The Beginning

What inspired me to set up this blog was what happened yesterday. I got up around 6 a.m. After my daily ritual of writing morning journal, smoking hand-rolled American Spirit cigarettes and drinking expresso made with French Roast, I started writing on the computer. That's where I do my serious writing, or so I thought. This image has been lingering in my mind - two tiny spiders, each engrossed in their perfect centers of the universe. It was a photo I took in fall 2008. It speaks so well for the "trapped" feeling I always feel during winter. I thought maybe I wrote about it I would feel less trapped. Without much thinking I started by first explaining how the photograph came about - how we went on a whim and got a new Mac and a digital camera two years ago and how the new technologies empowered me to see the world with new eyes. Half page into my writing it dawned on me that I set out to write about the "web" as in a spider web, but I was drawn into writing the "Web" as in WWW! I'm not done with the story yet, who knows where it wants to go. I don't even know where this story is going. Oh, right, now I remembered, the sea lions.

But I have to tell you about the dogs first. We adopted another dog lately and she hasn't been trained to walk "nicely" in the neighborhood; she barked at people who have lived here longer than she has, she jumped up on people with a mouthful of slobber, and she doesn't stop for cars. So I've been taking her and her new brother Noodle(By the way, her name is Mei Mei, little sister in Chinese) to the beach so they can run free AND most importantly I can relax too. Now you know why we were at the beach we can move on to the important stuff - the sea lions.

It was the voice we heard first - loud, rumbling and fighting noises. "What is that sound?" I asked my partner Curt worriedly. "Don't know." Not an ounce of concern. "It's a beautiful sunny Monday afternoon and we are walking on a beautiful deserted beach. Relax!" said my critique. There was a good-size rock in the distance and as we got closer the brown blob covering the top, which I thought was moss, started to move! "Seals. No. Sea Lions!" Curt exclaimed. "Wow!" we marveled in unison when a couple of them raised their heads and let out this roar that it was unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. The dogs got really quiet. I think even they knew they were in the presence of something wild and untamed - like their ancestors before they figured out how to get food and shelter the easy way.

Before I went to bed I read "Women who run with the wolves".