Domesticated

I fear for my ‘Wayward’ identity! I… have… a… job… EGADS! And not only that, but I’ve found an apartment. I… will be signing a… a… a…. a lease!! I don’t know if I can handle all the stability and permanence!

Luckily the lease is just month-to-month and the job is only a couple days a week at a local day spa. I can cut and run from either with very little notice. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing things like gardening too. I spent many hours Monday weeding the garden so it can have some soil dumped on it and some berry bushes planted in it. My neighbor even came over and helped for a while. So there I was, a mini Desperate Housewife, gardening and chatting with the neighbors. And to add further evidence supporting the proof of my domestication, I bought sheets and have been watering, cleaning and doing things like taking care of the fish in the pond.

I’m not too worried though. It will just take a little more effort and a little more planning to maintain my wayward way of life. (Is that a contradiction? “Planning” and “effort” with “wayward”??) I’m still hiking and biking about this neck of the woods, I just scampered down to Palm Desert for a nice week and in April I take off for New York City. There I’ll have a nice long weekend of yoga (I’ve missed Jivamukti yoga!), dance (Stephen Petronio Dance Company) and seeing friends such as the Sweet Pea, the Sanguine and the Sarah. Perhaps the Lotta, the Jim, the Marie and/or the Elliot as well. Who knows? I am also determined to go to Alaska this summer. I will go to Alaska. I will!

As for the ‘Princess’ bit: no worries there. I’m not a rotten princess, but a princess I always have been and certainly always will be.

Wayward Princess, it’s not just a blog, a title or a person, it is a way of living!

Self-Promotion

I have a hard time with the whole promoting myself thing. I don’t like asking people for things, I don’t like talking to strangers and I have a bit of a shy streak in me at times. So walking into strange physical therapy offices, chiropractors’ offices, gyms, salons, spas and so on to ask them if they need a massage therapist or would they please display my flier and take some cards is very challenging for me. It helps a little bit if I tell myself, “I’m a great massage therapist and it is selfish of me to not let people know about me,” but then my insecurity makes me feel silly for even thinking such things and though it helps overall, I still find it hard.

However, Wednesday was the day that I MADE MYSELF go out and do all that unfun self-promotion stuff. I spent an hour or two visiting all the little places right in little ol’ Penn Valley that might possibly be employing massage therapists or be good spots to put a flier about massage. I was anticipating no one needing massage therapists but most people taking a flier to put up.

Surprisingly, many people said no about the flier, which was unfortunate but I was fine with it. Even more of a surprise was I ended up with three concrete possibilities for actual employment. One salon told me about a new spa just around the corner that is hiring a massage therapist. A local chiropractor said she already has two therapists but one of them is flaky and she would like to talk to me when she has more time. And then, most surprising, the next day I got a call from another chiropractor who got my flier from the physical therapy place and who is interviewing massage therapists for a job starting March 27th and would I please fax him my resume! It actually sounds rather ideal. It would just be Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 9-12 or 9-1 doing 15-minute massages on patients to help them warm up and get more from their chiropractic adjustment. That job would give me some steady, dependable income and a chance to work with a variety of people but still have time to develop my own private practice. And it is all of 2 miles from my house.

I definitely won’t be living in my parents’ house when they return in late April, but if I end up having enough work to pay for rent, food, gas, life, etc. I might just stay in the area through the summer. We shall see. My “plans” seem to be changing every moment.

Snow In The Desert

I'm somewhat tempted to complain about the weather. It is, after all, the desert and one is entitled to some expectations about what sort of weather one will encounter. Specifically, one tends to expect March to present hot and sunny pool-lounging weather. It has been, however, cold and stormy. There've been some crazy winds whipping the palm trees about, heavy rains and cold temperatures. Cold for the desert I should say. Over the weekend the highs on the valley floor were only in the mid-50's (oh the agony!) and there was actually a whole pile of snow deposited at higer elevations. Which, even those most put out by the "bad" weather must admit, is pretty stunning and beautiful. Luckily the storm seems to have moved along and I managed to get one last lovely day out of my week here before leaving tomorrow. So today was spent doing this:


While looking at this:


Not sooooooo aweful after all.

Victory!

My baby brother has just returned from 14 months of trying to conquer to globe (see his woefully untended blog "Global Conquest" in the list of links to the right.) He has returned somewhat pale and thoroughly undernourished - he lost 25 pounds - but victorious. The photo below he plans to send to his comrades back in Poland, where he was living and working, and who are currently plagued by bitter cold, snow and ice.

And as you can see by the photo below, it is rather nice here so I'm going to go play outside. We have a BIG day ahead of us. I think we might go swimming and then get the world traveller a new phone and phone service. And then we might go swimming again. There may also be some reading and/or drinking beer by the pool. Stress, stress, stress!

Redefining My Relationship With Snow

When I was little snow was a great plaything. It rarely came to visit and when it did it meant no school and a day of sledding. Sometimes we would go up to the mountains for a fun time visiting the snow. When we moved to California snow became even more removed. It was strictly something one sought out and never did it impose on you when you didn’t want it around.

Then, while snowboarding at age 16, I smashed up my arm right proper and snow and I were on the outs. College somehow led me into the “snowbelt” of western New York where our relationship further deteriorated. Severn or eight months of snow, ice, the cold and gray skies does not work for me - it snowed on my graduation day in mid-May for goodness sake! After college work took me to D.C. briefly and then Philadelphia where I continued to be assaulted by cold, cold snow and ice.

Last May I fled this darkness for sunny California. However, where I live in the foothills of the Sierras, there is the occasional snowstorm and just this last week I had to actually deal with it. Thursday morning roads were a bit snowy and icy and then Friday morning there was so much snow I had to put chains on my little car and drive oh-so-carefully to school. But it wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t that hard, nothing tragic happened, all was okay and I think it was an important step in asserting myself over the snow. It also helps that it is so beautiful up here (especially compared to dirty Philadelphia), which makes the snow rather breathtaking and fairy tale like. And then there’s bit about there being many bright, sunny beautiful days before and after storms with moments of bright beautifulness even in the midst of a storm. That helps rather a lot.


Saturday was another significant step in redefining my relationship with snow. I actively sought out and played in the snow. Lovely new friend Chris and I went snowshoeing up in the mountains. There were many feet of deep powder going up and down fairly steep slopes so we got quite a workout, but it was quite fun to be playing outside in all the fresh mountain air surrounded by exceptional beauty. Two guys had started about an hour or two ahead of us and broke quite a bit of trail for us. They turned back shortly after we caught up to them but we kept going and worked with a couple of other snowshoeing fools until we finally turned around as well. Even with the teamwork it was a pretty strenuous challenge to break a trail going steeply up-hill in knee or waist-deep snow. It was somewhat Zen though – just one step at a time until we finally got there! It took us two and a half hours to go out and only an hour to get back.

The most amusing part of the day was definitely Samson the Snow Duck. Samson is Chris’ beautiful Labrador/Retriever who is almost three years old and still thoroughly full of Labrador puppy energy. Samson is also totally in love with the snow. All day he was plowing off the trail into powdery snow so deep he would actually be swimming in a porpoise fashion through it. I think of him as a snow duck because we’d toss a snowball for him and in his attempts to find the snowball (which generally dissolved as soon as it hit the snow) he would dive headfirst into the snow and root around with his head down and butt up ala a duck. At times we would throw a snowball ahead of us and let Samson do the initial trail braking. We were a tad bit nervous that he would exhaust himself (is Labrador puppy-energy actually endless, or does it just seem that way?) and he’d have to be carried or dragged back to the car. However, when we didn’t let him lead he would plow along parallel anyway or follow so close behind the leader that he’d step on the back of our shoes and/or get cracked in the head with the show as we stepped. In any case, I think we all had a really good time and slept very well last night!