It is late, and I was up early, but I’m trying to think what I can do over the winter, and there are a lot of positions I feel I should apply for, but right now at this very instant what I want to do is this.

I’m still reading my solo women in the wild essays on the bus, though I’ll be done soon. I am guiding. I was thinking about what things I have wanted to do in the past, and remembered that I wanted to coach crew, and I wanted it badly, even though on some level I know I only wanted to keep rowing myself. Today I took out two little girls in the triple kayak, granddaughters of a friend of el presidente, for a kayaking lesson. The older one figured things out, the younger one isn’t quite old enough to understand and pay attention to keeping the paddle straight as it goes into the water. And I’ve been saying for a while now that rock climbing should be my winter sport.

I’ve also been saying I’ll go back to school, but maybe, when it comes right down to it, I still do not feel any certainty about what I should be studying, what I should be aiming for. Field research in the Russian Far East, which is based entirely on the concepts that a) I want to be outside and b) I don’t want to have spent nine years studying Russian for naught. The thing is, I would blindly join research of Siberian segmented worms if I thought it meant I would be able to go camping in Siberia and ask the locals where to find said worms, and then I’d probably just be miserable. And in Siberia. With worms.