Crocodile Tears, Crocodile Falls

For whatever reason, I never get any exercise when I work day shifts. I mean to, but when I go into work at 10:30 and come home shortly after 3, starving, it just doesn’t seem to happen.

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to get anything done,” I moaned, albeit tongue in cheek, to my parents when I had dinner with them on Thursday. “I mean, I work 20 hours a week.”

Yesterday, after I complained about my lack of exercise, Andy suggested I hike down the lake to check out Crocodile Falls, a small, but pretty waterfall tucked behind a campsite halfway down on the lake’s south shore.

“My snowshoe bindings always fall off,” I said, not sure why, really, I was accepting such a defeatist attitude toward things.

In the end, I went for the trek. It took awhile, nearly two and a half hours round trip, but miraculously, the general ickiness that plagued me at the beginning of the hike completely disappeared by the time I reached the falls. The falls are pretty well snow covered, but there are several pools of open water where the snow has melted away to form an icy frame around bubbling, swirly water.  I plunked down on a snow covered rock and listened to the foreign sound of burbling, running water. The entire area is infused with a pungent and deep smell reminiscent of geraniums that must come from being a place that does not completely freeze in the winter and is never completely dry. Teeny, tiny icicles hang from the cliff face, the creek’s boulders are capped with mushrooms of snow, and there’s an otter slide down the upper falls. I’m also happy to report that my snowshoe bindings didn’t fall off once.

I had a minor meltdown yesterday, thinking about job opportunities in this rural area. Rather, lack there of. If only I was the only one affected by this reality. When there is a good job opportunity half a gazillion people apply for it and no matter how perfect the job seems for you, there’s always some other applicant unimaginably more qualified than yourself. While the goal is to freelance full time, I don’t see that being self-sustaining for a while and until then, it would be lovely to have a dependable source of income that doesn’t make me feel like clawing my brains out. Oh bollocks.

We watched HBO’s film “Into the Storm” about Winston Churchill last night and that cheered me up immensely. I’m not a huge WWII buff – when it come to my Anglophile ways, I know the Tudors much better than the Churchills – but to be honest, I’m fond of anything British Isles and I loved the scenes in the War Rooms. I toured those while I was living in London two winters ago and they, and the adjoining Churchill Museum, are well worth the price of admission. Janet McTeer played Clemmie Churchill funny really since, we’d just watched the 1992 Wuthering Heights earlier in the week in which she plays the maid Ellen. She was by far the strangest actor in the film (while I love Juliette Binoche in Chocolat a French accent is not what you expect in the middle of Yorkshire) and I was happy to see her in “Into the Storm.”

I set up some freelance submission tracking spreadsheets yesterday. Not that I really need them. I made a new year’s resolution to submit a query a week, but I bet you can guess how many I’ve submitted in actuality so far this year. Since we’re now entering the fourth week of the year, I’ve got four queries to crank out before week’s end. I think I’ll get a start on that today.