Once Upon a Time...

She stared at him, through the barely open eyes and the lightly tinted shades. Smoke from the past gently entwined about her arm, swirling, whispering, as if to remind her about what she had done, and what she was about to do…

This is me. Dark and twisty or however that phrase works itself out. I figured this blog needed some sort of proper introduction, because there’s no starting a story, any kind of a story, without a really proper introduction – you know, one of those that gives the background and all the little details that you really didn’t need to know and takes up the first half of those books you were forced to read in high school literature.

She breathed in, once, deeply. Secrets were always so painful to keep.

Okay, I’m really kidding. That’s just a story. And a little Photoshop in some soon-to-be-nonexistent free time. This, is actually me, as I’m sure you all know.

And that, is a giant piece of kelp. It’s what girls who spend the summer constructing nuclear waste treatment plants and wandering Seattle’s seashores tend to more or less eventually develop a fascination with :).

Speaking of summer, summer was great, if unfathomably short. I spent it being a “field engineer” at one of the world’s largest engineering projects, one that attempts to immobilize all of Hanford’s liquid nuclear waste into glass. In the piping group, we install and inspect the pipes in each of the five facilities, and there are a lot of pipes. My free time was spent wandering the site in the blazing heat, discreetly watching the ironworkers install rebar from a shady spot afar, or catching a ride back to T1 in a golf cart, listening to stories about “the old days” when workers were allowed to tie on to cranes and swing around. Sometimes I would get the chance to see Louis and Punchy in the warehouse to ask about some business issue like flanges, or shelf life, and then listen to them talk about old music and records and the Beatles. "Good stuff," they say. Punchy calls everyone "wacko," except for Louis, whom he calls "el wacko."

Outside of construction, many days and nights were spent hearing tales of giant fish and the occasional “monster” caught by the fishermen of Dash Point, Seattle. The stories were always accompanied by the sound of the fervent waves crashing against the well-worn wooden pier.

So with all the introduction stuff aside, Scotland is what this blog is to be all about. And that, I am both tremendously excited and terrified for. I guess that's what they call anticipation. I have most of the details ironed out about as flat as I can get them, so I am positive I don't need a visa, I definitely have housing for even the first night I am there, I have transportation from the airport to my housing, and I have a list of places to go, among other things. But I’m still anxious. Against my adventurous judgment, I have settled on not traveling beyond Scotland my first week, because I can’t quite convince myself I won’t get kidnapped or mugged and end up utterly lost and without a plan of action. So, I won’t travel beyond Scotland my first week. Dark and twisty? Maybe just a little.