Labor Day

For the first time in many years, I did NOT spend my Labor Day weekend at a Mensa gathering. Since heading back to the 'burgh for the gathering was out of the question, Mike and I headed up to the sprawling metropolis of Willow Creek, California , where my parents have a cabin on the Trinity River. There were seven of us... Mike and I, Mom and Dad, my sister Heidi, her husband Doug, and their grandson Lance.

Heidi, Doug, and Lance didn't join us until late Saturday, so the rest of us spent Saturday morning enjoying the annual Bigfoot Days parade, ice cream social, car show, and crafts fair. Willow Creek is the self-proclaimed Bigfoot Capital of the World, and has a festival each year and also has a small museum with numerous Bigfoot-related items as well as local Indian artifacts and such. The famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film was shot near Bluff Creek, not terribly far from Willow Creek.

This was the first time Mike met one of my siblings... he didn't run screaming, but he did get a good taste of the sarcasm and interplay that occurs when a critical mass of my family assembles. The most amusing point of the weekend was when Lance, aged 21 months, decided to pick up a hose&nozzle my dad had been using to water the plants outside. Dad scrambled to turn off the water before Lance soaked anyone.... and then learned there was still a bit of water left in the hose as Lance proceeded to squirt him.

The drive home was a bit of an adventure. Between our arrival Friday evening and Heidi's on Saturday, the Pigeon Fire sprang up along the highway we used to get to Willow Creek, and quickly grew to engulf several thousand acres. Highway 299 remained closed on Monday, and so we had to use a winding Forest Service road that connects the major cities of Burnt Ranch and Hyampom, then on to Hayfork on a slightly better road, then to state routes 3 and 36, finally getting to a "real" highway, I-5, near Red Bluff. The forest service road had some beautiful scenery for Mike to enjoy while I drove a pitted, slide-prone one lane road along a ridgeline with a drop of several hundred feet to one side. 2 hours of that was quite enough, thankyouverymuch.

School is going well. I needed to step down from one probability class to a slightly more elementary one. My background in measure theory is non-existent... I tried to teach myself what I needed to know over the summer, but apparently didn't teach myself quite enough. I think the prof is a bit disappointed that I chose to step into the other class rather than tough it out, but he'll just have to cope.

Hope everyone had a good Labor Day. We sure enjoyed seeing some of the family, and I got to show Mike at least part of my world.... he still hasn't been to my hometown of Eureka, but I spent enough of my summer weekends hanging out in Willow Creek that it was still a good taste of how my side of the family lived.