realized we were going the right way, but the purchases turned out to be justified, because the Google directions REALLY failed us once to GOT to Boston, whereupon we became immediately and nearly irrevocably lost. I think we saw half of Boston, driving around on one-way streets, before we managed to find our way to Newbury Street, which the internet said was the best place in Boston to shop. We finally found a (super expensive!) parking lot, left the car, and walked along the street window shopping. It was warm enough for just light jackets, and the wind was gently blowing, and life just felt... good. It was a nice day. We got pizza and hung out in a giant Barnes and Noble. I got to fondle the leather in the Levenger store. And we chatted and got caught up and just generally had a good morning. I took her to the airport (with a minimal amount of getting lost), and then realized I'd never bothered to Google the directions to get home from Boston. So I meandered my way toward I-95, which I knew was SOMEwhere south of the airport, and eventually made it back that way. I got home at 4:15, just 23.5 hours after leaving Tuesday afternoon. It was a super fast trip and definitely not enough time with Ann, but it was a really good day.

I took a two-hour nap (~450 miles in 23.5 hours, on very little sleep, ouch), then went to a dinner party at Emily's. Her roommate got a creme brulee kit, so we drank wine and flamed our own creme and it was awesome. I came home tired and happy, sweet tooth definitely satisfied.

This morning I got up super early again to drive Andrew to the airport. The weather was definitely not as friendly today. It rained. But it was a nice, warm, gentle rain, the kind that means spring is on its way and the worst of the winter is over. It was a hopeful rain (which was good, because on the drive back from Boston yesterday, the weather was gorgeous but I was definitely not in a hopeful mood. I listened to some of the first music I ever bought, in the eighth grade, and cried because the stupid sappy emotionalness of it seems to fit my exact romantic situation right now, way more than it ever did when I was 13 and thought it was so poignant). I stopped at two yarn shops on the way back (Google redeemed itself) and ended up buying some Noro Kureyon. Oh my god. I love the colorway. It's greens and browns and just a touch of blue--it's all earthy and dark and I dunno, if it had a name I would name it Redwood Forest Mulch.
See it here... and here. (All colorways here.)
It's not terribly soft; I'm going to make a bag out of it and felt it. This is, I admit, a bit absurd, because I'm making a bag out of Cascade 220 that I'm going to felt, and then I'll have two extraordinarily similarly constructed bags, but they'll be wildly different in color and texture, and slightly different in size. And I just couldn't resist the Noro. Maybe it's its reputation, but honestly I think it's the colorway that I love. I found a cheaper knockoff, but the colors sucked, so I went with the real deal.
Anyway, enough about yarn.

Shannon and I went to a used bookstore today. She bought me coffee and we sat between the shelves and held books and talked. It was good. It felt so... life (I know that's not an adjective; be quiet). Maybe "real" is the word I want. I felt like I existed. I guess lately I've just felt like things have been happening to me, but the last few days have felt more like real life. I feel like I'm living again. It felt so good to drink coffee and sit near books with a friend; it felt like something I would do. You know, me. Whoever that is... wherever she went...
I guess maybe I'm just finally catching up with myself; my body got here in July and now my soul and heart are catching up.

Speaking of my heart.... This is a reminder to myself of the advice my mother gave me in June of 2004: "Just. Stop. Thinking. About him." It seemed so obvious, and yet I never seem to remember that it's an option. So this is a reminder. EVEN if I believe I made a mistake, I can't do anything about it now. Life is just too short to sit around and cry about mistakes you've made; you have to truck on forwards and hope that you can make up for it when a better time comes around. I KNOW a better time will come around; I feel that in my soul, in every fiber. So I just need to enjoy life and make myself a better person and be READY when that time comes.

Next week is Thanksgiving break, and for those of us who attend fancy private Ivy schools, we get the ENTIRE WEEK OFF. This is a new thing for me, and if I had money I would definitely have flown somewhere. Probably home, but you never know.

Anyway, money is tight, so no flying. Today I was going to get in my little car and drive in a random direction, like I did in August when I found that beach in Rhode Island. But it rained, and I slept in, and I ended up not driving anywhere. So. Since I'm not going anywhere for Thanksgiving break, I've come up with a brilliant idea.

I will pack up the tent I still have, and about a million blankets and pillows, and I'll put sandwhichy things into the cooler, and pack everything into said little car, and I'll strike out in a random direction on Saturday. And I'll have a multi-day driving adventure, in which I will probably get horribly lost and will end up somewhere terribly boring.

Of course, by random direction I mean I think I'll head north this time. It would be neat if I could have a list of cool things I might want to stop by and see, if my random driving gets boring and I want some directed driving. Do you recommend anything? Anything in Vermont or Massachussetts or upstate New York, or any of the other New Englandy states? Or should I strike out south and check out Maryland and all that nonsense? I'm pretty easily distracted, so any sort of thing is of possible interest. Including things like corn palaces and giant balls of twine. Do they have that sort of absurdity on the east coast?

I'm also in the process of attempting to convince a friend to come along, but my hopes are not high that that will work out.