Yurt Life

The Real World is underway. We all spend a lot of time in the kitchen/hangout yurt-good meals, deep conversations and good fun had by all. The first weekend with the interns led to an impromptu night of charades. Many bottles of wine and good brownies have been consumed. Good stories and deep dark secrets are starting to be revealed. Lots of "bar room privilege" conversations. Many of the interns (Cuatro, Chris and Gilly) are musicians and play in bands. After the intern welcome party we were fortunate not to have rain so we decided to start a fire in the outside pit and had an impromptu jam session. A friend of the SLI-Alex had brought his guitar and led Cuatro and Chris through many good classic songs. After a bit of coaxing, Gilly grabbed the guitar and sang a song she had written. She had yet to reveal she was in a band but you could tell she had a great voice. The next night after a few glasses of wine she let slide the name of her band. Secretly we went to google it and found the website and nonchalantly turned on our computer speakers and started playing her album. She was found out.

Chris had the first catastrophic event. He had the perfect day planned to kayak the local Russian River. He drove to the takeout spot and parked his car and hitchhiked back to the start. He had the perfect run and as he exited the river and climbed the hill to the road his car was gone. Immediately he thought it had been stolen. He did not have a phone with him and he kept trying to flag down a car for help but it took quite awhile for someone to stop and at least let him use her phone. Unfortunately when he called the police to try and track down his car, he found out it had not been stolen but towed. He was legally parked but his car had an expired out of state tags and the police thought the car had been abandoned on the side of the road. He ran back to the SLI and told us his predicament so we drove him to pick up his boat. Being Sunday he could not get his car out of impound because he needed to get a valid registration before they would release it. Each day kept ticking off $50. Things got worse when he went to the MVD on Monday and the computers were down and they had no idea of when they would be back in service. Boom-another $50. Got to love the California system. Thankfully on Tuesday the system was operational so I drove him into town to pick up the registration and his car. He tried his best to talk the towing company into reducing the fee but no luck. I think we both knew when we walked into the dingy office and the person behind the desk resembled "the beer drinking, cigarette smoking, trailer trash woman" things were not going to go our way. The beautiful tranquil day on the river cost $600. We suggested getting a ride next time!