shine on

The moon is so full and right out my window - right out my window! (I just pinched it with my fingers.) Is the man in the moon singing the same song as me? It sort of looks like a flashlight - does that mean there's a sky detective investigating? ("Not to worry, miss. Sky detective is on the case.") Gigantic Nancy Drew and/or Hardy Boys? Can I claim tax exemption for my new religion?

Maybe this is too much wondering about a regularly occurring celestial event, but it's been raining a lot and now it's not and wow is it beautiful. I'm going to pinch it again.

gouge eye v. the rancher’s daughter

This is Starvation Creek, which is at the bottom of Starvation Falls. I think it’s so pretty! I’m finding that it’s really hard, at least with my camera and level of skill, to get a good picture once I'm in the forest. This isn’t even that deep in - it’s a highway rest area, for crying out loud! (and state park, and hooked into a series of trails but I digress...) It’s dark in there, is what I’m saying. Not dark as night dark, but the light is very green since it’s filtered through a lot of trees. I like how this one turned out.

How did Starvation Creek get its name? Let’s consult the experts. Here’s the Oregon Geographic Names book entry on the falls (since the creek isn’t listed in the edition I have): STARVATION FALLS, Hood River County. These falls were so named because it was at this place west of Dog (Hood) River that a party of pioneer travelers suffered because of some defection in their commissary.

I love the Oregon Geographic Names book, which is not only fantastic for finding out how things got their names, but also features the opinionated dry wit of the “compiler.” The edition I’m looking at right now is the 3rd, and used to be my dad’s so there are notes and arrows all over it. For example, here’s one with an arrow for the town of Drewsey:

DREWSEY, Harney County. Abner Robbins started a store at this place in the summer of 1883 and called it Gouge Eye, apparently to commemorate the frontier method for settling disputes. About a year later Robbins applied for a post office, but postal authorities were reluctant to accept the original name, so he substituted a new name, Drusy. Eventually the office was named Drewsey. Oregon, End of the Trail (Oregon Guide), page 468, says the new name was in compliment to Drewsey Miller, the daughter of a rancher. In 1926 the compiler was told the name submitted to Washington was Drusy, which authorities changed to Drewsey. Drusy seems more like a girl’s name. The Oregon Guide calles the name Gouge Eye unpleasant, but the compiler thinks it a stout, picturesque bit of nomenclature, much better than some of the gutless expressions of today.


GREEN! many textures, many shades of green on one tree.


Doesn’t it look like this tree is out for a stroll? I’m pretty sure it was still moving when I took this picture, only it’s moving in tree time (like bullet time in the Matrix, only MUCH SLOWER).

These photos are all from Martina’s celebratory birthday day trip out the gorge.
more to come - I haven’t even gotten to the peacocks yet. (or stonehenge!)

like this a lot

Yours Truly Presents: The Morning Benders "Excuses" from Yours Truly on Vimeo.

I love this Morning Benders video - it's been weeks since I first saw it and I still wake up with this song in my head all the time. Apparently my sleeping mind is a fan of the wall of sound style! I'm also fond of the video for the idea of gathering ones musical contemporaries, friends, friends of friends and that one guy you met that time and making something beautiful. Here's what this video, with its assemblage of beardy and non beardy guys, long haired and short haired girls, smiling and serious strummers and drummers and singers, makes me want to do: assume that every single person I cross in my everyday wanderings is on their way to meet a bunch of other people and make something AMAZING. (they could also be on their way home or to their studio or town square to make something amazing by themselves!)


(...visual segue...)

I AM SO TIRED! So tired. This week kicked my ass. The good news is that my blackberry scratches are just past the itchy stage and therefore about to disappear and I have the next 2-3 days off from work. I have a lot (A LOT) of things to catch up on. I'm going to drink water and sleep in and be industrious!

p.s. here are two things that made me happy just yesterday:

lightning cat vs. the iceland volcano

"Occasional lumpiness has its charm, but do we really want to be less sassy than our Victorian ancestors?" (fishnet socks!!!)

blackberry warrior

THE SUN IS SHINING. I just came in from a vigorous and hard fought blackberry battle. (I try to pull them up by the roots, they try to peel the flesh from my bones. We're pretty evenly matched, although I think they have a slight runner root advantage on my 'I will beat you with a shovel!' technique.)

As it turns out, there's a lot more garden once it's not covered in blackberry. This is good news because I just bought one of these yesterday:

It's not going directly where the blackberries are, but like everything else lately in order to do one little thing I have to do 15 other things first.

three things about monday

1. I ate a miniature cupcake in honor of Beverly Cleary's 94th birthday. The library I worked at is in Ramona Quimby's neighborhood, so naturally there was a party. There were mini cupcakes, stickers, many rounds of Happy Birthday, and some sugared up but smiling parents and children.

2. April is national poetry month - I signed up to get a poem a day for the month and today's was lovely: a dream language adventure that spans continents and seasons in one short prose poem. Read it here: Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea by Cecilia Woloch. "My own bags were full of salt, which made them shifty, hard to lift."

3. I want to see this Edwardian lady adventurer movie right now - she definitely looks capable of thwapping someone (be they man, mummy, or flying dinosaur) with a parasol. After I watched this trailer the first time I thought "hey! this reminds me of The Professor's Daughter," but then saw that Adèle Blanc-Sec has her own comics of extraordinary adventures. Wikipedia describes her as "A cynical heroine, she is initially a novelist of popular fiction, who turns to investigative journalism as her research and subsequent adventures reveal further details of the mystical world of crime." Subsequent adventures! Mystical world of crime! Must learn more. (do you think they'll reissue because of the movie?) This looks to fill an Indiana Jones shaped hole in summer movie viewing.

pyxie cups

In the learn something new every day category, I discovered that these little stylish plant dudes are called pyxie cups or goblet lichen. Now I know! Here's some more info:"Pyxie cup or Goblet Lichen is common on rocks, soil, and rotten wood. This lobed, scaly thallus has stalked, upright cups (to 1 in.)... Many varieties in N.A."

I found this out while flipping through the freaking adorable Golden Nature Guide (non-flowering plants), which I found at the Friends of the Library sale today for a QUARTER. (it was half off day.) It's such a great little book - I love the illustrations. It is now my goal to find all the Golden Nature Guides - I love having something to look for at book sales.

Here's a picture of the cover of my 1967 edition. SO CUTE! How did it last to the second day of the sale?

(do you suppose there are ever any lichen misunderstandings?)

crazy person: I'm a lichen
innocent bystander: a lycan? like a werewolf or something? (mimes scary werewolf face and claws)
crazy person: no, a LICHEN. (does best lichen impression which isn't very good)
innocent bystander: I think that might even be worse.
crazy person: it is, it is. There are no books or movies about sexy lichens, that's for sure. It's hard out here for a fungus and symbiotic algae. That's what a lichen is you know.
innocent bystander: indeed. (flees)

here's some further LICHEN INFORMATION, because The More You Know and all that jazz... Under the chapter heading of LICHENS I learned that "Lichens are pioneer plants which usually grow where other plants do not furnish competition. ... These slow-growing, long-lived, sun-loving plants flourish in cold, dry climates, in forests and on mountains--wherever the air is clean and unpolluted. Reindeer and caribou eat some lichens; extracts from a few species are used as antibiotics. The best known use of lichens has been in making dyes for Harris tweeds and for litmus paper."

HARRIS TWEED! LITMUS PAPER! This is the kind of bizarre fact I'm delighted to know. Thank you Golden Guide.

project status report

Hello internet! I’ve fallen so far behind on things I wanted to post and do - I kind of made a deal with myself that I would stop talking about all the stuff I haven’t done and just DO IT, but it was stressing me out. Apparently keeping a complaint vent open is IMPORTANT or there will be a complaint explosion that will take out a city block AND a country mile. So the way I see it, it’s my duty as a sometime citizen of crazy-town to vent the reactor core! or you know, consequences.

So here’s my keeping myself honest project post of THE TRUTH, mostly unvarnished. (I never hear about the varnished truth or the lacquered truth, but have heard the liquored truth. If I had a Truth Detective on retainer, I’d get him on the case.)

project status report:

bookcase project: The new bookcases are in place and mostly arranged. It’s the mostly part that bothers me here - why not spend the couple of hours it would take to finish this project? good question. I’m very pleased with how the project went so far, so why not be REALLY PLEASED and finish it? It’s like I exist to irritate myself.

quilt I started at the end of last year: I have been working on this! Again, a couple of hours would probably get the top finished, and for me that’s the hard part. Once the top is as big as I want it, the rest of it is more or less not a problem because the decision making is done.

blog book reviews/movie reviews: I used to talk about books, movies and tv a lot more here and I miss it. I got burned out when I tried to talk about EVERY SINGLE book I’d read in a year so I quit, but now I’m having a hard time easing into a middle ground. Same thing with movies (although I never talked about every movie) - but I think it would be fun to make a record of it all, even if it’s just a weekly list. Not everything has to have it’s own review or mini-review - I know this! I just need to figure out how to relay this information to that part of my brain. (see above, re: existing to irritate myself.)

NaNo 2009: Yes! I completed another year. And by completed I mean I reached 50k words on the last day, then dropped it like something heavy. As I keep doing this (4 times now), I do think I’ve learned a lot - this one was closer in tone to what I was attempting than any of my previous efforts, which is progress. This project/process brought home that it's good for me to dive right in and get to work, but I also need some time to think about what it is I want to do. Some decisions can be made on the fly, but not all. The deadline is key for me getting any work done at all - this urgency is something I need to be able to generate within myself but haven't quite figured out how. (so annoying!) I also need to develop my outlining skills or at least figure out a way to pair my mostly intuitive story instincts with a way to keep things moving forward. Short targets, or something. Which brings me to…

Script Frenzy 2010: I had ZERO plans to do this. I was encouraging Maggie to do it and she said “you should do it too!” and since I was just saying that I needed external deadlines because otherwise I transform, transformer style, into Endless Excuseatron, I said OKAY! Woo! I’m glad I did, even though I have no idea what I’m doing and it’s hard and makes me a little nauseated when I realize how much I don’t know what I’m doing and, and, and. I could go on and on. I’m really uncomfortable and embarrassed (who am I to try this?) and in a general state of low-level panic. But weirdly enough, this is all good - I don’t push out of my comfort zone often enough, and this is… if my comfort zone was the sun, this project is one of those cold little rocks out by pluto. BUT (I’m saying “but” a lot) I can already tell that this is going to help me with my outlining problem. So, I give a queasy right on to this project. I think the NaNo people maybe need to make a Poetry writing month for their next endeavor. Yeah!

ANYWAY. Confession is good for the soul or something like that. Just writing this out I can see I have a problem finishing things. Most likely for the typical boring reason that if it’s done everyone can see that it sucks, whereas if it’s in process I can just say “shut up! it’s not done.” Or, as is my usual practice, I never tell anyone what I’m doing so I don’t even have to say “shut up! it’s not done.” ha ha ha! Oh, man. Onward!

hello, springtime

Here's the thing I've decided: I've got to be better about managing my time. I can do it! I just need to ... do it. I see a lot of concentrated Freedom in my future.

Anyway - here are some springtime pictures. I'm posting them NOW because it's still springtime, although maybe not quite the exact same phase of spring as it was when I took these photos. Close enough, I say.


Wheeee! I took these out of the passenger seat of a car in one of the less attractive parts of town. You'd never know it was all gas stations and parking lots looking here, though.


... see what I mean? (I still love those trees! I love that they're standing for beauty and biology against an ugly bank of america sign.)


!!! This plant still makes me crazy in the good way. Pink bleeding hearts (smaller, more feathery foliage) are native to this area and I love those too, but these are just too much. (not really too much - they are just exactly enough.)


I can't remember what kind of tree these petals came off of, but I like the way they look against the sidewalk. Nature's confetti!


This tree is at the park I go to the most often. It really doesn't look like much 11 months of the year, but that 12th month is spectacular. It's light pink, but looks more white here against the cloudy sky.


slightly pinker, here.

so much it hurts

I know this is last week's news, but I'm so excited for the Scott Pilgrim movie - I wasn't sure about it until I saw the trailer (below):


...and now I can't wait! I guess the good thing is it gives me time to reread all the books. You should check them out if this clip looks at all funny/awesome/both to you - the tone is very similar. Go here or here (or both if your clicky finger is itchy) to find out more about the series. Go here to see who's in the movie. (Anna Kendrick as Stacy Pilgrim seems perfect, if the 2 seconds she's in the trailer are any indication.) All that, plus Beck wrote the songs for Sex Bob-Omb. (!!)

elementary, my dear watson

there is some kind of night chirping bird in the tree right outside my window. I think he's sending morse code to the moon (which is full and surprisingly visible considering how much it's been raining) or to another bird, or maybe he's just reciting his to do list ("wake up early for MORE WORMS!") or something like that.

Now the bird sounds like he's making fake bird calls! like in some broad teen comedy where the well-meaning but lunkheaded football player is teamed up with the nerds for whatever reason and he's hiding in the shrubbery trying to give a signal. It's supposed to sound like a whippoorwill, but because he is "hilariously" inept and too big for the bushes, he sounds like a startled chicken with a megaphone. Except my bird does sound like a whippoorwill and not at all like a football player or a chicken with a megaphone. Oh, wait! I just looked it up - we don't get whippoorwills here (I just love typing the name), so it's some other night singing bird but still not a lunkheaded jock trying to signal some nerds from the shrubbery. How do I know? NO SHRUBBERY.*

(photo taken tonight in photo booth of flowers picked this evening. they smell so good!)

(*okay, there is some shrubbery, but it's totally not the kind of shrubbery I was imagining and is therefore ineligible.)

exactly what to wear

Pajamas make Jehovah's Witnesses move faster. Pajamas at 10:30 AM, anyway. I heard a bang bang banging at my front door - I thought 'TIS UPS AND NOTHING MORE. (UPS/Fedex doesn't care if you come to the door in an extra tall experimental turban or pajamas or whatever.) But no! It was an old white guy in a stetson hat wearing a big belt buckle and an even bigger gut, holding a stack of tracts and dealing some fast, no eye-contact patter about something big happening on Sunday SUNDAY SUNDAY. This was without a doubt the quickest JW meeting I've ever had. It's a pajamas miracle! (Because I'm not a door slammer even when people are selling something I'm not interested in, it's usually hard to get away without at least a little awkward chitchat while they attempt to determine if my immortal soul is up for grabs.)

ANYWAY. Today was so gorgeous! it was sunny and 70 degrees and I'm glad I enjoyed it while it was here because now it's raining. I took these pictures this afternoon around 5pm when the sun hit just the right spot. I had to roll around on the ground to get to proper daffodil level, which on the one hand was great because the grass was just mowed and it was a beautiful sunny day, but on the other hand was somewhat awkward because there was a boring man taking a boring interminable phone call on the sidewalk. I thought GO AWAY with all my might, but he outlasted me. Not before I got these, though.

springtime color, sunday report

Happy Spring! Yesterday (first day of spring) was AMAZING. More on that soon. There were peacocks.

I think I'm at the last stages of this neverending cold. Woo! I'm to the part where my brain is more or less operational, but still marinating in snot. (I know this is gross, but sometimes the truth is gross.) Anyway - along with many crumpled tissues comes a weird kind of focus, which I used to get some etsy stuff done that I've been putting off forever.


My etsy expectations are limited: I sell things on there to fund my paypal account, which I use to buy things on etsy - mostly gifts, but stuff for me too. Since I've released myself from the burden of "developing a brand" and "search engine optimization" and so on, I make things when I have time or feel like it, then take pictures when I have time or feel like it. Lots of people have done very ambitious things using etsy, but it takes a lot more work than I'm willing to do. This was a relief to realize! I think I'm warped from all my years working in the craft industry - it's hard to break that "can I sell it?" mindset, which I find really limiting to the creative process, especially when I want to make something weird. Not that I think these little magnets are particularly weird, but I like making them because despite using rubber stamps, no two are alike. I also like the small size, which limits how fussy I can be.


The craft industry mindset that I'm talking about is one that makes it hard to make ONE NECKLACE to wear instead of developing a whole bunch of them and some kind of assembly line process to put them together. Does that make any sense? I think I'm finally working my way out of that particular bramble. I know I want to do more sewing (FOR ME) and maybe get out some supplies and start making a necklace a week just to see what happens. I have a lot of supplies, but my taste has changed quite a bit since I acquired most of them. It could be interesting.


I have a lot of respect for people who do pursue their etsy ambitions - there are so many talented people selling on the internet! It's just not where I want to put the focus of my creative work right now. So much of craft success on the internet is marketing and that's not where my strength or interest lies AT ALL. I'm a craft dabbler and that's okay.


boy, do I like taking pictures of colored pencils!


Hey, we can pretend that determined woman above is Nancy Pelosi, pushing through legislation! Congratulations and thank you, Speaker Pelosi for pushing on healthcare reform. It's not perfect, but this uninsured taxpayer appreciates the bill as a good place to start.


green pencils for spring!

tattoo case file no. 23

A tween girl in a short sleeved top comes to the counter with a man of late middle age. She has a large heart drawn on her upper arm in blue ink filled with the words EDWARD SUCKS. He’s checking out some things I presume are for him (books about fishing) and some things I presume are for her (YA stuff). She makes sure he asks about renewing items and is particularly concerned about a Stephenie Meyer book called The Host. Everything renews. She makes sure that I know she’s already read it. I wonder if he’s her grandfather, her uncle, her father - maybe she’s the third youngest of 12 children, maybe he had children later in life, maybe he had children very early in life. Maybe she’s been sent from home to stay with family for an extended period of time. Maybe they’re neighbors and there’s some intricate deal in place where she agrees to hang out with his socially awkward daughter at school if he agrees to check out the vampire books her mom won’t let her read. But that’s not the part of the mystery that’s plaguing me: What does she mean by EDWARD SUCKS? She loves him (the heart) but acknowledges Edward sucks because he’s a vampire and that’s not just his nature but his PHYSIOLOGY? Edward sucks because he’s super lame and she’s an ironic bic pen tattoo artist?

sick day survey

I'm having a sick day today. I've caught some stupid cold which includes a noisy wet cough which means Resting with a capital R is about all I'm good for. The good news is that Resting with a capital R is the perfect state for watching french movies in the middle of the day! I'm awake enough to read subtitles, but too tired to be fidgeting about the things I think I should be doing.

FRENCH MOVIE FOR TODAY: Rules of the Game. I've never seen it - but since the list of movies I've never seen is so much longer than the list of movies I have seen, there doesn't seem to be much point in being embarrassed about it (although sometimes I am). Here's the trailer:



NETFLIX LOVE, YES OR NO?: yes! I just sent back The Hurt Locker and the Invention of Lying and expect to get Up in the Air and Good Hair today. As great as this is (I've been out of touch with recent movies for a long time), I find that I really love the Watch Instantly section - so much good stuff on there, both new and old. (I got a roku, which means I can watch it on my TV - this is how I'm going to watch Rules of the Game.)

READING: Today I'm reading Heat Wave by "Richard Castle" - yes, it's a tie-in to the television show. Let's just say that in my imagination Richard Castle, TV novelist, writes better novels than this. However, the book is short so I'll finish it - it'll either get better or be over. (this is a motto I try not to extend to much else, though.) Maybe it's fine for what it is - I don't read a lot of crime fiction anymore, so I'm probably not the best objective judge. Although it's not really fair to compare it to other crime fiction, since it's a novel within the world of a TV show that's based on characters within that TV show allegedly written by one of those characters, but we all know it's not since... I need more drugs.

(this book is behind one of my favorite patron moments at the library - a guy came in with the book, which he LOVED, and demanded to know where the rest of the Richard Castle books were. Of course, there are none (yet), but in the world of the show there are a lot of them. He didn't respond to my attempts to explain, so I sent him to the reference desk in the hopes that they could sort it out without anyone feeling stupid.)

oops! it is time for cold medicine, lunch and a movie.

p.s. Leslie is in Belize writing vacation haiku! This may be my new favorite form of travel writing.

p.p.s. New Lost tonight!

spring forward

These pictures are from a walk to the park on March 4th. My paternal grandfather was born on the 4th - he always used to tell us that it was the only date that was also a command. MARCH FORTH. (he was also, among many other things, a gold medal flirt and an encyclopedia salesman. I suspect one contributed to the success of the other.)


Is it weird to admit that I prefer walking when it's kind of raining and a little cold? It justifies wearing a jacket, which means I have a pocket for my camera.


I used to try and frame pictures with no power lines showing, but I've decided now that I kind of like them.


QUESTION: Will it rain with sharp needle raindrops? Will the sun shine? Will there be mist?
ANSWER: probably.


You can't really tell in this picture, but these daffodils are INCHES AWAY from a very busy street. I like that about them. There they are, doing their daffodil thing (being yellow, nodding to passerby, cheering all but the blackest hearts) right next to rushing traffic. These are front line daffodils! Sure, they're in a garden bed, but it's not in the safe zone! It's out where the action is happening - photosynthesizing in front of THE BUS. Top that, pampered daphne in the back yard.


This was at the end of my street on my way home - I almost fainted it was so pretty. (this is a LIE. I didn't faint or almost faint, but I did catch my breath and sort of jump around a little like I bumped into an electric fence.)


Right?


This was less than 30 seconds and 5 feet from the previous picture. I love that crazy flat grey! The sky moves fast - It goes from glum to glorious, from rain to radiant, from blah blah to bleep bleep in NO TIME FLAT.