Quieting the Monkey

Tuesday was a rough day.  In hopes of making Wednesday better, I decided to try to not say anything negative all day, including not being snarky through IM or Facebook or e-mail.

Guess what?

It turns out that I'm kind of a negative bitch.  I didn't realize it until I consciously decided to stop.

In one instance, I was in a situation and thinking about how I'd later share that situation with others... focusing on the ridiculous behavior of someone else, naturally.  I remembered that I wasn't going to do that today, and so I just sat there with the coworker while my monkey mind kept looking for ways to be negative.

It didn't take long for the chatter in my monkey mind to die down a bit.  What was the use of getting all ramped up about this when I wasn't going to share it with anyone so they could (obviously) agree that I was horribly put upon?  My monkey mind sulked.*

And then something unexpected happened.  The monkey cocked its head and said, "Maybe this person is here because she's afraid she's going to break something and feels that sitting with you will keep her from that."**

Huh.  That's not so bad.  That's quite nice, actually.  I suspect that it's also the truth.

I wonder what else the monkey has missed?

*I looked for a picture of a monkey playing the cymbals to put here, but HOLY COW are they creepy.  Just imagine there's a not creepy image here.


**You'll have to trust me that this makes sense in context.

Completed Glynis Socks and Namaste Progress

Elsewhere, I have talked about my love for Indigodragonfly yarn.  I have a desire to hoard the yarn in skein instead of knitting with it.  Fortunately, Kim started a KAL (knitalong) in which the only rule was that you used her yarn.  That gave me the push I needed to actually...well, use her yarn.

Glynis pattern knit in Indigodragonfly MCN: The Sock-quel, My Name Is Indigo Montoya colorway

In other knitting, I finished a pair of socks for a Christmas gift for my sister.  Click here if you're a ravelry member and your name is not Brenda.

Now I'm working on a yoga mat bag from Knitty called Namaste.  I found something to make with the cotton yarn that has confounded me ever since I bought it.

Namaste pattern knit in Manos del Uruguay Cotton Stria


A friend asked me if I wanted to take a yoga class with her this summer, and we've been going for several weeks.  I'm really enjoying it, although I have to remember not to look at other, freakishly flexible people in our class.  I know that the important thing is that I feel the stretch, not how far I'm able to move a body part.  This is difficult to remember considering my hamstrings are more rubber cement than rubber band.

Onward and upward.

Vacation, Part 6: Victoria, British Columbia

Our last stop was Victoria, British Columbia.  We docked a little after six in the evening and were only there until midnight, so we had a very short visit.  We spent it at Butchart Gardens.

Jennie Butchart created these gardens out of a limestone quarry that she and her husband, Robert, owned.  At its peak in her lifetime, there were 35 full-time gardeners employed.  I'd love to know how many people it employs now--much more than 35, I'm sure.  The ownership still remains in her family, although at one point one of the family members offered it to the city for $1.  The city refused, knowing it couldn't maintain such a place, and so the family got busy making it work.

And they have.

The above shot of a fuschia blossom is the first time I've ever had luck using the "flower" feature on our camera.  You should be very glad I'm not posting all the flower pictures I took.

As the last part of the quarry was exhausted, the quarry was transformed into a stunning sunken garden.

There is a formal garden, which isn't my personal favorite type, and an amazing Japanese garden.

There were some beautiful water lillies, and a rose garden that I would love to visit some year in July or August.  There were a few blooms when we were there, and I can only imagine what it looks like when most of the plants are in bloom.

The gardens are so gorgeous that even the trash cans have planters on the top of them.  This statue was at the entrance of the gift shop, I believe.

On the way to and from the Gardens, the bus driver drove past some Victoria highlights and told us about them.  This is a very bad picture of their Parliament building, although it's the best one I could get out of several tries.  The architect had it outlined in 3,333 light bulbs, so it always looks like a Christmas decoration.

Victoria was our last stop.  We spent the next day traveling back home, and the day after that doing laundry.  It was a fabulous vacation, and I'm trying to hold on to all the beauty we saw.  

Vacation, Part 5: Ketchikan

After Glacier Bay, we headed to Ketchikan.  Mom, Andrew and I boarded a boat.

The difference between low and high tide in Ketchikan is staggering.  We were at a particularly low point the morning we took our ride, and we saw eagles, a mink*, and these stunning sea stars.

The boat took us to an old salmon cannery.  Although the cannery is closed, it's now used for storage for fishermen and for tours.  There's an intact line, so they showed us the process of how the salmon were processed.  I am very, very grateful to be a vegetarian.

After the cannery, we took a short walk through the forest to get to a waiting bus.

The bus took us to Saxman Totem Village, a FDR-created New Deal project for the Tlinglit tribe.  

*I would like to know who first saw a mink and thought, "You know what would be awesome?  Raising these guys on 'farms' so we can kill them, skin them, and make them into coats!"  They're small and... well, ferret-looking.  We really should be smarter as a species than to make mink coats.  After seeing a live mink, I do feel particularly amused to think of rich, obnoxious women wearing their skins.  It's like a ferret coat.  My amusement is little help to the minks, and I apologize to them.

Vacation, Part 4: Glacier Bay

After Skagway, we spent the next day on the boat.  The ship went into Glacier Bay, which cannot be adequately described or even photographed.

A naturalist boarded the ship and spoke over the intercom to tell us what we were seeing.  The boat traveled very slowly, stopping for around an hour so we could soak up the view.

And what a view.

There are things to say about Glacier Bay, but I find that I can't.  There's a stillness I feel when I look at these, and I can't find the words.

Vacation, Part 3: Skagway

The second stop on our Alaskan vacation was Skagway, a tiny town that boasts the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad, built to help transport gold diggers across the mountains.  There are some very unpleasant stories about how the trip used to go for these nuts before the railroad was built.  I will not spoil this post by telling any of them.  Let's just say that I think people searching for gold are certifiably crazy and often unpleasant.

Their insanity, however, provided me with an excellent train trip where I saw things like this:

and this:

and these rapids that we were told have never been successfully navigated:

The train itself looked like this picture.  The brown cars were the passenger cars.  We rode up to the summit, which was just over 20 miles.  Then the green and yellow cars detached and somehow moved around to the other end of the train.  Everyone in the passenger cars switched sides of the car and also moved the seat backs so we were facing the right way and everyone could get the view of the (incredibly steep) drops.

 

Here's a shot of the train getting ready to go over a bridge that really, really doesn't look very stable.

There were two tunnels we went through.  It was an interesting experience to go through the complete darkness.

The guides talked a bit about the difficulty of building the railroad in the 1890s and also of maintaining it today. Britain sent an engineer to see if it was possible to build a railroad.  The engineer was convinced it wasn't, but then happened to meet a Canadian who was convinced it was.  The railroad was built with English financing, Canadian plans, and American labor.  This was before dynamite was invented, so tons of black powder was used to blow up bits of the mountain.

I'll leave you with another stunner of a view.

Often on this trip, one of us would mention how unlikely it was that anyone besides the three of us would ever want to look through all our photos.  We have so many photos of mountains and glaciers.  I think we were trying to capture the sheer magnitude of our surroundings, which was impossible.

This is one of those places that I want to keep in my mind and visit whenever I get bogged down by life's minutiae.

Vacation, Part 2: Juneau

It had seemed impossible to sort through pictures (even though I had already done it for some Snapfish projects) and write about the rest of our vacation.  Apparently I just needed to talk about outlet covers for a bit because this morning the task didn't seem daunting at all.

Mom, Andrew and I spent three days in Seattle before boarding a giant ship and going on an Alaskan cruise. Our first stop was Juneau.  Juneau is Alaka's capital, which I find interesting considering you can't get there except by water or sky.  The roads all end either in forest or glacier.  There's a ferry system connecting Juneau with 33 or 34 little villages, and our guide told us that Juneau is able to support some big box stores because these villagers make occasional trips to stock up on durable goods.  Juneau's three largest economic areas are government, tourism, and fishing.

We had signed up for a combination excursion of whale watching and a rainforest hike.  This is the boat in which we went whale watching.

The boat captains talked over radio to one another about where whales had been spotted, so we were able to go a few places where there was activity.

We found these sea lions resting on a buoy.

We also saw whales, although it's nearly impossible to get a good photo.  We saw lots of tails, flashes of skin, and spouts of water.  Here's a decent tail shot.

We took a walk through part of the Tongass National Park.  Our walk was through a temperate rain forest.  Everything was covered with lichen and moss, and it was very, very pretty.

We walked to Mendenhall Lake at the base of Mendenhall Glacier.  I didn't get great photos of the glacier because of the rain and fog, but here's one of a waterfall from snow runoff into the lake and some of the giant hunks of ice floating in the lake.

This first stop is where I started to get an inkling of how big and wild Alaska is.  Later in the week, a guide would tell us that an Alaskan is born every minute, just not necessarily in Alaska.  Lots of the people we talked with had relocated to Alaska from somewhere else.  After spending just a little bit of time there, I can understand the pull.  It's very, very beautiful.

Next post: Skagway!