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.

Parliament Building

I fell in love with the Victoria BC Parliament Building.  

Eugene specifically and Oregon generally does not have cool buildings from the late 1800's in it; many of our cool old buildings were knocked over in the sixties, seventies, and eighties and replaced with brutalist concrete, glass boxes, or steel baskets—all of our other buildings are log cabins or cedar ticky-tacky.  

The Parliament Building looks like it came from Rigel VII, where the original Star Trek pilot was shot.  It has writhing grotesques on its pillar capitals.  Various Old Dead White Guys and Figures of Extreme Allegory stand in its niches or along its ramparts.   

Many Oregon buildings look like, to quote Frederic Edwin Church, they were built by people "whose ideal of architecture is wrapped up in felicitous recollections of a successful brick schoolhouse or meeting house or jail."  

And the Parliament Building has a library built into it in the back (the south side)!

If the Parliament Building were in Eugene, chances are good that it would have a dojo, a bellydance studio, a former womyn's bookstore, a bubble-tea place, or (most likely) a cannabis dispensary built into its back.

I circled around the building, gasping every now and then as new features came into view.  The coat of arms for British Columbia hung over the main, gated entrance: a wapati (elk) stag and a bighorn sheep supported a shield with the Union Jack and a western sun of the province.   The grotesques atop pillars enchanted me with the way the masons had carved the figures so that they wrapped around corners, but were still aesthetically pleasing seen straight on.  

Along the west side of the building there is a simple rose garden, with a sundial in the center of a circular pathway.   I really did loose track of time because there were so many details that I wanted to photograph.  

I am not sure why taking photographs of interesting buildings brings me so much pleasure.  Part of it is recording an interesting array of geometric shapes and artistic designs.  It feels similar to how I feel photographing raptors or art in the Metropolitan Museum; part of which is the pleasure of curation—and in the case of the raptors is the desire to create hieroglyphs and other designs from patterns in nature.  Perhaps love of photographic buildings comes from hanging out with architects in the early 1990's, or maybe I'm stocking my mental store of places to use in story.  

I circled around to the north side of the building, where I had started.  I overheard a tour guide say that it was 11 o'clock, which meant that I might have (okay definitely) missed the Water Taxi Ballet.  

Travel By Water

Sunday morning we arose early and caught the Port Angeles Black Ball Line Ferry, the Coho, to Victoria BC.  I should chime in at this point and say that although we used the controversial ArriveCAN app to tell the Canadian government about our travel plans and COVID status, at no point during our travels did anyone ask to see the QR code the app produced for our clearance credentials.  ArriveCAN apparently has the Canadian media and regional boarder folks in a tizzy; using it a day or two before we actually left was irksome, but not the travel deterring angst-fest it's being made out to be—but then again, we weren't just waking up and deciding to drive across the US-Canadian border for High Tea on a whim.

The Child would have loved the Black Ball Ferry because Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters sing a 1950's style jingle about it, which the Coho played going into and out of port.  We were incredibly lucky with the weather:  the waters were very calm whenever we were afloat and the temperatures during our visit didn't rise much higher than the mid-eighties.  Along the thirty-mile trip through the Straight of Juan de Fuca, we saw orca whales in the distance.  

Pulling into Victoria, the modern apartment buildings along the shoreline surprised me; it looked like Portland.  I was expecting more castles or old-timey barbarian (not barbaric) splendor.  I mean, it's Canada; a foreign country; and Victoria's a place more English than England—where was the charming peasantry and why were there no ancient, crenelated gun towers or at least a trebuchet or two?  The recording of Bing and the Andrews Sisters was nice, but subconsciously I was expecting a production number out of the Wizard of Oz, like the Winkie Guards' Pike Dance outside the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West.  Then a sea plane took off out of the harbor docks and flew overhead and I spent the next five minutes with the opening credits scene from Fantasy Island in my head.  So there was that. 

When we sailed into the inner harbor, the Empress Hotel came into view.  It looks similar to depictions of Hogwarts School, only with far fewer towers.  Bits of the Parliament Building were also visible, so Victoria was redeemed as a Truly Foreign Place.  

As we debarked from the ferry, we saw the Water Taxies warming up for their semi-regular Water Taxi Ballet.  Not quite a Pike Dance, but still entertaining.  The ballet wasn't set to start for about twenty minutes; Mark suggested I could go take a look at the Parliament Building... and I walked over... and I started taking photographs... completely lost track of time... and missed the ballet in its entirety.  (I was in trouble for that one; it didn't help that our cell phones were confused by being 30 miles away from the US, so no one had been able to reach me while I was snapping pix.) 

Port Townsend

On our way to Victoria, BC, we stopped in Port Townsend.  After visiting the local lighthouse and old World War II fort, we made our way to the old downtown for dinner.   This required navigating around a music festival.  We didn't have to be anywhere, really; the ferry left from Port Angeles early the next day, so all we had to do was eat and then drive to our hotel room in Sequim WA (where they were about a third of the price of the ones in Port Angeles).  

We found a restaurant called "Siren"; I wound up ordering fish and chips, I forget what Mark and Nancy ordered, but the food was good.  The most amusing thing about the restaurant was that all of the tables on the outside balcony were swathed in large, hexagonal umbrellas:  this was to protect them from seagull poop.  

Afterward, we wandered into a jewelry shop.  The shop owner commented that she thought we knew each other from somewhere; I'd have to agree, but we didn't know where.  She was a Eugene Country Faire regular, so maybe that was it.  

That was the funny thing about Port Townsend, I kept seeing people who looked vaguely familiar—perhaps it was a Small, Liberal Town in the Pacific Northwest Filled with Middle Class White People Thing.   Mark purchased a sparkly orange/red vest from Sri Lanka.

The old part of Port Townsend had many buildings from the later part of the 1800's, so there were lots of cool fiddly-bits on the buildings.  I like how buildings from this era have the mark of their craftsmen upon them in the column capitals or in the keystones of arches or the weaving patterns set into brick.  There weren't any gargoyles or grotesques that I could find, which was too bad, but there was still a rich vocabulary of place there.   (Eugene, alas, lost a lot of its distinctive Victorian architecture during a period of urban renewal in the 1980's.)  

What caught my eye architecturally were the sandstone capitals from the old city hall:  they reminded me of some similar capitals in New York City, and I wondered how much of the similarity was because they were carved by the same artisan or if there was a common booklet of carvings that masons in the late 1800's used.  

Looking back at my old photos (see the dragon, below), I see that the carvings are different enough that they probably aren't the same craftsman... but maybe they're from the same workshop?  I don't know; the similarities are there, but they were more prominent in my memory than they are in the photos.