Gray Landscapes

Seastacks at Bandon OR

Spokane Falls WA

View from Mt. Erie WA

Landscape with tidemarks, Crescent City CA

Amongst the San Juan Islands WA

From branch to water's edge

Not counting gulls, coots, mallards, and Canada geese, a sampling of waterbirds at Coulon Park, Renton.

Cast, in order of appearance: Belted Kingfisher; Common Merganser (female); Hooded Merganser; Gadwall; Common Merganser (male); Pied-bill Grebe; Clarke’s Grebe; Barrow’s Goldeneye; Northern Shoveler

Wade in the water

A tip of the bathing-cap to the aquatic theme of this week's Sepia Saturday.

My folks, pictured deep in the land o' lakes above (Michigan), bought me this record when I was a kid -- selections from the TV folksong revue, "Hootenanny."

I grew very fond of several of the more upbeat folky songs on it ("Katie Cruel" in particular), but my least favorite (at the tender age of 10) was Judy Henske's rendition of the gospel song, "Wade in the Water." Between the intense lyrics and her growling performance, it terrified me.

At any rate, 50 years later I love Henske's performance. She foreshadows by several years another powerful emulator of black blues hollerers, Janis Joplin, who I also simply couldn't bear the first time I heard her, in 9th grade. (I was a sheltered child in the '60s... in addition to this record, my parents bought me Miles Davis and Schubert...an attempt, I suspect, to lure me away from the likes of Elvis Presley.)

I was quite pleased when the great '80s American band The Replacements stole the Hootenanny cover design for one of their own records.

Here are some interesting other renditions.

• Traditional: Ella Jenkins
• Rocking: Big Mama Thornton
• Jazzy: Ellen McIlwaine
• Electro hip-hop! Rudy Jimenez

For more water wading of various sorts, don't forget to visit the afore-linked Sepia Saturday!

Wedding, Summer Solstice 1986

Today is Saturday, June 21, 2014. It is Summer Solstice. Twenty-eight years ago, Summer Solstice also fell on Saturday, June 21. We felt it was an auspicious day of the year to get married.

All photos by best bud Herb Payton. Thanks, padre.

First we led our small crew of witnesses across Puget Sound and around the top of the Olympic Peninsula to the deep fiord of Lake Crescent, and then through the woods to our chosen spot.

No fancy church for us.

I'd written a suitably idiosyncratic, humorous, and marginally poetic service, and we'd hired a local judge to do the honors. (She is now a State Supreme Court Justice.)

There was something meaningful about letting balloons loose across the lake, but I'm not sure what.

The parental units (mine bookending the group, Robin's mom and step-dad to the center right). Everyone was looking different directions because there were three photographers!

There was also something symbolic about finding a snakeskin in the grass -- old lives left behind, I reckon --  not to mention the deer who wandered by to watch the proceedings.

Live noodling by the talented brother-in-law in the sumptuous old lodge. The bartender was named Lloyd, like the one in "The Shining."

Cutting the custom cake (in a "Miami-Vice"color scheme, with abstract "New Wave" marzipan shapes and plastic bride and groom in hand-painted psychedelic dress). Plus PeeWee Herman-ish palm-tree vegetables as table decorations.

Pleased with ourselves.

Whew, that's over.

For more wedding content from the past, check out this week's Sepia Saturday.

Snow

An unseasonably dry and warm winter in western Washington means we have to go to Snoqualmie Pass to see snow, and not very much at that. Still, it was cold enough to freeze Gold Creek Pond.

Sepia Lighthouse

This week's Sepia Saturday theme peripherally involves a lighthouse on an antique postcard... and I just happen to have a fitting entry in my collection, sent to my paternal grandmother seven years before my father was born.

Family historian though I am, I have no idea who cousin Camilla was. She must have been related to Jessie Bentley's relatives on the Daniels or Orr sides.

This park, and specifically the presumably decorative lighthouse, prove to have been popular postcard fodder.  Here's a bit more information about the park from another card...

And lastly, from Ebay, here's another copy of the card at the top of this page, sent a few years later to a Miss Vanderhoff at the Shredded Wheat Company in Niagara Falls!

Pilings/\sgnilip

Things That Make You Go "Hmm"

Concrete box of mystery, Lake Chelan, WA 2011.

A careful reading reveals the proto-sandcastle on the shore as well as the intriguing curve of floats demarking the swim area.

(Why is there a word ["cube," obviously] for a three-dimensional square but not one for the equally common three-dimensional rectangle? [I could say "rectangular parallpiped" but it's nowhere as succinct, now is it?])

Tree-o

Times of the day from the standpoint of a dryad.



Morning mist, Lake Boren, Washington




Still afternoon, Boca Trabaria, Tuscany






Night wind, Lake Bellevue, Washington