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.