Marblemount. Apparently, the administration was consolidating their housing, and since there were only two of us living in that house, and other larger houses had empty rooms, they moved me into a new house, with 5 other housemates. It's a lot of fun - we've done some communal dinners, and they just set up a slack line behind the house to practice our rope-walking skills. This Thursday, there was a volunteer appreciation event, and I got a t-shirt, canvas bag, and water bottle, plus a $50 gift certificate for the gift shop. We saw a pine marten on Monday, when we hiked up to Cascade pass - it was very cute. Meghan, one of my coworkers, got married last week, and we were all invited to the wedding (as well as around 300 other people). It was a nice wedding, with lots of good food afterwards.The main news, though, is that I lost my CD case, along with ten of my favorite CDs. I was biking back to the library, going around a bend (which I've since learned is called Dead Man's Curve), and saw a bump in the road ahead of me. In the past I've slowed down when I pass over it, but then I have to work extra hard to get up the following hill, so this time I tried to go around. Unfortunately, I made two errors in judgement. The first was, to avoid going into traffic, I went nearer to the edge of the road. The second was that I miscalculated exactly how wide the bump was, which meant that I ended out hitting it after all, and was going at full speed, near to the edge of the road, when I hit it. And, I was still going at full speed, near the edge of the road, when my CD case, resting in the basket mounted on the front of my bike, skipped once, twice, and out of the basket, off the side of the road. This wouldn't ordinarily have been that much of a problem - I would have just stopped, turned around, and retrieved the case. Unfortunately, at the time my case fell out, I was going over a bridge. Over a steep ravine. Filled with blackberry bushes.
Well, I wasn't just going to write the case off - those were ten of my favorite CD's, after all - so I started climbing down the side of the ravine, among the blackberry bushes, in my shorts and sandals. I didn't make much progress there, even when I crawled under the other side of the bridge, to try another angle of attack. At that point, I decided to bike back up the hill, and race down again, trying to simulate the CD case using a piece of bark and a stick, to figure out where exactly it would have gone. Based on my calculations, it should have been right in the middle of the thickest part of the thorn bushes. So, I went home - then came back, with jeans, boots, a thick jacket, pruning shears, binoculars, and a flashlight.
I began by carefully and meticulously picking my way through the sticker bushes, pulling thorns aside to look at the ground below. Beginning with the epicenter where I thought it should most likely be, I searched in ever-widening circles, based on increasingly unlikely projections of where it might have fallen ("Well, maybe it hit the guard rail, and fell straight down, then rolled back under the bridge. Well, maybe it caught a thermal and soared into that tree. Well, maybe an eagle caught it in its beak...") Not making any progress with that tactic, I grabbed my pruners, and proceeded to lay waste to the entire hillside, destroying with a furious vengeance every scrap of vegetation in sight, before picking through the twisted wreckage in search of the case. Still no sign. At that point it was getting dark, so I went home.
Then this morning, ready for another assault, I returned and spent another hour searching through the now dessicated remains of the once verdant hillside - again, without success. So, I started to head into Concrete - and immediately discovered that my ear-bud headphone had caught in my bike wheel and snapped off. And also, that I had a flat tire. I managed to hitchhike into town, and left the bike at the hardware store, where one of the workers promised that he'd fix it when he had some spare time (he installed a new tube for me, but apparently there were complications, and he'd had other customers waiting). The CD-case, filled with the ten best CDs I've ever purchased, remains unaccounted for.
I think, by this point, that it's clear to all of my readers what the obvious moral of this story is: pirate illegal music.
Sincerely,Nathan
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