curbside pony

I think the Portland pony/horse project motivation can best be explained as "WHY NOT?  there's a horse ring right there and I have this plastic horse in my bag!"  All I know is I've been unreasonably charmed every time I've come across one. This fine fellow is right by where I park my car when I go to work - I'm glad there's plenty of grassland for him to graze upon.

How are things ? Things are good here, except I have fallen out of almost all outward communication  apart from ACTUALLY SPEAKING to people in person. It's weird and it feels like a loss because there are things that don't really fit in to conversation or that nobody wants to talk about or are just my fleeting interests or whatever and instead of expressing them in a blog post or email or (terrible) drawing or photograph I just breathe them in and there they stay. In some ways unsatisfying, but in other ways very nice.  Looking for a balance is what I'm doing right now.

(actually doing right now: sitting at my desk, which is covered with etsy domino debris listening to the wind howl out the window (we are having a wind storm!) thinking about how nice it is to make a blog post here about essentially nothing, but also thinking how nice it was when I went to bed before midnight last night and basically having a Ralph Wiggum moment. Goodnight!

wind farms and the C.A.R.T.

The Crazy Ass Road Trip is a longstanding tradition in my family. We did not have a lot of money when I was growing up, but that didn't stop us from having on the road adventures. (Gas was cheaper back then, and curiosity, as always, is free.) ANYWAY, what this means is I have seen many weird things that were spotted on a map and tracked down with casual yet borderline obsessive zeal. It often went something like this: "What do you suppose they mean by biggest hole/tree/ alligator/ etc.?" "We'd better go check it out. Girls, get your things." And off we'd go. None of this is really important except to give a little background by way of explanation -- when my mother says something seemingly crazy like "I want to take pictures of these county courthouses, and I want you (meaning my sister and I) to go with me," it's not as weird as it sounds. Or it IS as weird as it sounds, I'm just used to it.

These particular courthouses were in Moro, Condon (eastern-ish Oregon) and Goldendale, Washington -- east of The Dalles and west of Pendleton, more or less. It's so beautiful in such a different way than the western valleys of Oregon (where it rains -- what most people usually think of when they think "Oregon"). The normal otherworldliness of the eastern Oregon landscape was amplified on this trip because our journey took us through Wind Farm country. It was so surreal to come up over the top of a hill and see the spinning wind turbines -- unexpected, but so beautiful in its way. This particular grouping of turbines crosses state lines. I could see them all the way over on the Washington side. (Granted, the Washington side isn't far, but still!) According to the official website, this is an excellent area for wind farming due to the big sky and consistent wind (no doubt from its vicinity to the Columbia river gorge). So interesting! Here are some pictures from a one day Crazy Ass Road Trip. Most of these were taken from the car and don't really do justice to the vastness of the landscape or the COLOR. The fields were a lot more golden than they appear on camera.


(no wind turbines here, but the contrast between the hills and the clouds was spectacular in person. I took this one on the move -- I just rolled down my window and snapped.)


(!!! -- this is so pretty I almost can't stand it! No turbines here, either, but they were on the other side of the road. This is the view from the turbine side. I have to say the clouds made taking pictures easier.)


(the road. Doesn't it look like a car commercial? Did you know that they film lots of car commercials in Oregon for this very reason? I think it would be terribly fun to drive in a convertible roadster of some sort, a completely different kind of fun on a bicycle, but I can report with certainty that it is plenty of fun in a regular car. Those mountains in the distance are on the Washington side of the Columbia.)


(here they are! They seem huge from far away, and they ARE huge up close.)


(more of them -- I wish I could have taken a picture that showed how many of them there were. It was something to see.)

In non energy producing, road tripping or family story related news, there has been a chestnut escalation! Today there were TWO chestnuts on every post at the park. You wouldn't think that would make it twice as fun, yet somehow it does. (there was also a Mystery Key, but I believe it was unrelated.)