I am experimenting with integrating Twitter with this blog.  Since I sometimes do have 30 seconds to update my Twitter status even if I don’t have time to write a full post.  (Which is, after all, why people love Twitter so much.)  However I think I will turn of the Twitter comment integration, it doesn’t seem to really work.  If you would like to follow me at Twitter, you can find me @annavwilliams.

In any case, since I last posted on this blog, I have:

• Added several photos to my new photoblog, Anna Vera’s Photos.
• Begun to exhume old photos from my hard drive and post them, and am gradually chipping away at the backlog.
• Put up my poetry blog, Anna Vera’s Poems.
• Attended the Reach the Beach event in Pacific City and watched the bikers come into the finish line.
• Hiked to Cascade Head and then to Hart’s Cove, where I photographed the forest and the coast, but also underestimated the length of the walk to Hart’s Cove, was hours late getting back, considered spending the night in the forest, and could barely walk for two days.
• Got my shoes drenched twice, once in mud-water, once in the sea.
• Fed the rabbits behind the Internet Cafe.
• Visited beaches at Bob Straub State Park, Cape Kiwanda, and Neskowin, and worked on my photograph collection.
• Coined a new acronym – YAHRP, which means “Yet another Haystack Rock Picture.”
• Realized that it is nearly impossible to get a photograph anywhere along the coast, between Cascade Head and Cape Lookout, without Haystack Rock appearing somewhere in that photo.
• Started sorting through YAHRPs and choosing my favorites so that I could stash the rest away, out of sight.
• Attended my niece’s theatre performance in Portland.
• Found an amazing “secret beach” which has a very climbable rock and its own sea cave, near my home but relatively hidden.
• Attended the June 6 Blessing of the Fleet in Pacific City, and paid tribute to 14 fishermen of the dory fleet who lost their lives at sea this year, amidst songs and prayers for better safety of the fishermen in the months to come.
• Worked on dozens of other websites and Internet Marketing projects (the details would bore you).
• Completed three lessons of the New York Institute of Photography Course.
• Drank a lot of coffee and tea.
• Extended my running habits past the mailbox and down the street.
• Found a long and virtually car-less road up the hill and into the forest, very near home.
• Have found the increased sitings of coyotes and their tracks near the house to be disturbing.
• Practiced the portrait photography I am reading about.
• Contributed photos of my local area to the Chamber of Commerce website (you can see them there at Pacific City Chamber of Commerce – but you sometimes have to refresh the page as a different photo loads every time).
• Oh – walked down the cliff beside my bedroom, to visit the waterfall, twice.  The second time I got completely lost and stuck between river and cliff, and almost could not get home, surrounded by grasses taller than me, stinging nettles, spider webs, unstable ground, brambles, branches (rotting and otherwise), bees, and lost trails.
• Journeyed to the other side of this property, via the land of two neighbors (now that our Bridge was washed away), and would have photographed the waterfall from that side, except that I forgot my camera (though not my camera bag).
• Played with my sisters cat.

There.  I could tell you a lot more but I think this should suffice.  I hope you feel somewhat updated.  I will try to increase the frequency of my posting.  In the meanwhile, thank you for visiting my blog and I hope to see you again soon

This post was originally written by Anna Vera Williams on Anna Vera. Original post: My Monthly Post.

Almost every morning the robin redbreast tries to break into my bedroom window.  He flies at the window, backs up, and charges it again.  I’m not sure what he is trying to do – maybe trying to get me out of bed.  If I sit up and yell at him he goes away.

My mom says they do it on the upstairs windows as well but she has no idea why.  They act like a bird trying to get out, not like a bird trying to get in.  Continuously flying at the window over and over.  Its so funny!  It reminded her of the joke about the drunk man.  There is a tree with a fence around it.  The drunk man comes and shakes the fence, yelling, “Let me out!” And then keeps circling the fence shaking it and looking for an escape.

I love how many animals there are here.  If you first drive up the driveway it doesn’t seem like you are entering a zoo.  But if you live here, particularly if you work 12 hours a day at a laptop in front of a window which overlooks the valley, you see a lot. I have seen bald eagles fly by many times in the last few months – and the last time there were two of them,  flying maybe 25 meters in front of my window.  The white on their heads and backs is so bright!  Several nights of the week I hear coyotes howling.  And once, a couple of weeks ago, we saw one run by and cross our driveway in front of us, when we were on our way to Pacific City.  I found their tracks too – wasn’t sure what animal it was but when I looked it up online I found it had to be fox or coyote.  And since I haven’t heard any foxes, I can assume its coyote.  The vultures come more frequently, and sometimes a hawk.  But they aren’t as exciting as the eagles.

In the beginning of Spring time, the bats came out.  They surprised me because at twilight they were dive-bombing (probably for mosquitoes) in front of my window.  And then gallivanting around outside the dining room windows as well during dinner.  I am glad they eat mosquitoes although I wouldn’t mind if they ate more of them.  Its hard to recognize them at first and I didn’t know what they were when I first saw them.  They looked like shadows of falling, flapping birds.  Except in this case the birds would have been falling in the same place and in the same direction, over and over.

Then there was this funny and stupid little dear.  I was coming back from my daily run/walk to the mailbox (I’m such an athlete.)  I was in the “walking” portion of my journey.  A little dear came out of the forest and started to munch at bushes about 10 meters away.  Between him and me was nothing but grass and I couldn’t believe he didn’t see me.  He kept walking closer to me, munching away, so I walked closer to him.  It didn’t effect him at all.  So finally I said, “hello.”  The little dear looked up and looked all around, searching for the sound.  But not looking at me, even though I was smack in front of him!!  So then I said “hi,” again and finally he found me.  He stared at me for about 2 seconds, and then turned away and trotted into the forest.  Stupid little dear!  So lucky for him that I wasn’t a hunter.

I haven’t seen an otter yet.  My mom says she thinks an otter ate all the fish in our pond.  She said it was so big it was almost the size of a small seal.  So now I regularly have dreams with talking seal-sized otters in them.

This post was originally written by Anna Vera Williams on Anna Vera. Original post: Alarm Clock on Wings.

The Forest

When I was very young, maybe eight, I remember my mother said that she would love to have a home on a piece of land with a river running through the back yard. At the time I thought to myself, in more eight-year-old terminology, “fat chance.”

We knew that we would be moving on day, when we sold the house we had at the time. We weren’t sure to where. I remember speaking about the Blue Ridge Mountains on the East Coast. My mother once said that they thought Oregon would be a good place to move to. I had never been there.

When I was 12 years old my father and I found ourselves real-estate shopping in Oregon. I remember a plot of land on a cliff overhanging the ocean; the grass at the edge of cliff looked like it could have fallen away at any moment if it were trodden on incorrectly, and as my father pointed out to me, the grass wasn’t as innocent as it looked. But it was beautiful.

One day our Real Estate agent brought us to a place in the forest near the Oregon Coast. It was a 55-acre property with a small, mustard colored house on a hill, overlooking a river and a fish pond on the other side of the river. The fish pond sat in a bit of a valley which was otherwise filled with trees. In the river there was a waterfall in the view of the house. Behind the house, between the highway and the river, was another tree-covered hill which we later named “Elk Mountain.” Down the road from our home and a bit beyond the waterfall, was a slight meadow in the forest, beside what we call “the Grotto,” which is an area of the river with stiller water and a kind of a high wall of Earth on the other side.

The owner of this property had created a network of roads and paths so we could wander throughout to our heart’s content. He had also created a fish pond full of fish – salmon I think, as well as a stepping-stone style stream to a spawning pond. Actually I now know that salmon can’t really survive properly away from the Sea, but this is another matter.

This piece of land became our home. My parents sold our house on the East Coast, and transported all of our belongings, including three cats, to the new forest property in Oregon.

At one point, Elk Mountain and the land beside the Grotto was sold for financial reasons. Leaving us with 30-some acres of river, pond, home, and forest.

When I was 16 years old I completed school and was determined to seek my destiny in the far reaches of the world. Staying in Oregon was out of the question. When you are that age and full of wonderlust, I suppose that anywhere looks more interesting and more promising than “home.”

Eighteen years later, after traveling and working in four continents, after hitchhiking through Europe and horseback riding through Mongolia as a teenager, after traipsing through South America in my early twenties, and after a million other things which I won’t discuss here, I found that I had come full-circle.  Not sure how long it will last or whether I will change my mind a week from now, but here it is.

The fact is that what I really need to do is get my own businesses off the ground and running, and those businesses are all Internet-based.   There’s no necessity for me to live or work in any particular location, and from a viewpoint of straight economics, it’s much more sensible to renovate the little bedroom suite in an extension of the house, pay a basic rent, survive on minimal expenses, and work on my online endeavors.

Now, living in the forest in the middle of nowhere has its drawbacks, particularly when one does not own one’s own vehicle. You are basically stuck here, for the most part. And there is a point where the recreational benefits of “going out to take a walk” reaches its limits. Particularly after  recent floods washed our Bridge away, making most of the property virtually inaccessible until the summer when the river level will go down enough for us to wade across it.

Therefore I realized I was going to have to find enough offline activity to keep myself from going mad, while I work online. And there is no shortage of possibilities.

My first priority is to create an herbal garden beside the room which I hope to soon renovate and occupy.  Actually, getting the room renovated carries a similar priority. And possibly more important than both of those is the fact that I have decided I want to have two cats.

The reason I finally settled on an herbal garden beside my room is based on a few factors:  Dear, gophers, and cats.

Deer are notorious in this region for eating anything edible within sight, but they have been said to dislike herbs. Deer fencing around the particular garden site by my room is not very realistic, particularly when I hope for it to become somewhat of an ornamental garden.

Gophers tend to dig under the ground, grab your plants by the roots, and pull them down to eat them. So a sign of gophers in your garden, is basically a disheveled hole in the ground where the plant used to be.

In order to solve this, I decided to comprise the garden of raised beds, enclosed in river rock. Once a small river rock enclosure is formed, I can probably insert some kind of plastic-covered wire mess in the bottom, fill the bed up with dirt, and then plant my herbs. River rock can be obtained from my river bed.

Cats tend to dig, which makes them poor companions of vegetable gardens. But herbal gardens apparently are more readily adaptable into to rock gardens. Which means a protective layer of pebbles could probably be placed on the ground around the herbs in order to hold the cat off.

I have virtually no experience as a gardener, so I will see what curves and surprises I am thrown by experience itself. But this is a plan I have formed based on consultations with others more well-informed on domestic subjects – such as my sister and my dad.

In any case, this is the general idea.

In regards to my business, there are other plans, concepts, and strategies I am working on.  Perhaps those will be the subject of a future post.  I will have to see how everything fits together.

This post was originally written by Anna Vera Williams on Anna Vera. Original post: The Forest.