buxton trestle

On new year's day my sister found the Buxton Trestle on a map or in a flickr group and said "right, let's go" so we did. It was so cool! It's part of the Banks-Vernonia State Trail, which is a rail trail, which doesn't sound like the right phrase at all since it rhymes with "whale tail" but that is what they call it anyway. Old rail line, now suitable for walking, biking, equestrian-ing (what is the word for horseback riding that's not horseback riding? Is there one?).

It was still quite frosty and a little bit slippery, but the walk was very beautiful!


I like the words 'buxton trestle' together. It sounds like a location in middle earth, or perhaps where a train robbery will take place. ("If we head them off at Buxton Trestle, the sheriff won't have time to get there! yee haw!" pew! pew! pew!) This part looks a bit like an old wooden roller coaster.


We saw no hobbits or elves or dwarves or train robbers, although any would seem plausible in the setting. (I love these frozen leaves that are outlined in frost!)


Where does this road go? We only went down it part way. An adventure for another time, perhaps.



The light on this tree was MAGIC. The frost and ice that was on it was sparkling as it melted in the sun.


Some frost on the trestle itself. I love these ice crystals.


Dude riding by on his bicycle. The trestle was slippery anywhere the ice hadn't melted - this guy was riding slow and steady, but even so he slipped a couple of times. (I never saw him fall, though.)


I like this view because you can see more of the curve of the trestle. I bet it's a lovely walk in all 4 seasons. There were a number of horses around, although they're not allowed on the trestle proper. I mention this because looking at this photo has put horse noises in my ear.


Doesn't this look cold? It's the water that goes under the trestle. I'm not sure which creek this is - either Beaver Creek or Dairy Creek, I think.

All in all, a very fun fairly gentle most excellent way to spend the first day of the new year.

january first

a frosty photo for the new year.

let's look at some trees

Trees make me feel better. I think these clouds look either like they have cellulite or that they've curdled slightly, but somehow it works for them.  Curdle on in style, my friends!


Ghost tree. (Love this one - this is shooting directly into the sun.)


this one seems friendlier, which I'm sure is due to the color and the fact that it's reaching out a bunch of leaves like it wants to shake your hand. (I would be scared out of my wits within SECONDS if I was ever lost after dark in a spooky fairy tale forest.)


Cartwheel!


Shadow puppet. I'm not sure what animal it's meant to be, but that's definitely an eye in the middle.


a series of tubes.


elephant trunk


Ghost tree #2: Mossy Style

out of season

I waited too long to get started on today's post, so here's a picture I took in the summer. (well, A summer, not this summer.) It was in the teeeeny tiny town in Illinois where my uncle lives when he's not living in India. It's literally in the middle of a corn (field? grove? acres? expanse? I don't know what the official term is. But thinking about it, it must be field, right?)

ANYWAY. This was from the back yard and I like the gold of the light against the black of the shadows and the dark blue of the sky.

QUESTION

If you celebrate Christmas, are you feeling it yet? I'm having a hard time drumming up any holiday spirit, but then I think "Jen, it's only December 3rd. Chill out." That's the thought I'm going to sleep on tonight.

over the edge in a barrel (part one)

I decided to split my Niagara Falls pictures into two posts - first the blurry and atmospheric instagram snaps. These are from my trip to western New York in the summer of 2011. This tall bronze gentleman is Nikola Tesla of SCIENCE FAME. . He is reading plans and making electricity with the power of his mind! (and a hydroelectric power plant.) 

Maid of the Mist boat tour, of course. I mean, we were THERE, it seemed like a waste of 3500 miles to be there and not get on the boat. 

Which isn't to say I didn't have second thoughts when we were all lined up in our cult-y blue rain jackets (more like blue garbage bags, really). Doesn't it look like we're standing in line to be sacrificed? If I hadn't been watching fellow tourists return on boats in their protective garbage bags, maybe I wouldn't have been so blithe about stepping on the boat. 

From above - I love this picture because it looks like an old postcard. Anyway! Part two of this brief Niagara series will involve photos taken ON THE BOAT. 

laurelhurst snaps, crime solving in a wig

SICKNESS UPDATE: hee hee. Because of the photos the type starts in the middle of the page so it looks like a news crawl as I write it. The most boring news crawl of all time! Let me try again.

WEATHER UPDATE: barely raining and dark skies as befits the middle of the night in Oregon in October. 

SICKNESS UPDATE: the update above was really more of a typing update, wouldn't you agree? I'm now picturing these words at the bottom of a news program. That's a job a person could get creative with (once, for the number of seconds it would take for someone to catch me and fire me. But then I would go rogue! I would hack into the news crawl technosomething and continue!) (note: in reality I could hack my way into a barn with an axe, but that's about it. No need to worry, Northwest Newschannel 8.)  

VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE UPDATE: I know it's late days to be talking about this, but I was watching the debate while IMing with my pal Martina and we came up with this whole ENDEAVOR that seems like the kind of thing I would like to read as a news scroll at the bottom of a traffic report for example. (btw, I keep typing an 'e' at the end of bottome, like so. ye olde bottome - i don't even know.) Anyway - it started with how everyone keeps referring to Paul Ryan as being so young - since we are near the same age as he is, she suggested we become elected representatives and move to Washington DC so we, too, could be young again. I reminded her that as women, the 'young in your early 40s' thing probably wouldn't work. The Man would find a way to render us hags or harpies or whathaveyou - Paul Ryan has probably already introduced a bill that makes it so. From there it evolved into an elaborate story about how we would be Senators by day but play in a rock band at night - nobody would know who we were - yes, like Hannah Montana, but obviously different since we would also solve crimes, which maybe she did, but did she solve National Treasure-style MASONIC MYSTERIES while wearing a pink wig and carrying a guitar? while being a Senator? DID SHE? If so, I will totally track down her show and watch it. If not, keep your antennae up for news of Senators who are never available for state dinners with foreign dignitaries because they are actually in secret tunnels under the city setting traps with guitar strings and clanging bad guys with cymbals and I'm working on the rest. Anyway. It distracted me from how much I wanted to punch Paul Ryan. (I'm not proud of this violent impulse, but I'm not going to deny it, either.) 

SO, THE PARK UPDATE: My sister had the very good sense to insist on going out somewhere yesterday since it was nice. I'm still feeling sketchy, so it was a pleasant stroll around Laurelhurst park. I forgot my camera despite saying "I should get my camera" before we left. I did have my ipod, so I snapped these and I like them! The top picture is of the cedar tree and water at the northeast end of the duck pond. The bottom picture is looking up at some leaves that were half green, half yellow. I can't remember the name of the tree, but they cast the most beautiful dappled shade. 

beach feathers

hello, October! I'm uploading a backlog of photos (always a backlog) and liked these feathers from July.


I think they're splendid. They were found right in front of Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach - LOTS OF BIRDS on haystack rock.


This feather almost looks like hair, which sounds freaky when I type it out, but it's not freaky! I find it to be an elegant feather.

beach texture

Here are some beach texture photos to end the month by.  I love this one because I think it kind of looks like a map or an aerial photo, but it's just some green algae (moss? other green growing life form?) on the rocks. (Can we invent a delicious and irresistible drink called algae on the rocks? "Algae on the rocks, and make it quick!" it has a ring to it, right?)


driftwood. I think this kind of looks like a train yard, but I had to think about it for a minute. In up to the minute weather reporting, it's raining really hard right now. My Fresno aunt is visiting and I'm sure she'll have complaints about it, somehow. I love her dearly, but she tends to frame everything from a negative perspective. For example: some idiot was setting off fireworks (before it started raining too hard) and she was sure it was gunfire.



This one also seems kind of mappy to me. More of a river map, maybe.

truffle shuffle take the stairs

Hello, lovely people.  I spotted this Goonies graffiti on a concrete barrier (to keep tourists from falling to their death) at the Devil's Churn. (Devil's Churn, Truffle Shuffle - sometimes life brings pleasing phrases all at one time.)  I have no idea how or why it was there, but I love thinking about it. Maybe someone was doing a Goonies pilgrimage - the movie was set in Astoria but it was filmed up and down the north/central coast. I was hoping to see more, but this was the only truffle shuffle I came across.

In an effort to get to my bee pictures, I've been uploading a bunch of stuff that was on my camera before the bee pictures, including a May beach trip, the iris gardens, and much much more! (hee hee. more cats! But I'm trying valiantly not to post 1000 cat pictures.)

Anyway, all this to say bee pictures and pictures of other things shortly, maybe even later today.


Here are some curved stairs that sprouted out of the cliff, seemingly unattached to a beginning or an end.  I saw at least two other examples of these staircases (is it a staircase if it's just out in the open air?) in the lovely beach town of Yachats.

more wetlands

Here are the rest of the pictures from my visit to the Smith and Bybee wetlands. The sun was angled just right to get all these reflections, which I thought looked pretty creepy/cool. The path ended right here, covered in water. At first I thought it was flooded, but now I think it might just be where people put their kayaks in the water.



Bottom of a tree! Overexposed, which I fixed and then unfixed. It was one of those bright but overcast days.


Here's the sun behind a cloud with those camera marks that I hate so much. Guess what? I finally discovered what they are! It's DUST on the inner lens. It gets sucked in there when the lens extends from the body of the camera - apparently Panasonic Lumix cameras are especially vulnerable.  I found a great tutorial on youtube for taking apart my camera and cleaning things up, which I would have done already but all my tiny screwdrivers are broken. Soon!


It's this great natural wetland on one side of the road, and then industrial train yard on the other. I guess the birds are probably all used to the sounds associated with the trains. I don't think the trains care at all about the sounds the birds make.


The sun is eating these trees! This has fewer of the dust marks, but I can still see some on the left. Blue sky is THE WORST for these stupid marks to show up. I can't tell you how many photos they've ruined. But apart from that, I like this photo.

pictures from the present

The kitten is walking all over my desk (which includes all over my hands as I try to type) so this will be brief.  These photos are from TONIGHT as I took the garbage and recycling up to the curb. It's supposed to start dumping down rain again tomorrow, so this little window of evening-blue sky was much appreciated. 

 

This is the light behind the tavern on the corner. Lovely ambiance, no? I think it looks like a scene from the X-Files - like this light has been glowing suspiciously behind a house in Portland, so Mulder and Scully are dispatched to investigate.  (If only! I have been watching some X-Files on Netflix.) 

I think this blue is so pretty. 

glass ocean

Doesn't this look like a glass candy ocean filled with glass candy creatures? I love it.


These were taken at the Glass Museum in Tacoma in 2006. The museum was closed! But there was still plenty of stuff to see, obviously. Like this glass ocean and these glass creatures, the color and the light.

waterfall nebula

the Waterfall Nebula from APOD

I love browsing through NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day.

miscellaneous pictures already

dude, this posting every day thing is hard! Not that I thought it would be easy, but I didn't think I'd be whining about it on DAY FIVE. ha ha ha!

One of my plans for winter is to start taking pictures again and getting my flickr stuff sorted out a little better. I was an early flickr user, I have a LOT of pictures and have gone through phases where tagging and organizing was, uh, not the highest priority. Of course that makes it so easy to find things later on! (and it's ridiculous that I haven't done it, because flickr makes it so simple. But I digress...)

In anticipation of Getting My Shit In Order, I was poking around and found these Five Random Photos:



Busby, who even at his most sleek summer fur levels is not a small cat, essentially doubles in size in the winter. (all fur.) the colder it is, the bigger he gets. This photo was from a couple of years ago. It makes me laugh because it looks like he has no legs at all, just tiny feet sticking out from this crazy ball of fur.



This photo also makes me laugh, although I was obviously not amused when it was taken, oh so many years ago. I'm not sure if it was my birthday or my sister's birthday, but my mom used to love to get us matching smocked dresses for holidays and special occasions. Dig the braids!



From my hospital stay last year. Both the view and the morphine were lovely. I did a tag search on "windows" and found that I have named a lot of pictures "out the window" -- I could do a whole mosaic of them and maybe I will! (but I promise not to post it until January is over.)



This was just a random out the window shot on the way home from Multnomah Falls, I think. That's the Columbia river, looking across to the Washington side. The everyday scenery in this part of the world is really beautiful.



... and here is one of my early flickr pictures. I only ever joined flickr so I'd have a place to host pictures for my (practically abandoned) garden blog. Maybe I'll revive that this year too.