The Deer and the Golden Delicious

I think I hear "merci"

It started out the way most things do, innocently. I had no plans to feed the deer. I was cleaning up the orchard, collecting all the fallen, rotten apples. Some I put on the northside of the house, others I just tossed over the fence. One day there were two piles of golden delicious apples, the next day they were gone. I gathered another pile and threw them out. The next day that pile was gone.

I knew some critter would eat them, but I did not plan to feed the deer. I planned to clean the yard, the deer got fed in the process. One day I went out and the doe and a yearling were there by the fence. They watched me gather the apples. I watched them watch me. I think deer should always be spoken to in french. It has something to do with their eyes. I say, "Bonjour deer, comment vas tu aujourd'hui ? Vous avez de beaux yeux". They look at me. They like hearing the softness of french. I can tell. I toss the apples over the fence. I say, "Ces pommes sont pour vous." They walk away slowly. They stop and look over their shoulders. I wave at them and say "Bon appetit, mes amis."

I know it's wrong to feed the deer, but that's what happened. Je suis désolé.

It's Friday, and you know what that means. It's time to send your beautiful photos to Pam at Tortoise Trail. She's hosting Good Planets this month, and she'd like your photos by 9:00 pm central time Friday night. If you've got a photograph that depicts the beauty of our earth, please sent it to tortoisetrail at gmail dot com. Thanks everyone, and have a great weekend.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

The Olympic Peninsula and western Washington have been slammed by a very powerful storm. There are trees down and power outages everywhere. We went out Wednesday morning to a dentist appointment about 30 miles away. Amazing journey. Winds gusting and leaves flying. Rains battering everything. Yet, on the entire journey we saw this beautiful rainbow. So, here's the best of Wednesday. We're without power and there is no telling when it will be back. Our laptops are running out of battery power. Roger rigged one of our old electric bike batteries as backup on our dsl modem, so we are at least not having to use our dial-up connection. But we're sitting with candles and the waning light of our laptops.
So, we'll be back when the power permits!

Thursday morning update: The power was restored at midnight. We had phoned Puget Sound Energy late Wednesday afternoon and were told power would be back for most people by Thursday and maybe some on Friday. We thought we'd be the Friday people because we are pretty out of the way.
We're thinking about buying a generator. Now that we're growing and freezing a lot of our food, we contemplated a big loss if the power was not restored within a reasonable time. We've never had a generator so anyone out there with recommendations, we'd love to hear it. We've also been talking about how to live off the grid. We didn't build this crazy, big modern house we're living in, and in many ways it doesn't lend itself easily to new ideas, and certainly not without a lot of money to invest in it.
The sun is shining brightly this morning. We haven't seen it for days. We'll probably go out for a hike at some point, and take a good look at how this recent storm changed the landscape. We read this morning that Seattle has gotten twice as much rain already as it typically gets for the month of November. It's interesting to consider that on the heals of the hottest and driest summer. Makes me think of global climate change, how about you?

Shades of Gray

The calendar says November, the temps say winter. We're in the thick of it, having weathered several blustery storms these past few days. We're actually on target for getting our average rainfall and then some. November is the month where our eyes begin to notice and discern varying shades of gray, looking for the play of filtered sunlight behind the darkened clouds.

Roger has been spending most of his free indoor time working on a Microsoft Access database project, trying to create something that will streamline the data entry for his Habitat for Humanity volunteer work. He loves this kind of project. In the recent past, he created databases for clients in Santa Cruz, once creating a very large one designed to keep track of student infractions and misconduct for the local university. What fun. He was using Filemaker Pro at the time, which he thinks is really an easier application to work with and much more intuitive than Access. But you build database programs with the applications you have, not the applications you want. Gosh, that may be one of the best things dear old Rummy ever gave to us.
I, on the other hand, am much more frivolous with my time. When I stay inside I tend to play with Photoshop. I do run outside to see if the digital camera can actually capture the shades of gray and even hints of yellow in the late fall sky. I don't think it can. I find it so hard to adequately convey the varying shades of sky colors. I took the top photo Tuesday afternoon. It was not so dark out, but in order for the camera to photograph the sky, it blackens the trees. So, I manipulated the photos with Photoshop to tease out what is really there. This would be done in a darkroom with burning and dodging techniques. In this digital process, I selected the blackened trees, or as much of them as I could, with the magic wand and did a simple auto curve correction. Wow. I was shocked. The amber needles on the western larch showed up just as they looked when I took the picture. I was really surprised to see them. I recommend enlarging each photo to see the differences. There are a few glitches where the selection wasn't perfect, and some of the tree tops look dark and splindly against the sky, or conversely lightly dusted with snow. It's an effect that I actually don't mind, so I left it in.

Another look at shades of gray in the afternoon sky

These are a few of the things we do to stay out of trouble when the weather turns cold and we're inside most of the day. There's always music on, and sometimes we just stop what we're doing and get up and dance.

vinyl

i have collected, over the years, a bunch of vinyl. as i was just a bit more stable than the parade of transient hippies who lived in my various houses, i "inherited" quite a few. i'm talking lps. albums. records. analog music. and some spoken word stuff too. they have been packed away for many years. i also have a box of cassette tapes gathering dust. and now the cds robin and i have, have also been superseded by technology. we are connected. we get our tunes on the intertubes and put them on an ipod. i just recalled that somewhere here with us in our new home is also a stack of 78 rpm records. those might not be vinyl. oh yeah, i may have one of the earliest records i bought. a wannabe beatnik kid stuck in the 'burbs, at 16 i bought a 45 rpm mini album, maybe called an ep(extended play): music from the movie "the man with the golden arm," which i had not, and still have not, ever seen.

last week i pulled out the ancient garrard turntable i got from somewhere. the needle had lost its point, so i laid out 20 bucks for a new pickup and needle. those old lps sound great! ok. here's some technical stuff. we record this stuff on a mac using a free program called audacity, by plugging one end of a patch line into the headphone outlet of our stereo amp and the other end into "line in" on the computer. we also record on our older pc using a program called sound forge, which we bought some years ago. either of these systems works for taking music from cassettes too. these programs record in wav format, and convert that into mp3. itunes will also convert a wav into an mp3.

here is a small sample of my albums, with commentary. it was tough to pick out just a few. there are lots from the sixties, seventies and eighties. rolling stones, the dead, quicksilver, jesse colin young, fever tree (??!). loads of us have those (maybe not fever tree, or cat mother and the all night newsboys) so i didn't pick any of them for pictures.


i was raised on jazz. well, not really. my parents liked music, but had no records. and thelonius monk wasn't even on their radar.










oh just look at this! you see the word "rapping?" does it sound modern? was this guy ahead of his time or what. recorded live in oakland, california, 1960.










i was there! as the crowd thinned out late at night the ushers opened the gates and let my high school buddies and me in. we were ten feet from the stage. 1959.









this record is in perfect condition. no scratches. and she is just too sexy for words.











one of my early faves. i may have worn out the grooves.











okay, i love this, but really, where did i get it?












paul is barefoot!!! is he dead?











a must for every beatnik.












one of the best live recordings ever of a great jazz standard.













i have more too.












another of my early favorites.

Right on Time

Wouldn't it be funny if we left the house and said out loud, "If we leave right now, when we get down to the creek we will see a seal for just a moment." Of course, we can't say that, but that's exactly how it happens. Had we left a minute later, there would be no seal to see. This is no cosmic leap of consciousness, but a simple recognition of how much of life is about being in the right place at the right time. Seeing a seal is very cool this far up Chimacum Creek. We've been walking the creek for a while now, getting to know its tides and seasons, and this was our first seal sighting. Had we not arrived at that moment, we simply would not have seen it. As it was, it only stayed visible for a minute, before it dove under. We never saw it again, in the half mile we hiked along the creek's edge to the bay.

I've always been intrigued by life's intersections, the ones that stop you in your tracks, and make you think about all the steps you've taken to get to this place at just this moment. They don't happen often, but when they do it's always, always memorable.

In 1991, Roger and I had one of those moments. We had flown back east to be with my cousin who had just lost her 48 year old husband to non-hodgkins lymphoma. It was a sad journey, and actually the only time we have ever been back east together. We spent a week in southern Virginia at my cousin's house, rented a car, drove up to DC, spent two days exploring the city, and then flew home to the bay area. While we were in DC, we had arranged to sit in the Senate gallery to hear whatever was being discussed that day, went to the Vietnam Memorial, the Smithsonian. We indulged in all those sights and sounds of our nation's capitol. It was fantastic.

I remembered that I had once come to Washington with my ex-husband Greg (we lived in Rhode Island) and we'd gone to the Old Post Office for lunch. There were lots of little restaurants and shops in the pavilion, and it seemed like a good place to grab a bite to eat. So, Roger and I found our way there, but when we arrived the place was absolutely packed. It's been years, so my memory might be faulty, but it seems to me there were hundreds of little tables everywhere, all full of people eating and talking at once. Chairs scraped against the floor, people moved all over, leaving tables, finding tables. It was utter chaos. We waited a bit, until a table opened and we grabbed it.

We had only been there a few minutes before the diners at the table next ours got up and left, and a new couple sat down right away. I looked up to make eye contact with the person who was seated next to Roger, and for a moment thought that I was seeing the face of the young woman who my ex-husband had started to date while he was still very much married to me. It was a face I thought I'd seen a million times, right after my ex and I had split. Katie's face was everywhere, on a flight attendant on the plane, a bike-rider zooming past me on some trail, a shopper in the local supermarket, the driver in the car next to mine at the red light. It was the face I had seen in my angriest dreams. Here it was again. Roger turned to look at the woman who had just sat down next to him, after following my gaze and the ensuing alarm in my eyes. I turned to look at the man who was now seated right next to me. Was this just one more of those trick sightings like all the others had been? No, it really wasn't! There he was, my ex-husband, sitting as close to me as if we had planned this very crazy and cozy rendezvous. He looked over at Roger and said, "So you must be Roger." Of course, I already knew who Katie was.

Ah yes, that was one of life's memorable intersections. We four sat and had lunch together, very civilly. Greg and Katie were in DC for some work that weekend, and Greg had also remembered the Old Post Office for lunch. So, we inquired about each other's families, talked about why we had come east. We laughed about the absurdity of the moment. Greg and I had only talked to each other quite briefly in the three years since I'd moved to California, and we'd gotten divorced.

Roger and I had taken an extra moment at the Vietnam Memorial, one lingering look at a name. Add the time it takes to figure out how to get from one place to another on the Metro. A table opened up in the food pavilion, and we sat down.

Harbor Seal in Chimacum Creek

Just before we walked out the door, we realized we needed one more layer of clothing to protect from the wind. We talked about a button that needed to be sewn on. We stopped and checked the mailbox. Then we headed down to the creek.

Our First Pileated Woodpecker

We saw this Pileated Woodpecker a few weeks ago. I sent a photo to Pam for Good Planets last weekend, but I wanted to post one here too. We were very excited to see this bird even though we've heard that it's a common bird, and people "see them everywhere." We had never seen one before, so it was quite a sight for us. We heard the woodpecker first with its rather raucous laughing call before we saw it fly to this tree. She stayed around long enough for me to snap three quick pics. Hey, even the common birds knock us out. I could drive you all crazy with photos of winter flocks of American Goldfinches that stay in our trees, or the Juncos, the Robins, the House Finches that flit about all day long. You're all lucky I spare you my obsessions!

What have you been seeing lately? If you've got a photo that depicts the beauty of our good planet, I hope you'll send it to Pam at Tortoise Trail for this Saturday's Good Planets post she's hosting. Her email is tortoisetrail at gmail dot com. Have a great weekend, friends.

We Did It!

We threw the bums out!

We are absolutely thrilled that the newsies are calling Virginia for Jim Webb. We have taken both houses of Congress. Let the hearings begin.

There is so much to do in the next two years. We hope that honest elections are high on the list of things to accomplish. We never want to fear that our votes won't count and that our precious democracy has fallen to dirty tricks, robocalls, Diebold paper-less ballots, purged voters, and intimidation. This is one civil rights issue that must be resolved before 2008 elections.

We are contentedly happy to let Speaker Pelosi decide what's on the agenda. We've heard her interviewed several times on Wednesday and were impressed with her articulate and balanced approach to the tasks before her. It will be a glorious day when we first see her seated behind the President and next to the Vice-President. A woman, a grandmother, and a Democrat.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.