There Were Librarians

Washington State Tribal Librarians meeting. This year we met at the Port Gamble S'Klallam reservation. Fourteen librarians came. Well, maybe 11, three of the people were from the State Library. The library itself is a wonderful and busy place, stuffed full of local art and vast amounts of materials. It's a branch of the Kitsap Regional Library system. County provides materials, computers, employees. The tribe owns and maintains the building; it is embedded in their increasingly well-devloped campus of buildings. Their resident rez population is about the size of Elwha's, but the library serves also a wider population off the rez.

We had an agenda, but the main purpose was connection. Everyone brought something to share—lavender from a neighbor's garden, dreamcatchers that a bunch of schoolkids made but they were really messed up so she remade them into objects of beauty (thankyou LR!); a gorgeous calendar with native foods recipes, joint product of the Colville Tribe and WSU; a booklet describing the results of Jamestown S'Klallam's digitization projects; and so on. We got a tote bag (librarian conferences always get tote bags), lunch at the Port Gamble casino, wonderful baked goodies for our snacks, a tour of the library and of the Port Gamble tribal center complex.

In the Longhouse, Port Gamble, August 18 (Click for larger image.)
In the library, Port Gamble, August 18 (Click for larger image.)

It all worked as intended. A week after the meeting emails are still flying back and forth with followup questions, thankyous, lists. ("What was that book people were talking about at the end of the table during lunch?") Let's do it again soon.

Shorebird Dude (JL's Whimbrel)

Was out at Hobuck Beach on Makah Bay Saturday. It was a very nice day, companionable and warm; but my pix are mushy and hazy and kind of glum. My little camera only actually does ok in bright sun. Two of the people I was out with had quite good cameras, and after using the images on their camera screens to try to identify the shore birds— we were doing live birds as well as the usual COASST survey for dead ones, had a tally sheet for the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society's Birdathon, the Clallam County Big Day— I was ready to throw my own camera into the ocean.

I do love shorebirds. And never see them on 'my' beach, Rialto. One of the several virtues of going to survey at Hobuck is the likelihood of seeing cheerful little shorebird dudes. If it has long legs and a long beak I'm for it.

JL's photograph of a Whimbrel, May 14, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Heard from MP, who was camping at Shelter Cove in far-northern California last weekend. She saw a mother-baby gray whale pair from the beach. So I am inspired for one last try at First Beach. Busy with houseguest this weekend, so will try to dart out to the ocean after work tomorrow. Today would be better, the weather is good and especially No Wind, an advantage when looking for whale blows,

but as a sort of working girl I have to go to not one but two meetings after my shift today. I gotta say, I still like having a relationship to my profession, care a lot about library work; but this having to turn up when scheduled instead of responding to the weather is less and less attractive all the time.

Large Amiable Group Surveying for Dead Birds at Hobuck Beach (Click for larger image.)

Yes Ships

This morning between outbursts of rain, the sky cleared up a bit, and a big tanker came cruising by the bottom of the street, very close in. Like maybe she would be coming into the harbor, that close in. Popped out on the deck for a picture, then to marinetraffic.com to look her up. Yes. Alaskan Explorer, destination Port Angeles.

Alaskan Explorer on the Strait, December 9, 2010 (Click for larger image.)

It was time to go to work. I just about kept pace with her easterly progress as I drove across town, so that she was just pulling around the end of the Hook when I parked; and when I got to my desk and then walked over to the college library's astonishing wall of windows, there was Explorer, just steaming by.

Alaskan Explorer coming into the harbor (Click for larger image.)

I worked until 8PM on Tuesday, and had my first experience of all that glass as a black curtain. Anything could be going on out there in the black night beyond the glass. The world might end out there and the building exist alone in infinite darkness. How would we know?

PS I think I've solved the iPad blogging problem. More investigation to be done, but the fifth attempt got me almost there: the trick will be to post the photos by email, then write directly in blogger.com. Emailed photos seem to behave the way I want. Yaay.

Such a Day

Glorious morning at home and at work.

Fall morning over H Street (Click for larger image.)

I don't usually mix realms, but have borrowed back these photos I just posted on the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Library's blog. (There are also some interior views there.)

Corner on the Rez (Click for larger image.)Fields at sea level. Note the Strait of Juan de Fuca... (Click for larger image.)Tribal Center (Click for larger image.)

Having Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Here

Fall quarter has begun at the college. I'm back at work, hanging out behind the desk; helping people find things, yes, but mostly helping people do things. Reconnecting with colleagues. Readin' professional stuff again. After this first busy week, must re-orient to the off-desk activities I left hanging at the end of spring quarter.

Back in the day, librarying was a much larger proportion of my life, in fact, practically the whole of it. I thought about the library patrons' needs and the library's needs day and night. My colleagues were also my circle of friends. Back in the day, any of us who spent time at the reference desk at Santa Fe Public Library might very well have found one of Peter Taylor's drawings left behind on the desktop amid the scrap paper. Sketched portraits of the library-user-traffic passing to and fro in front of us. We used one of these drawings in the Poetry Broadside about ten years ago. Here's another:

Peter Taylor, ball-point pen on paper (Click for larger image.)

Much more than I expected, community college librarying is not all that different from public librarying. There are these people, mostly young, who need help and have nowhere else they know of to get it. Fewer crazies, fewer passionate readers like the population who used to come haunt the new books shelves every day; and less continuity of faces, as the students cycle through the community college and move on. But it's the same work, really, and I'm so glad to still be able to be doing it, here where I want to be. Only, I miss my friends.

Library Day in the Life, Round 4, Day 4

I took notes all day and have no place else to put my contribution to the Library Day in the Life project, so here it is. This would actually have worked better on Twitter, but I'm finding Twitter so sticky these days that I dared not try to post a continuous record while on the desk. This is a play-by-play account of a four-hour shift on the desk at the Peninsula College Library Media Center in Port Angeles, where I am technically a part-time Librarian and more realistically the Busy-Time-Backup-Person.

*    Day begins with the usual cognitive exercise: memorize where I am parking the car. Parking lot is always full at the hour I arrive, so I can't choose to be consistent, have to cruise around until I find a hole and then recite the location to myself as I walk away from the car. I am carrying three tote bags today. More or less as usual.
*    Long talk with my boss about a horribly failed reference transaction yesterday. I suggest a small practical ameliorative arrangement, we need a bigger sign by the catalog computer so people will notice it.
*    Ask boss for search logs from the catalog. I want some idea how the students look for things, and what they look for. She will email some to me.
*    Arrive at desk. Various bits of information are passed along about library users in the building, or about to appear in the building, or just left the building. Then since I'm there to cover, my co-worker tells me she will "return to the pit", the periodical room, where she is doing a massive weeding project. (It's one of the reasons I was hired, to cover the desk so off-desk projects can get done by others.)
*    Conversation about keys. (I don't get to have one.) I am shown how to retrieve the most important key from my boss's office, but for the day I'll keep it clipped to my belt.
*    Where is the pencil sharpener?
*    Please would I unlock Study Room B? (Convenient that the key is on my belt.)
*    Another staff person comes out of the back room, opens a drawer, and removes a key on a large block of wood. OK, far-enough key coincidences for one morning, kthnxbai.
*    Do we have any kleenex? Yes, take several.
*    Finally I get logged into the several places I need to be logged into.
*    Student needs a book about Antietam. Check catalog, get call number, take him into stacks. Mention I also noticed we had a couple of EBrary titles which if this here book in hand doesn't suit he could read them online. He doesn't seem interested. He says he's never checked a book out, doesn't know what to do. Just give me your student number I say. He doesn't know it. (He is the first student I've worked with who can't recite his or her 895- number. Some of the international students are too timid of their English to say the numbers and hand me their student ID, but otherwise everyone can just rattle them off.)
*    Student needs to find a VHS tape her professor says he showed in class when she was absent that she will find useful for her paper on August Wilson. Unfortunately he misremembered all the details about it, and Wilson is nowhere in the title or subject headings and this catalog system doesn't show note fields, so it took detective work to find. She stayed patient, which not all students would do. Found tape, set her up at the workstation that plays VHS, with the special headset that jacks into the desk.
*    Student who comes in almost every day for two of the books on reserve for English 110 comes and asks for them.
*    Student checks out book on Eli Whitney.
*    Might mention that through all this the signup sheet for study rooms 1 through 7 is leading a lively life of its own. Only the big conference rooms, A and B, require our involvement, they have to be booked in the shared Outlook calendar. Also the newspapers on the west end of the counter are coming and going quite lively.
*    A lull. Quickie conversation with colleague who also followed the iPad announcement yesterday morning. I tell him the rapture has worn off and I'm back to thinking I'll get a Nook this spring and a netbook later on when one of my other two machines dies. He says he's not doing anything until Apple cuts the umbilical to AT&T.
*    Do we have a paper phone book for Everett, WA? No. Shall I call the public library and see if they do? No thanks, I can do that.
*    Here are some sunglasses that were found "in the girls' room." I add them to the collection of found glasses on the east end of the counter. Last week it was a collection of found water containers.
*    A lull. I am reading/winnowing email from the CJC-L (College and Junior College Libraries section of ALA) and CLAMS (College Librarians and Media Specialists of Washington State) email lists.
*    Conversation with the library intern about some magazine boxes that seemed to be available. Yes the brown ones are available, I can take them to the library at Elwha (my volunteer gig).
*    A confusion about available study rooms.
*    My boss has already made a new stand-up sign to place by the catalog station.
*    Instantly somebody sits down next to the sign, although nobody else sits there to look things up for the rest of my shift.
*    Class ends in the big library classroom, a bunch of people stream out, and another bunch of people stream in for the next class. (Once the new classroom building is finished, there won't be such a crunch for spaces for classes to meet, but at present there two flocks of kids here on Tuesdays and Thursday who don't relate to the library at all, might previously never have set foot in the library, this is just where one of their classes is this quarter.)
*    Student needs a... well she doesn't know what it's called. She needs things about tanning beds and skin cancer that are written by doctors. Hmmm. A journal perhaps? Yes! That's the word. I show her how to search in EBSCO for peer-reviewed journal articles, then have her log into one of the computers and do it herself so she can choose articles and print them.
*    A student I have a nodding acquaintance with because she works in the Goodwill where I shop strides by in an impossibly pink diaphanous shalwar kameez, and black and white wool mittens. We nod. She strides back out again almost immediately, now also wearing a head set and singing loudly to the music only she can hear. Letting her walk out much simpler than shushing her.
*    A student checks out Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Score one for the physical collection, yaay!! We have a little conversation about Zinn's death.
*    Can I check out a headset? Oh, please can I have the old kind instead of the new kind? (Or perhaps the other way around. I forgot to write them in these notes, but the headsets come and go all day— check out, check in, rubberband up the wires, check out again— and all the users have preferences for either the old batch or the new ones. Occasionally someone asks for the set with attached microphone.)
*    I have a little conversation with colleague about how we actually had the Howard Zinn book on the shelf. He had not heard that Zinn died, is distressed.
*    Student complains that someone's music is turned up so loud that it's disturbing her even though he has a headset on. It's true, I can hear it distantly muttering all the way over here. I go back among the computers, find the noisy station and shush the occupant, also shush another student whose music I can hear once I'm halfway across the floor.
*    I check my record at the public library to see if any more holds came in (it's a compulsion, I do it many times a day), and check their New Books list. Email a friend with a truly comic title from the new books. (What? Oh. Love from both sides : a true story of soul survival and sacred sexuality.)
*    A late student gallops in the door, across the floor, and into the classroom.
*    I help someone boot the previous scheduled person out of study room 6.
*    A tutor wants to book Study Room B. My coworker has a terrible time getting me to understand how to put it on the shared calendar in Outlook. Eventually succeeds.
*    The giant search log has turned up in my mailbox. I will start playing with it next week.
*    Behind the desk we are discussing children's author Mo Willems. Someone reports meeting him at a conference; he was not a nice man.
*    Frequent library user, community member not student, comes in to read the newspaper. Seems to be chewing on something. Coworker hopes he has has not been eating food out of the trash cans.
*    I go on break. My coworker, who takes very literally the direction that all business she does should be done under her own login, logs me out of everything even though she's using the other PC at the desk.
*    Back from break, log back in to everything.
*    Having trouble with the printing system.
*    A WorkFirst Work Study student has me sign her time sheet.
*    Custodian is in a swivet because the new giant recycling bin on wheels is so full of discarded magazines he can barely move it.
*    There's a question on CJC-L about the use of EBrary and Netlibrary books. I'm so interested in the topic I keep checking my email in case anyone has answered already.
*    Discussion behind the desk of two skulls which are in large red zippered containers. Skulls? Yes skulls. They belong to the dental hygiene program conducted by Pierce College. Pierce thinks they have all their skulls back, but here are these two that are plainly still here. Someone will call Pierce College. (I'm not making this up.)
*    Colleague says he is giving a class in research methods to some education students this afternoon right at the end of my shift, do I want to observe. Oh yes. (This is mostly what the library classroom is used for.)(It's got all these computers and a projection setup and so on.)
*    Help with printing.
*    A community user who used to be a student wants to know if he is still in the system. Not, but I can put him back in. I have a hard time getting his email address in there, and have made other mistakes in creating his record. I'm not exactly the sharpest newbie ever to join this staff, which has been together for years. I had trouble finding where to enter things in the same field last week. OK, maybe the system isn't altogether user friendly. There's about three places to edit address, and they all do different things.
*    Student comes in with overdue ILL book. Can she renew it. I bring her to the ILL person's office.
*    Leave desk. My work week at the college over. (Will be at the tribal library tomorrow.) Attend colleague's 'Education Search' class; a good proportion of these folks are paying attention, unlike the search class for English 101 that I observed earlier in the week.
*    Fail my daily mental acuity test: I remember where in its aisle the car is parked, but not which aisle. It's not in the first three places I look...

Updates

An agitated email arrived yesterday from the COASST people, again again there is "a lot of Akashiwo sanguinea foam on the coastal beaches." Northwest Public Radio had a story about it on Tuesday. So far no distressed birds reported. Apparently the beautiful cleanswept beach I saw Saturday was only a lull in the ongoing event. The Kalebergs saw the same beach aspects the day before, on Second Beach: swathes of clear beach, and a lot of long-familiar wood moved or removed. They have comparison photos.

Now the beaches are slimed again. Come on algae, go to sleep, it's winter.

Regarding the elk on Quillayute Prairie, a big "Aha." According to Erna Gunther, in Ethnobotany of western Washington : the knowledge and use of Indigenous plants by native Americans, "the Indians, meaning the Quileute, burned over Forks and Quillayute prairie in order to lure elk and deer to feed on the young fern shoots." Other sources say the same(1). The big field in Beaver, where I saw the elk last winter, is also a prairie that predates current uses, and is thought to have been maintained with fire by the Quileute before the time of European settlement.

I'm reading a terrific small book about a trip to find surviving, even thriving, Olympic oysters on the far Vancouver Island coast. The Living Shore : Rediscovering a Lost World is the perfect mind-rinse to follow Margaret Atwood's grim The Year of the Flood, which I just finished. ('Dystopia' is the most frequent label the LibraryThing taggers give that one. I'll say.)

Haven't gotten a good representative photo of my new workplace yet. Peninsula College has a handsome campus with great views of the harbor and the Strait, and a gorgeous new (opened September 2008) library. Big windows. I can stand at the circulation desk and see Victoria across the Strait (weather permitting), or watch the pilot boat chug out around the end of Ediz Hook, rendezvousing with the big ships. Being in an academic library is something new for me, and I don't yet have a clue how to write about it. I watch the student traffic flow in and out of the library, young ones and older ones, busy working on transforming their lives. Haven't been tweeting, and I miss it; but at Elwha we were busy moving bookshelves, and the college is not yet mine to write about either.

Students at bus stop; harbor; Ediz Hook; Strait; Victoria beyond (Click for larger image.)

The Hurricane Ridge camera has been broken for a few days. The Port Angeles Inn harbor cam was pointing up at the mountains until a couple of minutes ago, but I messed up and didn't save the image in time. The south-facing cam at the airport gives us this:

Another Storm Coming

Another storm coming, rain through the weekend, they are saying back in the staff workroom. Unfair to beachbunnies, say I. But so far the storms have been warm. We've had all this rain, and rivers going up and down, but up on Hurricane Ridge there is still no snow by the visitor center.

Hurricane Ridge Webcam, 1PM, November 4 (Click for larger image.)

Later: Wow. They certainly think it's going to rain. The gauge on the Elwha expects the river to really jump up.

Expected flow on the Elwha River (Click for larger image.)

Later still: read Cliff Mass Weather Blog, and admire this fabulous animation from the U. of Washington meteorology department. Waves. There's gonna be waves. Thanks to CS for pointing this out.

Intermezzo (Second)

I didn't dream it. Went today to the Peninsula College library to meet with them, and I do indeed have a new part-time job. Home now to fill out lots of paperwork and round up several forms of ID, then back to turn in the formalities and all is in process.

I've been in Florida with family for a week; then had a 22-hour houseguest— already ensconced in the guest room before I even got home— to run all over the map with; then, well, hanging around in a state of suspense unable to post or write email or really do anything until today's meeting told me for sure the current shape of my life.

Not only do I start next week on Tuesday, but since my birthday is on Friday my new boss is eager to make me the occasion for a staff party. We're librarians. We give each other parties all the time...

Shortly will return this blog to its usual beachbunny programming,

Looking East Along the Strait from Pillar Point County Park, 10/27/09... (Click for larger image.)though I do want to think about how to draw in a certain amount of librarianly content. Not much of what went on at the tribal library was mine to tell about. But I'm about to be learning about a whole new-to-me library world, academic libraries. And odds are I'll have things I want to tell.

First draft said 'They're librarians." Changed it to "We..."

Librarying

This is fairly astonishing. The Peninsula College library has called, and I will after all be starting a part-time job there as reference backup (and perhaps general fill-in-as-needed).

I'm still a librarian.

Details not to become clear until after I go see my ma next week. I do hope I didn't dream the conversation. So far I have only notes scribbled by my unconscious pencil while talking to the library director as evidence that it's really happening.

Brief Intermezzo (NPR Calls Them "Buttons")

Earlier in the week on both my primary email lists, PubLib and NGC4Lib (Next-Generation Catalogs for Libraries), people were articulate and depressed on the subject of the apparent impending demise of our profession. It made me wish I were not increasingly "unmoored from the Great Library Raft of Raison" (as L.M. put it); I want to have gone down with the ship if it is going down. I want to continue to belong to readers and the servants of readers; to answerers of information needs, shelterers of the needy, purveyors of enjoyments; and to the kind of techies and madmen whose idea of fun is to tinker up projects like John Blyberg's catalog card generator.

I need to put the next issue of the Poetry Broadside up on the web this weekend, it's overdue; and I need to have the discernment to spend the coming last beautiful long days up on the mountain, and then out at the ocean, instead.

http://www.blyberg.net/card-generator/ made this. Thank you, John. (Click for larger image.)

AHAB

No, this is not 'Reading News'. :-)

On September 16th there will be a "tsunami warning communications test along the entire west coast of the lower 48 states." This will include a test of the AHAB (All-Hazard Alert Broadcast) siren. We will NOT actually be evacuating. The National Tsunami Exercise with evacuation drill will be on 3/24/2010. But the AHAB will sound at Lower Elwha, triggered by the satellite warning system as it ought to work in the real world; in fact it sounds every first Monday at noon, for a test, but in those cases the button is pushed by the tribe's Community Emergency Response Team leader. The event on the 16th is statewide.

AHAB siren on the roof of the shop at Lower Elwha... (Click for larger image.)

We are in the tsunami zone. At Elwha, and here in town along the harbor. Here's a map. Click for larger image. (Sorry for the blurriness. It's from the Washington State Hazard Mitigation Plan, Hazard Profile - Tsunami, 2004, and I can't find a better version anywhere...)

I've borrowed this train of thought from the Elwha Klallam Library's blog, where I posted it yesterday. I don't mean to make this a regular thing, but one of my projects for the weekend is to reconsider my web presence. There is at present a mostly rigid wall around my librarianly life at the tribe, because I have construed it as not mine to tell about; that's why what I write here is nearly all beach-bunny all the time, with not even as much about my library life as I share on Twitter. And in fact AHAB and the tsunami map, and the preceding post about the Washington Coastal Atlas, really belonged here rather than there; only I couldn't think of anything else to post and needed to put something up.

Running Away to the Ocean

Stopping by the tribe this morning—some business about ordering, about the catalog on LibraryThing; and create a couple more posts for the web page to add to the stockpile, as my next absence will be a long one—

but then heading west while I'm still caffeined up. "I am too long away from water, I have a need of water near." (*)

Webcams at La Push, foggy. 7:30 this morning. View live (1) (2)   

P.S. Can't pretend otherwise. When it's not Philip Whalen or Lew Welch, the poet in my head (since I was a very young woman) is Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Paradise Weather

Out at La Push today, helping in the Quileute Tribal Library. Weeding, mostly. Oooh there's some eminently weedable items on these shelves. Lots of eagles around the mouth of the river, and J. says she saw a whale out the window yesterday.

Looking out the windows, this is exactly what you see:

The webcams at La Push, looking southwest, looking west (Click for larger image.)

Today

Addressing a number of important topics, in the 140 character form (Click for larger image.)

School at the Edge of the World

In my persona as (volunteer) consultant/helper to tribal libraries, I spent Friday with the woman who takes care of the school/community library in La Push on the Quileute Reservation (maps: 1)(2). We were working on the corner where the Native American books are shelved: putting things in order, assigning numbers, reshelving. (We also got permission to get rid of seven different old encyclopedia sets.)

If I worked there, I'd never get anything done. The windows of the library look west, and those of the adjacent classroom look out at the north end of First Beach.

Classroom window, Quileute Tribal School. Looking along First Beach. (Click for larger image.)"When there are whales, we see them out there behind those trees." (Click for larger image.)
Library window, Quileute Tribal School. Looking west, to Gunsight Rock. (Click for larger image.)

It rained like crazy while I was driving out there, and then was really windy. The whole building shook. Then the weather moved on east, and things lightened up. When we were finished, there was no point to chasing the storm east along the highway and getting blown into the lake. So I parked the car behind the school and went out on the beach. Low tide, and lots of wave action. Not likely to be able to spot gray whales. One of the teachers told me they've been seeing them, though not today.

The school is the left-most building, with the blue roof. (Click for larger image.)

The empty classroom which opens on the library, where two teachers and I took our lunch trays, had signs and posters in Quileute, Quileute words on the greenboard. I heard that the actor who plays Jacob in the Twilight movies came for lessons in speaking Quileute, to prepare for his much larger role in the second film, now in production around Tofino up on Vancouver Island (not around here in La Push and Forks, where the stories take place)(eeee-too-bad).

A Week in the Life (Updates, Various)

Left out of Friday's beach-day account: eagles, lots of eagles. Hearing eagles, seeing eagles. At one point three of them flew by, one calling out determinedly. M. says because it is nesting season.

Saturday I read all day, while a sequence of mini-blizzards passed by (M. was snowed in again until yesterday). I had somehow ended up with too many library books coming in for me all at the same time, first time in my entire reading life that I was overwhelmed. Have spent the week winnowing, postponing, and reading reading reading.

Also spent much time this week following various librarianly types on twitter, and thinking hard about my (non-existent) professional web presence. It's because my workplace wasn't mine to tell about that this journal-of-a-sort has devolved to all-beachbunny-all-the-time. But I've decided that what I am doing at the tribe several mornings a week is work even if I'm mostly not being paid any more, and I need to figure out some way to account for the part of my life that is not about the water. Perhaps not here...

Sunday, between snow flurries,

Looking Across Freshwater Bay, March 8. (Click for larger image.)I went out to the mouth of the Elwha, but not until after the surf had begun to subside. It's all springy in the woods there, willow catkins and shrubs leafing out and flowers on the bushes. A lot more shells than usual. Sat on a log, watched the waves and the surfers. P.S. No, for heaven's sake, I'm decades past learning to surf. No balance left, and besides, it would take the world's largest wetsuit...

Looking Towards East Shore of River, Exactly at the Strait March 8. (Click for larger image.)

Tuesday the sunrise was especially seductive. The sun has moved well north of the vacant lot, and is shifting fast towards the spot where it rises on the equinoxes.

Sunrise, March 10. (Click for larger image.)

Wednesday was a perfect blue afternoon and there were a lot of b-i-i-g ships moving around. A Polar tanker dropped its pilot and moved on out of the Strait. A second Polar tanker came into the harbor, passing much closer to the inner shore of Ediz Hook than usual,

but by then I had discovered that my camera has died for still photos, though it continues to be ok for movies. This distracted me utterly. I couldn't even see the world, strange gorgeous big shipping passing by, etc etc. Could only twitch, and think, obsessively, "Camera. Must. have. camera."

Weather remains cloudless and gorgeous. Thick frost on the cars this morning.

Hurricane Ridge Web Cam, March 12. (Click for larger image.)

Familiar Seascape, New Angle

La Push on the Quileute Reservation. James Island, Gunsight Rock, etc. But taken from the window in the library of the elementary school, where I was working with the woman who takes care of the library. I had to notice, she was not for one moment distracted by the view. (I sure was.)

There was too much glare and too much salt on the windows of the adjoining classroom, which looked out along First Beach, so no picture from there.

The window

PS Stopped in at the restaurant to pick up a Quileute alphabet poster for V. Wouldn't mind kind of belonging out there, as well as at Elwha. Only kinda, of course.

Volunteer Lady

Turned up at the public library this afternoon to do a little indexing of the local paper—alas I am presently the only one doing it, and I only get one or two papers a week done, so we are ever further behind. I usually manage only one paper per session, 'cause it's just too deathly boring. But today there was also another lady in the volunteer cubicle. She was folding brochures; humming to herself and radiating humankindness as she sat there. Occasionally we talked. She got up after an hour and walked around with her cane, came back, set herself to fold 75 more brochures. It was altogether pleasant and companionable, and kept me awake twice as long as usual.

It remains ten degrees colder than normal, and raining on and off. Clearing over the Strait at the moment, mountain covered in cloud. The days are getting longer really fast. Photos taken from the deck.

Evening clearing. Fruit trees blooming in the neighborhood. Click for wider image.

The vacant lot across the street. Mostly Arbutus menziesii. It's so-o-o nice to be back in Pacific madrone country.

The Neon Orca

Friday we went on a field trip to the library of the Port Gamble S'Klallam tribe, our other cultural sibling, over at Little Boston, near Kingston. We picked up the librarian of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe on the way. As we were shown around, sat around talking, and ate scones and juice (librarians ALWAYS feed each other), we were by way of having a mini-conclave of the tribal librarians of the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The library is simultaneously the tribe's library and a branch of the Kitsap Public Library. Very nice new building, just opened this fall. The teen area has furnishings chosen by the kids themselves, including a wing-backed chair for reading; and an enormous beautiful neon piece by Jimmy Neon, the leaping orca from the tribe's logo; the artist had to use blue instead of black so it would light up, but oh my it is very cool.