CaseQuest

everyone who lives in Seattle around february/March/April waxes up their metpahor to share how they feel about sunshine and spring after so much rain. So sorry if you have heard it all before. I am solidly from the camp that believes it actually doesn't rain all that much here. Defintely it rains here more than it does in other places, but I have never lived in those other places - in ascending order I have lived in Oregon (just as rainy), Providence (just as rainy plus realy cold), and Maine (so cold you can't tell if it's rainy or not since your eyelids are frozen shut and your skin is numb). I did not always think the Maine weather was as cold as I know it to be now, I only clued into that when I spent a winter week at home a year ago after a couple of years in the PNW. Turns out you lose your aptitude for artic survival when you change climates. I spent the week fearing that the dog was going to get us both hypothermiated with her insistance to poke around every snowriffle before finally blessing one with a midnight pee. This to say, compared to other places (and don't get me wrong other places, i love you too, with all my frozen heart) Seattle has pretty bearable weather that I find ideal for survival at 98.6 degrees with only a few layers of insulation (one of them preferably gore or some other tex). So when November rolls around and I start finding myself in class with wet pants and soggy shoes I tell myself, "this isn't really a rainy season, why it's only a few morning drops that will burn off by afternoon." It's not until february or so that I take a good long hard look at the sky and realize I am deluded and deluged. But then! These sunny days start happening, and then I think, "It's not really a sunny day, this weatehr is just hanging out until the next cloud swarm invades." But they keep happening, and suddenly entire weekends go by where I can spend the entire thing outside without anything tex at all. It is not until this point that I remember how fantastic the summer is here with 17 hours of fresh lovely sunlight and temps rarely over 90 (cause don't get me started on weather that is too hot), not much humidity, pretty green all the time, pretty perfect (one could even say maine-esque). It's like this big climatological surprise. So this year I thought about what it says about me that I have this cycle of convincing myself in the winter that the weather isn't all that stinky, evenutally giving in to the fact that we're all going to die of whatever you die of when you have an extreme vitamin D deficiency, pouting in disbelief on the first run of sunny days, and then grudgingly accepting the fact that the weather is going to be beautiful for the next 5 months. I need to change the ways in which I weild faith. Wouldn't it be better if from the get-go of those first sunny days I started thinking about how great everything was about to get instead of mistrusting it? And to take it a step further, why should I think like that in the winter, "hey, all this rain means that the best weather ever is just around the corner." Sounds like some very peppy preacher talking in my head, but what is wrong with a little pep?

Anyway, I spent some of the sun of last weekend inside finally completing the curtain for my TV. It makes an extreme difference and no one can convicne me otherwise. truth is, when you live in 400 sq. feet, the way you part your hair makes an extreme decorative statement, but it's my nanoworld and no one else has to live in it. I actually bought my sewing machine back in January but hadn't been able to put it through the paces since I was missing a bobbin case, which is like a little suit-of-armor for the bobbin, complete with eye-slit. When I started looking for a bobbin case, sewing stores told me they didn't sell these things and it should have come with the machine. Finally, i ended up back where I purchased the machine and bought me home a bobin case. The follwing weekend, follwoing the instructions in the manual, I opened up the hatch on the undersideof the machine where the bobbin lives, only to find a case already in place. So after three months of case questing, I possess more bobbin cases than will ever be of use.

And when I started thinking about my fruitful but pointless CaseQuest I immediately thought of CaveQuest, the first computer game I every played on our 1985 IBM PC Jr -- the purchase of which my mother painfully had researched in Consumers Digest and occured exactly 2 days before IBM took the computer off the market because of its extreme dumbness. CaveQuest was a mostly black screen, with a little 5-pixel red stick guy in one corner. This little guy was in a cave and relied on your directing the arrow keys to get him out without runing into the cursory dragons, trolls, witches, etc. that live in computerland caves To play, you hit an arrow key and either nothing happened so you hit another arrow key or a note popped up (in electring green of course) that you had run into something and you were now dead. A thrilling game really. For the whole family. When I moved out here I learned that a lot of west coasters of my generation had grown up playing a game called Oregon Trail instead of Cave Quest. i am quite sure Oregon Trail would not have been possible on our machine becasue IBM had only programmed in recognition of the origional 13 colonies, Additionally, Oregon Trail is no kind of game for a New England kid. I have never played, but it sounds like it is all about how proper planning will lead you to an amber waves of grain goiden destiny. Hard work and hope. Those of us forged in real winters, winters consisting of more then a few mopey months of rain that soon give way to 17 hours of daily sunshine, belive in the hard work, but what is the point of the hope part? CaveQuest is more Cotton Mather's game, hard work and inevitable damnation. Cause let's face it, unless you are prone to drowning in puddles, Seattle winters aren't going to do you in, but there are one million and one ways to die of frostbite (or at least it seems there might be). Considering all this, I'm not so hard on myself for my delayed development of faith.