today, the beach!

The sky was crazy, but that's fine. We all have our moments. This is Instagram processed, but the sky really did look this tinfoil color. (I have regular camera pictures to prove it, but as always those come later.)


there's a little blue here. This is facing north, the previous picture was south. It's really blown out, but that blob of white to the left of the hotel is sand, the dark splotch above is a rock/mountain/something that reaches goes right out into the water. They used to drive around it in the olden days (when the tide was out.)


This was from a part of Lincoln City called Road's End. The water was dark, but had this LIGHT coming off it anyway - maybe like a suit of armor that needs to be polished hit with a really big flashlight. (or the sun I guess if you have no flashlight poetry in your soul.)



This was the sky at around 4pm. This is a picture of the sun.

ANYWAY. Getting out of town and standing in front of the ocean was lovely as always. It always is, no matter the weather or state of the sky.


September has been my least-blogging month in years - what's up with that? I like the looks of October though, blogging wise.

battery race

I am sitting outside. There's a breeze and when I looked up just now, there was a cloud that looked like a cartoon fish skeleton. And now a giant squid. Maybe I should keep my eyes on my keyboard. Anyway - I've been such a terrible procrastinator lately I thought I'd blog race to the end of my laptop battery - because once I go inside to plug it in, I will no doubt be distracted by a million things. That's just the way of it these days.

1: See this picture over here? I read this (The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity) yesterday and enjoyed it very much. It seems like there's been a lot of media lately about reality v. fantasy and meta bleed-through from one to the other. This is sort of in that area, but also talks about fan culture - in this case of a very popular children's series coughcoughHarryPottercoughcough. 
Also something about an evil cabal strong arming writers to do their evil will... I've already put the second volume on hold because I want to see what happens next. Warning: this book is gross and gory in parts, but nothing so bad that it kept me up at night or anything. (I'm a delicate flower, re: horror.)

2: Wordstock is coming! Jennifer Egan will be there! I am excited!

3: OMG. The kindle/library lending thing just started, and it's AWESOME! It's been very easy to navigate so far, I only wish there were more available titles (which I assume time will take care of) and that there was a way to return a book early if I'm done with it so someone else could check it out. (each e-book is purchased by the library separately can only be checked out to one person at a time.)

The library's had e-books (and downloadable audio books) for a long long time, but the kindle association is new. I remember the look of total confusion on the face of a dude (who thought he had really found a way to rook the system) when I explained that he would have to wait just as long or longer for the new George R.R. Martin e-book as he would for the physical book. He thought that since it was electronic there was unlimited access! "It's just a file!" he said as a thousand publishers 3,000 miles away clutched their pearls without knowing why.   My first library kindle book: Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block. LOVE. Lanky lizards indeed.

I'm almost in the battery red! let's see... oh, yes:

4: DURAN DURAN tonight! Woooooooo! for Miz Tara's b-day. WOOOOOOOO!

oops. now it is in the red. That is all for today's battery blog race.

make two pictures and call me in the morning

I have been a lapsed blogger since my road trip return - I've also been a terrible e-mail correspondent and so on (ha ha - my fingers slipped, so first I wrote "xo on" and then it was "zo on" like my fingers want to write this with some kind of movie-fake heavy accent to distract you from my weak excuses). If I were a  blog-doctor and forced to give a diagnosis (just so you know, the blog-doctor of my imagination wears a white coat and a stethoscope around her neck), I would say I've been taking a little mind-break and that's okay. The trip was wonderful, but I think it's taken me this long to achieve my introvert-balance again. 

One of the most fun things I've done (and am doing!) since my return has been an art challenge with Martina and my sister. We took a pledge to make one new thing a day for 100 days - so far I've been doing sketches and watercolors. We've only been doing it for 19 days so far, but it is so fun! I have no expectations of myself in this arena which is TOTALLY LIBERATING. I sit down to do my thing which might lead to wondering (like today) "how the BLEEPING BLEEP am I supposed to draw ice?" and it's fun - a challenge, not a disappointment that I don't auto-magically know how to render ice in a glass or whatever.  We post them to a circle on Google +, and then I put mine into a box and that's that.  Michaels has a new line of cheapo student art supplies which makes it even easier to say "oooh, I'll try that." (watercolor set w/ 36 colors = 4.99) 

ANYWAY - all of this is to say that I think I'll be back soon with some book reviews or at least links to awesome things because I have seen so many awesome things. 

no title (the news)

• I'm reading The Big Burn by Timothy Egan (which is excellent) while the sky here in Portland is hazy from the Dollar Lake fire up on Mt. Hood. I've read past the Theodore Roosevelt/Gifford Pinchot bromance (more on that in future) and now I've read up to the middle of this raging fire. Terrifying! I can't even imagine how horrifying it must have been to have your choices narrowed to burning to death or - if you were lucky - most likely suffocating in an abandoned mine.  Fire prevention, detection, and fighting is more sophisticated now than it was in 1910, but it's still scary business. All fire-dousing thoughts to those fighting fires all over the west this summer and fall.

• Yesterday was blackberry picking day and my arms are covered in tiny scratches. Worth it, though! My sister and I were part way down a horse trail at the Willamette Mission state park when a voice asked us if we would step out of the bramble. Weird, right? Is this a stick-up? But no! It was a woman on her horse, and the horse was freaked out because he could see our bright colored shirts and couldn't tell that we were mild mannered cheapskates picking berries on public land.  We stepped out, and he was no doubt still a little freaked because of our giant bug sunglasses and shiny bowls. The horse lady was very nice and explained that the world looks different to horses. I was not offended. The horse even aalllmost took some berries from my hand, but in the end decided that he would decline all offerings from bright shirt wearing bugeye having shiny bowl holding mild mannered cheapskates. I can't say that I blame him. (although I ate the berries he rejected because those were some good berries!)  We also picked up some hazelnuts since it's getting to be that time of year and the park has a hazelnut grove. I think those will be better in a few weeks.

• I'm trying to be organized for my painting project. Instead of my usual pell-mell slapdash of rushing out to buy supplies and starting RIGHT NOW, I'm trying to plot it out. It's more complicated since I'm going to paint the floor without taking all the furniture out. I have to paint the walls before the floors, but put up baseboard (which I need to paint to match the walls) after I paint the floor. It's turning into one of those "if a train leaving at 4pm has apples on it..." kind of math problems - when I think about it too hard I just want to lie down.  One step at a time - I don't think it will be nearly so bad once I get underway.

dahlia weekend

The Dahlia festival down in Canby has been going on all weekend - I saw it on Friday, and it was truly beautiful! These are some instagrammed pics from my ipod. I have some I took on a regular camera that I will probably post at some point, but these are more timely and handy. 

I love dahlias - they are a big burst of color at the end of the summer. 

I used this instagram filter (toaster) because it reminds me of the polaroid photos my grandpa used to send us of his garden in portland. Roses, dahlias - all seemed so exotic to me in Florida, where it was mostly too hot for the old fashioned garden flowers. 

Rows and rows and rows - acres of dahlias! More information on dahlias here.

and one more! 

reading about fires and rich dudes

I'm currently reading Timothy Egan's The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America for my non-fiction book group. It's about the huge forest fire that blazed across Montana, Idaho, and Washington in 1910 and the birth of the US Forest Service.  I'd heard that it was a good book, but I had no idea how much I would enjoy it! I'm still in the early parts where he's setting the scene. I guess I really didn't have much of an image of Teddy Roosevelt except that he was a massive extrovert who carried a big stick - I'm loving this view of him as a progressive conservationist (...who also wrestles people in his underwear).

Don't these robber barons sound strangely familiar? Except now instead of being fought on behalf of the "small man," they get enormous tax breaks? Here's a quote from a section I read this morning on my break:

John Rockefeller was perhaps the richest American who ever lived. Morgan and Weyerhaeuser were not far behind, each with a net worth roughly equal to that of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, in contemporary dollars. Rockefeller had more than four times the wealth of Gates, his stake at just under $200 billion, when adjusted for inflation. As to Roosevelt's view of these men, he was rarely discreet. He called them "the most dangerous members of the criminal class, the malefactors of great wealth," in his best-known phrase, uttered during a sharp economic downturn. And he was more cutting when he really wanted to be dismissive.

"It tires me to talk to rich men," he said. "You expect a man of millions to be worth hearing, but as a rule, they don't know anything outside their own business." When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to Roosevelt's campaign, the president asked that it be returned. It was somewhat jarring, to say the least, that Roosevelt, from a wealthy New York family, and Pinchot, who had inherited a chateau with twenty-three fireplaces, had turned so vehemently against their class, envisioning the national forests as a way to "help the small man make a living rather than help the big man make a profit," as Pinchot said freqeuntly. But once engaged, they never looked back.