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.

Anxiety Dreams

Not up so early this morning.  I'm working on a short story that is done enough for a reading tonight, but really not quite finished (it wants to be too long for the reading), accordingly, in the dream department:

I dreamed that Peter Gunn (the one from Carleton College) and I were late to a History Class being taught by my Middle School History teacher.  What I remember was that people were performing presentations, on the Civil War, I think.  And then there was a test.  When I got my test back, I had an "F".  I looked at my answers, which seemed more or less correct, but I'd been marked down rather arbitrarily based on the teacher's obscure formatting rules.
"Well," he said, "It's OK, entertainment isn't your strong suit."
I was upset, and must have been awake enough to be annoyed that a twenty-five year old me could fail a Middle School History class, and now I was going to have to go to the principal's office to get the grade changed to Pass/No Pass to try to salvage my GPA.

No, I haven't just started a new job.  That couldn't have anything to do with it.



There was another dream, which mostly involved taking a bus tour--I think... there might have been much more.  The only thing that I really recall was that a small black bat flew from a red barn, into the bus, and between my Mother and her friend, J.D., then sort of crawled along the back seat, over my shoulder, and back out the bus.  Maybe the bus was a van, because the side was open.  There was a short discussion about how some people would over-react.  (I'm guessing the cat was active during this one.)

Fortune Cookies and Dreams

Today is my first day back at the UO English Department as a technology consultant.  I'm looking forward to re-joining the team because they appear to still have a friendly esprit de corps.  Coincidentally, I got a fortune from a cookie last night which seems apropos: "You will be soon be part of a team.  Work cooperatively for success."  (Yes, there's an extra be in there.)

Last night's Chinese food probably is the source of the non-stop dreams I had...


I was working on a play.  All I can remember at the time was that I had written it, it involved a mailbox, and I'm guessing that it was supposed to teach astronomy.  I was working under a deadline, throwing all sorts of things together, and I needed an iMac with which to print the script for the rest of the small cast and also 3D print the mailbox.

The iMac I wanted to use belonged to another IT department (this was an amalgam department, which, now that I think about it, was housed in the rocky foundation of the Very Large Gazebo (which was possibly also a library or bookstore).  There was a kind of hand-shake agreement that I could borrow iMacs, but someone in the other department made a sudden decision that I wouldn't be able to.  I was furious.

So, I had to improv my one-man play (OK, there was an assistant).  Without a 3D printed mailbox.  I gave a lecture about the rotation and orbit of the Earth and how it produced the seasons, spinning a large multi-colored umbrella for the earth while I walked around my lovely youngish female assistant who held a beach-ball sun.  The lecture was delivered in Mock-Swedish, ala The Swedish Chef.

---

There was a break. I was climbing a mountain with Mark (or at least it started out Mark, but over the course of dream events we changed into other characters).  We got to the top, and it was snowy.  I don't recall why we were there: if it had started out as a regular hike, or if we were exploring a jungle, or if we had crashed on an island or what.  We decided to rest, and spent a lot of time trying to find a comfortable position to sleep (I wonder if I was tossing in my sleep, as the rocks and snowdrifts weren't all that cold, and seemed too easily moved; sort of like pillows).

Presently, there was someone singing "Where Are the Simple Joys of Maidenhood." and the upshot was that I was alternately a disembodied third-person observer or a twenty-something beardless man with longish curly hair.  There were two women climbing the mountain, an older matronly woman and a younger maiden.

I don't recall, but somehow we ended up in the roaring river which was suddenly there.  I guess I must have recalled that we were supposed to be on a mountain, because after flowing through some mountainy-mesa-y valleys, the river plunged over a cataract (one of three) and into a pool.  The matron was swept over the cataract, screaming, and into a clear blue pool in a very deep caldera.  Oddly, she wasn't drowned or smashed to pieces.  The waterfall, it turned out, was pouring over a lava vent, so there was hot lava at the bottom of the pool, and ash collecting on its rim.  Oddly, she didn't boil to death; so the water temperature must have been just right (snow run-off plus hot lava equals ashy hot-tub?)

---

Another break.  The maiden and I (as twenty-something) were in a wooden kind of house built into the side of the cliff next to the waterfall.  We were looking for someone.  I am not sure if the matron was with us, or stuck in the pool, or if we were trying to work our way down the house so we could get to the pool, or if we were trying to find a Dr. Livingston character.

In any case, the twenty-something went downstairs, where jungle natives blew air-darts into him.  (I must have dreamed about blow-darts earlier, because they seemed familiar somehow.)  He passed out and woke up with everyone in an overgrown, bushy, scrub-oak jungle.  There was a voice-over about gentle natives meeting brutal Europeans, the resulting conflict, and now how the gentle natives were angry vindictive natives who shot people.  Cue the parting bushes.  Cue a rifle barrel point out...

And I woke up.

Vacation Report

We're back from a visit to the Stout Redwood Grove, near Crescent City, and the Oregon Caves.

We camped for two nights in the Patrick Creek campground.  One of the attractions was that there was no electricity, so that meant there weren't a whole lot of RV's with stereos and satellite TV surrounding us.  We were right on the river, and surprisingly, I didn't have dreams about waterfalls or tidal waves.  

The first night, Thursday night, was stormy.  I'd just gotten the tent set up when it started to rain in earnest.  There was thunder and lightning, which was cool.  We managed to start a fire -- I liked the grills there:  they had a corkscrew for raising or lowering the grill over the fire.

That night I did have a very long serial dream that was part Pokemon  and part Voltron, with extra vivid colors.  Mark is blaming some chocolate cake we had just before bedtime on that one.  There was a lot of flying in that dream, and I managed to remember enough of it to try to draw some of it.  The second night I slept poorly; I was looking forward to a repeat of the technicolor dreaming, but instead I hung in a kind of flat, dark awareness that didn't feel restful.

Friday we visited the Stout Redwood Grove.  The trees usually remind me of the stars because some time in the 1980's someone used the analogy of the life cycle of trees to illustrate the life cycle of a star.  I'm always inspired by the girth and height of the redwoods, and the old fallen trunks are always fun to scamper on.  It amazes me that some of the trees are 2000 years old -- I can barely believe I have memories ranging thirty years or more and I get lost in the imagining when I wonder what it could be like to be twenty centuries old.  

We stopped for milkshakes at a place called She-She's.  Somewhere Mark has a picture of us sitting in plastic chairs shaped like hands.  

Saturday, after a breakfast at the Patrick Creek Lodge (Food, Booze and Snooze), we left for the Oregon Caves.  Mark made reservations at the Chateau there.  Visiting the Chateau is a little like going back to the 1950's -- or at least the Cafe there is (OK, and our room's bathroom had a 1950's feel, as well).  We ate more hamburgers and milkshakes there in two days than I normally have in about three weeks.  The Chateau was like a smaller version of the Inn at Old Faithful. And... staying there one night was on the spendy side -- but I appreciated being able to get a comfortable night's sleep right (except when a guest was coughing her lungs out at 4AM) next to the caves. 

I took an architectural tour of the chateau, which turned out to be more historical than architectural.  

And then there were the caves.  I remember visiting them sometime around 2002, only I had mixed some of the vaults up in my memory.  I think my favorite features are the creek coming out of the caves, the soda-straw stalactites hanging in the Ghost Gallery, and the feature called Paradise Lost.  

We were lucky enough to take more than one tour (Mark took the candlelight tour).  What was interesting to us was how each ranger told different versions of the same story.  It was like the folk-process meets the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  In some stories, the bear featured in the cave's discovery is a brown bear, in others its a grizzly.  In some stories, a devastating mudslide happens in 1964, in others 1954.  In some versions of the ghost story, the hapless groom brings a pistol; in others, a riffle.  The first tour of the caves I took, the focus was on the people who had interactions with the cave during the Taft presidency.  The second tour of the caves I took was focused more on the spleliogenesis of the caves.  

Sunday, I was prowling the chateau's top floor and I managed to get some ghost stories out of the maid.  She was cleaning "Elizabeth's Room."  Elizabeth was a bride who in some stories hung herself and in others jumped out her window (roughly sixty feet up).  I heard the story about the guest who kept finding his clothes repacked in his suitcase and who was woken up by a ball of light at 2AM (he checked out right then).  I heard about the four ghost children, who alternately giggle in the night, or cry in the cleaning closet, or who tuck in other children (or maybe Elizabeth does the tucking...).  There wasn't a story about the maintenance man who apparently liked working at the chateau so much he decided to stay.

I asked the maid if she had ever seen any of the ghosts (she'd been working there for ten years) but she said that she hadn't.

And then it was time to come home.  Mark did all the driving, for which I was grateful.  

It's at a Chateau

We were lucky enough to stay at the Chateau at Oregon Caves.  I was humming the opening to "A Weekend in the Country" during our stay ("just think of it Petra / it's at a chateau..").  It's a small hotel with about twenty rooms.  The Chateau was constructed in the 1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). 


The instide reminded me a little bit of the Inn at Old Faithful.  It was dark, which encouraged looking out the large windows at the forrest outside.  There used to be a short balcony running along the west side of the building, but the snow load was too great in the winters and they were removed.  The interior was a kind of mix of Arts-and-Crafts and pioneer. 
What was amazing to me was that the hotel was in the middle of a steep ravine.  The lobby was on the street level on one of the hotel, but on the other side it was on the forth floor.  The stream from the Oregon Caves was mostly diverted around the hotel except for the bit collected in a reflecting pool uphill from the building.

In December 1964, there was a huge mudslide caused by a pinapple express melting all the snow uphill.  A seventeen foot high wall of debris barrelled down the ravine and through the hotel.  It knocked the hotel off its foundation and they had to use hydraulic jacks and chains to put it back.  As a result, there are places where the doors are not square with their jams, and if you look at some of the support beams in the gift shop, you can see they aren't square.

I think I'll live with the clay ground making our house foundation move a little.