Sorry. That wasn't for you. That's just my new motto.

Anyhow.

Last weekend, for to celebrate my first week teaching, I took Herald down to Skagit during the floods and we took a walk in the Northern State Hospital park grounds, which used to be an insane asylum back before the seventies shut-down of asylums (in my birth year, heh). This place is a weird one; rumor is they practiced full frontal lobotomy and had a whole building dedicated to electoshock therapy. And at the far side of the place, there's a cemetery commemorating the people who died while living there. The creepy thing--there are no headstones; it's just an empty, green field, sown with the unknown. I guess the place used to be self-sufficient too, so most of the buildings are barns and silos and such, but all gone to disrepair.

I like the place. It's on the haunting side and the first time I visited it was during this past summer with my sister, with the sunset falling just as we were leaving and barn owls rustling off their perches to start hunting against the green and pink. My plan, I don't know why, is to take a series of pictures of the place. I also want to read more about it, and see if there's anything to add. Maybe / maybe not - it seems like it's already been represented and misrepresented, and what more could any piece of history ask for?

So, for now, here are some pics (many are a bit blurry because the bloody rain. I couldn't keep the water off the lens even with a plastic bag, my hands, and two lens rags. Herald was sniggering at me.).





















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In other news, teaching is whupping my buns. It's back to reading, reading reading, and to top it off, I've lost some of my facility in the classroom--that easy pleasure in just being in there. Now I feel like I'm struggling to figure out what to say all the time, and I've picked up a few speech patterns that are not so spectacular. Like trying to explain in a variety of ways, failing towards the end, and saying: "Um. Yeah, that."

I'm a bit on the tired side, but it does feel great to be back at work. And I'm also trying to get myself back into a real writing habit, but that's going over like bog juice at a cocktail party. Maybe it's an okay place to start, but my brain just feels empty.