Five senses

Sight

Spring in the Willamette valley is a feast for the eyes.

Sound

The hills are alive...with the sound of turkeys. These guys regularly cross the road in front of our house.

Smell

Wisteria in full bloom.

Taste

"Spicy Szechuan Shrimp" was one of the things I made in my most recent Chinese cooking class at a local community college.

Touch

Fun to touch stuff when you're 18 months old.

(If you're gonna be a grandma, you might as well be Indiana Jones' grandma, right? The baby on the left is little R, my grandson.)

Linking to the one photo meme I ever link to: Friday My Town Shoot-Out.

Men at work

A house project is like a disease that begins with a little cough but then develops into a one-thing-after-another scenario. The deck slowly rotting off of the back side of the house was like a symptom that we chose to ignore until it got bad enough to demand unequivocal attention and treatment.

So there is major demolition/construction happening now, and it isn't limited to the deck. The coming weeks will involve a new roof, a new door, a replaced concrete slab, and a remodeled bathroom.

Nobody is more fascinated by the activity than Stitch, who is observing the noisy drilling and sawing from approximately 6 inches away, separated by a pane of glass. That's Harlan, a construction guy, on the other side.

Rumbling equipment, strange big men, and trucks beeping in reverse are Reub's worst nightmare, but he's learning to cope. (Thank you, Prozac-for-dogs!) Eddy takes it all in stride. Here he looks down on the busy scene from yesterday: the pouring, tinting and texturing of a new concrete slab.



Two cement trucks, like giant mating dragonflies, blocked the road in front of the house yesterday AM.

They ran a big fat hose to the back of the house.

The concrete gushed out, the guys put cool boots on, and smoothed it all out. I was jealous because it looked like fun. Hard to see, but the concrete has a faint green tint.

And now bright blue, because of light reflecting off of a tarp overhead.

Rain mustn't fall on the new concrete as they sprinkle grey-green powder over the top: magic dust, that will add a stone-like quality to the surface. After every dusting they move the red textured mat, and do a jig on it to imprint texture.

"More like clogging than jigging," the dancing workman explained carefully. 

Pretty neat. In a day or two the dust will be washed off and the final surface will be revealed.

Turtle watching

Ephemeral pond on the Little Willamette

John is on the board of Greenbelt Land Trust, a superlative local non-profit given to protecting and connecting sensitive habitat and open areas in this part of Oregon. One of the many things they do is sponsor guided walks on the lands for which GLT is the custodian.

Last Saturday was a beautiful day, and we decided to tag along on just such a trip to see Western Pond Turtles, a species listed as "critical" on the Oregon sensitive species list. We walked  through open areas, down to a slough of the Willamette River where we would be likely to find them sunning on a log. Because they are shy creatures, there was a blind to hide behind. We were glad that beavers hadn't destroyed this blind, like they did the previous one.

 We were in luck! There were 4 turtles enjoying the sunny morning. Western Pond Turtles get to be 40 years old; none of these are youngsters.

 
The hope is that they will be able to lay eggs on this nearby slope, recently taken out of grass seed production and now a safe place for turtles. Maybe sometime soon there will be baby turtles scurrying down to the river from here.

 This area known as the Little Willamette is lovely and I'm so glad to see it under the care of the land trust.

Do you have a land trust in your area? I wonder.

Fringe Cup

 I hope that you do. It's a a really good way for land owners to work out deals that benefit their property and the ecosystem it encompasses.

Purple Martin houses on the Little Willamette

It's also a nice way for the public to have access to special habitats and  learn about the creatures that live there.

Cool primitive plants

 The ferns have been unfolding. 

This pic comes from Book 15 of the 4^th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885–90). Public domain.

This fern-unwinding process never fails to take me back to, oh say the Carboniferous Period 350 million years ago.

 Ferns just look primitive. A child going through her "dinosaur period"  always includes them in her drawings. They belong there!

 Mastodon trunks, right in our back yard.

A related plant, Equisetum (or horse tail), also hearkens waaay back. In those days when coal was being formed these guys grew as big as trees.

There are no seeds or flowers because, like ferns, this is a spore-bearing plant. The strange white cone-like stalk is where the spores are, completely separate from the leaf-bearing stalks.

John Napier developed the logarithm from observations of Equisetum, noting how the spacing of nodes decreases from bottom to top of the shoot.

Equisetum is unaffected by herbicides, and if you think you can get rid of it by pulling it out, well you can't. No wonder it's the single surviving genus of the entire class Equisetopsida.

"A living fossil" is its nickname. Here in Oregon, despite its interesting history, Equisetum is officially called a "noxious plant." Oh well, I still think it's amazing.

Short bloom

 The hint of summer-to-come has arrived: heat. By this weekend the temperature will rise into the 80's, high for Oregon, even in July.

The spring flowers will have a short bloom. This is a trillium saying good bye.

The transparent petals are like the skin of a very old person, but the center is like the belly of a pregnant woman.

 Meanwhile, in the house I keep cut flowers long past the time when they're "fresh."

 This is when they are at their most delicate, each petal ready to drop.

Exquisite.

At the rodeo

 Wading through images saved on the external hard drive, I was searching for subject matter to use in a drawing class. What fun to come across rodeo pics off of John's camera as he was learning to use it a few years back:

The rodeo is a spectacle, but never more so than in the final minutes when they let loose all of the broncs in a dusty, spirited stampede that swerves in a wild gallop around the arena. It is breath taking. I love pictures of horses.


But there were lots of shots to admire. Flipping through photos shot in continuous drive mode:

 Team steer-roping: they're going full speed. How do those hats stay on?

 Down goes one cowboy, tackling the steer. His hat stays put.

 The tricky steer puts on the brakes.

 This causes the cowboy to miss completely.

 Although his hat and sunglasses never move from his head. Pretty cool.

 The rodeo clown has the most dangerous job: keeping an enraged bull from goring his downed rider.

 I don't remember if there's a cowboy inside that barrel, but personally I'd rather be in there...

 ...than out here.

 Rodeo clowns get paid quite a bit of money to do this. Don't worry, he's fine.

 See? Back on his feet in the next shot.

 The bull stops being so mad. And wow, the cowboy clown keeps that hat on the whole time. Amazing!

Clouds

There's been good cloud-watching lately.

You would think that Oregon, with its wet climate, might be a good place for cloud drama but actually it isn't. Often the sky is either cloudless and blue (summer) or uniform gray and misty (winter). It is punctuated by the color of the verdant landscape and with a little luck, maybe a rainbow.

The changeable spring climate has been populating the sky with all manner of fascinating cloud creatures this week. What do you see?

I see Eddy. Catching a tennis ball.

Or maybe Pegasus, the king of cloud horses.

I love clouds.