Free will is the burner upon which all of our watched pots sit quietly beneath our eyes. When we first drove into Corvallis 2 months ago after 3 months of traveling, we had no idea where we would live. We optimistically assumed there would be a beautiful and affordable state park close to town or just some place where a trailer full of Kentuckians could hide for a few months until we got our bearings. These assumptions made the subsequent acceptance of actual reality a bit prickly. We found out that the closest state park was over an hour away and booked through spring. The only RV park in town was closed for the county fair for 3 weeks and trailer parks (something we had NEVER considered) were unkempt and skeptical affairs. We ended up at the Blue Ox RV resort 15 miles away in the middle of a record-setting heat wave.(for those analogically inclined, RV campground is to camping as dental chair is to hammock) After a week of baking our brain-potatoes in the campground, we moved into the somewhat dismal but tree-covered and breezy Corvallis Mobile Home Park. We've been there ever since having a damn fine time and have enjoyed the reality check. Lately things have been changing really fast; we've found a farm that we can rent some space on, we've ordered a tipi to set up on the farm, we restarted music lessons, joined a gym (the gym has a locally brewed IPA on tap and a daycare. awesomeness indeed), found a baby-sitter we like, and started going to a weekly pot-luck with some other breeders . It's starting to feel like we live here a little and we both like the way things are shaping up. The last couple of months have been a mystery to me, honestly. Having been born one of the luckiest people around, I'm used to things just sort of working out the way I expect them to and I distinctly did not expect to live in a mobile home park and argue with my insurance company about what constitutes a "permanent address". Now that things seem to be swimming along in the giddy coincidental way that I'm used to I realize that I needed to get my priorities straight and that the trailer park was the shoe-horn that my brain needed to fit into it's Sunday shoes. It's too easy to get hung up on how your life is perceived by others and trying to be the director of the musical you also happen to be starring in. Knowing exactly what you want is infinitely more difficult than acquiring it.


A popular piece of cocktail trivia holds that sharks cannot live unless they are constantly swimming. I have it on good authority that the only sharks ever studied were toddlers.