It’s been far too long. I’m deep in writing Prisoners in Paradise — the tragi-comic tale of our year on Skopelos — and am forcing myself to crank out 1,500 words a day. For the non-writers out there, that’s the equivalent of four paperback pages, and a respectable output. At 55,000 words, I think I’m about halfway. I hope to have the first draft done by mid-March. There are few things as satisfying as typing ‘THE END’ on a piece of work. You only get to do this once, then you have to start on the revisions….
I’m mostly enjoying the writing, and like quite a bit of what I have so far. The hard part is that I’m reliving each and every day, in cases minute-by-minute, on Skopelos as I write, and sometimes it rips at my heart pretty bad.
But you know what? This sucker is going to SELL!
It’s been snowing here: we had our third snowfall in a week today. Yesterday we got 5 inches and they closed the main road down our hill into Willits. Here are some pictures, all taken on my daily 2- to 3-mile walks:
View from our deck yesterday
Our cowboy neighbours’ house
and their mailbox
Lake Emily, our local water supply, is filling up again
I’ve finally got around to massaging and uploading the promised pictures from the holidays. Here they are!
With Lois and Richard at 1 a.m. Christmas Morning, after their party
Me relaxing in Lois & Richard’s hot tub while they slave in the kitchen
Linda’s grandson Benjamin visited for a week. He flew all alone on Christmas Day and we met him at Oakland airport and got back to Willits in time for a late dinner. He’s 11.
I took Ben hiking in the woods while Linda was at work
On the 27th we got snow!
Our house — ugly on the outside but very nice inside. We have left-hand apartment
Ben and two of our neighbours built a snowman
At the weekend we drove up to the Giant Redwoods (sequoia sempervirens), about 90 miles north of Willits. Many of these monsters exceed 300 feet (about 90 metres), with the tallest around 350 feet (110 metres). The biggest are over 2,000 years old.
Linda and Ben INSIDE a giant redwood. Many become hollow inside as a result of natural processes, but the tree remains alive and healthy
We had a wonderful and busy holiday, and I have lots of news and photos to share, and will do so this weekend. But first I have to tell you of my brush with death early this morning. The following account was written within an hour of the event:
It’s been storming hard all night here. Trees are down and the roads are a mess.
It was 7:45 a.m. and just half-light. I’d just returned from taking Linda to work and was opening the car door when the twilight turned to floodlight brilliance. There was a loud brapp! noise. I froze for a second, and it stopped. My God. A power cable. There must be a power cable right next to me in the road. It’s okay if you stay in the car, isn’t it, because the tires insulate you? I looked around the car but couldn’t see any wires down. Across the road, the cables were still strung between the poles, exactly where they should be. The breaker on one of the poles must have blown.
I reached for the car door and it happened again. The light was dazzling, searing the eyes. I was about to die, no way could I survive this. I waited for the jolt. After a couple of seconds it stopped. I was still alive.
I threw the car door open, intending to dash for the stairs, and the blinding light came again. I had my head outside the door and one foot on the ground: this was it, I was dead for sure. In the midst of the noise and blinding light came motion, and an even more intense glare, beyond real. From the power lines less than a hundred feet away poured a pure white blowtorch of – what? Not exactly flame, more like a jet of plasma, wider than a man and over twenty feet long. It blew, roaring and terrible as a blast from a dragon, clear across the street toward our lawn. I watched, awed at the power of the thing as it blistered and writhed for a couple of seconds until the breaker blew like a clap of thunder.
I don’t scare easily, but I slammed the car door and flew up the stairs to our apartment. For a few moments, I felt as though even being indoors offered no protection. This event was more terrifying than the 7.0 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and a reminder of how utterly insignificant we are. I considered how even this ferocious electrical display would be insignificant compared, say, to the storms on Jupiter; and how those forces were as nothing compared to energy of a sun; and that, its turn, to a gamma-ray burster.
It’s good to be reminded of one’s place in the universe.
Many of you who followed our Aegeandream blog will remember that during our last month on Skopelos our island — yes, OUR island — became the set for the forthcoming sure-to-be-a-blockbuster movie, ‘Mamma Mia’.
Based on the Abba-inspired musical, the movie features a number of major stars, including Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, and Pierce Brosnan. Skopelos being such a small pace, we saw all of them more than once in our last few weeks on Skopelos, since they frequented all the same bars and tavernas as everyone else. Our good friend Dimitri was actually hired as Pierce Brosnan’s driver and guide for the actor’s entire stay.
And tonight Linda found this trailer, full of shots of our — yes, OUR — island:
We have the lions (mountain lions, aka Puma, aka Cougar) around here. There’s no shortage of bears. But we’ve recently heard from several people that we also have scorpions, and that they are not infrequently found indoors, especially when the heavy rains begin.
It’s been raining heavily for two days now. And I HATE arachnids of any sort. Yrch.
Our car is all better now after having the oil pan replaced. Apparently the plastic oil pan on VW Passats is very low to the ground and a good knock to the underside, e.g., running over a kerb, will frequently crack it. The part alone costs $275… $275 for a plastic moulding!!
We’re getting ready to go and spend Christmas with friends in the Bay Area, which will be terrific.
Work on the book of the Greek adventure is going well. I’m perhaps a quarter of the way through and hope to have this first draft finished in two or three months, at which point I’ll send it out to my group for critique.
I’ll be posting some more pictures soon. Other than that, here’s wishing you all the very happiest Christmas from us both, and best wishes for 2008. We all want a really good year!!
This is what happened yesterday — our car dumped what looks like ALL its oil on the driveway in a couple of hours! We really hope it’s just a broken hose or pump, but won’t know till we get it to a mechanic tomorrow. The local kids are very impressed.
We’ve been busy in the run-up to Christmas. Last night was Linda’s office Christmas party, held at a local vineyard/winery. Our Greek friends would fall about laughing if they knew this sort of thing starts at 5:30 pm in the USA.
And now, some photos:
First snow on the mountains nearby
Freezing valley mists in the early morning; ground is white with crunchy frost
Knot in fence rail with frost
Frost crystals on fence rail
Our Christmas tree is up!
And now– Linda speaks!
Ben is coming…..
Being back in the United States has some benefits. I speak the language really well. And, closer proximity to my grandson is a blessing as I try to transition from Skopelos to Willits. Ben will be flying, all by himself from Albuquerque to Oakland on Chistmas day. We will greet him at the airport after a year’s absence. It will most certainly feel like Christmas with a young one around for a week. I worry that now that he is eleven he won’t be the little kid anymore, but I have been assured that when kids visit grandparents they will revert back a couple of years. I am counting on this!
The season has been busy; new job, new house, new broken car, holiday parties and settling in. Most days I have a longing for Greece. In Greece I had a longing for the U.S. Perhaps I am just one of those people that wants it all. Now to figure out how to get it!
For you faithful readers, have a wonderful holiday. You are missed and loved wherever you may be on this planet.
The toilet doesn’t leak, but my office does…..(heavy sigh!)
One of the great things about working from home on a computer is that you’re not limited to local radio stations or a few CDs to keep you smiling while you work. There’s a fantastic choice of radio stations online, including literally every program on BBC radio.
It’s somewhat surreal to catch up with The Archers, a BBC soap opera which has been running nonstop for 57 years and is the world’s longest-running radio show, while sitting in the woods of Northern California designing heating systems for wealthy folk.
And then there are all the Greek music stations on the net, which I’ve been listening to a lot partly to keep up my Greek but also because I’m feeling very, very homesick for Skopelos and seriously missing both the place and the people.
So much for my good intentions of making frequent and oddball entries here! Truth is we’ve both been very, very busy. Linda puts in a solid 9 hours most days, and I’ve been running about the same or more the last few, what with AutoCAD design work, trying to coordinate and set up my friend’s e-commerce website, and working on the novel of our Greek Odyssey. Oh, and keeping up with critiques in my own writing group, which is going through a particularly prolific phase, with Janice getting her YA (young adult) novel agented — a few were actually competing for it! — and Juliette close behind wit several agents asking to see her own YA fantasy novel. It’s a hot field, and both these women are excellent writers who’ll have their name in raised print on book covers before too long.
It’s finally started to rain here, hard, which I like. Willits averages 53 inches a year, which is wet indeed, but we’ve been here six weeks and have only seen three or four days of rain on our first week here. Since then it’s been dry and damned cold for California in November — like the low 20s (about -5 Centigrade) the last few nights.
Following my last post, the following item — culled from today’s BoingBoing who picked it up from Newsweek– proved utterly irresistible to me. It seems that the New York Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic church has published a colouring book in which decidedly female angels warn kids never to be alone with an adult (which presumably includes priests). Here’s a sample:
This remarkable item from today’s BoingBoing compares the preoccupations of the (presumably liberal-centrist) Wikipedia audience to those of the right-leaning Conservapedia audience. This is true, folks. While I don’t usually get political on our blogs, this is too bizarre. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
We took a trip to the coast on Sunday, to the town of Mendocino. An hour’s snaking through gorgeous forested hills, a quick left turn at the coast, and there we were.
Mist on the coast
A London taxi from circa 1950 — what’s it doing here?
Mendocino is perhaps the most well-preserved township I’ve seen anywhere along the West Coast. The newest building we saw — the general store — dates from 1909; everything else appears Victorian, and there’s a water tower at least every block, a few of them converted for living. We spent time walking and finished our tour with an hour or so in the Ford House, an 1854 structure now turned into a fascinating museum. Its builder, Jerome Ford, was the man who first recognized the value of the giant redwoods as a lumber resource, the fascinating story of which is briefly retold here; this is how the timber industry of the West Coast got started.
The Ford house and museum
One of Mendocino’s charming streets
Statuary on the bank tower
Sunset Light
The only thing which spoiled Mendocino a little in our view is the pervasive New Age/old hippie aura of the place; even though all the myriad gift stores in Mendocino are pretty upscale, how many little leaded-glass baubles, grey whale stuffies, and wind chimes does the world really need? It’s all so very passé in the 21st century, rather like people going around in Victorian clothing would be….
