(Last weekend was our four-day camping trip with the redwoods on the coast, so you’ll be seeing a lot more photo posts for a while. We took over a thousand photos last weekend alone.)

I love driving through the green hills of northern California, I tell you what.

We went to Point Reyes, where the sea is angry and the cliffs are high.

And we saw some ten or so tule elk from the road.

I found a blood-stirring, no-holds-barred page that says, essentially, “do it, motherfucker.”

I read about a blind man who taught himself to see by echolocation. Oh my god.

I read about the care and feeding of a novelist – oh, man, so true.

And since I’m writing this on Thursday and missing all of Friday’s great links (because, as you read this, I have been on the road for four hours with another four to go!), I am giving you the rest of our best Six Flags photos!

I learned that “bright faith” makes everything brilliant and alive and a little bit crazy, and that’s the stuff of life.

I learned how to use social media without driving yourself nuts, while still being real and true to yourself.

I learned about 15 things you can do to improve your day – they are tiny and totally reasonable.

I learned that comparison is crap and useless. Everything’s subjective.

I learned how Do Mi learned how to play guitar, and I was motivated to keep trying.

I was shown a well-established list of guidelines on how to get published according to an agent.

I learned some self-strong guidelines about friendships and boundaries. These are excellent.

I learned that you shouldn’t wait for a crisis to stop fretting about the little things.

I learned that grief is a necessary thing – taking time to allow the pain, sadness, anger to exist is vital to being able to, in time, move on.

Lastly, I learned that Tal.ki is completely unresponsive to questions and help requests, whereas Nabble is feature-strong and awesomer, so I changed around the 15 Minute Ficlet forum and am so much happier with it now. Huzzah!

And your Friday Photo:

Do you see what I see?

Tonight, I found myself playing the game again, centering around our fifth houseguest cat, Kali, aka Deathcat, aka Bitty. She’s been here four months with no official departure date, so she’s sort of ours until her mama can receive her. Then, just to contrast, I played the game with my dog.

I can’t pick just one, so have a handful:

My first car was a ’93 Chevrolet Cavalier, teal and two-door. It was 800$ and could not get up to 60 mph even when going downhill. I named him Sora and had him for some two years before upgrading to a car that could manage a highway commute to college.

My first job was at Morgan’s Foodland Fresh, a local grocery store. The owner/manager had known my mom for years and didn’t mind taking on a total newbie as a cashier. I loved working there and only stopped because I moved an hour away for college.

My first martial art was tae kwon do chung do kwan, the original school of TKD and the one they still teach as combat-oriented. I’ve never wanted to learn any kind of sportsy or competitive martial arts, and chung do kwan fit the bill of being really enjoyable without the sport connotation. I was a teenager and trained for two years, not terribly intensively (I was a slacker); my mom and I took three classes a week together, and she regularly kicked my ass with her street-brawling and football-charging tendencies. Chung do kwan inspired a lifelong interest in martial arts and led me to seek another sensei when I later moved to Colorado.

My first novel was The Dark Wars, hand-written in a series of five spiral-bound notebooks. I only worked on the story during school, beginning in seventh grade and petering out in high school; the version online is only a book and a half of greatly revised and rewritten chapters, rather than the four and a half books I wrote by hand. It started from a wistful daydream and ran from there, introducing me to a ridiculously long cast-list and a very important period in Lavanian history, albeit AU due to human inclusion. It classes itself as young adult, simply because that’s what I was when I wrote and revised it.

My first pet was a mutt named Cricket. She was black, medium-sized, long-furred, and incredibly sweet. Mom was driving three-year-old me home from McDonald’s one day, down our windy bumpity gravel road, when we noticed a tottering blotch with legs following the car. I threw fries out the window for her and begged my mom to let me keep her. We drove out to the construction site where my dad was working, the puppy foaming from the car ride – of course, my dad’s reaction was to yell about rabies. However, my impish charm won out (as did my mom’s veterinary logic), and we kept her. Cricket was my best friend for fourteen years.

First of all, my partner-in-crime and my love, J. (You can’t tell it in this picture, but his hair goes past his waist.)

Secondly, the furballs who call me kin. From left to right: Orion, a female shih tzu runt, Mary, middle-aged aunty, and Kitsune, female fox-spirit tabby.

Thirdly, the purrboxes J brought to the mixer. Terror is on the left, and Nicodemus (Nikki) is on the right. (Sorry for the low quality; my camera broke shortly after I arrived in Nevada, so this was taken on my phone.)

And, a new addition, our long-term houseguest, Kali Vicious! (Also known as Deathcat or Bitty.)

Th-th-that’s all, folks!