Even old-timers in Yosemite hadn’t seen so much snow in 30 years. The storms started the weekend of March 19, and kept going through 11-15 feet. That’s right. Feet. Of. Snow. Roads closed as trees and rocks fell across the road, and plows failed to keep up with the snow. Power lines were also hit, knocking out power across the region – leaving people without lights, and without heat. On top of that, in our neighborhood of Yosemite West, our archaic water system sprung a leak, cutting off our water supply. For one night both the generator for communications and the battery back-up to that generator failed leaving residents deprived also of phone contact.

Tom and I missed most of the drama. Returning from a wonderful weekend in Bishop visiting a friend, we saw no need to wait for the convoy and fight our way INTO that situation when we had wonderful welcoming friends who were willing to host us for a few days. While friends dealt with 42 degree INDOOR temps, no hot showers, and the like, we were taking walks in the central valley sun, having dinner with friends, watching movies IN THE MOVIE THEATER – a rarity for us, and telecommuting happily from our computers, showering, doing laundry and enjoying central heat.

The thing that is really great about situations like this one is the way people come together and take care of each other. We had some renters staying in our house that first weekend, and are so grateful to all of the neighbors that pitched in to help make sure they were doing OK – raiding our upstairs apartment for non-cordless telephones that would work without power for them, shoveling and plowing, checking in, and helping to share information. (It helped that we had really cool renters too.) You can feel the community pulling together.

When we finally did return to the park on Sunday, we were greeted by many neighbors as we made our way down the single plowed lane to our house. One neighbor who’d stayed through the entire ordeal, and had been doing daily shoveling duty wandered down to our house with his shovel over his shoulder to help us dig out. Another neighbor with a bobcat plowed through the 10-11 foot berm in front of our driveway and created a spot for us to park, a third neighbor took some extra time with a plow to clear our street, and widen the mouth of the parking spot, and a forth neighbor, having finished his driveway drove down later to make sure we were doing OK. How could we not be OK with awesome neighbors like that?

That’s my Yosemite.

According to some of the things I’ve read, one of the most enjoyable parts of NaNoWriMo is the sense of community and the pleasure of sharing the experience with other WriMos in the area. Perhaps I’m missing out. I know I haven’t talked much about NaNoWriMo this year – not on the blog and not to many people IRL either. Still, it was an interesting experience for me, and I’m proud to say that I’ve managed another 50K words of utter rubbish in under 31 days. No, you will never see any of it.

If I’m feeling honest I would admit that I had a much more detailed plan this year, and that the result of that was a marginally better story than last year’s story. That makes sense. At least this year when I hit 50K words, I still felt like the story was going somewhere. It’s not done yet, the story, I mean, but there are so many other things to do in the world, I’m not sure if I want to finish it, or just declare victory and move on.

I had a harder time finishing this year than last year, that’s for sure. I had thought that planning a relaxing trip to Hawaii would give me plenty of time to type away, but instead, it was harder to make the decision to write rather than explore, and by week three, I was at a huge deficit. More than anything else, this year taught me that I will probably never write a publishable book. When I think of the time investment that author friends have put into a single work – I get the itch to go snorkeling, surfing, hiking, skiing, just about anything. This exercise certainly gives you some appreciation for the sweat and determination that goes into creating books.

Speaking of books, I’m dying to tell you about a book that hasn’t come out yet, but which I’m really looking forward to. Now that I’m done with the WriMo stuff, it will soon have a post all its own, but in the meantime, check out author, Greg Crouch’s blog about China’s Wings, the pilots who flew over (through, really) the Himalaya during WWII. Tom and I got to hear a preview of some of these stories over dinner one day years ago at Hans’ Basecamp, and given the teasers in the blog, I can’t wait to get my hands on the published result!

Tom has been bugging me for a while about how much protein I don’t eat. I keep telling him that I am not vegetarian, so probably my protein intake is taken care of, but then he points out that when we eat together, I always eat vegetarian because he is, and since I wrinkle my nose at protein supplements I sometimes get less than he does. So, I decided to try to find out exactly how much protein I’m supposed to get and start keeping score.
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Think of all the things that I have to be grateful for.  Family. Friends. Health. Fun work, and great co-workers. Enviable lifestyle. I live in Yosemite National Park, after all. The list could go on and on.

Tom shared a great audio interview with the sucessful copywriter, Ted Nicholas , with me the other day. In addition to imparting other good technical and attitudinal advice for writing copy, Ted recommends developing an Attitude of Gratitude by starting each morning with being thankful.  He spends 15 or 20 minutes every day just to get started with a postitive mental outlook. He even writes them down in a list and strives to add at least one new thing every day. Who, after all, can write powerful, moving copy when grouchy, dispirited, and dissatisfied?  And even if I don’t plan to write anything, who wants to be grouchy, dispirited and dissatisfied, anyway?

I stumbled on (that’s a little S) a great blog, called Zen Habits just before I heard the Ted Nicholas interview, and one of the first articles I read there was on ways that being grateful can change your life for the better. Would taking the time to remember how lucky you are to have a person in your life change the way you treated them on a daily basis? How about remembering the the huge favor your co-worker did for you, before you confront them about a mistake they made? Would it change the tone of the conversation?

I haven’t started making a list of things that I am grateful for yet. But I carry the thoughts around in my head, and it makes a difference.

We still haven’t managed to achieve some of the unnecessary parts of our house, like painting the trim or 3,000 other things, but we did finally manage to get our parking meter installed. Now we can start making some money off visitors.

We’re quite proud of our parking meter, one of the only ones, perhaps *the* only one in Mariposa County.

Thanks Mary!