A 30 to 40 percent chance of scattered employment

In meteorological parlance, there are these two words about rain that pop up a lot: scattered and isolated. When you have isolated showers (or thunderstorms) moving through an area, that means that a storm will do something, somewhere, but for any given observer, he only has a 10 to 20 percent chance of getting rained on. Scattered means that more rain is coming and a particular spot has a 30 to 40 percent chance of getting rained on. Growing up in Puget Sound, most of my life has been lived on days expecting scattered showers.

And now, I am getting into a situation of scattered life. I have looked at seven apartments, called 10 others, applied for 20 jobs and had one job interview (although the rejection letter just came for that one). In viewing the apartments or applying for these jobs, only about 30 percent of them seem remotely interesting -- but I feel obligated to make the queries anyway because we need to live somewhere and be able to pay the rent.

The apartments have mostly been all right, although a few have been ghetto or rent-controlled. The reviews of these complexes on the Internet, however, have been atrocious. I've been trying to determine if this anti-landlord invective has any merit, or if only cranky people go on these sites to wish fire, brimstone, locusts and frogs upon distant descendants of their former apartment managers because they took too long to fix a washing machine.

Some of you may be wondering how we ended up back in Puget Sound with a life like the weather. I guess this is where the cheery part of this blog entry starts. Miri got a JOB!

Yes, an actual paying job as a zookeeper taking care of exotic animals. She works part time at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma in the Asia exhibit. This is a very good thing as Point Defiance is one of the best zoos in the world. She gets to work with Asian river otters who sound like squeaky toys when they're vocal, tapirs, anoas, porcupines, Sumatran tigers, gibbons and siamangs. She feeds them and cleans their areas. (But don't worry, it's a protected contact facility, meaning the humans and animals never get to play.) Having a part-time job at Point Defiance is a resume builder job, meaning that they employ you for a year or two and then you have to go work somewhere else. (They rarely promote their own people into career positions.) We are hopeful that one of the other two zoos (Northwest Trek or Woodland Park) will hire her later.

I am searching for a job, and we're really hopeful that after I get employed, we can rent someplace to live that's halfway between the two jobs. If you happen to have a friend trying to rent a duplex, let us know.

We have gotten to do some fun stuff recently. On our anniversary, we went to a bed and breakfast south of Spokane and got to drive around in the Palouse country. Here's a picture of Miri at Kamiak Butte:


Click on the photo if you want to see more from that trip.

Miri's parents came to visit us in Spokane, and we went to Lake Coeur D'Alene to go canoeing. Robin and Grant happened to be coming through on their way to Missoula that day.

The other really cool thing we've gotten to do was a hike up at the Sunrise area of Mt. Rainier National Park. Here's a picture of Miri pointing at a black bear:


I got some pictures of Mr. Bear, but if you want to see them, you've got to click on the picture to get through to the album. That's kind of a cheap ploy, isn't it, but you want to see the album now, admit it!

So that's the news from Ruthfordville. Write back, say hi, tell us how you're doing. Jisa the dog wags her tail for you.