Fall is waning faintly like a multi-colored lantern burning out, and chilling lips begin to kiss my garden in the morning.

Hello again from the other end of this electronic box.

I've not had very much time to write to you lately (or to upload my pictures due for the previous post), but it is because I have indeed been thrust into the seemingly interminable toiling and tasking of falltime in academia. It doesn't sound very glamourous, and the truth of the matter is that it isn't. Well mostly not. Of course I get something out of it, or else I wouldn't be there.

I've been interning at a local (and national) non-profit environmental advocacy group called Orlo this term. Aside from learning quite a bit about such organizations, I've been helping to edit for the up-coming issue of their quarterly literary publication, The Bear Deluxe magazine ("exploring environmental issues through the arts"). I like doing this kind of work and, as an added bonus, I get credit for it. I am also helping to plan a recycled fashion show ("wearable art out of trash") called Junk to Funk that's going on here in Portland at the Wonder Ballroom on December 2nd.
And I'll have an article about pollution in the Columbia River Gorge in the March issue.

So I've been pretty tied up with all of these delicious-if-demanding activities this fall. And a couple of classes--oh yeah--and I'm preparing for my pre-graduation thesis to be completed by March.

But I am sorry to have been neglectful of you, the readers. City life hasn't been the whole of my life this season even if it has been the bulk of it. I have gotten to take some wonderful-but-brief weekends to places like Bagby Hot Springs and hiking up to the base of Yokum Ridge to sense if not view--for all of the lingering, opaque fog wrapped itself in a proprietary and familial manner tightly around it--the summit of Mt. Hood.
The wonderful mountaintop felt so close we might have tasted it. We might have jumped right off the edge of oblivion right over to its snowy flanks and built jolly snowmen out of its powdery coat. But, of course, it wasn't that close at all.
It was far.
Almost as far away as my papers at school. My job at the daycare center with two-year-olds laughing and giggling and clutching on so. But I like those things too... As different as all of them are, in my fancy little skirt and biking shoes-clad world. I'm always kind of clutching on too, kind of like them, those little kids, that seem to soak up my love like the roots of some tall tree.

Two weekends ago I plucked lots of lovely little mushrooms from beneath the shade of some such trees. I sliced them at the underground stem so that they'd grow back. They were delicious with beets and we ate them in Thanksgiving.
Next fall maybe I'll see them there again.

Michael and I are planning a snowshoe backpack trip at the end of December;
I can hardly wait, but I will I suppose. My bike Bonnie Blue Bell will have to sit this one out, I think, but she deserves a rest. I took her to the bike shop last week where friendly Ian said she was lucky I brought her in when I did. Poor shape, that was. But rolling again proudly, as ever. Maybe after finals I'll get the time to treat her right, after all. Buy a new rear wheel that will carry a heavy load to Alaska in the spring, after I graduate.

We'll just have to wait and see.