just lost yet another post to the black hole of who-knows-what internet void trashbin, grr. I honestly haven't experienced such consistent insolence from a computer since back in the days of '92-ish when it was expected that a computer would eat/dump/delete/lose whatever you were working on at any given moment... but I saved that post as a draft, then it dissappeared! Ok, enough.
I'm going to resort to the ol'
listing of major points, which is what I usually do when a particularly long email gets deleted/erased/black-holed...

1.junk "stock exchange" email recieved this morning at work with "Bride Stripped Bare By" in the subject line. That is the first part of Marcel Duchamp's "Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" painting title- WHAT is that doing in a junk email subject line?

2.Kansas. Jon and Jody (lovely critters with whom nk and i went camping over the weekend) are movig to Kansas. we saw 2 kansas liscense plates while driving and could not not not decipher the background image on the plates- a temple in a burning field- what is that image?

3.This - ok, I forgot already.

4.Also driving along near Aberdeen we noticed a car with a dreamcatcher hanging from its rearview mirror. This raised a few questii=ons: kie IF the purpose if a dreamcatcher is to catch nightmares and promote good dreams then what is it doing on the rearview mirror of a car? Is this person sleeping in this car, (didn't look like it) also, conversation drifted onto the topic of Steven King's novel "Dreamcatcher" which we actually went out and rented the movie of... so bad. Even if Jason Lee was in it, and the CGI was tolerable- it was bad. Eve Morgan Freeman sucked. I mean, usually his performances are so vanilla that they neither fall into the "good" or Bad" category, but his acting was crappy... all all crappy. The toothy worm-like creatures almost didn't allow me to sleep... I tried putting on NPR but nk couldn't sleep with it...

5. Camping. I was defeated by the stupid river by our campsite. it appeared to be a calm-ish usual run-of-the mill river, BUT while wading from one river to the next island I simplt couldn't cross the second wider, faster, deeper portion. My whole body was moving with the water- only thing holding me in place was the walking stick which had me propped upright and my feet, which were jammed under the large flat riverbed rocks at each step. After three attepmts at crossing, and realizing it was impossible i waded back, rested on the island, attempted to spread the pincones of a lond fallen dead pine tree which somehow was laying in the middle of the otherwise surrounded-with-nothing-but-rocks landmass. While re-crssing the smaller, slowe and shallower river back to the campside side of the water I must've been exhausted by all the other efforets and actually fell, whackig myself realy hard in the head with the huge walking stick (a small tree actually) and was swept downstream for a few paniked seconds before regainting footing and crossing entirely, drenched freezing and kind of satisfied.

6. Due to the bounty of dry driftwood, building a campfire was easier than ever... that driftood just goes up like nobody's business, and there's a ton of it everywhere.

7. we brought francoise along (my pet box turtle, about hald the size of a softball) for the camping trip. Strangely, on the first beachside stop at Kalalek (sp?) she was oogled, petted, poked and practically attacked by a whole group of at least 12 elderly Chinese tourists all saying:
"Oh, she alive? I never seen alive before. Very tasty! Very tasty, you know?"
"You find her here?"
"OOOh, she have baby?"
"How long you have her?"
and so-on and so forth.
Most attention the turtle has ever had.
I couldn't answer their questions quickly enough. The reallly old folks didn't speak english at all but were making faces like they were on a rollercoaster "OOOOHHHHoooo!!!!!"
wow, who knew a turtle could cause such a commotion... not I. or her, little Francoise.

8. sitting here, jittery from coffe, at a desk on an overcast day it is hard to imagie that at theis time yesterday I was wandering thorugh ancient rainforests, and yesterday morning the only concerns were water, trees, rocks, turtle, coffee...
The great thing about that campsie was that one had to wade there through a stream. Kida off the beaten path, but with a huge expanse... the only disruption was the 4am fisherman dropping off his boat, then returnign to freak us out by walking around our tents an hour later, no explanation or sense. Frightening, though. hearing not only the unidentifiable sounds of little animals outside but also heavy boot steps, oddd gear sounds, and pacing...