chip... if you are reading this...

1. great memory
2. liquid dinners are not good for livers
3. thanks for the good advice, you are a great friend and i cherish that.
4. let's try to go fishing before september. 5. i'm compassionate NOT volatile and that's the last time we'll discuss it :)
6. this is my fav picture of you from like forever ago.

can i please live here?

i am now a pogie slayer. kind of.

i love getting phone calls at 9:30 at night from stephen (brotherinlaw/boss/brother i never wanted but love to have) telling me he's picking me up at 4:00am cause we are going seineing for pogies before work. yup. awesome.

promise

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
Christopher Robin to Pooh

beginning of the day and the end of the day

ahhhh shit. what a day.
i started my day sitting on a bench in portland with the coolest guy i have met in a long time... that was a fun 20 minutes.
i ended my day hauling in a pogie siene by hand in the dark and fog by hand. that was a fun 2 hours.
the stuff in between paled in comparison to cool guy and fresh bait.

cam is in training, future smack master

he evidently only comes on the rainy
days. he's a trooper. he makes his dad do silly things. like climb in crates. he wanted to see if i could fit in there with them. not a chance in hell. stephen and i have a hard enough time not killing eachother on the boat/floats, and by killing i mean we can't not throw things like hammers, rusty nails, rubber bands and pitchforks. the crates are just not gonna cut it.

recycling lobstermen?

so, i'm on a mission. i'm trying to get the lobstermen to recycle their returnables. most of them throw them in their trash and then throw their trash in a nasty bait barrel and i hate picking through the nasty trash to get to the cans. some of them make the effort to bring them home, and by some i mean one. some of them throw them overboard which infuriates me. so i have a plan. we have this pond on the island owned by the sweetest old couple, sanford and mabel. in the winter we skate on it and it is awesome. there is a little warming hut there with a fireplace inside. there are skates for everyone, hockey equipement, pucks, and hot chocolate and s'mores stuff. there are even lights so we can have night skating. sanford has opened this pond up to the community for years and as a community we try to take care of it. for a lot of us, the pond is a saving grace. the winter gets long and boring and going down there for a night game of hockey breaks the boredom. we always try to have a community skating party... last year i helped organize one and we had over 70 people there. trust me, that's a lot since there are only around 350 people here in the winter. its great, we bring food and music and it's like a lifetime original movie, but real. i always love seeing the wannabe thugs teaching the little kids how to tie their skates or play hockey... so back to my plan... everyone loves the pond, so i am collecting the cans and bottles and donating all the money to help with the pond. my goal is to buy some new skates, a new helmet and lots of hot chocolate and marshmallows. i'm having a competition to see which boat brings the most cans and whoever wins gets... something. i don't know yet. i'll bake them cookies or a pie or something if its an old guy and if its a young guy maybe beer? i don't know. check out my recycle center on the smack. clearly i am a dork. i'm so proud, like it's a 5th grade science project and i won a spot in the science fair. the lobstermen think i'm kind of crazy, but at least i amuse them:)

one of the best ways to wake up... just one, there are others i like more

i woke up smelling the ocean.

jade and brandon are having...

a boy! hooo-rah. boys are good. emery will be a badass big sister. love my cousin.

cam works hard.

my nephew cameron came to work on the Predator with us on monday. it was a crappy rainy day and i thought he would be miserable. nope. he is a worker. he takes after me. it poured and poured more but he didn't care. he didn't want to wear his rain coat. he was soaked and by the end of the day he was pushing those 90+ lb. crates around. he's 5.

damn, it was a good yesterday

seriously though. all day i felt great, like i was winning on some game show, but it was real life. sadly, there was a period after the jasen experience where i kind of gave up on happiness. long term and normal good day happiness. i felt... well, i felt a lot. but i am mostly free of those feelings now. so anyway great day break down:

1. saw the sunrise with my pup frodo at my favorite beach, sandy.

2. i got to hang out with my new friend matt it was a great couple of hours. he made me laugh, a lot, he gave me great advice about a tough thing and he told me i had the whitest thigh ever. i don't necessarily know if that's good but whatever. matt is an amazing tattoo artist and please, please, please get your future tattoos from him. he's trying to raise 2 kids and he could use the support. plus, he's hot and into yurts which is sweet.

2.5. i got to spend a few great minutes with my favs, katie and dom. love them

3. i went to the fabric store and spent a small fortune on super cool fabric. i will shortly be turning the fabric into dinner napkins to sell in my sister's store which i will charge a small fortune for. i am building my empire one sewing project at a time. i also got some fabric so i can finish making curtians for my living room with the sweet ass fabric i got on ebay. check out my future dinner napkins.

4. i went to whole foods. i had 3 things on my list: an aluminum water bottle for my friend carly because i was afraid she would die from the nasty chems leaching from her nalgene bottle she's had for a million years; coffee and anti-bacterial soap. i left with only purchasing those three things which is a minor miracle. i am a sucker for all those lush veggies but i perservered and i am pretty damn proud of myself.

5. i got the 3rd season of weeds. i love kevin nealon. he is funny shit.

that's the breakdown. and for reals, it was great. my white thigh looks great!

it's early and the morning sounds are making me murderous.

crows at 4:45am are not fun.
the pyschopath that lives right outside my bedroom window (well, that's where his woodpile is). he thinks splitting wood at 6:30 is cool. i don't. his woodsplitter or saw or whatever the f he uses needs like a pool of WD40.

i'm thankful, really, the sun is shining. just sometimes i want to shoot the damn crows. and i want to blast method man in the dude's window in the middle of the night.
but i won't. i don't know how to shoot the rifle and i lost my favorite method man cd.

birthdays (not mine) and thoughts (these are mine)

it's wierd. i had to write the date a million times today... on all the slips for the lobstermen, the bait inventory; the lobster inventory etc... and everytime i wrote it i thought some variation of "shit, today is jasen's birthday" the wierd part is this morning when i woke up and wrote the previous entry about how happy i am and wrote about jasen, i didn't even know what the date was. i was still half asleep but was compelled to think about jasen. ok. hippie moment but i was feeling some energy vibes or something.
what i thought about was his birthday 2 years ago. we were in maine med. his whole family was there and then some left. his brother bought him this crazy gas powered remote control beast of a car. it cost $400 or something and i remember thinking, damn, we could use that money for the kids, or the bills or something because neither of us had worked for almost a month at that point. he went outside with his brother and someone else, maybe jerad? they played with that car around the maine med parking lot and snuck him beers and smoked a joint with him. i waited in the room with his sister-in-law and other family and was so worried. worried that he would fall out of his chair or get angry at seeing the outside even if it was just the parking lot or have an accident as he had no control of any body function... i was scared for him to return because i knew he would feel sad and i was still unsure wholly how to sit with his sadness and not try to fix it.
what i think now i shouldn't have cared how much the car cost or if the doctors would find out he got high in the parking lot and drank coors light. it was his birthday. and he deserved whatever moments of happiness and normalcy as he could get.
it's strange to be writing about jasen. it is a part of my life i still keep pretty close and deal with frequently. it's nice to feel that i am letting go.

if you need to find me look here.

this has been a great summer for me so far. so much better than the last couple. 2 years ago in june my boyfriend jasen got in a serious accident racing motocross and and we spent over 2 months at various hospitals... a couple weeks at MassGeneral; a few weeks at MaineMed and then 5 weeks at The Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the hardest thing i have ever done. last summer was crazy at my job as the director of the rec center here on the island. it sucked in so many ways i don't even want to go there... (however, not nearly as bad as the previous summer)

this summer i have been the happiest i have been in 3 years. most of it has to do with my job. seriously. i deal with smelly bait, grouchy lobstermen and spend most of my time on a float and i love it. i love being outside, feeling strong, and working with my brother in law, stephen and my friend carly. at the end off the day i feel exhausted, i smell like dead fish and my body is bruised, those crates of lobsters feel heavier then 90lbs after dealing with 40th, 50th, 70th of the day. at the end of the day i feel great. like a want to eat a whole cow and run 3 miles and go to bed. who would have thought that happiness can be found on a small float with 50 barrells of dead fish?

i know, enough quotes already.

"those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass."

confucius

"the secret of happiness is freedom; the secret of freedom, courage."
thucydides

friends are fun but sometimes they disappoint you.

its true.

darwin is cool. change is good.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

darwin

cheers for loafers!!

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Henry David Thoreau

the best kind of exhaustion

ocean air. loading lobsters. steaming to portland. smelly bait. bullshitting with a bunch of bitchy lobstermen. i love it:)