I had a pleasant weekend in good weather. Worked my hydro shift Saturday morning, then in the afternoon went up to Austin Hotsprings on the Clackamas River with M. The area of the springs has been recently rearranged by the owners using a bulldozer. The pools have all been filled with gravel and there are new concrete barriers blocking entry to the place. Rumor has it that a woman and two children were badly burned there about a month ago. Apparently the owner was trying to minimize his liability by destroying the pools, but somebody had already built a new pool and while we were there we were working on a second one. You can't stop a hot springs from coming up out of the ground, and you can't stop people from trying to get in it. People stay clothed at this hotsprings because it is so close to the road, and because a lot of Russians use it, and they are conservative.

The people there were a multi-ethnic mix; a large pack of Hispanic-looking kids with a few men, a middle aged Czech couple (George and Vera) who were very pleasant, a couple of American women one of whom is one of my hydro patients, and the other of whom looks native. As we were leaving at dusk a large pack of Russian men and children showed up. The Russians don't speak to us or engage us at all, but you can recognize them by their language.

The pool was quite hot, as the sulfur-smelling water percolates up from the gravel in the shallows at the side of the river. Someone had even used concrete to establish this initial pool, but it was blown out in places and shallow enough that you had to lie down to get your whole body in. Sometimes a jet of exceedingly hot water would come out of the floor and blast you, and you'd have to move quickly to avoid getting burnt. We kept toying with the cold water input, which is how you keep part of the pool tolerable. Where the cold is mixed in, it is bearable. Elsewhere it is too hot.

On Sunday Suz and I went to Elk Rock Island and walked around, sat in the sun, enjoyed the light on the river and the breeze.....it's a very nice park and about 10 minutes from home, so we will return there for sure. Even on a weekend there were few people there. There is little or no parking for the park, and signage is at a minimum, so we suspect the people there were mostly from the immediate neighborhood.

I was disturbed the whole weekend by knowing that I probably flunked my ortho exam and also the practical lab exam......I keep reliving the mistakes....I totally knew the answers in some cases but for whatever reason they didn't come out at the moment that they should have....or I had the right answer and changed it to a wrong one.....this morning I awoke to another convoluted and desperate dream.....I haven't been writing down my dreams but I have been dreaming a lot.....seems like I am on the run all the time.

This morning's dream, the bit I can remember, entailed me trying to drive my truck somewhere on icy steep roads, making the first move, but then sliding helplessly nose-first into a deep hole. Then I collected up all my stuff from the truck and left it, with the idea that I might not even go get it out of there.