Friday, October 22, 2010

november is here... well almost

I like to forget what month it is.  I realize that we have almost 10 days of october left but as I am missing out on Halloween I've decided to forgo the end of October and move straight into November.  Plus we've just gotten our first winter rains here in Northern California so I feel fully justified in this calendrical adjustment.
Today I drove up to Kenwood in Sonoma county under the rainy skies, passing by fields of grape vines, their leaves turning a fall yellow.  The hills are yellow too, that ruddy yellow of dried grass, but a couple more days of rain will turn them their winter silvery gray.  As I drove  I was thinking about the normal descriptors people use for gray: gun metal (or maybe that is for cars), steel, aluminum, etc.  I decided that the sky was the color of that pale almost white ash that develops in flakes on burning logs, ash gray.  And the light was flat, pressing the hills into a painted backdrop of burnished gold grass with the dark olive stain of oak trees lining the clefts in the hillsides.  It was a pretty drive.

packing

My room looks like a bomb went off, which is not a real deviation from standard practice, but gives me anxiety all the same.  I've realized that 3 years of living out of a back pack has given me some strange habits; the one at hand being a deep desire to know that I am all packed up and ready for the next day's adventure.  The problem is that this packing for this departure is a bit more complex than my normal day to day packing and repacking of Poppy (my Osprey waypoint 65L pack).  In the next two weeks I have to brave November in Toronto, the beginnings of the dry season in Costa Rica ( I just checked the weather there: a high of 80 with thunder storms), and then I wrap it all up by moving to Antigua, Guatemala... for a year.
Moving is not my favorite activity, though the prospects of having my own little place where I can grow a basil plant and make coffee and put up photos sounds AMAZING.  Right now I am focusing on those images rather than the overwhelming feeling that thinking about packing brings up. ufff.
Catch you in Guatemala or Chepe or Toronto.