For Your Birthday AND Christmas

Whew.  My vacation is about half-way over.  I feel lucky to be able to take a larger swath of time away from The Day Jobbe, and at the same time I'm wishing for a few more days just to write and research.  

An ice storm came in just before my birthday and coated most of the Willamette Valley with about a quarter inch, which made this year's celebration with friends an insurmountable challenge.  I am grateful that the storm happened after the Solstice Spiral Walk, because it would have been to dangerous for folks to drive to the UU church.

I am not sure what was the most irksome:  the annual necessity of having to schedule birthday events around holiday availability and weather (which is good for developing a martyr complex), sitting in an empty reserved room at a large cafe table (which is good for spreading out reference books and practicing translation of photos of Egyptian Antiquities), or having the wait staff forget that I'd already paid for the space and double-booking a drop-in group (which is good for self-righteous savoir faire). The brunch was good, and I drank a lot of tea.

Afterward, Mark and I wound up taking a slippery walk through the local Pioneer Cemetery.  There's something about visiting a cemetery on or just before one's birthday that is good for perspective.  We ended up at the Egyptian revival mausoleum, Hope Abbey.   By this time, the air temperature had gone up enough to make ice slide off of leaves, and I was able to capture some interesting images.

The next day was in the 50's, Mark planned a yummy family lunch out at a local winery, and he made a lovely chocolate cake.  His cake was much better than deconstructed chocolate thing I got at the winery (which we laughed at because it looked like an undersea tableau of a marine life-form reproductive setting),  and better than the free birthday slice I got from the great bakery around the corner (which was chocolatey and serviceable).

Christmas Day we visited my Corvallis family and had a pleasant ham lunch, put together mostly by my Dad. This year there was much telling of old family stories.  One thing Mark learned is that the little town that my dad puts together for the outside train is based on Colm St. Aldwyn, England, which is a kind of Burridge ancestral home. I managed to both use my camera to take some photographs of relatives and play some music on my harp—this was a win because I usually only manage to bring them to Corvallis and then not use them.

On the Second Day of Christmas, I ate some caramel pop-corn and pulled a crown off of the top of one of my lower molars.  It doesn't hurt, and I managed to visit my dentist for an emergency re-glueing, but now I get to have a root canal just before New Years.

On the writing front, I'm working on a short story that has taken some unforeseen twists.  I've also gone through into Scrivener and updated the formatting to "Modern Shunn Format" from "Classic Shunn Format."  Probably the most difficult thing for me to get used to is using a single space after a period. And Smart Quotes.

Happy Winter 2022 Solstice!

Solstice morning (12/21), I went to write at a cafe and managed to snag a tarot reading.  The gist of the first half of the reading was, focus on one thing, prep for writing and be ready for the muse, but loosen up and try not to force things.  Also, cleaning up a work space is like unblocking congested feng shui.  The second half was set down the things you're doing, take stock, and choose the direction you want to take (and have fun on your Summer trip).  

I came away with a reminder that wands can symbolize fiery inspiration, which is different from the inspiration from the airy heights or the intuition of the suit of cups.  Also, when I attend Eugene Pride events, I'm re-telling myself the fifteen-year-old story of being the only gay dad at a Eugene community meeting of about two hundred.  

Mark was kind enough to purchase a Solstice Gift for me—a pierced gnomon pocket sundial. I had told him about it a couple of weeks ago with the caveat that it was "totally frivolous."  It has a latitude ring,  a horizon ring, and a calendar bridge that has a sliding pierced gnomon.  I'm waiting for a clear enough day to use it; right now it's leading a double-life as a Christmas Tree ornament.  It's very cool, and I need to find an effective hook near a window for it.

The day was mostly cloudy, but there was enough of a break in the clouds to allow me to focus sunlight onto a candle (okay, I cheat a little and hold a match next to the wick) and light it.  I honestly believed that it would be too cloudy to perform this feat this year.  I spread the flame to candles in the fireplace, and then to to the Solstice Spiral Lights event at the local UU Church.  

Last year it rained buckets and doused all the candles we put out for the Solstice Spiral.  This year was drier, but also windier, so keeping candles lit was sometimes a challenge.  It would be fair to say that this year the Solstice Spiral Walk was more of a folk practice and less a Wicca-lite ritual.  I think most people enjoyed walking the spiral.  Of course, after drawing a spiral and laying down fir boughs and sounding a tone drum for over an hour, I'm a little sore.  

Pre Winter Solstice Musings

It's the eve of the Winter Solstice.  In about sixteen hours the Sun will be the farthest south that it gets, and it will begin climbing more northerly.  The day afterward we'll have a new moon.    I'll be glad for the extra sunlight.  

Tomorrow I'll be laying out a spiral and holding ritual space for a Solstice Lights Spiral Walk.  The forecast is calling for more clement weather this year.  With any luck, I'll be able to ignite a candle with the light of the solstice sun.  Last year it rained and rained and rained, which made having an outside spiral walk with candles challenging.  This year we're a little more prepared for uncooperative weather with LED backups and more covered lights.  Also, we have an indoor Plan B if it looks like a Second Flood is going to happen.  At least a horrific cold snap, which I'd seen in a long-term forecast last week, doesn't appear to be happening.  

What the Winter Solstice means to me is that this is a time to examine the structures that sustain and renew us for the rest of the year.  That there's a New Moon about twenty-four hours later means that both the conscious, primary processing, and the unconscious, secondary processing modes are focused on the same inventory of systems of maintenance.  At the risk of sounding like Dion Fortune raving her herself, the deity that I associate with this time of year is the Castellan, who sits on the Inward Deosil Spiral between the Grid of Systems and the Tree of History. 

I believe this calls for a Tree of Life tarot reading with a yearly-planner and scones.

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Today I spent the morning in a Zoom conference writing with other writers.  I managed to polish and write a bit on a short story that I've been toying with for the last few months.  I've been discovering the plot as I go along, and the next step is to focus on what the main character's emotional stakes are—I've got all of the visual eye-candy and cool magical McGuffins in, so right now the story is functioning on a wonder-story level, but it needs more work to function on a "character dissatisfied with their situation" level.   

Holiday Break

The winter holiday is upon me!  I've taken a large swathe of time off with the vague notion that I will write and do various projects.  The first thing that I've discovered is that I'm going to be writing in the morning, I really need to wake up about two hours beforehand to get things like exercising, showering, eating, and generally waking up out of the way.  I also need to maintain a list of tasks to do besides writing.

Aoife has figured out what Postal, FedEx and UPS trucks sound like—apparently, it's pure evil.  Whenever one pulls up anywhere on our street, she goes into high alert, determined to kill whomever it is out there who is obviously a homicidal fiend in human form bent on deeds of depravity and trespass.  She's pulled the brass hood off of our door's mail slot twice since the holiday delivery season began, prompting Mark to replace it with a tasteful wood cover.  

Saturday was the last day of clear skies, and the grey overcast has returned.  I was able to take some photographs of Mars near Aldebaran and the Pleiades, and later the next morning the waning moon.  To my surprise, as I was crunching around on the frosty deck, one of the local hummingbirds came and visited the fountain.  Mark had been raking, and when he realized I was photographing them, he thoughtfully froze.  All I can say is that I am glad I'm not a little hummingbird sticking my bare bird feet into running water on a 30F morning. I don't know how the little things stay warm. 

The first weekend of vacation was taken up with holiday preparations.  We attended an in-person gathering of the cousins on the Burridge side of the family—out-of-state family stayed out of state, and various folks with children cancelled with child ailments; so while it was sad not being able to see everyone, the gathering was less boisterously overwhelming.   The Zoom Gathering was stereotypically Zoom, with a little bit of lag, odd camera angles, muting issues, thrown in to keep things hilarious.  We will have to host a outdoor gathering some time in the spring or summer when more folks can attend in person.

Sunday I went shopping at the local Holiday Market.  I enjoy shopping, much more so than Mark or The Child, and when I go alone, I'm able to do the reconnoiter-commando-raid style of shopping.   In addition to visiting with some of my vendor friends, I made several new best friends by wrapping myself up in a storybook glamour of the green and grey wool cloak, the Assassin's Creed hooded vest (with green shimmery paisley), a pewter Green Man pendent, extra rings, black KN95 mask, and my unbound hair.   Everyone seemed more interactive than I recall from previous years; I'm going to guess that the last two years of COVID has the extroverts overcompensating, myself included.  

The only downside of shopping at the Holiday Market is that I have to remind myself that I'm shopping for others and not myself.  And that I'm a solitary practitioner and not someone in a jewelry coven.  And I'm sure that I have enough ritual jewelry.   

Full Moon Conjunct Mars in Opposition

Happy Full Moon Before Yule in Conjunction with Opposition Mars.

We thought the sky would be too overcast and cloudy to see anything, but around 8 PM, there was a large enough hole in the clouds to take a few pictures.  

Of course I was fiddling around with the tripod and the camera focus to get too many photos before new clouds swarmed overhead, but I did manage to get some shots that weren't too artsy.

The moon was already a little to the east of Mars when we saw it, so I think we missed the actual occultation of Mars.  Still the two were about a fingers-width apart, and while the clouds may have blurred Mars a little, they also cut down on the Moon's glare.

Visitor of Light

Some nights, not every night, an otherworlder visits the corner at the foot of our bed.  I will wake and discover it silently and inscrutably standing.  Who knows how long it stares down at us as we sleep.  Usually, it is a short thing of shadow that walks backwards and away through the bedroom door and away through the hallway, or it's a manikin smudge with glowing eyes that folds itself into some dimension orthogonal to ours.  But its latest manifestation was filled with light.  

This time, its head was a featureless white globe of light.  It lit up the closet doors and the bedroom door and the bookshelves.  Around its wiry, curving neck and over its head was a frill like a dowdy lampshade or a dusty bonnet filched from Laura Ingalls.  Its body -- or at least its arms, possibly its legs -- were covered in thick grey skin, like an elephant's or a rhino's, with short squat triangular nails at the ends of its hands? Hooves?  

It stood at the corner of the bed by my feet, light streaming from off of its head, with an attitude of curiosity possibly more malign than inscrutable.   Then it stepped backwards, and, as if multiple, overlapping irises of gauze closed it off from the bedroom, it and the light shuttered itself away, leaving me, Mark, and the dog in darkness.

I've gotten used to it. 

Repeating Patterns

It's that pause during the year before it seems like everything happens all at once.  Thanksgiving will hit, I'll need to figure out some sort of holiday craft gift, start production, and mail out items soon.  And set up a Winter Solstice Lights Spiral.  While trying to write, going to work, and other everyday tasks.  Somewhere in all of this we want to send out holiday cards, too.  

We've made some fairly creative holiday cards in the past; I think "Smokey Knew He Could Save Christmas" was my favorite.  A few years ago, there was an abortive attempt to have us riding the notes in a music score for "Jingle Bells," but Mark thought it was "too gay," and we've devolved to generic portraits.   Perhaps this year's card will be "Merry and Tired."  

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The other day I finished "wiggling tiles," as I liked to put it, and came up with a tile pattern using pentagons.  

I was pleased with the effect, but I had a suspicion that I'd done something similar.  Sure enough, as I was going through my photo collection to try to find pictures for a family 2023 calendar, I ran across a design I'd done last spring that was virtually identical.

And looking more closely, this is essentially a variation of interlocking circles within a hexagonal array, which I did a variation of last November.  I suppose there's only so many ways one can have repeating infinite tiles using pentagons, and it involves arranging them around hexagons.  

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I'm trying to decide if Twitter imploding is a good thing or a bad thing.  

On one hand, I have some contacts with writers, Math Art Folks, archeology, Pagan, and folklore specialists that I would hate to lose; on the other hand, having one less social media site to visit might not be a bad thing—Ursula Le Guin famously did not have a Twitter account.  On the first hand, it's kind of fun to see what other folks are doing, especially when I remember to use curated lists; on the other hand, virtual friends are virtual, and none of my family are on Twitter.  And then there's the whole DoomScrolling thing.

I might post more directly to this blog and less directly to other social media sites in an attempt to simplify my life and also to exercise my ability to focus on something longer than 256 characters, which feels like it has atrophied in the last two and a half years.   We'll see how well that works; Twitter (and Instagram) make it easy to fire off a quick post.  The same quick post with Blogger takes a little more effort (fire up a computer, upload photos, write text, import photos...) mostly because there appears to be no mobile app for Blogger.  

I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere.

Carousel Griffin

Made a quick visit to the Albany Carousel.  The last time I was there, this griffon was a partially carved hunk of wood beneath a cartoon banner of how it would look.

Full Moon Dream

We join the dream in progress.  Mark and I were at a kind of conference or festival, a combination of OryCon, a LGBTQA retreat, and a pagan celebration.  Mark and I were in a small motel room with lots of moonlight  through the window, white sheets, and white curtains [hot sex scene redacted, but I will keep the joke "up periscope!"].

Early in the morning, a man in his late twenties or early thirties knocked on our door.  He was an amalgam of various people I know, clean-shaven, short curly hair, earnest.  He wore a sheet or a toga.  "Oh good," he said when we answered the door.  "I wanted to check in on you to see that you hadn't disappeared and let you know that last night Todd [editor's note, Todd is a random name] and I were walking around last night Todd saw you naked in the window, and I turned and I saw you, too.  You want to be careful."   The implication was that the conference center was in a rural area and we risked harassment at the least.

There was a break in the narrative.  I was sitting at a long formica-top table in a darkish conference center cafeteria.  A group of us might have been sitting in a booth.  There were clumps of people walking by, and my sense is that it was morning... but it might have been evening.  Three generic "townie" guys were at one end of the table (in waking life they remind me of the 19 year old "townie-hood-wanna-bes" who used to hang out in downtown Northfield, Minnesota, only in the dream they were super-generic, bland, middle-Americans), and six or so folks of diverse gender and orientation were at the other.  The two groups were at the same table, but sort of pretended the other wasn't there... or more accurately, the guys were pretending to be part of the gay/pagan conference, and everyone else was pretending to be taken in.  

The leader guy pulled out some hand written notes out of envelopes and started reading the letters.  I wondered how he'd gotten a hold of them.  The letters were things like coming-out stories and poems.  It wasn't exactly a doxxing, because he didn't know exactly who the authors were, but he was reading them to his friends and saying things like, "Can you believe this?" and other judgmental statements.  I worried that he might have something I'd written.  A discussion started between the lead guy and one of the diverse women, and it seemed like one of the generic guys was not as convinced of his moral superiority as he had been.

There was a break in the narrative.

I was in a brightly lit conference room, like a conference center ballroom divided down the middle by a movable partition.  I was waiting by a raised floor or stage, about fifteen feet on a side.  It was a square grid of white squares about two feet wide, either a dance floor or else some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game.  Stairs on the grid led up to a second raised dais with a blocky throne.  I was wearing large black boots, more than motorcycle boots, but less than Glam Rock boots a group like Kiss might wear, and I held a large hammer (it wasn't Thor's Mjölnir, the shaft was like a sledgehammer's, but the head was a large rectangular hunk of metal).  A woman in a white dress, along with everyone else, was waiting for "Steve" (I've forgotten what his name was in the dream) to show up, so the presentation/conference could begin.

Finally, I said, "Well, I've got the boots and I've got the hammer, so I'll just start things until he get here."  I hopped onto the stage, went up the stair, and sat on the throne.  The presentation hadn't been going on long when some townies came in and glared at people.  I shrank back a bit on the throne hoping to remain inconspicuous.   

There's another break in the narrative.

It was dusk.  I was moving along a mostly straight path set along grassy and lightly wooded hills.  In waking life, the motion was similar to RollerBlading, but in the dream I was walking quickly.  The path was made of a dark red marble, with quartz veins and inclusions.  I supposed that either a heavy dew was falling or it had rained because the surface was shiny.  I held a long-handled rake, or squee-gee, or hockey stick in front of me, which I used to clear the surface of the path as I raced along.  I cleared off fallen miniature maple leaves that had fallen from some of the trees that the path sometimes passed through.

There were townies in the hill, but they had changed into fantasy raider armor of a vaguely Nordic type with thick helmets, with down-pointing bull horns on either side.   Sort of like the Knights of Ni, but I am only making that association many hours after waking.  They never got onto the path, but there was a sense that they might pull me off of it as I went speeding by.  I swooshed through miniature maples overgrowing the path, managed to avoid them, and raced before them.

Ahead in a canyon, there was a large group of mostly men having a dance contest.  It was night, but there was enough light from overhanging lights, and possibly a fire, to see bright red costumes of two men spinning around each other in a kind of tango or lindy.  In waking life I'm pretty sure this was inspired by a dance routine I'd seen earlier in the day.  More people came walking in procession along the path.

I was there to announce the end of the dance contest so that the contestants could be chosen and the next festivity could begin.  I rapped the butt of my rake in a four-four rhythm against the marble path, which made a loop around the dancing ground, and began to chant (iambic octameter?) in a language unknown to me: 

Oh-be Bárðarbunga nachtan
Oh-de Bárðarbunga nacht !

[editor's note, the chant is an approximation; the words Bárðarbunga and nachtan were not actually used, but something like that - there was certainly a ð in the mix.]  The crowd joined in and it became a call-and-response.  The energy of the chant grew until a hairy, burly man wearing nothing but a large, brown leather kilt rumbled a sustained and deep tone which ended it.

I woke around here; there was another scene where someone needed a special balloon inflation rig before the dance awards ceremony could start, but mostly I lay in bed and tried to fix the syllables of the chant in my mind.  

I'm trying to figure where this dream is coming from.  I was fatigued from a COVID booster and Cedar Creek Fire smoke, so the Full Moon ritual this time around was harping before moonrise in the backyard circle, scratching Cicero while an orange moon rose over the hills, and smooching Mark (once I got him outside).  This was followed up with various electronic word games with Mark, a small libation of tequila in honor of the moon, and the season one finale of Lucifer.  

The first part of the dream feels like typical privacy anxiety.  In the back of my mind I'm always wondering how well drawn bedroom blinds are and just how sound-proof everything is.  Mark at a convention, let alone a gay paganish one, would have been a sure sign I was dreaming if I had stopped think about it.  I think the convention is a lite version of "back at Reed" motif. 

The second part of the dream I suppose is a continuation of being out anxiety.  Mark dropped out of the dream.  I'm making some plans for traveling to a big city pride, and maybe this is connected somehow.  Though I am not sure where the generic straight rural townies are coming from.  They weren't "townies" per se, more just super-generic middle America dudes.  

The third part of the dream is puzzling.  I don't know what is going on with the boots and hammer.  The dream became more "Norse" as it progressed from this point.  The only thing I can think of is that earlier the previous day I had used a (smallish) hammer to drive some rebar into the ground in order to place gardening crooks for the sun and moon around the back yard ritual circle.  Oh, right... and recently I'd come across a 1902 painting of a "Young Germanic Warrior Looking at a Roman Helmet," by Osmar Schindler

The forth part of the dream is a fairly textbook otherworld transition material -- I'm surprised there wasn't a horse or a river involved, but the motion along the path (which did have a watery sheen) would count as crossing a boundary into an other realm.  Even if the waking world backyard circle of bricks transformed into the dream dancing ground, the hammer transforming into a rake/hockey stick still seems a little odd.  

The dream started in bright moonlight, transitioned to day time interior spaces, and returned to night time light by fires.  I don't know why by the end of the dream everything had become a kind of Heathen-fest.  I would have expected Greco-Roman or Egyptian or something more Arthurian.

Recovery Full Moon

I'm trying to get into the mood for tonight's full moon.

It's a little difficult because around 9 AM Friday morning I got my latest COVID bivalent booster, which meant that around 7 PM I started feeling tired, had the chills and a fever of about 100 F by 9 PM, and by 11 PM my fever had gone up to 102F.  Thankfully, Mark set up an air-mattress nest in our living room for me to shiver in which did not include Aoife draped across my knees or Cicero abusing the Laws of Gravity near my face.  Aside from waking from shivering I managed to get adequate sleep, and by 8 AM Saturday my fever was down to 100F.  

I didn't have the ocean of sweat moment this time around—either hydrating tons during Friday; or the new vaccine prevented the artistic, but gross moment; or else I slept through it.  

Saturday I was fairly tired, and reread A Wizard of Earthsea with an eye for how description and sentences were structured, napped, and watched both the movie Hocus Pocus (1992) and its sequel (2022) for the first time.  The movies were goofy, and I didn't realize they were aimed at middle-school aged children until about ten minutes in.  I enjoyed them, and I would say that I understand how they would be some people's  version of Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal.  

Sunday, I was still slightly tired, and with some other aches and pains and an air quality index of 160 from the still burning Cedar Creek fire, I haven't felt particularly witchy, mystical, or in the spirit of All Hallows' Eve.   Perhaps I will burn some incense sticks, play the harp, and do a tarot reading for myself.  Then again, given how Aoife is tearing around the yard barking at neighbors and passers-by, and how Mark —who dislikes incense— is knitting outside... maybe I'll just play the harp.

Parliament Building Interior

After our visit to the Butchart Gardens, we returned to Victoria and went on a walking tour.  Mark and I wound up returning to the Parliament Building.  As we neared it, a man engaged us with some questions; he had a microphone covered with a windsock and a video camera.  Apparently we looked Canadian (and "diverse," which Mark thought was code for "gay")!  He wanted to ask us about Canadian politics, but realized he couldn't as we were US tourists.  We all joked that we could answer questions anyway, and Mark and I improvised some absurd statements about Justin Trudeau, taxes, the environment, and Parliament actually getting things done on their agenda.

Getting inside the Parliament Building was like going through airport security.  After we went through a metal detector and had bags X-rayed, we were free to traipse through the first and second floor halls.  Under the rotunda, a very loud docent was giving a tour, which we avoided.  The stained glass looked more stunning from the inside of the building than the outside.  

In addition to various windows celebrating various British monarchs, there were many windows which were statements about virtues, or which were dedicated to great thinkers and philosophers.  I wasn't able to get a very good photograph, but the most amusing window to us was Cicero (the name of our black cat); I didn't recognize any catnip or mice in the design.

I'd say we spent about forty-five minutes of mostly me photographing building details and Mark actually reading the placards describing what the rooms were used for (Parliament wasn't in session, so we didn't see any legislators).  I forget who commented first that we'd traveled a great distance (over 350 miles) to visit a capitol, and neither of us had taken the trouble to visit Oregon's capitol in Salem, only 65 miles away.

One thing that I haven't written about our trip to Victoria were the great numbers of seagulls flying through the air, but mostly loafing about building eaves, frosting the roof lines (and our balcony) with seagull poop, and filling the air with their mournful screeching.  The award for the most dramatic presentation goes to the seagull who must have been roosting on our hotel's chimney at night and whose unworldly utterances floated out from the fireplace hearth (unlit) which we were drinking around.

MidJourney

I have been trying to get MidJourney to create images that aren't a Lovecraftian Cthulu-scape.  The program works well for poems and abstract images of static objects, like buildings and trees.  I had fairly good success putting in lyrics from an old We Three song the other day ("...the moon sails over city lights, sails over stars and the water's edge.").

MidJouney did fairly well with still life prompts, like "High tea in a garden with roses and lavender," but not so well with "Black cat having high tea in a garden with roses and lavender" until I also pointed it at a picture of our cat, Cicero.  Still... the AI has a penchant for adding third (or fourth or fifth) eyes, drawing cyclops-cats, or inserting demonic felines.  Or just making lopsided kitties.  One particular specimen looked like the love-child of a cat and a snowy owl.

I am reminded of a 1970's Sesame Street short where a disembodied man's voice is asking disembodied children's voices how to draw an elephant, which has many moments of kids shrieking, "Not like THAT!" and laughing. 

Visiting Butchart Gardens

It seems like a lifetime ago but it was only about two weeks since we visited the Butchart Gardens outside of Victoria, BC.  The Gardens were started over a hundred years ago by Jennie Butchart, who was the wife of a cement manufacturer and limestone quarry owner.  The Butchart's house overlooked the quarry, and Jennie got tired of looking at a strip mine, so she planted flowers.  The story goes she even planted ivy along rocky cliff sides from a bosun's chair.  The gardens have been a tourist attraction ever since.

Research about the gardens suggested an early arrival, so I booked the first charter bus out of the harbor to the gardens.  The day was clear and started out in the low seventies.  The bus driver gave a non-stop speech about Victoria (the most haunted city along the west coast, among other mosts) and the environs as we traveled for about a half-hour.  If I remember correctly, he was from Saskatchewan, and his accent reminded me of my time in Minnesota.  

When we got to the gardens, Mark took one look at the map, saw its suggested path, and promptly lead us the opposite way.  This was a good thing; the first hour or so of our garden experience was a quiet one.   The gardens were still in full bloom, which a pleasant surprise—I was expecting more autumnal foliage.  We saw the Italian Garden first, then the Star Pond, then the Japanese Gardens, then the Rose Garden.  

I liked the boxwood hedge with arches on either side of a statue of Mercury in the Italian Garden.  The Star Pond was nice, but over-hyped.  

I very much enjoyed the Japanese Garden because it was shady and cool, with many little niches and covered tea ceremony benches.  It also had a little metal dragon fountain springing out from the top of a slope.   

At the other end of the garden, we found the cove and dock for the sea planes.

Because we went through the Japanese garden backward, so to speak, when we found it, the tori gate appeared to open up onto a main lawn; this combined with the southeastern morning sunlight made the gate extra mysterious looking.  

The rose garden was very traditional and fun.  I espeicially enjoyed the gazing globe there. Rose fragrance filled the air, and the trellises and hedges created a small enclosed place for contemplation — no small feat given that the number of folks traipsing around was climbing. 

Where a path from the rose garden met a path from the Japanese garden, there was a medium sized fountain with another dragon sculpture.   By this time in our tour of the garden, we were beginning to run into the folks who had taken the traditional path.  

After some wandering, we decided to have tea (our second in as many days!).  Since we didn't have a reservation, we were seated outside, with the caveat that we would likely be visited by wasps.  Our waiter reminded us of Ned Flanders (it was the mustache).  We ordered tea and two servings of savories.  The first non-tea item was trifle  By the time we finished the trifle, the wasps had indeed discovered our plates, so we put a bit of sausage roll out for them as tribute and they mostly left us alone.  The meal was delightful, but I would have to add that some of the savories were trying too hard to be exotic and were more puzzling than delicious.  

After the very filling meal, we wandered about and revisited the fountain, the carousel, and other features near the sunken garden.  Bt this time we had been visiting for about three or four hours, and the post-lunch crowds had were visiting the gardens with us, resulting in some congestion.  Toddlers in the throes of "The Snackening" were more evident.  

So it was time for shopping!  Nancy and I hit the gift shop while Mark did a final round of the sunken garden and the fountains.  I bought some tea (which I've already brewed most of!)

We found the same bus and bus driver waiting to whisk us back to Victoria.  

The gardens were fun.  I would visit again; I'm not sure if the allure of formal gardens or the chance for a fancy tea with proper scones is the draw.   Mark said he enjoyed the garden, but didn't need to see it again—and there were other gardens in Victoria that we didn't get a chance to visit that he would rather see instead.

The Moon and Old Songs

A week ago tonight we were traveling by ferry back to the states.  The sun set just as we set out, and the crescent moon shone over the orange horizon reflecting in the water.  As twilight deepened, the moon sank lower and became more ruddy.  As we pulled into the harbor, suddenly the moon was no longer a beacon of sky and water, but a lamp over the mountains — a pale red bow aimed below the rim of the world.   I stood on the upper deck gazing at the moon, and it seemed like I stood still on a platform while the red moon moved closer.   

An old memory of a song (by We Three) came to mind and I found myself softly singing:

"The moon sails over the city streets / Sails over stars and the water's edge.  / The wind moves the water like a spider's web, / it can be a trap, it can leave you dead.  / Swallows, moving in and out of it, in and out of it. / It's all in the way you live, in the way you live."  

When I finished, the ferry terminal bracketed the moon within a rectangle of metal.   We grabbed our bags and disembarked.   The Blackball Ferry song did not play, and I was able to maintain a poetic mood for a while.  Man, I need to find my old We Three recordings.  

 

[2022-09-26 Editor's Note:  At the beach the other day, starting with the whirlpool, more of the song came back to me:

The Moon sails over the city streets / sails over stars and the waters edge.// The wind moves the water like your wavy hair / I see a reflection there / in the whirlpool. // Thread like like a spider's web,  / it can be a trap, it can leave you dead.  / Swallows, moving in and out of it, in and out of it. / It's all in the way you live, in the way you live.

 I'm still not sure about that double "in the way you live," at the end and have a vague notion there's something about living on the waters edge or looking from a cliff.]

Building Details

More photos of the Parliament Building.  I took a lot of photos over several days.

I think this might be a lion.

A floral face.

A little owl.

A statue holding a book titled "Law" and standing on a plinth labeled "Law."  I'm going to guess this is a personification of Law.

Crown atop a book gracing the top of a pillar of the library wing of the Parliament Building.

Foliate Head carved into the keystone of an arch.

 

Two allegorical figures, maybe Architecture and Surveying, on either side of a dome.

Mark sitting regally in a chair installed outside.

Stone stag and bighorn ram supporting the crest of the Province of British Columbia, outlined in large, unlit, white Christmas lights.  I would have to add that the lights looked like a Disney gingerbread wonderland by night, but distracted from the lines of the building by day.  Perhaps some day they will be replaced by more discrete LED strings or illuminated by lasers somehow.

This set of photos does not include the ones I took of the stained glass or the building's interior.