Beggars and Raindrops

Hey Kids! Today has been a decidedly better day than yesterday. I'm sure that not waking up at 4 a.m. with a persistent bout of insomnia had something to do with it. Then I was just a whirlwind of activity, which always feels good. I bravely tackled the many stacks of old paperwork and unopened mail which have been lurking ominously in hidden locations around the house. I did a lot of recycling and refiling. I went to the store, post office, and gas station. All in all, I am very pleased with myself for being so successfully industrious.

One of the main perks to my day was that someone called me this morning and offered me work on a 2-week project next month. Oh happy day! I'm ecstatic to have real work in my immediate future, even if it does entail staying away from home in a cheap motel in Barstow. Yikes. It's a survey project, and I love surveying--it's always been my favorite archaeological endeavor. Sometimes it feels like getting paid to go on long hikes in the wilderness--that's in the most ideal situations. Sometimes it can be a real ordeal, as in the three months I spent in the blinding heat of El Centro's desert last summer. No matter what, it always is exponentially more fun than sitting in an office typing away on a keyboard under florescent lighting.

There is a hitch, of course: I had been planning on going to a really fun beer class at Stone next month on the day before my birthday. It's going to feature many samples of different varieties of stout, one of my favorite styles of beer. And I'm going to miss it. At first I was considering missing a few days of the survey to come down for it and celebrate my birthday, but that's just displaying a phenomenal lack of common sense. I'm in the unfortunate position of beggar at this point of my life, not chooser. So there you have it. I will be spending my birthday in Barstow, sitting in a local dive bar drinking Bud light...ACK! I will, of course, be doing no such thing, even though I'll be in Barstow. Maybe I'll buy a jelly donut and stick a candle in it after I eat my frozen dinner.

The day even closed on a lustrous and gorgeous note: There were mountains of dark blue rain-filled clouds filling the eastern half of the sky, but there was room under the western cloudbank for the sun to break through, and it was shining this brilliant intense white light on all the buildings in the neighborhood and lighting them up in glowing contrast to the darkening sky behind them. It was absolutely breathtaking. And then there was lightning! That is a rarity around here. Real lightning and real, booming, echoing rounds of thunder following. The first fat drops of rain started coming down just as I turned the corner of my street. I thought my ice cream cone was dripping on my wrist at first...but it was just sweet, gentle, glorious rain.