Mushroom Pictures

I've been busy.

Here, last week we went on a mushroom hike.  Have some photos:

 Mushrooms were thick along the path.

 We called these "Ghost Chanterelles."

We called these "Hedgehog Mushrooms."








We didn't eat any of these.  Mark did find some real chanterelles, and we cooked them up with rice and ate them.  And lived.

Dream: Cave of the Hero's Junk Quest

Lots of wandering around dreams last night.

I was carting a lot of objects for a (I think) Neo-Pagan display in an indoor-outdoor museum.  I don't recall if I was loaning my harp or some other object.  But the display wasn't quite where we thought it was supposed to be, and where we were going to set up would be in the rain.

Something about a new house which was our old house.  Or vise-versa.

The part I remember well was that I had followed Mark into a cave.  I think we were at the zoo, but we might have been at some sort of park rented for seminars.  The opening of the cave was in a hallway -- very Alice in Wonderland, and it just opened up off of the corridor.  The cave was rocky, tubular, and about eight feet in diameter.  A quick brook flowed through the cave (it sprung up where the cave met the corridor).  The rough walls were damp.  The light was dim, but not particularly dark.

Graying lumber spanned rocks set in the brook to make a path.  Mark was farther along the bend in the tunnel.  There were objects in the water along the way.  Mark made a comment like it was a scavenger hunt.  I remember one of the planks had fallen off the rocks and was in the water, and my feet got wet.

I came along a part of the path that had a lot of objects strewn around it.  There was a book with a locked cover, a worked metal chaffing dish cover, a small key, and some other stuff.  I wanted to look at the book, and the key looked like it would fit, but the largish square lock on the front of the book looked like it contained hidden blades in it and I didn't want to be poked.  The shaft of the key looked like it was made out of a rolled up piece of paper with writing on it.

In the end, though, it looked like all this stuff belonged to someone else.  The chaffing dish lid looked like it was there by mistake, so I brought it back out of the cave.

Some other dream things happened, and I returned to the cave entrance.  It was flooded with spotlights, and Enya-like music played over a stereo system.  Right next to it was a convention hall (it's as if this part of the dream was set in a Marriott or something).  There was a standing cloth curtain with a big white paper sign with the words "Waiting Area" in big black Papyrus-typeface.  I was tapping the lid and noticed it made an impressive gong sound.

A five-foot-something man was in charge of the display.  He was bald on top.  He wore dark slacks, a white opera shirt, and a dark wool vest with lighter threads making a raged basket-weave pattern running down in two wide stripes along his front.  It turned out he had put all the stuff in the cave, and it was a part of some sort of New Age vision quest.  He kept speaking in pronouncements, and said something about The Hero's Quest.  I gave him his lid back.

Then there was some more wandering... this time in Astoria, and I rehashed the previous evening's conversation by taking some tap-dance lessons and then meeting my Fairy Godmother... and also being in a huge dance routine with Jerry and Kathy Oltion, who had developed the ability to freeze scenes, make everything fuzzy around the edges, and surround their hands with saturated color. All while dancing in time with the music.


Crazy dream.  I like the book and key, and I'll have to figure out a way to use it in a story.

Sunday Dragonflies

Yesterday it got up to eighty degrees.  A little too warm for me, but mostly nice.

Sometime in the late morning, a huge dragonfly came into our yard and patrolled around.  I'll have to look up what kind it was.  The body was blue, and its head and eyes were enormous.  It hovered around the glass table on our back deck, then slowly navigated around the patio furniture.   It nipped after a gnat, looped around the yard, and then navigated through the chairs again.  I was wearing my dragonfly T-shirt, so its appearance seemed meaningful.

I hoped it would stick around, and I put out a plate of water for it, but it was really one of those pond dragonflies and after a few more minutes it flew away.  I'm hoping maybe we will see it or another like it -- dragonflies are one of my favorite things, and this one was spectacular.   

Mark did notice our usual red dragonflies in the neighbor's dead forsythia.  By then it was afternoon, and they were holding still--I think so the birds wouldn't notice them.  I like them, too; sometimes on the right day, you can lie down on the back lawn and look up into the sky and see a whole fleet of them zipping around eathing mosquitoes or gnats or whatever it is they eat.  

I'll have to find my dragonfly guide and see if there are any plant suggestions in it.

Dream: Room of Prophesy

Lots of "Back to School" motifs; the standard "The homework assigned last week that I forgot about is due now!" sort of stuff.  I'm still trying to figure out what giving M.C. a massage on a school bus means (man, her left scapula was really tight).

Anyway, we join the dream in progress...

Two mean seventy-something sorceresses ruled the area... think Dame Maggie Smith only sterner and less fun.  I was somehow indentured to them... or at least they were my landladies.

I was in a house or a large Reed College Old Dorm Block style building.  I have a vague sense that this was a Doctor Who episode -- in the dream I wasn't quite me, and I wasn't quite The Doctor.   The layout of the house was short halls and suites of smallish rooms.   The floors were wood and the walls were brick.  As the dream progressed the setting changed from slapped-together 60's decor to Edwardian.

One of the rooms in the house was The Room of Prophesy.  I entered the room, and presently was joined by an older man (who was probably Doctor Who).  In the room was a day-bed with a dark brown quilt on it, decorated with a goldenrod colored fine vine filigree pattern.  The Edwardian decor kicked in very strongly at this point.  

Sitting on the day-bed in Edwardian dress was a twenty-something woman.  Her dress and bonnet were mostly brown, with darker brown piping.  Sitting next to her, or on her lap, was a eight-year-old boy.  He was sucking his thumb, and tied to his thumb was a white string that floated out of his mouth and disappeared into the dark recesses of an open closet.  

At some point, I made the mistake of closing the door to the Room, trapping myself and my older guide in the room.  We were stuck there.  Also in the room were tokens representing the Twelve Days of Christmas (yes, I'm still working on that particular Art Project), which we tried to use to open the door, but it remained fast.  

At last the door opened and a female companion poked her head in.  She wanted the Room of Prophesy to show her the father of her child, which is why she opened the door.  We gratefully exited and the dream went on to other things.

When I woke up enough to remember the dream, but not enough to actually rise, I tried to figure out how to make this a story.  The Room of Prophesy is fun, but as story characters, I wasn't able to solve the problem (getting out of the room) by myself.   And plot-wise, it's the dreaded, "two characters in a room talking" pitfall.

The string leading into darkness was very much like the string leading to darkness image I got once while skydiving, which in turn I first saw on a creepy "Alive from Off-Center" show involving marionettes.  In the show, the strings connected the puppet to the puppeteer, but the puppet only saw them disappearing into darkness.  During the skydive, I couldn't remember how to do a back-flip, and the image of a string leading into a dark hole superimposed itself over my vision (I think it was my brain trying to tell me, "Look, I have no idea what this 'backflip' thing is you keep repeating at me as we're falling 80 mph 5000 feet above the ground.")

Eye of Horus Render

Ah, Blender. I've missed you.  Here, have an Eye of Horus SVG file to render.

Wow.  That worked whole lot more effectively than wiggling little bits of cut-out paper in front of a camera late at night.

And Mark has is getting into his Holiday Beading thing -- now that I've got the Eye in a Blender file, I can convert it to something MakerBot could print (I'll need to add little eyelets for him to string string through...)

Sigh.  It looks like I'm reverting back to my late-night-computer sessions.  Time to get back to going to bed by 9:30 (uh oh) so I can get up early in the morning to write.

Oh!  Hey!  I could add a gear to this Eye and....

Eye of Horus

I had some unexpected time so I went to the paper shop to use their paper cutter-plotter. I plugged in my Eye of Horus design.  I made a few eyes and a "St Teresa of Avila" style display frame. Unfortunately, after I got home, the large eye slipped behind a base-board heater and got a little bent.  I'm flattening it under a huge stack of books, so maybe I'll get better pictures tomorrow.



Mark insists this is a Free Mason symbol.  It's not exactly....  Well, OK, it does look like something from a Laura Croft movie.... Hmm, I was going to take this to work for my Shrine to Tea.




Oh well.  I can feel my Psychic Powers growing. That'll come in handy when I'm dealing with Graduates of the Eugene Psychic Friends Network School of Driving.

Willamette Street Archeology

 The city is altering Willamette Street.  It's part of the annual construction which turns Eugene into a giant Mille Bournes game.





 From about 1910 to 1950 (dates very approximate) there used to be a mule-drawn trolley which ran from the Willamette River up to a lumber depot or train stop somewhere along 30th street. 




 At some point the mules were replaced with an electric motor.  Eventually, the trolley topped running.  There are other parts of Eugene where you can see the old rails, but on Willamette Street, they were paved over.






 The construction uncovered a stretch of the old line.  You can see the wooden ties underneath the old rails.







 The street used to be paved with cobblestones. 






 We couldn't tell if the rail ran down the middle of the street, or only on one side.
 What was interesting to us were the layers of different paving materials used in the second half of the 1900's.





 The gravel underneath the rails and the ties reminded me of how the Romans constructed roads.






 If the rails were running up the center of the road, then half of them have already been removed.  We wondered if some of the materials were being saved for the Lane County Historical Museum.





The rails have been in the street for about sevety years.





I wondered if any sewage or drainage lines went underneath; Mark thought none did.







In some ways, it's too bad there's no more trolley.  But given how badly the traffic backs up behind the buses.....

Paper Crafts for Mom

Last week I worked on a birthday gift for my Mom.

She has some souvenirs from a 1965-ish visit to Japan, and I wanted to make something that would go with them.

I was going for a kind of Edo aesthetic. Mark said I'd re-made a Parcheesi game board. I've never played Parcheesi, but a quick Google search shows me that he's right (now that I think about it, I've seen the board before; I've never played the game).

Undaunted I worked some more.  Mark said that the finished product had a Bauhaus feel to it.

And Mom likes it, which is what counts.

Dreams of Late

Last night my dreams took a turn for the better, but lately I have been having a series of unpleasant dreams.  

The theme of one dream last week was "The Return of the Old Gods" meets "You Don't Know Who is in the Secret Kabal (Oh, and, everyone who could be on your side hates you)."   Part of the dream must have been inspired by "The Devil-Hound of the Baskervilles," because there was a dog who was conditioned by an evil alien demon.  

At one point Dr. Who was involved.  I really need to understand what the Doctor means in my dreams, because dreams with him in them usually have a feeling of smothering associated with them.  They sometimes have elements of the Labyrinth dreams--where I am usually stuck in a confining, very narrow tangle of passage ways and tunnels.

Then there was the animals dream--where what I thought was a weasel turned out to be a kind of narrow-nosed golden retriever.  It really looked like a weasel, though.  It snuck into our house, and I wasn't pleased in a "Oh great, a wild animal is in our house" kind of way.  Then the dream house--I want to say it was made up of mostly screen doors, but I might be splicing dreams together--turned into a kind of swimming pool and snakes were wriggling out of the faucets, and I wasn't pleased in a "Oh great, water snakes in the pool I'm in."  I was sure they were poisonous.   Luckily, the weasel was a snake-eating weasel.  I'm sure this dream is about my libido, but I just don't know how.

Finally, there are the Child in Peril dreams, which are straight-forward The Child is in Peril.  These usually involve New York City windows and ledges, but the latest one involved balancing along the stair railing in my parents' house.

Last night's dream was relaxing by comparison--for much of the night I was going over my current manuscript and tweaking the text.  In waking life, someone pointed out a way I could tweak the ending, which I like, and I think I was rehearsing adding that part in.  Also, Eric WItchey spoke to the Wordos last night, and I was probably rehashing what he said.

At the end, the editing turned into registering for a convention... and the last scene involved Wonder Woman, Dracula, and a youngish Dick VanDyke as a detective chasing an evil tatoo artist.

Dracula was most likely from the post-Wordos discussion, but in the dream he was a metaphor for writing.

Bat Sphere with Light

Whew.

I've been busy, and without much time to write in the blog.  So here are some picutres.  

Mark and Jenn were over the other night and Mark suggested putting the sphere of bats under the lampshade instead of on top of it where it's been living.  

I liked the resulting shadows.  

Mark D, however, pointed out that the paper bats next to the light bulb were awfully warm.

(He also pointed out that my bats looked like dead taxidermy bats pinned to a board.)

So I took them off. We'll have to try something with a tea light.

Tea Tech Fail

One morning last week was a comedy of errors.  I got a little behind in the routine -- this is what I get for emptying out the dishwasher, I think.  I realized that I should have made my mid-morning thermos of tea, and started the water boiling just in time to have the tea ready.  I love my thermos; it can keep a whole lot of tea warm for up to about eight hours.  And its stopcock is super -- click it open and tea pours out; click it closed and the heat stays in.  

I was about to pour the tea into my thermos, when I managed to drop the stopcock for it.  It hit the floor at the right velocity and angle to burst into pieces.  I suspect that it's designed to be modular for ease of cleaning.  I gathered the scattered plastic:  The black outer ring that screws into the thermos's neck, a black axel with a jaggy coat-tree top, and a white crown gear which is part of the click.  I should be walking out the door, but instead I'm looking around for a spring which I think should be allowing the jaggy axel to push up against the crown gear -- ballpoint pens have springs, and without them the pens wont click, so my thermos uses the same mechanism.

I get down on my hands and knees looking for the spring, but I cant find it.  It's not with the crumbs under the kitchen table, or any of the chairs.  It's not under the cabinets.  It's not under the fridge.  I look some more.  For ten minutes, all the time aware that I'm getting later and later and I've got a bunch of brewed tea and no way to take it to work.  Flustered, the fall-back action is to take fresh dry loose leaf tea to work and brew it there. 

After work, I come home and go out on the deck.  It's possible the spring jumped out onto the deck and rolled between a crack.  So I look under the deck.  Which involves a lot of limbo-wiggling through dry, pokey dirt.  It isn't there. 

Dejectedly, I put the stopcock together without the spring to see just how broken it was.  

Click-click.  And. It. Works.  Click-click.  I test it a few times and it continues to work.

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

Still Life with Sky

I forced myself to get up this morning to write.  So far all I've done is make tea and look at the pre-dawn Moon, Jupiter, Sirius and Orion.  In the intervening period, the sky has grown lighter and now all I can find are the Moon and Jupiter (and Sirius if I look where I know it was a few minutes ago.

This has been the week for weddings.  Last weekend my cousin Molly got married in a Washington State Park.  This weekend my other cousin Kevin gets married in his family's vineyard.  

Now Jupiter is looking like Sirius did a half hour ago, and Sirius is a hidden blue spark twinkling above the power lines.  The Moon is a brighish sliver, which was blueish a moment ago, ad the Old Moon in Her Arms has blendied in with the pastel sky.  

The quality of the morning isn't silence, it's the small sounds in the distance.  Before the crows started calling, and the neighbor's hen decided she wanted to sound like a guy.  The whisper of semi-truck tires on the thoroughfare.  The distant thunder of a car engine.  A screen door opening, then closing.  The throb of the box fan in the house, and the flap of feathered wings.  

The sun hasn't rissen, yet; but the light in the sky jumped a notch and chased away any purples lingering in the dawn's pastels.  Now Jupiter is the hidden spark, and Sirius is an optical illusion.  

And now the birds are quiet, and the road noises are quite, and the only thing I can hear out on the deck is the quiet tap-tappnig of my keyboard and the rumble of the boxfan and 'fridge.  Surprisingly, no freight train has sounded its whistle.

I can't see -- no, wait, there's Jupiter, doing Sirius's optical illusion trick now that Sirius is done with it.  The Moon looks warmer, and there's a red tint coming up over the houses to the east.    

There isn't a cloud in the sky. I think today is going to be very warm.  

Island Strata

After my cousin's wedding, we went for a hike on the island.








We came across a cliff that had eroded.








At several points in the past, the beach must have been higher, because different layers of rock and sand were piled onto each other.







This was near a tiny waterfall--more like a water-trickle. The large stones procted the sediment underneath them from eroding.







The cliff side had been there long enough for moss to start growing on it in some places.







It was easy to imagine one was looking at Arizona cliffs. I almost expected to hear the Road Runner.

Wedding Mural

My cousin Molly painted this mural for her wedding.  It's hard to see in this photo, but it was about eight feet tall.







As soon as I saw it I recognized the four elements.  I was a little surprised, because I thought I was the Neo-Pagan in the family, and weddings usually take place at St. Mark's Cathedral in Portland. 




Molly and her wife, Janet, worked a really long time to come up with words for their wedding that would be meaningful for both of them.  When I asked about the Moon and Mercury, they said that these were the ruling planets for Cancer and Gemini.



Speaking from experience, it can be difficult some times to be in a mixed-faith marriage.  In addition to the Neo-Pagan elements, my cousin Jane sang The Lord's Prayer (another family tradition).




They did a great job giving the ceremony a NeoPagan feel without being in-your-face about it.  I think all the ritual tools were there, but at no time were the non-Neo-Pagans alarmed by an unsheathed athame during an Invokation to the East.  Instead, the quarters were summoned by the ringing of a bell.


When they get back home, this mural will go up at their business.  All the guests signed the margins.





I think the favorite line from the ceremony was after they drank ritual wine together and the officient said, "May you never thirst."

Lesbian Celtic Camping Wedding

My cousin Molly is marrying her partner, Janet, in a camping wedding.  Since they live in Washington, by noon they will be wife-and-wife.  I don't know the particulars of the ceremony other than they will have a hand-fasting, and that they will jump a broom.   To the shock of the traditionalists in the family, there will be no bagpiper--unless one gets snuck in.  In a side-conversation, it turns out that there are two traditional bagpipe songs for weddings:  Mari's Wedding, and the Lewis Clan Wedding Song.  Both are the same tune.

Most of the family has gathered in a camp site for the ceremony and party.  A few are staying in the Indian Casino about twenty-five miles away. 

There's almost tame deer living in the surrounding woods.  I thought more of them would show up for the apples the kids knocked to the ground.  The deer's shift was covered by raccoons, who visited in the night and left a trail of Wheat Thins from the picnic table to the nearby bushes.  

Saturday morning the brides were up at 7 AM moving things around.  I'm not sure why Janet had a small hatchet with her, and we were awake enough for all of us to make Norman Bates jokes.