June 7, 2002. It's been kind of a stressful week. Our vacation was so nice, and so relaxing, and then I come back and on Tuesday the Corporate Ax Murderer came to visit to tell us all our fates (we knew they were moving the marketing department to Tennessee, we just didn't know when). Of the four people on my team, one is being laid off on August 2, one on August 30. My boss and I get to stay and be "absorbed" into the technology team; no one in Tennessee knows squat about the web, so we're going to stay on until December 30 and do the websites. (You could tell the Corporate Ax Shrew didn't know anything about websites, since she kept referring to doing the websites as "web case startup" which just doesn't really make any sense.)
It was just really icky, and very smarmy, like how she met with all of us separately but gave us each the same speech ("I guess you know why I'm here...this has been very difficult...for the people"). In many ways it's ok, because it's not like we were all bowing down to the corporate gods or anything (though I do like having a cafeteria in the building). The bad part is really that there are no jobs at all in Maine right now. For the moment I've decided to take this opportunity to get a career or something. Since if you drew my career path right now, it might just be a little spiral to nowhere. And, you know, Dave got a geology degree, so he's a geologist, and then an engineering degree, so he's an engineer, and I got an English degree, but that makes me...what? an English person? No. I'm currently entertaining getting a library degree. I love books and I love cataloging stuff. I'd love to have an actual profession. There seem to be a lot of librarian jobs around here, but you need an MLS degree. I don't know. My biggest concern with the librarian thing is that I really love being around people and interacting and whatnot, and I'd worry that I couldn't do that as much as a librarian. At any rate, on Monday I'm going down to Boston for a Simmons College information session on their Library and Information Science program, just to see if I can figure out more and see if it's for me. I'm also excited because I'm taking the train down (many hours of knitting!) and I am going to stay over at my friends Ian and Ellen's new house. (They just moved in last week! And I rudely invited myself to stay over! Heh. I am excited to see it though.) Ian's a filmmaker and producer extraordinaire, and you should all check out his hilarious collaborations with Faith Soloway.
Anyway, back to me! Profession! Trying to come up with one! I didn't think this was stressing me out too much, except that my jaw has been killing me, so I must be gnashing my teeth all night long.
June 4, 2002. So here are some pictures of The Best Campground Ever. It was in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and was on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with mountains on the other side (i.e., the non-ocean side). I feel sorry for all other campgrounds we ever stay in now, since they clearly won't come close to comparing to this one. You could walk down to the beach and watch the sunset. Doesn't the van look happy?
June 3, 2002. I'm back! We had a great time on our trip to Nova Scotia. Here's a quick rundown of what we did, with updates throughout the week, as I think of things. (My verb tense is all over the place in this, sorry, but if I stop to fix it now, I'll fall asleep before I put this on the website.)
Day 1. Weld, Maine. Visited my high school friend Cat at her grandmother's farm. We ate fish chowder, played croquet, and climbed Tumbledown Mountain.
Day 2. Bay of Fundy National Park, New Brunswick. I eat a huge pile of fried mussels as soon as we cross the Canada border. The border guard does not ask for my birth certificate, even though I wave it at him and ask if he wants to see it. I spend the next hour saying, "He didn't even want to see my birth certificate!" To think we almost canceled the trip because it seemed like I wasn't going to get my birth certificate in time.
Day 3. Walking on the ocean floor in the Bay of Fundy. Then on to Antigonish, Nova Scotia. We eat somewhere called the Piper Pub, order a pound of fresh mussels for appetizers, haddock for dinner, and a pound of fresh mussels for dessert. I'm sure the waitress thinks we're insane, but she was very nice about it.
Day 4. Glenora Distillery in Glenville, N.S., the only distiller of single malt scotch in North America. Cathedral in Cheticamp with giant silver steeple. Also visit artisans cooperative in Cheticamp, where I, predictably, become obsessed with rug hooking. Hike on L'Acadian Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, see a moose. Stay in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, in the Best. Campground. Ever. Photos tomorrow. Really, best campground ever.
Day 5. The Skyline Trail (which is the photo above) to look for more moose. No moose. We do see whales, however, and then see more whales over lunch at Pleasant Bay. We also do the Lone Sheileah trail, the Bog trail, and the Coastal trail. Day 5 was the day we couldn't stop hiking. Camp in Ingonish. Nice campground, but can't even come close to living up to Day 4's campground.
Day 6. Baddeck, to see the Alexander Graham Bell museum. Mrs. Bell at age 14 looks creepily exactly like me at age 14. Alexander Graham Bell built a giant hydrofoil, taught a dog to say "How are you, grandmama?" and tried to breed sheep to only have twins, but only succeeded in breeding multiple-nippled sheep. All very interesting. Then we drove about two hours to Louisburg, to see the fascinating restored fort there. Too bad it wasn't open. Damn guidebook had the wrong dates. In a huff, we drive five hours to Halifax.
Day 7. Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (in Halifax). Ended up being the shipwreck museum in many ways, so it was a little depressing, but still very cool. There were reporters and a news crew doing a story on this guy who had temporarily donated his collection of White Star Line memorabilia (White Star was the Titanic company). The guy wore little white gloves. He was my age, maybe younger. We figured he must be independently wealthy or something, to have amassed this huge museum-quality collection already. Then we went to the Citadel, where they had guys in full Scottish garb playing bagpipes and drums and generally marching around. I got the overtired giggles in the war museum (a bad place to get the giggles) over the fact that the acronym for the Canadian Women Army Corp was "CWAC." We drive to Petit Riviere, and stay in a great campground, but which is still just the ugly stepsister to Day 4's campground. This was our last night in Nova Scotia, so we stopped in a grocery store to get supplies for our Nova Scotian Final Dinner: fiddleheads, scotch kippers, smoked herring, and Alexander Keith India Pale Ale.
Day 8. We hike in the Seaside Adjunct to Kejimkujik National Forest, and see harbor seals romping happily on rocks. They are so cute we can hardly stand it. We drive to Yarmouth, N.S., to take the high-speed Cat boat back to Maine. They make the cars line up according to car type, so they put the VW Vans together. This is fine by us, as VW Van people are always fun to talk to. These people worked at Dartmouth, and were very interesting. We ended up chatting with them for the whole boat ride. We got off in Maine, where the border guard again didn't give a whit about seeing my birth certificate. We stay in Acadia National Park, where we immediately get eaten alive by mosquitos. I get three or four mosquito bites on my face, and worry about returning to work looking deformed.
Day 9. We hike in Acadia, on the Bubble Rock trail and Pemetic Mountain trail. Then we head home, through all the tourist clutter of Mount Desert Island, to our excited and confused cats and a mountain of laundry. All in all, a great trip!
