Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Here's piece written back in 2016, and touched up a little for today's post. It seemed like a good response to this week's Day of Overeating Thanksgiving holiday.   What’s for Dinner?  Mom’s acting weird. Well, that’s kind of normal, if you follow me, because she’s always weird, but usually she’s weird like wearing strange clothes and working all night on one of those bizarre sculptures she makes. I won’t ever tell her this, but I don’t like them. They have too many jagged edges. They’ll tear holes in you if you get too close. I sometimes wonder if she’s out to destroy someone, or if she just sees the world that way, all jagged. Either way: weird.   But what’s really weird is that she’s started cooking. No more Swanson’s pot pies, and no more trips through the fast food drive-through window. So now, I have to eat what she calls “real food,” which is sometimes pretty unreal, if you know what I mean.   Her idea of real food can get pretty d...

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US readers! Here's a turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner. I've now been drafting like crazy for two weeks, and have broken 30,000 words--more than 1/3 of the way through the book. I have a corpse, a bunch of suspects, and a lot of notes about the things I've forgotten to include or to follow up on. With the holiday this week it'll be hard to keep up my writing goals, as I'll be prioritizing time with the visiting kids, but if I manage to stay more or less on track I'll be close to halfway by the end of the week. The biggest holdup is that I haven't outlined much beyond where I am now, so there may be delays while I figure out how to get where I need to go. Or I may just keep writing, knowing where I need to end up, and hope for the best. The end result seems to be similar either way: a big mess that takes a lot of rewriting to make come out right. In the meantime, I'll have eaten my fill of turkey and pie, and that's wort...

  Title: The Curve of Time: New, Expanded Edition Author: M. Wylie Blanchet Publication Info: Whitecap Books, 2011, 272 pages. Originally published by Blackwood & Sons in 1961. Source: Library P ublisher's Blurb : Widowed at the age of thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet packed up her five children in the summers that followed and set sail aboard the twenty-five-foot Caprice . For fifteen summers, in the 1920s and 1930s, the family explored the coves and islands of the BC coast, encountering settlers and hermits, hungry bears and dangerous tides, and falling under the spell of the region’s natural beauty. Driven by curiosity, the family followed the quiet coastline, and Blanchet—known as Capi, after her boat—recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the bright stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months. The Curve of Time weaves the story of these years into a memoir that has insp...

Last weekend I shared photos from the hike in to Skoki Lodge and one of our outings from that base. Today we'll finish off my fall trip to the Canadian Rockies with some amazing peak-top views and the rather wintery hike out. On our second full day at the lodge, the weather was iffy at best, and only two of the three of us were crazy enough to head out for our planned hike up Skoki Mountain. At about two and a half miles round trip and a 1600' climb, it's not a huge undertaking, though a bit steep (you can make it even steeper by taking the "scree trail" which goes pretty much right up the side of the mountain, but we took the longer route).  We lounged around for a bit after breakfast, but there appeared to be some clearing around 9:45, so Tom and I headed up through the trees. About the time we hit treeline, the snow resumed. Still, visibility wasn't zero, and Tom's weather app said we'd get clearing about eleven, so on we went. If you look closely...

I'm a little late with today's post thanks to the massive bomb cyclone that hit the NW last night--power was out at my house for about 10 hours. Of course, if I weren't a procrastinator, it wouldn't have mattered, but I am, and it did :D     Title : Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses Author : Robin Wall Kimmerer. Audio book read by the author. Publication Info: Audiobook Tantor Audio, 2003, 8 hours. Paper and ebook 2003 by Oregon State University Press, 176 pages.  Source: Library Publisher's blurb: Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer's book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead...

Yes, friends, that's right: today, Washed Up With the Tide is released on the world! If you pre-ordered ebooks, they should drop onto your device today. In fact, they should already be there, and you should be too busy reading the book to read this post. If you didn't pre-order, today's a great day to buy the book. Why? Because a big bump of sales on one day pushes me up the sales ranking and increases the odds the book will be seen. So, yeah, that's totally about me, but since you know you want it, why not click "buy" when it will do me the most good? You can also (finally!) order paperback copies. I sent for mine some time ago, but I guess Amazon wouldn't want me to give any out before they do, so they haven't even shipped them yet. For those who pre-ordered signed copies, I'll get them out as soon as they arrive, apparently along about the end of the week. And for anyone who hasn't seen all my excited posts about this, here's the scoop:...

Continuing to work my way through my photos of the Canadian Rockies, I'm overwhelmed by how many images I have from our 3-night sojourn at Skoki Lodge . Of course, they mostly aren't of the lodge--we did some great hikes, coming, going, and while we were there. The lodge, not far from Lake Louise, a rustic mountain retreat with first-class dining but a 7-8 mile hike in (or even longer; there are multiple routes, all involving at least 6.8 miles and a stiff climb), was built in the 1930s. There is no electricity, and no running water. This week we'll take a look at the hike in and a dayhike to Merlin Lake and the Dragon's Drink above it. Our trip started with check-in at the office in the town of Lake Louise, followed by a drive to the parking lot, and a shuttle bus to the trailhead. Sunrise on the peaks behind Lake Louise. The Big Beehive, Mt. Whyte and the Victoria Glacier. I was up early enough for the sunrise, but with all the logistics we weren't able to start h...