Water, Water

Astoria, Oregon ~ November 23, 2011

It's been storming and blowing for days. A lot of the area had power out last night from downed trees, but I was fine here - only a flicker of the lights during the evening. In the photo, the rain on the river was so heavy my camera didn't know where to focus. It's always interesting to see what washes down. Above, it was a good-sized leaf. Below, a small log.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Emergency Room Tapir

Astoria, Oregon ~ March 3, 2011

(With more octopus and less jaguar.)

You never know where you're going to find a tapir! Fortunately, I had my cell phone with me and it had a camera.

I had the worst flu or cold of my life - or whatever kind of bug it was - in late February and early March of this year, and on March 3rd I took myself to the Emergency Room to figure out why I felt so bad. As it turned out, I had a freaky reaction to Tylenol PM and I was having something just short of panic attacks. Since I wasn't seriously ill or damaged, it took them over three hours to get around to processing my tests. Meanwhile, look who was there to keep me company! Under the circumstances, I was especially glad to have the little tapir's company.

I don't know who got the idea to paint a mural with a TAPIR of all things in the temperate lands of northwestern Oregon, but we are, after all, in a rainforest, albeit different from the one where this little Asian tapir lives in real life. 

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Red on Red

Astoria, Oregon ~ November 1, 2011

Every year I smile because someone had the foresight to plant bushes along the edge of the Safeway parking lot that turn screaming red in the fall. This year I'm also glad that they were near the car. 

I haven't said much about this, and I won't make it long now, but I've had a hell of a time wanting to take photos this past year and a half. It simply hurts too much to stand for any length of time or walk to where the good angle is. I can't even think of taking a walk beyond a stone's throw from the car until I get better. I had a relapse of fibromyalgia a year ago last Memorial Day weekend. I've been dealing with it off and on for 30 years, and some years have been very good. This time severe foot problems came along with it. This is new as far as noticing that it was a real problem. In hindsight, there have been nagging symptoms that have been seriously misdiagnosed more than once over the past ten years, as much as I talked with medical people about what I was noticing. I'm fed up with doctors. They're fine if you break something or need surgery, but I prefer to work at this from the point of "what can I do to help myself?" I'm working with my Egoscue guy again (specific exercises for specific causes of musculo-skeletal problems), and again I have hope. I had given up the "e-cises" for much of the summer for various reasons, although after much thought and observation, I still believe this is how I'm going to get better. It took some time for my muscles to recover after I quit the anti-inflammatory meds almost two years ago. I'd been on them for almost 10 years, and now I'm not even taking asprin. Meanwhile, although my muscles still get sore very easily, they are better. I feel and hope I can get back into the routine of the exercises that are going to get me literally "back on my feet." I've started again, taking it slowly.

A dog with sore feet likes to curl up and sleep. I've been curling up with my projects, which keep my attention and keep me creative and mostly positive. I've been wanting to work on them anyway. For followers of this blog, this is why you're seeing more pictures of my office than of the wonders in the outside world. I feel ready to begin to bridge that gap, so here's a photo of Mother Nature, even though she's been domesticated by the landscape artists who complemented Astoria's Safeway.

On another note, I'm working on blog format today and clicking on my own sidebar (and moving some slow-loading links into the tabs above). I just noticed that one of my all-time favorite blogs is NOW DEAD. The remains are still there. If you love fun and crazy art, check it out. I was a collage artist in an earlier incarnation, and I LOVE the humor in this blog! It was best before the decoupage folks joined in, but I haven't gone through the posts in awhile to see how it's evolved. Here it is: Scrapeteria.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Faces of the Season

Finally, after a long and pleasant summer, it rained like crazy for a couple of days straight. It seemed unusual just because it hasn't happened for awhile, but soon it will be almost a daily routine. I love the rain, so no problem here. The piece of two-by-four is a harbinger of real logs to come as the rains wash the shores upstream. I took this picture on October 22, and today there was one of those interesting reed mats that cover the water just in the area of the photo. I got distracted before I took a picture of it, and soon it was gone.

You can't see their full beauty in the bright light and high contrast of the photo, but these flowers outside my front door have been my friends all summer. They found a niche, then withstood all events, including someone pulling off the bloom either because they liked it or "just because." There is a ton of foot traffic on the River Walk, so you never know. Anyway, they came back wonderfully and are still looking good today even after a couple of days of our first cold-snap. I'm sure they like the reflected heat from the building and the blacktop!

When I see a pink glowing sunrise like this one over the water . . . 

. . . it usually means there's a brilliant sunrise over the River Walk.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

A Few Chapters and a Bunch of Notebooks

I've been stuck in bed with a horrible, exhausting cold for two weeks now, so the work goes slowly. I had the good fortune to aquire an iPad before the cold struck, so I've been fiddling with that. If you don't want to work, there's not much of a learning curve and everything is almost seamless, but if you're like me and try to make things do what they were not intended to do, it can be quite a curve. I LOVE my iPad. It does many, many things, is light weight and pretty, but it's not a laptop. I had to learn a lot more than the basics (while sniffling and coughing) to do actual work along with playing games, listening to music, and making some notes. What I learned was how to make eBooks that can be read in an iBook reader. Big smiles here! In the end, it's easy, and they look fantastic. I had to figure out what I could and couldn't reasonably do so I would know what direction my project might be taking and whether I should be focused on scanning to PDF, making Word files, or whatever. Meanwhile, the mid-project results are less elegant, but are fully functional.

The shelf in my photo shows one set of the Chapters I published from 1992 to 1995. I got a smidgen of the way into the project before it got derailed. That's OK. It was huge and I was no longer clear how I could get it where I wanted it to go. Meanwhile, I had transcribed a lot of information, researched the references, filled in the blanks, and presented it in readable form. A glitch came a number of years ago when I found that my old WordPerfect 5.1 files would not convert completely intact to Word, but I've now scanned the printed copies of the chapters, and anyone interested can find downloadable PDFs on this page of my web site. The Word files remain for me to do something with as the project progresses.

The notebooks you see to the right of the chapters in the photo are filled with pages of chronological project data - research, synopses of material, etc. These notebooks are labelled by year(s). Some of the notebooks are alphabetical files of people, places, historic events, etc. And there are more notebooks in the other room.

I'm getting a certain amount of clarity about the path I want to walk through this mountain of fascinating information, and even some clarity on the results I want to achieve. It's a process, and, I'm really excited to be getting back to it. I'll keep you posted. (By the way, if you have an eBook reader (or at least it works with some brands), you can import the PDF files. They don't work as perfectly as a real eBook, but the graphics, captions and footnotes are intact, which is perfect for this stage of the game.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.