John Burridge

The other weekend, we went with some friends and hiked along the Breitenbush River, near the Breitenbush Hot Springs.  The Hot Springs were closed, and we would have needed reservations to get in, so we didn't visit them.

We'd done the hike once a few years ago, and I'm remembering the river being lower and the air being hotter, so I'm thinking we went in late July or August (I'm not finding an entries in the blog about the hike).

This time around parking was a little challenging -- everyone had been chaffing under the COVID-19 lockdown, and the usual pull-over at the trailhead had been commandeered by a bunch of folks for camping (?and dog training?).

The hike is a little challenging in places, as one has to go single-file over fallen trees which have been repurposed as bridges.   For the most part, though, the trail meanders alongside the river, alternately winding between evergreen trees and brushing up to embankments.

Eventually, we had to turn around because a flood had taken out a bridge over a major tributary to the Breitenbush River.

The wildflowers we saw were mostly finished, I'm thinking if we'd come the first week of May we would have seen more blooms.  The only ones I recognized were trillium, (I want to say) larkspur, and columbine.  There was a lot of Oregon grape.

Another semi-washed-out trail led to an overlook above a deeply carved gorge.  There was a kind of ladder, really a downed log with some notches carved out of it as anti-skid holds for one's feet, but they were slippery.  Just as I finished saying, "Well, this isn't so bad; now watch me fall on my butt," I slipped and nearly landed on my camera.

The view was cool, though; it was the sort of place you'd expect a re-enactment of "Das Rheingold."   It was also the sort of place that you wouldn't want to fall into.


Along the way back, I took a ton of photos of the shadows of trees, and flowers, and mushrooms, and leaves.  I only got a little behind everyone, no more than a minute or two.  Or maybe five.

The sun is out for the moment, and I'm taking the opportunity to work outside while I can.

The last few days have been wearing--it's been very, very grey.  I don't mind the rain so much, but the grey, sunless skies add to the smothering sense of endless, identical quarantine days piled on top of each other.  Being unable to switch from working remotely on The Day Jobbe to a different hardware setup has made it difficult to write, and I find that my bedroom office furniture makes me sore after a few hours.  I never realized how comfortable and supportive my campus office chair was.

Also, when it's wet out, I can't sit outside with the laptop and write at Café John (as I am now).   I'm  less likely to physically leave the house, which, I've discovered, is problematic.  It was bad enough the other day that I was seriously contemplating which was worse:  staring into the void and having it stare back, or staring into the void and not caring if it stared back.

Mercury and Venus are within about a degree apart from each other in the sky.  I'm hoping to get a photograph of the event, but it's looking like the clouds are going to interfere.  The outlook is better for a few days later, when the new crescent Moon shows up in the evening sky next too them.  In lieu of astronomy photos, here's some flowers from various local yards.

The leaves are turning.  I took my camera and went looking for good candidates.  I'd noticed a few red edges on some leaves around the corner, and waited until the afternoon when the sun would shine through them.

I unpacked the tripod and took a lot of shots with the camera on full manual.  This resulted in a lot of bad shots -- either under- or over-exposed, but I managed to get a few photographs that approached the glowing colors above my head.

Of course, there was one really over-exposed photo because the camera remembered the manual settings when I had been taking some pictures of the moon and stars.  I laughed when I saw this one, but I kept it because it seemed as if the shape of the leaves had been burned into the image -- which I struck me as "artsy" and brought out the fiery nature of the leaves.

And it was a moral imperative to take a photo of the miniature rose on our deck.

 Our yard has been invaded by mushrooms.  I don't know what kind of mushroom this is, although I'm pretty sure last year our neighbor had three or more rings of these growing in her yard -- so maybe they're related. 

Mushrooms have been springing up all over the neighborhood, I'm guessing because of the really heavy rains we got a week ago.
 Autumn is officially here.  I have managed to catch a cold from The Child's school.
The fuchsia at the side of the house survived the summer and the benign neglect that we heap upon it. 

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A couple of weeks ago, we discovered we had poppies growing in one of our beds.  I always liked the tons of poppies our former land-ladies grew (orange, red, white, and yellow).  Mark doesn't remember planting these and we think they might be volunteers.

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Our poppies came out a mauve color.  The buds' protective sheathe would pop off in the morning, and the blooms would furl open.  There were four opposite petals, which would last about a day before falling off.

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About every other day, another bud's stem would straighten, the sheathe would open, and a new bloom open.

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I thought it was cool that there were only four petals.  Most of the flowers I'm familiar with have three or six; apples and roses have five.

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What I didn't notice was that the seed head has a nine-fold radial symmetry.

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We had about ten days of the blooming cycle.  This provided many opportunities for photography.  I suppose if we had more plants I could have cut a few more blooms, put on some robes and twisted sheets and shot some wildly allegorical photos (Morphius and His Cat, Death Drinking Tea, "Poppies Will Make Them Sleep").  I do occasionally get Sting's "Children's Crusade" stuck in my head, though.

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Eventually, all the flowers had bloomed and dropped their petals.  I am not sure, but I think the seed heads would balloon out a little to a more spherical shape, then contract at the base.

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I knew they would develop little holes, but I couldn't remember if they would be in or just below the crown shape at the top.

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After about a four or seven days, we discovered the holes at the base of the crown.  The stems turned yellow and brittle a few days later.  Mark and The Child removed a seed head and scattered a few seeds in various places (our yard's soil chemistry is wonky, so who knows if anything will sprout).

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Mark also bisected the head, which is when we realized the interior is nine-fold.  I cut open a few more and dragged out the camera to try to document in interior structure.  I should have included a ruler for scale.

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The seeds, I think, form on the inside ribs of the seed head and eventually fall off into the chambers.

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The inside had about a half teaspoon of seeds, which I scattered along the side of the house and around the Sphinx.  Fingers crossed that the soil works.

Last week, flowers in our yard provided some good photo opportunities.  I enjoyed the mystery of the poppies; each day was slightly different as the blooms shrugged off their protective sheathes, flowered, and then disrobed--casting spent petals--and held up ripening seed pods.  The bed where they grow looks like a scene from an Egyptian frieze.
This week, there's one poppy bud -- the last -- rising up toward flowering.  We're not sure how long it takes the pods to have viable seeds, or if the seeds will only grow in the raised bed or all over the yard.
I'm hoping they'll bloom in more than one place, although, given the history of the yard, it's unlikely in the eastern bed and a slim possibility in the western one.  It's possible they might do well out front.

I heard through the grapevine that this year Eugene ranks as the highest pollen count in the nation.  Mark is really wiped out this year.  The pollen is making me tired, I think.  Which in turn is making me tired.  Which in turn is making me grumpy and listless.   I wish I felt creative and energized instead of like The Void is gaping right next to me, which is tiresome.

Ah well, time do mash together songs like "I Need You," and ... well, nope -- just a straight up rendition will do.

Some poppies sprouted up in the back yard.  Mark's a little mystified as to how they got there.  We weren't quite sure what they were at first.  The flowers started blooming last Tuesday or Wednesday, and they must have done their thing because both blooms have dropped their petals.  More blooms seem it be in the works.  The flowers are a pretty lavender shade, and we're hoping for more volunteer plants next year.


Gym Report:  Skipped Friday and went to the gym Saturday.  I dialed back the weights to my original values, but youch, I've definitely pulled a latissimi dorsi on my left side -- possibly when I lifted Smokey in a cat carrier on the way to the vet -- which doing any kind of press quickly revealed.  I'm managed to do everything, and the exercises seemed to help loosen up where I was tight.

The universe it trying to tell me something, I think, on three separate occasions the last few days, someone has told me a variation of "Getting old means putting on a sock and pulling a muscle."


On the writing front:  Mark and The Child went with some friends to the coast, so I managed to get some work done.  Some of it was actual re-casting exposition into action.... and I'm finding it helpful to think of a recently critiqued manuscript as a detailed outline.  Or something.   Looking at the word count... not stellar progress (not quite 1000 words).   But... there was some back-story filling going on, and also some research (space beer and aereospace composite materials).  So, not a total loss.

In related news, I Did All The Laundry, made crustless quiche, diagnosed a solar LED string, created three glass tiles, watched "Age of Ultron," and administered cat meds to a cat that hates cat meds.

I got a contest rejection Friday night, which I suspected was going to happen because the market usually contacts folks about a week before the winners' announcement date, and I hadn't been contacted.


Dreams have been kind of weirder than usual, lately, with long, complicated plots.  Unfortunately, I haven't been motivated enough to arise and write them down as I wake, so I only remember the odder bits.

Last night I dreamt someone was trying to silence witnesses by driving pencils up their noses in order to make them lose the power of speech.  In a typical dream-logic hole, I don't know why this wouldn't prevent them from writing down messages.   In another dream, I was looking through a camera that made all the microbes in one's mouth light up... it was sort of a cross between a macro-lens and a microscope, and I was looking into a celebrity's mouth. . .

 Wednesday evening we herded The Child into the car for a forced march hike around Mt. Pisgah Arboretum. 











I'm trying to think when we went there last, but all I can come up with is that it must have been before The Big Snow, because there were a few more freshly downed trees and limbs (at the time, the arboretum was closed for two weeks while crews went around making sure the trails were safe).








The sun slowly set as we walked various trails.  The Child said that he wanted a mostly flat hike, so we went to the swamp bridge, and the wetlands art installation, and the river banks.










I like the swamp bridge, because there's often dragonflies or fish to see.  Tonight there were ducks hiding in the lillies.  In the grass beneath the bridge a bunny was foraging.







Afterward, we went up (hah! a trick!  we had to climb up!) to the incense cedars, which smelled the most wonderful I've ever smelled them. 







We ended up in a meadow about a fifth of the way up the slope of Mt. Pisgah; I remember one Winter-solstice-like time about ten years ago, taking a picture of one particular oak while it was shrouded in fog with a wan sun casting beams through its branches.   Today it was high white clouds with raptors in a blue sky.






Cow parsnip.  Related to the carrot.


The Willamette River.  There were raptors of some sort flying up above, but they were too far away to photograph.  The swifts over the river flew too fast.  Oh well.


Mark said these felt like scritching a cat's ear, and I've forgotten their name.



Um... a pretty purple flower!














Wild Mountain Rose.  It looked like something out of a fairy tale.