Spring Iris

The irises are flowering out front.  They get more sunlight than the irises in the back.  I love the way that they smell, which too me has deep base notes with a touch of sweetness.  Writing this, I think iris and carnation would go well together. 

Agates, Seals, and Florence

We went to Muriel O. Ponsler Beach again to escape rising pollen levels and to search for agates.  This is the time of year when the pollen levels start to rise; the trees are very active right now, and I'm not looking forward to when the grasses start up—after an hour of typing outside, my laptop, keyboard, and mouse have a dusty yellow coating.  It's good for Mark to get out of the pollen and it's also good for him to get out of the house and into nature.

Mark is a natural early riser.  I pulled myself out of bed at 5 AM and we managed to leave the house a little before 6, just after sunrise.  By pre-arrangement, Mark drove, and I napped a little.  

I must have misread the tide tables, because at a quarter 'til 8 the tide was much, much higher than I thought it would have been.  "You be sure to keep an eye on the ocean," Mark warned.  "Don't think I didn't see you last month, standing on a rock, surrounded by water, with a funny look on your face."  (Reader, I was in no danger of inundation, and the retreating flow of the ocean around the rock formed a natural deposit of agates and stones of interesting nature.)

When we got to the beach, there were only three or so other folks there, so we could let Aoife off leash while we threw her ball for her and hunted for agates.  Sometimes she'll drop her ball on top of an agate, at least for Mark, but this time around we stumbled over two really large ones on our own.

Afterward, Mark wanted to go to the Strawbery Hill park and look for seals.  I was hoping that I'd be able to photograph them, but they were mostly in the water.  The tide and foam and my far-sightedness made it difficult to zoom in on them with my camera.  It was easier to get images of cormorants.  I was hoping that I might catch a pelican or two, but they were too far out to get a good likeness. 

We were in Florence by noon, where we walked along the streets and docks.  Florence is a very dog-friendly town, which I hadn't realized until then.  That said, Aoife was very leery about going down one ramp. They've made an effort to have interesting art along the paths—an icosahedron caught my eye; I thought it was welded metal, but I think it something else.  

We grabbed a light snack from a dock chowder stand, but the combination of Three Aggressive Dogs (snarling and lunging), hot noon-time sun, and a busy dock wasn't the best for the dog (she didn't like it when a boat bumped into the dock next to us), so we ate quickly.  

The nice thing about leaving for the coast at dawn is that one can spend a sufficient amount of time enjoying it and still get home by mid-afternoon.

Oregon's Partial Solar Eclipse

Today I managed to site today’s total solar eclipse.  Oregon was outside the path of totality, and Eugene only got about 23.5% sun coverage.  I thought this eclipse would be a little like last year’s, which was not very visible through the clouds, but the morning was relatively sunny before the eclipse, so I readied my colander, camera, and tripod with high (or at least higher) hopes.

I set up my portable work desk on the back deck and set things up.  I put a solar filter over the lens of my camera.  Back in the summer when I bought it, I had a notion that I’d fly east to be in the path of totality.  But by the time I got my act together in mid-January and sat down to actually purchase a ticket, they were prohibitively expensive.  The filter allows me to get a close-up of the sun’s disk, complete with sunspots. 

When the eclipse started, there was a light haze.  As the eclipse progressed over the next hour or so, the clouds became thicker.  This presented a bit of a challenge, as I had to keep adjusting the exposure time to compensate for changes in the sun’s luminosity.  When the cloud cover thickened,  I used a longer exposure time; when I used a longer exposure time, the camera was more likely to pick up the scattered light from the clouds.  Also, I’m also thinking the filter messed up the sharpness of focus—although I sometimes have difficulty dialing in sharpness of the moon’s features when I’ve extended the lens barrel out all the way.

Between shots I took a look at the sun through some eclipse glasses.  I also tried to get a good image of the eclipse through the holes of a colander; I think it would have worked better with more of the sun covered by the moon and less covered by the haze and clouds.  

This eclipse was fun, and I remember the eclipse of Friday, August 5, 2017.   That eclipse was a party with eggs, bacon, and mimosas.  This eclipse was juggled between a kind of early lunch, and various Day Jobbe tasks.   The previous eclipse was a family event; this year it was just me (Mark went into work), the dog, and the cats (Aoife did lunge into the camera tripod near the end to harass squirrels).   The effects of the eclipse were muted by the clouds, and we weren’t in the path of totality, so there were no amber alerts, shadow bands, or roosting birds.

Shortly after maximum coverage, the clouds thickened and hid most of the rest of the eclipse. I did get a few shots in at the end when the sky cleared some.  Of course, as soon as the eclipse was complete, the clouds cleared up and the sky was a deep, clear blue.

Still, it was better than last year’s annular eclipse.  

I wound up taking about 200 photos. It’s safe to say that not all 200 were stunning eclipse shots, but they do show the process.  I chose about sixteen that seemed the best (or at least the most interesting).

Agates, Crossbills, and the Oregon Coast

Over the weekend we went to the coast.  It seemed to me that it had been a while since we had left the house, although Mark reminded me that we had entertained some friends the week before.  I guess last week's craziness with car keys and some not-quite-awake-yet bus rides have skewed my memory of successful ventures from the house.

Aoife came with us.  We managed to actually leave before dawn and thus reached the Muriel O. Ponsler Beach about 8:30.  This meant that there were virtually no other dogs there, and we could let Aoife be off-leash (there were also no birds or marine life, either).  I had brought my camera, but was only slightly tempted to take Yet Another WPA Concrete Bridge In The Mist shot.  

High tide was about two hours before our arrival, so we hunted for agates.  The weekend was sunny and clear, calm, and warm for a March Oregon Coast day: 65F. The day before had been a high surf advisory; the waves when we were there seemed normal, although a little erratic. 

Mark is very good at finding all sorts of interesting and unusual rocks in the surf.  This time around there was a lot of large, plain basalt; bright red jasper; banded rocks; quartz; and small-to-medium-sized agates.  Mark did find a mouse-sized agate.  At first I only found jasper, but later on I hung out at the end of a peninsula of basalt where the retreating tide would tumble all sorts of rocks and my agate count went up.

I'd forgotten the Chuck-It. Mark and I had to take turns throwing a ball for Aoife. For about two hours.

Afterward, we went north to Depot Bay in the hope of seeing migrating whales.  But we saw neither whales, nor pelicans, nor seal lions, nor coastal eagles.  We did see some Crossbills, which we didn't know were Crossbills until we got home and zoomed in on photos I took and saw their crossed beaks (used to extract seeds from pine cones).  In addition to wild fauna, I got some photos of Aoife as an "Irish Pit Bull."  

Pre-Lockdown Throwback

 

Huh. Four years ago today I shared a joke photo with my co-workers showing a supposed toilet paper roll made out of unmatched socks.  

It seems like a lifetime ago.

Conjunctions and a Rough Week

I should start out this post stating how much of a pain switching from standard time to daylight savings time has been this year.  Even though I've (mostly) gone to bed between 9 PM and 10 PM, I've pretty much been bedridden until 7 AM all week.  I've also been tired, cranky, depressed, and filled with ennui, which Mark is blaming on the time change. It could also be other things, like new moon, and the Very Grey Weather we've had since about the 8th.

Thursday morning, I'd actually managed to haul myself out of bed at 5:50 AM, shower, hard boil eggs, get dressed, and pack for a day of working remotely in Corvallis.  As I reached into the closet for the car keys at 6:30, I saw that the nail I usually hang them from had fallen out and the keys were nowhere in sight.  I felt around the To Go Bag on the closet floor and found the nail, but no keys.  I moved shoes and bags out of the closet.  I got a flashlight and looked around the closet.  

Mark got in on the search.  There was a discussion of alternate places the keys might be, even though they should be living on their nail.  I went through all of the jackets and coats I had worn in the last week.  I checked under a table.  Mark looked behind the boot bench. I went through my day pack. The tracking device on the key wasn't showing up on either of our phones, and there was speculation that battery was dead. Mark went through the battery basket. I looked under the couch. Mark checked under an entryway chair. I looked under the kitchen table. I emptied out my day pack. I took a flashlight, because the flashlight can help me to consciously look at things instead of glossing over them, and shone it under the TV, and by the computer monitor, and under the couch again, and into the closet, and under the front door's lamp.  I took off the couch cover and looked under the couch cushions. Mark looked under the computer desk. I took off the cushions under the Stickly Chair.  Mark swept under the rolling cabinet of wicker baskets.   I looked in the mail basket, and the winter glove basket, and the dog toy basket. I looked at the guest room desk. Mark went through my day pack.  I wandered around the living room, checking the mantle for the third time.  After about forty minutes of turning the house upside down and still not finding the key, I cancelled the trip to Corvallis and remote-worked from home.

That evening, the search continued.  I went into the guest room to tear apart the bed.  I picked up my day pack, and saw the car keys, sitting just below the zipper along the top of the main compartment.  Mercury isn't retrograde, but I'm blaming other supernatural forces for hiding the keys.  Mark suggested that I get a hammer and pound the nail back into the closet wall.  Which I did. A lot.

The skies have cleared up around the 13th, just in time for a conjunction of the Moon with Jupiter, and then a very close pass of the Moon by the Pleiades the next day.  "I thought you said they were going to be next to each other," Mark said Thursday night.  

"Well, I thought they were," I said.  "I guess Earthsky led me on.  They're still about as close as they're going to be on this pass."

The next night the Moon was right next to the Pleiades, and I was lucky enough to get some images of them during twilight, when the sky was still bright enough to even out the washing-out effect of an almost-quarter moon.  "I thought you said you could see the Moon next to the Pleiades," Mark said when the sky was much darker.

"Well," I said, "it is.  If you put your thumb over the Moon, you can see the Pleiades right over it."  Mark likes to be a contrarian when I say that the Moon is next to Jupiter, and Thursday night we had a loud conversation on the deck about how apparently close planets and stars are to each other, how I think it's neat when celestial objects are in conjunction (because it looks cool and doesn't happen every day), and how Mark thinks this is like religion.  I suppose on one level it is like religion, in that photographing the sky makes me feel like I'm participating in something larger than myself.

The best thing about the conjunction was that I realized that since we're close enough to the Spring Equinox for me to easily compute the sun's and moon's position on my Portable Stonehenge, I could mark the Pleiades position on the Holes, which, unsurprisingly, is near Aldebaran's position.  So I did.

Graphics and Dreams

The other week I finished up an interweave pattern using the 9-6-9 star pattern from last month.  It refreshing to work with stars using a pattern other than a ten-fold one.  I held back on my urge to use strongly contrasting colors and managed to come up with a combination that's energetic, but not spastic.  

On the dream front I've been having unpleasant dreams over the last week that have me examining issues of trust, duty, authority, power, and artifice.  I'm not quite sure what children damaging a wooden play structure with dried out lion's fingers means, but I'm pretty sure that the army of assassin-geishas has something to do with my ambiguous feelings toward drag queens.  At the very least, I suppose that it generates some interesting exchanges with ChatGPT. 

Writing Progress

Mark has taken a look at my latest manuscript and he agrees with the folks who gave me feedback: it's boring because the stakes aren't high and there's a lot of dialog.  

Sigh.  This is what happens when I focus on cool ideas and world-building.  Back to the drawing board.  I suppose that it counts as writing practice.   

Slightly related, I rearranged the paperbacks in my library. I did find a few duplicates and also some hardbacks that I very likely will never read again.  Dislodged from the paperbacks were the old blank notebooks I've been filling since 1995.  There's fewer than one would think, as it usually takes me about three years to fill one completely.  They're interesting as a record of story ideas or of questions I was working through, but I think I would have to index them or at least put their dates on their spines for them to be useful. 

Be A Writer, It'll Be Fun

Arg. Tuesday is my writing night and this particular writing night has been mildly unproductive.  Or was that wildly unproductive.  Part of the problem is that I seem to want to write vignettes (which are static dead-ends) or  poetry (which I suppose counts as "art"). 

I guess I need to just force myself to write short stories based on a modular outline—what my friend Nina calls "roll-ups"—for the next few months just to get started and to have a story with an ending.  I'll have to see if I can come up with something other than "quest" or "secret library" or "whiney hero" plots (or "eye-candy" non-plots).  

Here; have a recent hummingbird photo.

Tiling Stars

One of my hobbies is playing around with different types of tilings.  Mostly I like to play around with Penrose Kites and Darts.  I also like to try to fit stars into regular patterns.  The most recent exploration that I've done comes from Daud Sutton's "Islamic Design," where he talks about making a grid out of right triangles, and then placing regular polygons and other shapes onto the edges and corners of the triangles.  In the case that I was interested in, he used five-pointed stars.  

Getting the stars down on the triangles was simple enough, but it took me a lot of wiggling to get the nine kite-shapes at the top and bottom of the design to look symmetric and not smooshed.

I'll have to see what sorts of patterns will result from right-triangles which form squares instead of hexagons.

A couple of weeks ago, I read about a technique for putting odd-numbered polygons and stars together.  Start with a figure, duplicate and reflect it, then make the two closest points touch.  Skip a point on ether side of the touching point, and place a reflected duplicate there, too.  This will make a repeating line, which you can put together into a mesh.  I tried it with 5-, 7-, and 9-stars; the 7-stars were the most aesthetic, so I put together some interwoven 7-stars into a larger interwoven pattern.

Whats fun about this technique is that it allows one to break away from patterns that are hexagon- or square-based. 

When In-laws Turn 90

The first week of February we flew to the east coast to celebrate Mark's Mother's 90th birthday.  Mark is one of seven children, and his mother has thirteen grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren (of which The Child is the oldest).  Almost everyone—including the Florida nephews and nieces—was able to come to the celebration, which lasted several days over the February 3 weekend; there were upwards of fifty people spanning four generations in the Suffern house.  

Probably the best way to describe the gatherings in full force is "a frat party with lots of theatre people."  Or possibly a slightly grittier version of backstage at The Muppet Show.  

Since there were so many relatives scheduled to attend the fancy birthday lunch, there was a raffle to "sit at the captain's table" with the birthday girl.  Since the instructions didn't specify a limit, Mark proceeded to fill out multiple tickets with his name on them.  This sparked a loud discussion among his sisters about the interpretation of the rules and whether Mark was stuffing the ballot or not.  During this time, The Child (at least) wrote Mark's name on an extra ticket, and somebody else submitted a ticket labeled "Anyone BUT Mark."  

When the tickets were drawn, Mark's name was drawn five times (six if you count "Anyone BUT Mark"), and after a consultation, Mark's Mother decreed Mark disqualified.  

"I've been sent away!" said Mark, "Banished."  Smeagol-like, at the fancy birthday lunch, he sat down at the captain's table and pretended to lick the forks.  

The lunch was a hearty Italian meal, with several courses (I had salmon).  The strangest aspect of the party was that it was the same venue as Mark's Mother's 70th birthday, but the room seemed smaller somehow. We couldn't figure out if the room had been painted a white back then and that the now red walls made the space seem closer, or if there had been some slight remodeling or additions.  

Afterwards, Mark and I took late-afternoon nap; the news of which alarmed one of the precocious young nieces, who firmly announced to her mother that she "did not take naps."  We rejoined the family at the Suffern house, which by this time, through the piano magic of one of the nephew-in-laws, had turned into a kind of piano bar with sing-alongs—I don't know what happened, one moment I was chatting in the living room, and then next moment I had a solo singing "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina."  The requests poured in—"This Land Is My Land," "Part of Your World," "Under the Sea," "Piano Man," "Bohemian Rhapsody," Scottish ballads— and folks were still singing when we left at midnight.

Birthdays, Migraines, and Wildlife

The last weekend was both busy and slow.  Saturday we collected The Child and visited my folks to celebrate my Dad's birthday.  He'll be 90 next year; when that happens, we'll have to plan a large celebration with fancy food and champagne and maybe a Mozart Quartet... Or something.   This time around was a modest affair with immediate family.  

Sunday started out typically. Mark and I had talked about getting up before dawn and going to Delta Ponds to try an spot some more beavers.  I woke up around 6 AM, peered between the blinds at what I thought was an overcast morning, groaned, and burrowed further under the covers.  

Around 7 AM I did toddle out of bed and found Mark in the living room.  The sun painted high clouds magenta, and the waning full moon hid behind the two pines to the west.  I realized I was a Bad Husband for keeping Mark from his early morning nature walk, and said that we should go—but Mark said we could go in the evening.  

After breakfast, I thought I'd join a Zoom writing session of folks I know, but then I got a blind spot in my vision as I was trying to catch up on social media on my phone and the next thing I knew, there was a vibrating spiral of blue lightning in the middle of everything, which put the kibosh on reading or doing anything requiring sight.  

I ended up napping outside all morning on our deck furniture.  In the sunlight. It got up to 65F.  This is two weeks after the snow and ice storm and about a week of temperatures in the mid-20s.  I think I might have gotten a mild tan.  

Luckily, my aural-migraines aren't too bad; although my eyes didn't feel like they were focusing properly until the mid-afternoon.  I convinced Mark to go to Delta Ponds a little early, and we headed out around 4PM.  Mark thought we were there a little early, but as we were walking along the place where we'd seen a beaver the week before, I heard a nibbling sound, and there was a great big beaver sitting on the bank just below the walkway stripping the bark off of a twig.  Mark saw a smaller beaver near-by. 

January Wildlife

The Willamette Valley is slowly recovering from last week’s ice and snow. Several friends and acquaintances have had scary encounters with trees falling on or near their houses and cars; the most famous victim of weather is the Cascades Raptor Center, which lost an aviary to falling trees and is currently a deathtrap due to partially fallen tree limbs.

The other evening, Mark and I took a walk along the Willamette River and the inlet into Delta Ponds before shopping at the local mall. Rain fell, and I was glad for an umbrella.

A gang of kids sat on cardboard in a circle out of the rain under the Valley River bridge. Mark initially wanted to see logs, debris , and other flotsam as it came barreling down stream, but all we really saw were small twigs awash in the gallons of water rushing along the downed trees along the river banks and bridge pylons. I peered into the glooming grey, hoping to see an osprey or maybe one of the Skinner Butte eagles, but all of the birds must have been hunkered down elsewhere.

We left the bridge and walked along the bike path along the river toward Delta Ponds. Through the leaning trees and fallen branches, Mark pointed out a white heron in the shallows. Water washed over trees growing from slender eyots near the river’s bank. We saw some ducks between the river and the path, and when we rounded a corner where the inlet flowed into Delta Ponds, there was a tree stretching up bare branches laden with cormorants. On rainy winter late afternoons, the looming cormorants take on a gallows aspect, as if they were awaiting some watery menace to surface and dispense nacreous bounty.

A sign along the path listed likely animal residents of the waterways and I was surprised that river otters were on the list. We walked farther, not quite to the sluice gate near a car dealership, and then Mark saw a large animal swimming in the current. I thought it might be an otter because it was swimming more quickly than the nutria we usually see, but when it hopped out of the water and onto a bank below us, we saw the wide flat tail of a beaver. Mark was elated. We followed the beaver back toward the Willamette. I’m not sure if it was looking for downed branches to drag off somewhere or roots to eat or what, but during most the time we saw it, it made an almost dog-like whining, as if it were muttering to itself that “no, this branch isn’t right.”

The last time we saw a beaver up this close was around February 1, 2020, also during a flood, when the beaver in question was gnawing on an oak growing next to the bike path. I had forgotten how big they are. 

When Your Husband's a Writer

Scene:  The living room. Mark is using a swifter.

Mark:  "There. I've finished sweeping and the floors feel less gritty."

John:  "Isn't that a metaphor for life." (Notices his shoes on the floor by the couch and goes to put them on the entry shoe rack.)

Mark (aghast):  "John!" (Steps in front of John and clasps him by the shoulders) "Look into my eyes."

John (trying to step around him): "But I need to pick up my ..."

Mark (holding him fast):  "Honey. Honey. Look at me: Sweeping and cleaning is an actual job we have to do to maintain the house. It's not a metaphor."

John:  "It's not a metaphor? Why can't it be both a metaphor and—"

Mark: "Oh my God, this explains so much."

First Snow and Ice of 2024

The January winter storms have hit and covered much of the Willamette Valley with snow and a crust of ice.  Power lines are down, and it seems like half of my friends up and down the valley are without power, or their wells have stopped, or trees have come crashing down near or onto their houses.  The city has closed public parks and bike paths.

We’re lucky to be in a part of Eugene that seems to have robust power transmission.  I believe the last time we were without power was due to someone speeding down Willamette Street at something like fifty miles per hour and smacking into a power pole (Willamette Street is straight, so they would have had to work a little bit to hit a pole at the side of the road).  

The time before that was a strange occurrence: lightning overhead caused a mechanical switch (maybe a line arrester) at the top of a pole near our house to trip.  I’m guessing that the lightning caused an induction surge in the transmission line.  Only houses on our side of the block were without power, but some linemen came and used a very long (and insulated) cherry-picker type tool to flip the switch closed.  

Luckily, the temperature has only gotten into the mid twenties, so the animals can go outside when they need to.  Aoife doesn’t appreciate the snow on her paws—although one of her plush toys, a fox, has turned into an icicle that she likes to chew. The cats only want to be outside for a short period of time, mostly so they can stalk songbirds attracted by the suet we’ve put out .  The snow is covered with a crust of ice; walking is not too bad as the ice is bumpy and dry.  

Today it’s supposed to be sunny—it’s currently sunny in Corvallis—but at the moment it is still overcast with diffuse light bouncing between the white ground and the grey clouds.   But there’s a Winter Storm Warning issued for today through tomorrow morning, so maybe all we’ll get is deeper grey.  

I think an expedition for chocolate may be in order.