Plants at Juanita Bay Park and Forbes Creek:
foxtail
spike rush
bulrush
purple loosestrife
water parsley
burr reed
pond weed
cattail
water lily
water milfoil
duckweed
bladderwort
arrowhead
yellow iris
marsh cinquefoil
knotweed
water plantain

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I like the word visqueen.

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It’s really hard for me to continue liking people once I’ve disagreed with them, but only when I disagree with them about things that matter to me. It turns out a lot of things matter to me.

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Some people find God at church. I think I found God at the Tomales Bay Writers’ Workshops. Only, for me, there is no God. Just the feeling of God, which is not inconsequential.

It will rain.

The way you long for your own bed, your own nakedness in your bed, your fucking body in bed, your soft-dreaming mind dreaming a world much bigger than your own world, one that fishes for and recovers the dead without asking any questions, puts them right back in their La-Z-Boys and behind the wheels of their El Caminos, in their speed boats and at their dinner tables, where they start up with reclining, driving, eating and casting out their lines, every detail in place or misplaced or without a place at all.

During the year that I blogged over on my first blog, Sprigs, I managed to gain about 10 pounds. When I took a one-month break from that blog in September, I decided it was time to start moving rather than sitting in front of my computer every night. I began working out at the gym several times a week (I needed something to occupy my time since I wasn’t blogging), and I went on hikes with LoveShack every weekend. I lost 12 pounds that month, and I am still losing weight.

And can I just say, my ass looks amazing. It’s a fact that can’t be ignored. Apparently, it looks good enough for some guy at the Seattle Aquarium to point his video camera at it, because that’s exactly what happened to me yesterday when I was cooing at two adorable cuttlefish.

But not all is pretty, pretty, pretty as far as my newly slimmed and toned body is concerned.

Today, I have discovered that I am wrinkly. Much more wrinkly than I was a month ago. My hands look like they’ve aged 10 years, and don’t even let me near a mirror in a room that has bad fluorescent overhead lighting — which is exactly what we have in the women’s restroom at my workplace. I usually look a little yucky in that lighting. But now I look like an unskilled makeup artist has poorly drawn thick lines all around my eyes so I will appear decades older than I really am. Only there is no bad makeup artist, and I really do look like this.

A friend once told me that there’s an old saying: There comes a time when a woman must choose between her ass and her face. I didn’t understand that statement, but my friend explained it to me. As you age, she told me, your face looks much better if you are packing a little extra junk in your trunk.

I didn’t believe this was the case. But the way my face and hands look today indicate that adage is true, at least in my case.

I have a difficult decision to make, but I think I’m going to choose my ass. That’s because, at its best, my ass looks much better than my face ever could. Besides, LoveShack has really been fond of spanking me lately, and I can’t say I’m not a fan of the spanking.

I watched a documentary with LoveShack last night about cane toads, which were introduced to Australia to control the cane grub and are overtaking parts of the country. They will eat anything that fits in their mouths and poison anything whose mouth they fit in. Many people hate them, but it’s not really their fault they are there. It’s not like they asked to be brought over from Hawaii for the sole purpose of protecting the cane crops of Australian farmers.

(This was a job they failed miserably at, by the way. Apparently the two types of cane grubs in Australia have habits that make it impossible for the cane frog to eat them. One is out before there’s any cover on the land, which means the frogs aren’t out and about yet. The other doesn’t spend its time on the ground, so the frogs aren’t able to gobble them up.)

The documentary was moderately disturbing because it featured a number of people killing the toads with their cars, with rods and knives, and by boiling them (to extract the hallucinogenic poison). But I’m glad I watched it because I learned a new word from the program, which I hope to incorporate into a poem: It’s amplexus.

Amplexus

n. pl. amplexus or am•plex•us•es
The copulatory embrace of frogs and toads, during which the male fertilizes the eggs that are released by the female.

[Latin amplexus, an embracing, from past participle of amplect, to embrace : am-, ambi-, around; see ambi- + plectere, to twine; see plek- in Indo-European Roots.]