One Year after the Tsunami, we shared with Japan

 Most everyone knows that the Tsunami was major and that the impact of it upon Japan is inconceivable on so many levels.  Our Small, Northern California and Southern Oregon harbors had a bit more than sympathy pains for our Japanese brothers and sisters.

Starting between 7 and 8 AM, we began to experience our own Tsunami, and the waves cycled through the commercial boat harbor, destroying boats and docks and peoples incomes, but most devastatingly of all, Pulling two people into the sea, in Southern Oregon at Pistol River (They managed to get ashore) and destroying the life of one young man who was pulled out to sea in Northern California, but who's body was found long weeks later in Washington.

 His Father, Jon Weber, is hiking the route from where his son's body was found, to here where his son was pulled into the sea, that story in the Del Norte Triplicate at

http://www.triplicate.com/News/Local-News/Trek-makes-good-progress

There were several crabbing and fishing boats left shattered on the harbor floor, so this big crane was bright in to help raise the broken boats from the harbor.  

This is a picture I took of my TV screen when they were showing how the water from the harbor was being sucked out of the harbor and then came flooding back in in 10 minute cycles

My Aunt sent me this paper with our hometown on the front page news, from her home near Pittsburgh PA

Although surviving the Tsunami is not a free card other, this sailboat survived the big tsunami, only to lie broken on the rocks in the spring rains and flooding of January 2011

 This smaller crane was here just last month to help fix the channel markers which were broken and moved and have caused a headache for boats coming in and out ever sine

 This dredge loaded up barge after barge of the silt which had been deposited in the harbor and filled the boat basin during the tsunami

Crescent City won one of the $10, 000 prizes from Reader's Digest in the We Hear You America Contest to help with the rebuilding, but as the Curry Coastal Pilot said

"Visitors to Crescent City Harbor this week will find a port that is a shadow of its former self, the surviving boats in the fleet crowding around a handful of new docks. 

Emergency funds to repair and replace docks and other facilities have been hindered by state and federal bureaucracy. Crescent City’s port was one of three California ports to be damaged by the tsunami, while Brookings’ port was the only one in Oregon.

Still, the work completed so far is impressive: the removal of 61 pilings, the dredging of 83 barge-loads of silt deposited by the tsunami, and the repair of about 500 feet of protective rock slope, all at a cost of around $5.1 million. 

“It’s been kind of a remarkable year for what we have accomplished since the tsunami,” Young said. "

To see that whole story go to

http://www.currypilot.com/News/Breaking-News/Tsunami-one-year-later

water, water, everywhere

Battery Point Lighthouse

Lake Earl

Today I am lazing in my robe, looking at pictures from this weekend, feeling lucky to live where I do.  Knowing that there are many beautiful things in other places in the world too, I still find the variety here where the redwoods meet the sea to be stunning and speak to me.

There are days the poverty and mold and overwhelming number of grey days really get me down and make me long to be anywhere warm, but this was the kind of weekend that fools tourists into packing up and moving here, deceptive in its mildness, relaxing in the warmth, even ugly and poor looks beautiful in the mid winter break from cold.

Mary D. Hume at Gold Beach, Oregon

See the faint line of light at the horizon?

This was the kind of light that gave everything a peaceful quality and made feeling blue a particularly good thing to feel.  Staying indoors, glued to the computer, writing and blogging and hanging around facebook is the tempting route through the winter here, but getting dressed and  breathing the air outdoors leaves a strength that lingers through the week.

The outdoor places here are empty, the playground only had out family, the beaches were deserted. Does anyone else get outside with their family, and when you do, where do you go?

Make it Dance

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. 
George Bernard Shaw 

Emma Belle Lafferty Slack, My Mom's paternal Grandma, with me

For Christmas this year, I got the gift of an enormous frame for a collection of family pictures.  I was given it because I am loved, by people who notice that my walls are covered by family pictures stuck on with funtac and that my hand is rarely without a camera in it.

They probably didn't think of the other gift that came with the frame.  The gift of time spent pouring albums out onto tabletops and remembering and defining and deciding who is the family that has to be included in this tribute to those who I love and who love me.

Austin, my oldest son, and Ford his puppy

Greg and I, Do I need to say '80's

Paul & Priscilla, my parents

Mimi & Harvey, my In-laws

Lawrence Slack & Paul Miller
Grandpa & Dad

Harvey & my Boys in the oil patch

1987 right after I went to School in China

My in-law's 50th anniversary 

around 1996

Greg & I as students in China

Being Dad

and being Mom

Brothers

Finally a girl in the family

and more girls

Suddenly the fact that I have Family is amazing to me.  It isn't the family I was born into, and yet it is.  It has gained and lost people, by birth and death but also by choice.  It is filled with love, and always has been.  And I am grateful.

I know when I was born into my family, I soon came to accept that all families were like mine, and mine would always be made up of the people it contained at that time.  In other words, me and my parents and my Grandma Grace and Grandpa Lawrence.

It would have terrified me to consider how many times that "family" would add or lose people, and to think of it as not stable but flexible and dynamic would have felt like dangling over a bottomless dark pit.

 But the more I have watched and lived in this world, the more I see, that my family is connected to your family, and nothing is dark or lonely except our own isolationist sense that we are alone. 

We are not, 

everyone is here together, a family of humanity sharing just one home. 

 The more people I get to know, the more I see to love. Sure, we are not good, or evil, but a blending of my strengths and my weaknesses with the rest of the people here gives us more than enough strength to overcome out problems and solve our issues and celebrate our differences which after-all, are our strengths.

Easing into 2013

 Where I live, it feels like all the seasons are available today. It is raining here but there are pink flowers and yellow and red Maple leaves and Green Grass, just up the hill and inland in a 45 minute drive I am in the snow and the trees are bare or lightly frosted.

 My January has been like that too, one day the house is filled with family and food and laughter, the next it is just me and a good book and my computer.  One day I am healthy then without warning I am screaming from an ear infection then coughing from a cold or doubled up with abdominal pain and the flu.

 So will it be a good year or not? 9 days into it, I have experienced such a wide range of emotions and experiences and I have no idea what else the year has to surprise me with.

 But I do know I can choose how I greet the surprises as they come my way, wide awake, or sleeping through them, fearfully or trusting that there is good wrapped in there somewhere.  I know I have been shown time after time that the most important element in deciding how my day goes is the attitude in my mind when my feet hit the floor.

When I wake up moaning, "I hate being me" I have a day I hate. Simple as that.

 When I determine to find the magic and blessings in the day. I do. Strange how that works.

 "If You Don't Believe in Miracles, Perhaps You've Forgotten You Are One."

http://www.positivelypositive.com/2011/10/25/if-you-dont-believe-in-miracles-perhaps-youve-forgotten-you-are-one-pic/

from Karen Salmansohn

 And there are little miracles everywhere I look today.

So I do not know what will happen to me in 2013, but I have decided who I will be when they happen.

I will be the one who greets the changes with the knowledge that things will be great, because so fat, in my nearly 50 years, every year has held a lot of greatness and more amazing people and events that bad ones, by so far the scales will never balance.