Our Town

This is our town...California's motto...Eureka...I have found it! "It" is a fair-to-middlin' city with some flashes of brilliance, located on the north coast of the state, about an hour and a half south of Oregon. It is bounded around the north and west by Humboldt Bay, with the ocean just beyond the Bay's narrow and always tricky, sometimes dangerous, entrance. To the east are the beginnings of mountain ranges, and to the south, dairylands, forests, mountains and the rest of California - a different world altogether.

Wasn't too long ago that this was still a rough-and-ready town, built and sustained by loggers and fishermen. Now the old industries are dying out, and government is a big employer. Eureka is the county seat, and the immediate area houses Humboldt State University and the College of the Redwoods. They are struggling, too. Compared to the populous and mega-urban south, we have little political clout. But we do frequently have the highest gas prices in the country. What we have, as well, are beautiful surroundings, temperatures that are relatively temperate year-round, more than our fair share of rain, and easy, laid-back livin' if you care to indulge.

These are some bits and pieces of our town; quick snapshots of whatever's interested me as I've walked around the place. We also have suburban type neighbourhoods, rundown areas, and really tacky commercial strips, but who wants to see photos of those. You have your own, right?



To see them closer up and with more detail, try this link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/humbug.pat/OurTown

And just WHY did I want to do this?

The view from my kitchen sink

Well, this is the pits. I finally open one of these things and all I can do is sit and stare at the blank screen - actually it's a taupe screen with all kinds of options for posting, publishing, fonting, aligning. It's my brain that is blank and won't produce anything postable, publishable, fontable, alignable. This thing will save my drafts automatically. Save my drafty old brain - okay?
Actually this is a test - to see if I'm here and what it looks like.
Hot rodders do it in drag. That's absurd enough.

Who am I? A Canadian living in the U.S. - from British Columbia to northern California by way of a brief detour through Arizona. A displaced person - a DP. When I was a kid, people referred routinely to new immigrants to the country as DPs. It was a derogatory term, said with much superiority and condescension, even as we patted ourselves on the back for being so good as to take "them" (whoever the current wave of "them" was) in. I really am glad that y'all were good enough to take me in, even though I've never completely assimilated.

That's enough for Day 1