2006-09-10 - 5:29 a.m.
I stood barefoot on the asphalt in the parking lot in front of my apartment at about 3am on the morning of August 17th. I hugged and kissed Wobegong, then I stepped back and let him sit in his car. Then he backed the car out of the parking space, and I walked to the diver's window and tried to stick my face in to kiss Wobegong. He thought I was being silly, but rolled down the window and kissed me anyway. Then he drove away.
I haven't seen him since. He got into graduate school in Utah, and that's where he is right now and what he's doing. He and I talk every evening, and I've even bought a headset telephone to make the talking easier and easier to do other things while doing.
I miss him. I am married, yet living alone. My one-bedroom apartment is filled only by myself and two cats.
I have now seen my parents and my sister more rencently than my spouse. My mother flew out to California to visit me and to visit her family. I flew out of to Florida to visit my father and my sister. I was also planning on visiting my mother, but the vehicle my father had lent me had the breaks lock up! So I spent one of my vacation days driving, and then walking, around gainesville, to find out what was wrong and then to get it fixed.
The previous day my sister and I had gone to Silver Springs in Ocala national forest. The spring is one of the many clear water springs in Florida, and it is, as many are, set up for swimming. My sister and I didn't get there until around noon, and the weather was threatening rain. I'm not used to Florida clouds anymore, nor to Florida rain. Both my sister and my father think it is best to wait out rain (and thunder and lightening, as that's the scary part) in shelter, while I am not used to waiting for weather.
Anyway, my sister and I showed up at the spring, ate lunch, and then changed into bathing suits to go swimming. We went swimming, but it wasn't particularly hot, so the cold water wasn't particularly welcoming. The spring had only a sprinkling of people to begin with, and they thinned out and dissappeared as my sister and I swam. There were a lot of fish in the spring. We put our glasses on so we could see all of the interesting plants and animals. We got out, dried off, changed, and then walked around the spring again. By this time, we were the only ones there. We saw schools of at least three species of fish, and we saw an otter. The spring basin is very shallow, with four separate springs. The springs are white limestone split by deep, very narrow fissures. A concrete walk borders the spring on three sides, and is close enough to three of the springs that you can almost look down into them from the dry ground. The otter looked like a small sea monster, creating a very wide wake, surfacing occasionally in a vertical, very sinuous undulating simming motion, and coming right towards us. We had no idea what it was until we saw a back foot, at which point my sister pointed and said excitedly "That's an otter!" and it was. The otter continued to swim towards us, confirming its identity by clearly having a thick pelt of fir, and even a distinctive otter face during surfacing. It then turned around and swam away.
I bought a hat in St. Petersburg. My father told me he'd recently bought his very broad brimmed one from a hat shop out on the pier in downtown St. Pete, and as I've needed one while hiking, I decided to try out the hat shop. I'd spent some time in a hat shop with an old friend in Berkely a few months ago, and I hadn't found one I liked. My dad's hat shop was much easier to nativgate. It probably had fewer hats, but they were impeccibly organized, which makes it much easier to decide what traits one wants in a hat, find the hats with those traits, compare them, and then choose the best hat. I started first at the outdoor hats, and found some very practical ones. Also, a very silly one that attracted me. It was a thick canvas safari style one with a thin green border on the edge of the brim. Unfortunately, none of the sizes fit me that well, and, although there were vent holes, it looked like a very hot hat. I went over to them men's hat section, and found a perfect one. It's got a bit of a cowboy hat top, a mesh crown, and a very, very, thick brim. It is almost exactly my father's hat, only with a more comfortable strip to rest on my head, and it is lighter. I enjoy it muchly. It looks like a men's hat when off my head, but, to me at least, just looks like a wide-brimmed hat when on my head. It was so cloudy on many of the days I was in Florida that I didn't get much use out of it. It did survive the trip back to Florida.
The first leg of my flight back to California was beautiful and turbulent. During the two hour flight the captain did not turn off the fasten seatbelt sign. The only thing he said to the passangers (no projected arrival time, no weather or landing informtion in Houston), as an apology for turbulance. The turbulance in question was a very sudden and significant movement in some direction or the other, for which I was very happy to have finished my beverages beforehand. I heard the sounds of many beverages spilling. Oddly, I was perfectly happy, content, and comfortable with the turblance. I had done the unintelligent thing at my father's house of watching a Nova show about Swiss Air Flight 111, which crashed because of an electrical fire, and I've talked too much to Wobegong about his fears of flying, so I occasionally feel fear in taking off, landing, and looking up. But I've been through a thunderstorm in a small, propellor driven commuter flight (even I couldn't stand up straight in the center aisle), so the turbulance in the big plane felt positively fun.
The beautiful part was the sunrise. We were flying west, starting right before sunrise. Each phase of sunrise took almost half an hour, and we were flying through clouds. This means that we were flying through pink clouds for something like 25 minutes! It look almost an hour and half for the sun to actually strike the plane. It was beautiful. As we lifted off, I could see the moon reflected in small lakes, then, further along, I could see the moon reflected on the wing. At one point, it was pink below the wing, the moon was reflected on the wing, and there were black, unlit clouds ahead, all on a blue and white background.
