Fish Tales

My friend Garth just started a kayaking video Web site. Yay, Garth!
Check it out!

Okay, the video of the falls I posted was just annoying. Especially since we (and by we I mean I) have been slacking off on blogging. So … I deleted it.

Once upon a time, I wrote poems.

I wonder if I’ll ever come to write them again…

I dreamt of fire twice last night. In the first dream, someone I know very well was reenacting a story of a man who died by fire and she lit herself on fire to show me how it happened. She continued to tell the story as her skin charred and peeled away from her body and as her limbs fell off one by one. In the second dream, I stood in the living room of my house and watch as a wild fire crept closer and closer to my home. The fire moved quickly like the cloud of destruction we see in movies after a nuclear blast. I was on the phone with my father giving him a blow by blow account of what I saw: people running for their lives. By the time I realized the fire was upon me, it was too late to run. I remember vividly feeling the heat of the fire on my skin before it consumed me.

Today, I made a second pot of coffee for myself. I rarely drink more than a half a mug of a coffee a day. But lately, I crave it all the time.

Tomorrow, we are leaving to spend a long weekend in a town called Mammoth Lakes located somewhere in the mountains of Eastern California just shy of Yosemite National Park. This is my attempt at little R&R before finals. Regroup and recharge.

Wow. Has it really been weeks since we last posted?

Hmmm… the last few weeks in a nutshell:

1. Eric was hired full time at the company where he has been temping. Let me get a “woot!” for stability and a “woot! woot!” for the benefits package.

2.  I have been studying my tiny, firm behind off in a desperate attempt to keep up with the tremendous amount of material my classes cover. Grades are good. I am preparing to register for next semester which I am looking forward to.

3. We paid $4.39 per gallon of gasoline earlier this week. The prices are as high at $4.50 in some areas of San Diego.

4. I rode a bike for the first time in ten or fifteen years. I rode it all the way to school and back. Take that oil gurus!

5. Eric is a carpooling machine!

6. We discovered the beauty of the local Asian food market. We love you pickled ginger!

7. Someone stole my ONLY bathing suit off our back porch along with a $40 pair of board shorts. Why? Who the fuck knows! Did Eric’s bathing suit disappear as well? No! Lucky bastard.

8. I woke Eric up at 2:30 a.m. a few weeks ago and had him drive me to the emergency room because I thought I was having a heart attack. I wasn’t having a heart attack, just serious indigestion. Oh, good times.

9. We have been checking out the local housing market. And by checking out the local housing market, I mean drooling over houses we can never afford. Apparently, I am supposed to be impressed that a 1,300 square foot home with an ocean view is ONLY going for $995,000 instead of $1.2 million.

10. We acquired a grill thanks to the generosity of our friends. Its a long term loan that won’t go to waste. Oh yeah!

Caught a bug.

And I am not talking about the kind I like to suck up with the dust buster when they invade my home. No, I caught the “sore throat wreck my body” kind of bug which is a bummer because it is not like I have time to rest and recover.

But just between you and I: I did sleep until 9:30 a.m. this morning. A luxury I cannot necessarily afford, but it did make me feel better. Now, I have to study for a Fundamentals quiz for the next four hours until I rush off to see my new acupuncturist who will hopefully give me some stinky herbs to sooth my throat.

Bless me. I just sneezed on my keyboard.

Ocean Beach residents have much to say and their public commentary tends to run on the indelible side. Debate frequently rages over whether what these folks have to say is sage or silly. I will leave it to the reader to decide.

As I have mentioned, I just spent the last three days studying the axil skeleton which is composed of the skull, vertebral column, and bony thorax or thoracic cage (the ribs, the thoracic vertebrae, the sternum). So, I am intimately familiar with the structure of each subdivision and its functions.

This afternoon, while jogging a three mile loop around the neighborhood, I got to the thinking about the bones, muscles, and cartilage in the thoracic cage as I attempted to deepen my breath. Then I began to picture my thoracic cage rising and falling, expanding and contracting as I labored to take in as much oxygen as possible. In my brain, I could see the first ten of my twelve ribs expanding laterally and contracting medially with each inhale. I could picture my sternum angling anteriorly at the sternal angle just below the manubrium. I could imagine the nucleus pulposus of the internal portion of my vertebrae absorbing the shock of my footfalls. In my head, I could see the real thing… the slime, the colors, the horror-film version of it all. And all I could think was…

EW!

So…

I’m alive. We’re both alive, actually. It’s just that the Fish Bowl has been turned upside down now that school has started. I’ve spent the last three days studying during every waking moment in which I was not seated in a classroom. Literally. I have never study so hard in my life. And this is just the first quiz of many quizzes to come.

Tomorrow, I am looking forward to doing the laundry because, for me, it means I’ll be doing something other than memorizing the 80 bones in the axil skeleton. Hell, maybe I’ll cook a meal instead of eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner out of a Wheat Thins box.