Morning, September 21 - Astoria, Oregon

Through the window at Coffee Girl. The white ship is the NOAA research vessel. I'm not sure what they're up to today, but a small boat took off at speed from the side of it, and then came around again quickly. Maybe they're tracking salmon? You can never tell, but the salmon are out there this week for sure. Ask the sea lions.

The cool thing about this photo, especially if you click on it to enlarge it, is that you can see one of the ships sitting on the river. It looks like it's on the pier, but it's not.

It was one of those days - foggily atmospheric outside and the feeling of having a free day and too much I wanted to do with it inside. If Laurel hadn't called me out to coffee (top photo, at Coffee Girl), I would have been at the PC ALL day. As it was, I made some progress with the animal jewelry web pages, putting more butterflies on the menu page, scanning and putting up a tarantula, some more gecko/salamanders, and some snakes. I don't know why this stuff takes SO long, but it does. I was messing with the format and organization a bit more and optimizing with links from other pages. The details never end. If the new site starts getting some traffic, it might simplify my life. It's fun, I just wish I had more time. But then, actually, by the time I get the old pin menu page pared down (taking out the individual items) and turned into links pages like the butterfly page and this one, Google will have found these new pages insects, reptiles, and more to come). So I guess it works out. Funny how that happens.

The landlord (Marty) spent the day putting in a new floor upstairs, so it was noisy. I've gotten used to that, as they've re-done the whole outside and underpinnings of the building. It will be nice when it's quiet again, though.

Laurel just finished blogging, too. She has lots of pregnant pictures now and people pictures. It's nice. I think I want to take more people pictures. Did you notice my blogs are mostly things and animals? Scenery? I don't dislike people, but yeah, I sure do avoid taking photos of them (and of me). A new day, a new world. It could happen.

What do you get when you cross an artist and a geek?

I don't know, but I've spent some time writing about it on the gift shop blog tonight. I had fun working on the site and trying to improve it. Working with Les's beautiful pins didn't hurt, either. I love looking at them. I get a lot of creative pleasure from working on the site, solving various issues, making it more usable, nicer looking, easier to use. But I can also feel the call to paper and paint yelling at me. Paper, paint, pencils, whatever. I've been away from it for awhile. Also, in all the time I've been working on the web I have, for the most part, either "not found the time" or not been brave enough to post my own personal art (much). I think that's changing. Maybe I'll do some this weekend.

As with my photos, I'll probably pre-date any early art I post. I like chronology, and I wish Blogger would let you date a post earlier than 1970 - but it's not really Blogger's fault, it seems to be something built into the web. When they built the Internet's guts, they were projecting forward in time, not back. But the goal is to actually make some new art, too. I don't know why I fight it. It's easier to make blogs and web pages, probably because there's less of myself in them. I've put up a few "safe" things over the years. At the moment I'm thinking of a drawing of a goose, and there's some stuff in the Journey section. That being what it is (link to link to link), it's easier to get a look at the artwork here. Some of it I like a lot and some is just off balance. I'm not sure why I used it. These pages were fun - working with the colors and text. I think this one is nice. It even attempts to explain why I like making collages.

Astoria, Oregon, weather report . . . and birds

After a number of bright, sunny days all in a row, the weather report is 51 degrees at nearly 9 in the morning, and heavy overcast. I guess it's more the way Astoria is "supposed" to look. The sun was nice, but it actually got a bit warm here. Most buildings have no air conditioning, and something strange (?) that I noticed the year I arrived - most businesses also have no cross-draft - i.e., no two windows you can open anywhere in the building that let the breeze air the place out and disperse the muggy heat that tends to build up indoors on nice days. (After a couple of warm days, you might as well be in Florida.) In many cases, this is because there is no air space between buildings. They have common walls on the sides and the back, so there's no opportunity for windows even if they had been considered. In our building here on the water, there are plenty of windows - most of them simply don't open, or if they do open, they don't create a cross draft with any other windows. This was partially remedied this past month when all of the windows were replaced, but there are still areas where there's no draft. A couple of us here are heat-sensitive (which is actually why I moved to the North Coast). Our air conditioner was also removed during re-modelling, and has no place in the new facade. This next summer, we're going to have to get creative with fans. Referring back to the photo, I've always loved the coloring on this ship. It's fun to see the variety that come through here.

Part of the building-wide renovations included a new deck. The coloration is not a mistake - the materials are supposed to fade to matching colors with a little time. It's nice to see it without clutter. I'll probably bring the potted herbs back from the front, but since we now have a covering over the whole deck, I'll have to remember to water them.

This morning I saw small birds feeding on the pilings. I don't remember these birds, and I'd like to find out what they are. Below is an enlargement - a poor photo, but you get the idea - a brown bird with white spots. It's always fun to see animals I haven't noticed before. (UPDATE: The birds are starlings - thank you, Tom Means! I see on Google that many of the photos show starlings with spots. I somehow grew up thinking they were only black with yellow eyes, and then gave it no more thought. Tom says that the winter color and also the coloring of females and juveniles is spotted. I'll be on the lookout for them now!)

New web site - crafts from the tropics and more

I've been working on the new gift shop web site a lot lately. I changed the whole face of it over the weekend and added some new categories. The picture above is a bit of the Amazon River - a slice out of a photo I took. I may replace it sometime, but I wanted something to use as a title background with a flattish area where I could superimpose the type, and I found this one in my files from my trip to Brazil with Lee in April, 2007. It seemed appropriate, because the site will include quite a number of items hand made in Latin America. I thought and thought over the idea of a short title that would say what I wanted to express, and could only come up with a long one: "Tapir's World ~ Arts, Crafts, Cultures, and Other Wonders of Planet Earth." It will include more than animals. It will also be about nature and about cultures. It's a mouthful, but the concept is pretty simple. Maybe I'll find a minimalist title as I live with it. Or not.

I started the new site as an experiment to see how the Market America web sites worked in practice. It seemed I'd be able to put items into the online store quickly, and it turned out to be true. I had a lot of painted animal pins on consignment from the artist, and the new method worked like a charm. I got several hundred up where people can see them, and I still have a few hundred to go. I actually got about 50 of them scanned and online in one day, but that was without optimizing, which can be done later. The gorgeous piranha pin below is one of my favorite pieces of painted animal jewelry in our store.


Next I decided to put up some werregue baskets (or jars) from Colombia. I say, "or jars," because despite the woven surface, they hold water. These are really special, and you can read more about them here. I'd had them in the shop for a few months and hadn't decided how to present them online. With the coding method I use on our other web site (hand-made HTML), I can present nice big photos on each item page, but to build a page for a one-of-a-kind item isn't very practical. I now had a good way to put up the five baskets in stock fairly quickly. They look nice. You do have to click all the way through to the order page before there's an option for enlargement. The more I work with the site, I'm sure I'll find a way to showcase certain items with larger images more easily. Anyway, the baskets are gorgeous and unique, and it was fun to finally see them online. Sergio got these for us in Colombia, and we'll be posting more about that later. We'll also be getting six more in the next shipment.

Next I started putting up the palo de sangre (or bloodwood) carved animals. Again, these are items Sergio sent from Colombia. We've had them on our original site, but again, each is unique and looks different from the next. The sizes and colors vary, etc., so I needed a way to display each exact piece that a customer would buy and to be able to get them offline again easily when they were sold. It turns out, I can take an item out of the catalog with basically three link or button clicks. So I began building our online inventory of carved palo de sangre wood animals again. I still have a number of them to photograph and put online, including armadillos and some more fish.

The carved wood animal pens (see the elephant pen below) are from China. We've imported our own shipment once, but it's not something we do every day. They ARE hand carved and painted, but they're done in mass quantities, unlike the red wood above. As it turns out, our new site is good for displaying these pens because the automated thumbnail photos are sized by width (100 pixels) and the length is in proportion. I should have thought of this for our other site, but it didn't occur to me. Our other site uses thumbnails at 100 pixels height, although I could break the scheme for something like vertical pens. It just hadn't occurred to me.


Next I put up Sergio's ceramic giant river otter. He used to work more in ceramics when he lived in Cali, where he had more outdoor space and access to a kiln. We have the one otter left, and there are a few more animals I'll be putting online in this category soon.


At that point, the site was becoming pretty interesting, but it still looked a bit bare. I decided to add some categories where I may have only a few items, but ones that had been problematic with our old site for reasons given above. I added the fish and turtle hair combs. They're probably mass produced in China, but they seem special to me because Lee and I found them on our trip to Sicily, and I'm not sure I've seen them online before. I tried the vertical approach, as with the pens. We only have 4 or 5 of each, so this site seemed the right place for them.


And then there's the tapir (below). This is Lucia, a baby Baird's tapir Lee and I saw in Panama. She'd made big news because Adrian Benedetti, Director of the Summit Zoo, had just taken part in a sting operation to transfer her safely from poachers to the authorities. We arrived in Panama City shortly after Lucia came to the zoo, and we were allowed to visit and scratch her, which tapirs like a lot. What's she doing here on the blog? No, she's not for sale! But she and her kind are why we're doing this - why we're selling animal-themed gifts, crafts, and toys, and especially why we're developing our new site featuring products made in the countries where tapirs live and now need our human intervention to survive. If we can't stay out of their way and let them live as they have for hundreds of thousands of years, then we're going to have to become more actively involved in making sure they survive despite our interference. Here's to Lucia, her relatives, all other critters of the wild, and the habitat they need to make it through the next decades.

Two seagulls

Lee and I were returning from a stoll along the River Walk when I snapped these two seagulls near the Maritime Museum. The top one is a juvenile, with the speckled plumage. The second seems to have nearly completed its adult moult, as it still has some mottling on its head. I don't notice that very often. But what's with the feet? I also hadn't noticed until I began working with these photos that the gulls have white legs and feet. I thought they were supposed to be yellow. I googled seagulls and found that that their feet seem to range from red to yellow to black, and I even saw one with very white eyes. I think the ubiquitous seagull must be more complex, and probably interbred, than I had ever given thought to. I've always liked them. Although they're often considered pests, I don't find them a bother. I'll be paying more attention to them and when I get a minute, I'll read something about them. For now, I've got to run. Ciao.

LATER NOTE: According to my Oregon bird book, the spotted heads indicate winter plumage. I had no idea! I'll keep watching.