Slept soundly, as always, though mid-night Katrina woke me up needing to go to the bathroom. She'd just gotten through being chased and chased and chased by lunatic eco-hippies that wanted to kill her for not being ecologically sensitive enough -- so she wasn't exactly in the frame of mind to go walking through the dark of the night by herself.

Oops. She just returned from her shower and caught me sitting in the tent cabin, writing. Jokingly scolded me with something along the lines of, "All locked away in here when there's a beautiful view outside." So true. And so, sitting outside now, my eyes are constantly distracted by the flow of water over rock, and my ears by the sound of mixing, tumbling, flowing water. Our brains must be hardwired to love such sounds and sights, for it seems that everyone, regardless of age or jadedness can happily spend hours entraced by the sound and motion of a flowing stream. Likewise for the dance of a fire -- though I suspect that the thoughts percolating through my head during such an entrancement are a bit different than most. Do other people spend their fire-watching hours pondering the reactions that release the flammable hydrocarbon gases that are really being burnt when you burn "wood" or the convection currents that give flames their shape? Even in the primative pleasures of watching nature's elements -- flame, water, earth and air -- I can't quite purge the science geek that's seeped into my soul.