John Burridge

I'd been keeping an eye on the eastern hills, which glowed red in the sunset, but the moment of the day's end slipped by unremarked during dinner.  (Equinox Quiche, both of which have Q's in them.)


We were distracted by dinner and video games, so we missed the full moon rising during the first evening of Spring. 
 Mark wisely suggested taking photos in the front driveway, which is not as netted against the sky by power and phone lines.
 I fiddled around with various automatic and manual settings to get different types of shots.  If the shutter speed was 1/60th of a second, I got clear lunar features, but no clouds.  If it was 1/2 of a second, the clouds came through, but haze and lunar glare made the moon look like a sunset.
At some point Mark accused me of not actually looking at the moon -- I had, but he had a point, and I straightened up from hunching over the camera and stared and stared and stared.

The iris are blooming this week.  I was looking through old pictures and the first week of May is usually when the swords send up their flags.  Our irises are mostly purple, which I like.  Sometimes, I wish we had the Great Bearded Irises that I grew up with and which came from a stock from my Mother's Mother's farm -- but they died out or were eaten decades ago.  Oh well.

Pollen season has officially arrived.  Mark will be extra-sneezy and stuff for the next six to eight weeks.   I think it's making me extra sleeeepy or something -- at any rate, that's one reason why I think I was having difficulty writing the other day.  It was one of those days when I would type and either stream-of-consciousness stuff would leak out or else I would type the same phrases over again.

Over the weekend we went on a hike to Sweet Creek Falls.

Along the trail there were many blooms and plants.  I saw this fern unfurling and used my camera's macro lens to take a picture of it (actually, this is one of three -- I like this one the best because I managed to get an angle which showed the growth's depth).

The engineering, if that's the right word, involved in packing all the leaves and the stem into a compact disk is incredible.

The other weekend we visited a friend's farm.  They have a kind of portable greenhouse built right on the rows of produce -- I think these are peas.

I like this photo because of the regular geometry of the greenhouse structure, the rusty texture of the stakes, and the organic feeling from the ground.  Also the cross-beams on the top of the beams looked vaguely like Golgotha, or at least like the telephone poles in John Roger Cox's "Grey and Gold."

Lately, I've managed to kick myself out of bed and write in the mornings before heading off to The Day Jobbe.  It helps that the cat wakes up at 4:30 and starts to do the feline version of "Early Morning Singing Song."  (No, I usually get up a little bit later.)

On the up side, I'm writing.  The mornings have been pleasant enough that I've been able to creep outside with a cup of tea and a comforter and write in the backyard.  Writing outside reduces the chance of me waking anyone, and if the family wakes up early, I'm not in their way on the kitchen table.  Getting in and out of the patio chair and wrapping or unwrapping myself out of the comforter tends to keep me sitting and typing.

On the not-quite-so up side (aside from my tea getting colder more quickly), I may need to switch to composing in long hand to improve my writing's connectivity and to catch stupid errors engendered by a an iPad's screen and auto-correct.  Now that I've noticed the disjointed element creeping into what I write, I'll be on the lookout for it; getting up a little earlier so I have a longer period to write would help, too.  



Now, if I could do something about those mornings when I really feel the cold in my hands and feet (pause to imagine writing in a hot tub).  

Scene: A late Sunday afternoon.  The sun shines.  Smokey the cat is in a hunting delirium because the grey jays have a nest in the camellia and there are four baby jays in the nest.  Father jay has previously dive bombed Smokey off of the yard's fort (and baby jay viewing platform).

Father Jay (hopping from power line to patio cover):  "Hey! Hey! The cat's here!"

John (opening sliding door and sticking head out):  "Smokey?"

Smokey (under the deck):  "Closer..."

Father Jay (hopping from patio cover to fort ladder): "Hey! Hey! Cat! Over here!"

John (stepping out onto deck):  "I don't see a Smokey."

Smokey (under the deck):  "Closer... closer..."

Father Jay (swooping over to catnip plant pot):  "Cat! Hey! Hey! Cat!"

John (laying down on deck, sticks head over side, looks under deck next to house):  "There's no Smokey here..."

Smokey (under the deck):  "Just. A. Little. Closer..."

Father Jay (jumping onto clothes line spool):  "Hey!  The cat's here!  Hey!"

John (gets up, moves to the yard-side of deck):  "There's no Smoke--"

Smokey (springing like a cheetah from the Serengeti):  "Ha!  Bird, you're going -- OH!  (ears twist back) It's John." (tail droops, speed drops to a walk).

John (almost falls off deck laughing at the crestfallen feline look and wishing he had a video camera)

Nobody warned me.

The other day one of my wind chimes wasn't going ding-ding but clunk-clunk.  I'd like really big chimes, but so far I've only had the budget for small (but nice) ones.  When I examined the chimes more closely, I saw mud or dust or something clogging up the finger-sized pipes.

I thought I'd clean it out.  I unhooked the chimes from the overhang, and got some tools to work the dirt or whatever it was in them.  When I stuck a nail into one of the chimes to clear out the clod, there was a whiny little buzz, which I felt through my fingers.  I'd impaled some creature.

It was gross, and I took a few steps back, fully expecting a hornet queen to pop out and try to kill me.  Or at least to flop out, trailing ichor.  Something did fly out, but I never got a good look at it.

Each one of the six chimes had been turned into a brood chamber.  Nothing seemed to be alive, but I fully expected a regiment of irritated insects to pop out at any minute.  So I got a bowl of water and I tried soaking out the clogs, but they'd been cemented in place with bug spit. Eventually, I had to use an air pump to blow the things out.  This was also gross, because it was like blowing someone else's nose -- all sorts of mud, pollen, bug carapaces, and some gooey waxy stuff came out and silted up the water so that it was yellow.   The last chime, the longest, required reaming with a screwdriver before my little pump would work.

But it was worth it, because the chimes are gently ringing in the breezes.  I just won't think about the price when I hear them sound.

 Last Sunday we took a walk through the Pioneer Cemetery.  This first shot is a detail photo of Hope Abbey, an Egyptian Revival mausoleum.  I'm not sure how one is interred in Hope Abbey, there aren't too many spaces and I recall that it pretty full.  On ether side of the entrance are lotus carvings. I'm not sure what the three drilled holes at the bottom are for; I'll guess they allow water to drain out of the walls.

In front of the mausoleum are to large concrete urns, decorated like giant lotuses.  They've been restored over the last ten or so years and now sport a full set of petals around their tops (they petals are modular and some were missing).  Planters like this make me want to learn how to work with concrete casting.

The most interesting discovery this walk around with the dead was finding a Daughter of the Revolution's grave site:  she was alive when George Washington was president.

It's the Sphinx!

With daffodils.  She's been crouching among them for about two weeks, and I figured if I wanted a good shot with her, I'd better hurry before the flowers wilt.

I lucked into this shot; usually when I photograph her, the Sphinx looks flat -- it was a cloudy day, and the diffuse light probably helped the camera to focus and also softened her features.  I took quite a few shots, trying to re-capture the right combination of camera angle and distance, and this is the photo I like the best.

In a month or so, she'll have a cave of sorts made up of... er, I forget the name of the bushes Mark planted.

One of the things Mark has done is have the foresight to recognize that we'll get new neighbors sometime in the next year or two and to plant some visual buffers--cypress trees--between our yards.  Our old neighbor was a few years younger than my grandmother, and it showed in her gardening.  I want to say that she was something like 94 and still working hard in her garden until she slipped at the local market and broke her hip.  She had all sorts of great looking plants.

I brought the camera's macro lens to bare on the cypresses.  Normally what I notice about them is that they seem to like the high clay-content soil we have around here and they're getting taller.  I hadn't noticed that they also make little pine cones.  So I took some photos of them.

It wasn't until I got the photos on a bigger screen that I saw how pine cones are like flowers.  I'd always thought of pine cones as something really different from flowers, but these teeny guys look just like woody rose buds.  And I guess it's where the seeds come from.  (OK. Maybe they're like corn....)

The other cool thing about this shot is how modular the leaves are.  This zoomed in, leaves look like they could come from a Monkey Puzzle Tree.

Up until Sunday, it's been fairly damp here in the Pacific Northwest.  When I went traipsing through the backyard to photograph flowers, I saw that the dandelions have wasted no time pushing up invading stems.  The last couple of weeks it's been raining or drizzling with a high of about 50F.  I suppose it's only a matter of time before the slugs come out in full force.

This is another macro lens shot, and I manged to get the focal point somewhere near the tip of the stem, with resulting fuzziness in the fore- and background.  What I like about this shot is that it's not so much about the fluffy parasols so much as it's about the seeds they carry.

When I started taking these pictures, I was mostly playing around with circles in the sand.  I'd wanted to draw some straight lines, but I didn't have a good straight edge with me.

Today we're lucky enough to have very clear skies and comfortable temperatures.  Also, it's the first weekend of Spring, which means that it's time to open  Café John.  Sort of.  Actually, the deck has been designated Not Café John by Mark... but in any case, I wanted a real tea with real savories.

So I whipped out the table cloth, the Ceylon Black Tea, and put together a savory.

• Preheat Oven to 200 F
  
• Take three slices of gluten-free bread and toast them; set aside.
  
• Slice Gorgonzola (or "Oregonzola") cheese as thin as you can, and place on the toast in a single layer.  Place in oven to melt chase.
  
• Chop about a half-cup or handful of toasted, unsalted almonds.  Fine is nice, but you don't have to get microscopic.
  
• Mix almonds into 2 to 3 oz Chevre (goat cheese) spread.
  
• Once you're happy with how melted the Gorgonzola cheese is, remove toast from oven and top with the Chevre almond spread.  Roughly three times as much of the Chevre should be used as the Gorgonzola; this will take some practice to find the point where the Gorgonzola is adding an earthy aftertaste or base note without having it overpower the Chevre.
  
• Serve with apple wedges and sliced turkey.  In lieu of tea, substitute sparkling apple and cranberry cider.

I'd had visions of bacon wrapped dates stuffed with the Chevre, but I would have had to go shopping (and I would have had to made up that recipe, too.

The tea itself was pleasant, and now that it's over, I must channel my inner Oregonian and observe that we really need more rain, not more sunshine.

As I was walking to the store the other morning, this fern plant caught my eye. At first I thought I was looking at an aquarium of sea horses. This picture doesn't quite catch the effect of the light diffusing through the leaves -- maybe because I took it at a slightly different time of day and the light had changed; or maybe because I had was in a hurry and didn't have time to play around with aperture and shutter speeds. It's still a cool fern, though.

A few days ago, the irises started opening.







Last year they all seemed to open at once. I might be remembering incorrectly, but this year they seem to be taking turns.





Purple irises like these are my favorites, although I like cobalt blue ones, too. When I was growing up, we had some giant bearded irises that were descendants of ones from my maternal grandmother's homestead. They were light blue or yellow. There may be a few at my folks' house, but I think a really cold winter killed most of them off.

I love irises before they are fully unfurled because their triangular symmetry is apparent.  They remind me of NASA equipment opening, or alien telescopes, or ceremonial hats, or craftily folded napkins at an erudite café.



When I see the fuzzy yellow insides, I wonder what the iris would look like with ultraviolet light.






I wonder if the stripes on the inside of the iris are a kind of landing strip for insects to follow for pollination.





In the early morning or late afternoon, shadows and light play upon the blooms.






The sphinx looks on from a short distance.

Yesterday the first of our irises bloomed -- this time by our driveway. I expect the other bed in the backyard to have opening ones soon; right now they are reaching up with darken tips.

I love our irises because they're deep purple, somewhere between plum and eggplant. I love the spears of bloom before the tight buds unfold and reveal their bearded insides. And I love the dusky scent of freshly opened iris -- it's sweet, but with a strong base note that gives it an extra potency.

Now if the darn slugs would just lay off of them....

Somewhere between the Sea Lion caves and Yachats there's a beach. We went at low tide a few weeks ago, so we could actually see and walk on the sand. Part of the beach includes some basalt cliffs, where I found this hole. The tide was coming in, and I didn't particularly want to crawl on squishy anemones or scrape myself on sharp barnacles -- so I didn't squirm through it.

 But I wonder what kind of wish I might have had granted if I did.

This is a snail from the Oregon coast. I'm not kidding: this guy was slithering around about two blocks away from the parking lot for the Sea Lion Caves. You would think that all the salt air would inhibit snails; but no, this snail was about the size of my index finger curled against my thumb. On the other side of its shell, you could see where I'm guessing a crow had dropped it or tried to break open its shell with a rock.