Last year, I was supposed to be unpacking from our big move to our new house, and instead I took a day off to take pictures of each type of flower currently blooming in our yard. You can see the 1st Annual Tour here. This year, I’m not really supposed to be unpacking (except we really still aren’t done with that a whole year later), but I am learning how to use my new SLR camera. So I headed out to the yard again, where there are flowers galore. And of all the things I’m likely to take pictures of (the cats, Preston, birds) flowers are the most patient and willing to just sit calmly looking lovely while I figure out what the heck is the difference between a picture taken at f-5.6 at 1/600 and one taken at f-6 at 1/800.

But after I got inside and uploaded the pictures I noticed something interesting. There are a LOT more flowers in our lawn this year than last year. Partly that’s because it’s three weeks later this year than it was last year when I did the photo tour. But also I like to think it has a lot to do with our having lived here for a year. We’ve been selectively mowing the lawn, going around the big stands of clover and other interesting flowers. There are some volunteer bleeding hearts and columbines coming up along the edges of the house (sorry, flowers are already past, so I didn’t catch them electronically). One of the most common flowers in our yard is some sort of weed, but I like it a lot and I’ve even weeded around it in the flowerbed to make it look like I planted it there on purpose. And of course, we’ve planted a few flowers as well. I’ve also included flowers on plants in the vegetable garden, because I figure they count as far is increasing food sources for bees and other insects. And also because a flower is a flower dude.

There were too many to put them in a blog post, so I uploaded them to a flickr set, which you can enjoy by going here. If there is no note below the picture saying what the flower is, that’s because I don’t know, and you should leave me a comment (either on the picture or here on the blog) if you know what it is.

And if you want to appreciate the fabulousness of detail that my new camera allows, you can click on the button that says “All Sizes” and that will give you a bigger version. Of course, the camera takes a much bigger picture, but it would take a long time to upload the full versions, so I just left them as large as seemed reasonable. I have definitely noticed what most reviewers have already said about the Canon XTi, which is that the stock lens isn’t great. I really feel like there should be a better level of detail in the larger versions than there is. But I’m confident that a fancy new lens will fix that

Last weekend, Hobostripper stayed with me. I’m not sure what else needs to be said about that. How often does one get a Hobostripper and her well-trained dog hanging out for a few days? I don’t know about you all, but this doesn’t happen to me all that often. We played in the woods, went to visit Rusty Cock Ridge, talked a lot. She wants to start some sort of wilderness education program herself, so we talked a lot about the things I’ve learned in the last few years. She made a fabulous beef curry stew that we ate for every meal for about three days straight. After that was gone, we resorted to eating amazing salads mostly from the garden in the backyard (just add cheese and hearts of palm…mmmmm).

The day she left, Preston got back from driving across the country. According to Mapquest, it should take 45 hours to drive from South Carolina to here, with no stops. Preston did it in 70 hours, including a 12-hour stop in Boise to hook up with some old friends, in addition to all the gas stops, construction slowdowns, and the occasional rest area nap. We have a conception in our culture that if you love someone, you should love them without reference to their actions. I’ve heard this called unconditional love, though it’s rarely actually without condition. Anyway, I love Preston for lots of reasons, and I would still probably love him if he didn’t have mad driving skillz, but it’s definitely one of the reasons I Like him a lot. And it’s not just about the driving, but about the capacity to take care of oneself (and beyond that, to act graciously and gracefully) in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations. He’s pretty cool and I’m glad he lives with me.

And then, two days after that, several pounds of alpaca fiber showed up in my mailbox!

Altogether, that’s 4 pounds of alpaca fiber. You can’t really appreciate the color of the grey/silver in the background, but it’s quite lush. My mom totally hooked me up. There was an ad in her local newspaper from a local alpaca ranch. They were looking for folks to spin up their fleeces. They will send me all the fiber I want, I’ll spin it all up and send them back half. I can do whatever I want with my half, including sell it. Wow! I was thinking that if I could spin a pound of it in 6 hours, then I could make somewhere around minimum wage for selling my half of the spun yarn. I tried it out last night. Haha! I spun less than an ounce in 1 hour. (For those of you who don’t live with an engineer who knows these conversions off the top of his head, there are 16 ounces in a pound.) So maybe I’ll have to go back to looking at it as just a great way to get fiber for personal use. But the alpaca is really nice to work with, so soft and really seems to want to spin thin. My first spindle is coming out to be a two-ply light sportweight, about 15-16 wraps per inch. This is definitely thinner than I usually spin without some effort. Here’s a close-up of the four colors, although you still don’t get a good sense of the grey fibers.

So far I’ve just been spinning the white fibers. They are really clean and un-matted. I haven’t had to wash it or card it, just pick out the occasional bit of hay as I spin, so I’m basically spinning right from the animal. He also sent me a half pound of suri alpaca to play with. I haven’t ever worked with it before (see my previous post about alpacapalooza for pictures of the two different kinds of alpaca). Their hair is longer and straighter and seems to matte more, so I will have to wash that stuff.  I’m also going to try washing some of the regular huacaya fibers, even though they don’t seem to need it, just to see what difference it makes.

And just to top it all off, Preston’s economic stimulus check showed up this week, so we are feeling even a little richer than usual. He’ll be putting his into surfboard shaping supplies (…”maybe a router,” he’s been musing…). I’m waiting impatiently for mine, with which I plan to buy a digital SLR, probably the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. And speaking of cameras, I’m motivated again to put some more effort into making something happen with selling photos. I feel like my current job has given me a lot of tools for online marketing and sales that I didn’t have the first time around. So I’ll be working on updating the main Whoa! Photos website and posting a new series of pictures that I’ve taken of a beautiful pin-up girl type. Lots of beautiful nature shots for all you pagans out there

Yes, that’s right. I said Alapacapalooza: Three Days of Peace, Love, and Livestock. It was at a nearby fairgrounds a couple weeks ago, and I keep forgetting to post pictures. If you have never seen a real live alpaca, you are definitely missing out. They are the most adorable little things you have ever seen.

See what I mean! It’s like a furry little ewok and you just want to pinch their furry little cheeks! I didn’t try it but, I suspect that alpacas do not like to have their cheeks pinched. In fact, I suspect that they take themselves fairly seriously.

You might notice that the fiber on the alpacas in those two pictures seems different. It turns out that there are two very different kinds of alpacas–the Suri and the Huacaya. The Suri have much longer, straighter hair. I understand that their hair is more like silk, very fine and smooth and not much crimp to it. But I haven’t had a chance to feel any of the unfinished Suri fibers. I think they look kinda dorky, you know, in an adorable sort of way.

The Huacaya are the more ewok-looking ones like the first picture. Their hair is curly, but not kinky like a sheep’s, and they don’t have lanolin so it’s super soft right off the animal. It feels like holding warm clouds. Really.

Of course, they all look funny right after they get sheared.

And it turns out that they think each other looks funny after they get sheared too. I had heard this about sheep, but witnessed it with the alpacas also. It turns out that they have a pretty incredible visual memory. According to the shearer, they will remember a person’s face for about 2 years, so alpacas that she sheared last year will know who she is right away. They also recognize other alpacas visually, and they keep track of each other by sight. So when one of them gets taken out of the pen and sheared and then brought back, no one recognizes her at first. There is lots of squeeling and sniffing while the rest of the herd compiles enough secondary clues to be able to confirm her identity without all the hair.

And also, one mustn’t forget the third kind of alpaca–the punk-rock alpaca.

p.s. Someone in my knitting group gifted me a *whole alpaca fleece*! Pictures to come after I get it processed and ready for spinning. It’s a beautiful grey color from an alpaca named Rex.

OMG! IT’S A BABY SQUIRREL!!

He fell out of his nest, and I think maybe he was too heavy for momma squirrel to carry him back up to the nest. I heard a squirrel in a tree near the neighbor’s driveway making a sound that I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t an alarm, or any of the usual chatter that I hear squirrels make. It was a low grumbly, talky sort of a sound. I stopped to watch for a minute, and the squirrel was looking down at the ground, but I was in the middle of doing something and I didn’t walk over to see what it was. A few minutes later, I was in the back yard and I heard Preston yelling at Magoo to “drop it!” (Magoo is such a dog sometimes, cuz she totally dropped it.) Preston scooped Magoo up and I headed toward the little fuzzy grey form squeeling on the sidewalk.

Of course, I expected it to be bad. Magoo has a history of inappropriate behavior with small fuzzy baby wild animals. (the link is to an archived version of the page, with some wonky formatting, but it’s still worth reading). But I picked up this little guy, and I could see by his fur that Magoo had just been holding him by the scruff of his neck. He was small kitten sized, and his distress call was like a high-pitched kitten distress call, and I wonder if Magoo thought he was a kitten. In any case, I couldn’t see any puncture marks. Within a couple seconds after I picked him up, he relaxed and curled up. His little eyes weren’t open yet, but he seemed to fall asleep. Every minute or so, he would wake up again, give a little distress call, and then fall asleep. We brought him inside, put him in a little box with some towels and turned to our #1 emergency resource, Google. We learned that you should keep them warm, that baby squirrels have very high metabolisms, and that if you leave them under the tree where the nest is, momma squirrel will probably come pick him up within an hour or so.

I also knew, from an interview a year or so ago, that the local human society contracts with a wildlife rehabilitator, so we called them to get the rehabber’s number. Her name is Tammy, and she said that we could try putting him in his box with a jar of warm water at the base of the tree and see if momma would come get him, but it was really cold out that day, and she didn’t think we should just leave him out. I think the way this is supposed to work is that the baby is supposed to be concerned about his safety and making distress calls so momma hears where he is and comes to get him. But this little guy is pretty comfortable with the world, and as soon as he was warm, he just curled up and went to sleep with nary a peep. Momma never knew he was there, and we started to worry that he would get too cold even with the towels.

When Tammy got off work, she came by to pick him up. She has the resources and knowledge to raise him. But she and I got to talking, and it turns out that she needs a fair amount of help with web design, and marketing, and maybe even a certain amount of feeding baby animals. It came up that Preston surfs, and she said, “Oh darn, it’s too bad I didn’t know you all last year! I had a baby river otter and I really needed someone to teach him to swim.”

!!!

Can you even imagine how cool it would be to take a river otter surfing with you!? I guess they are not born knowing how to swim or how to catch fish. Tammy ended up using a rescued raccoon to teach him to fish.

Anyway, so I’ve been working on some web design for her, and some brochure stuff, and she works during the day at the local vet hospital so I’ve been stopping by in the mornings before work to say hello to the little baby squirrel, who she carries around in her pocket. So cute! His eyes are open now, and he tries to suck on my fingers when I hold him.

Actually, it’s pretty much just the flooding that I’m going to talk about. The only way that fire is involved in our lives is the sad lack of a woodstove in our living room, but I’m not sure we can be so dramatic as to call that a plague. And Pavi and Magoo can both be pests, but they are considerably fuzzier than a horde of locusts and therefore a lot more pleasant to cuddle with. Things that are good to cuddle with can’t really be called a plague either. But there has for sure been some flooding around here. Both Preston and I have found our jobs affected by the fact that about 10 miles of I-5 is completely shut down between here and Portland.

In this picture, you can see where the cement barriers are supposed to be as they come in to the picture at the bottom. And then you can see where the flood waters have moved them all helter-skelter across the road. Also, if you click on the image, you can just make out a chunk of the roadway itself sticking out of the water on the left side near the road sign. I don’t know what all is involved in repairing the road to open it up again, but this makes me suspect it’s more than just waiting for the water to drain off.
These pictures were all taken by a co-worker of Preston’s, near the Chehalis/Centralia corridor where the freeway is still closed. Many of the pictures are quite close to places where Preston and I had looked to buy a house. We are thankful in many ways that we chose to buy in Olympia, and this is one of them.

The whole Centralia area is in a big flood plain, and I know there have been debates over time about how much should be built around there. In particular, there was a lot of debate about Walmart and the huge parking lot that covers over a vast amount of the wetlands that used to hold and absorb the extra flow. I believe it was shortly after the Walmart parking lot was built that the big flood of ‘96 happened. This year, they’ve added on to the Walmart complex with a huge Home Depot and adjoining parking lot extending further into what used to be the wetlands.

Be sure to click on this one in order to appreciate the 18-wheeler up to its windows in water.

We are fortunate to live in a house on a hill over a fairly deep ravine, so we didn’t have any flooding issues in our house, although we were briefly worried about the fact that our garage is below street level, so we were worried we might get some flow in from the driveway. But we suffered no ill effects. There were parts of Olympia equally underwater, in particular there were cars window deep in parking lots in the mall district. (Hmm, might it have something to do, again, with all the paved parking lots…?) My office wasn’t directly affected, nor was Preston’s, although the Chehalis river, normally about a mile away, came within a quarter mile of his building. Both of us have been dealing with the effects of the main shipping thoroughfare being closed, and I imagine there are businesses much harder hit than ours. For instance, I work at a snowboard shop, and the only two ski hills currently open in the area (Mt. Hood and White Pass, if you’re curious) are south of the I-5 closure. It’s still possible to get there, but it’s a 2+ hour detour each way. Those resorts have to be taking a hit if they are losing out on all their normal Seattle business.

I was thinking about home decorating today (something I think about more often than you might think), and about how people do this thing called “picking colors” for the different rooms in their house. I’m not totally clear on this, but I’m pretty sure that it’s supposed to help you know if some new item will go with the rest of the room without having to actually put the item in the room. Also, maybe it’s supposed to help other people know what to get you if they want to get you a gift for your house. Like if I know that someone else’s bathroom is decorated with sunflowers, then I might be able to get them a picture of sunflowers that would fit in.

So I was looking around the house today and wondering, if someone wanted to get us something for our house, how would I describe what would fit in? Colors are so hard to describe. One wall in our living room and kitchen is sort of a coral/sand/pink/orange color that looks different in every different light and time of day. How would you know if you had found something the same color? And then there are issues of style. Even if you did manage to find a painting that incorporated just the right shade of pink, but it was an impressionist painting of a lighthouse…not working with the current scheme.

So I started wondering if it would be possible to take pictures that would somehow start to capture both the colors and the style of what we’re going for. Here are some more or less successful attempts:

Living Room

In the living room, the colors are mostly really warm-lots of shades off red/orange and rich wood tones. We’re trying to offset all that heaviness with light blue and silver. The sheer curtains are a light grey-blue as is one wall in the room. We need more silver to balance out mostly dark furniture. The lines we are looking for are clean and sleek, but with a bit of graceful curve to them. Nothing overstuffed, but nothing severe either.

Kitchen

Our kitchen is so small that we are trying for sleek clean lines here. The counters are white, the cupboard doors are white, and the floor is white tile. One small wall is that same coral color as the living room wall, which is similiar in color to the flowers on this recipe holder. There are a few accents, mostly in red and blue, and some woodtone stuff that ties in with the living room (the kitchen is open to the living room). On the list is a set of nice silver hardware for the cupboards.

Bathroom

I’m actually a little lost with the decorating in the bathroom. The walls are blue. The ceiling is white. The floor is white tile. That’s all just fine, but the only thing in the bathroom that actually makes me smile is this arrangement of pale yellow towels against the blue wall on the gold towel bar. A little bit of the warm reddish wood tone from the picture frame makes this the perfect vignette. I haven’t figured out how to create that feeling in the rest of the bathroom.

My Room

My room has that same coral wall color (which usually looks richer than it does in this picture) and a lot of warm earth tones and textures. It’s definitely on the brown/red side of the scale, and I’m not too worried about lightening that up, since it’s supposed to be a cozy retreat sort of space.

Preston’s Room

If you can picture a combination of Hawaiian surfer culture and Australian aboriginal art, you can picture Preston’s style. I still don’t have it all figured out myself. His floor is this geometric diamond pattern. Decorations include Hawaiian-print sarongs and a hanging surfboard as well as these lovely curtains (if I do say so myself). I think the key is to use Hawaiian themes very judiciously, and use lots and lots of white space and geometric designs to balance out all those flowers and shit. Of course, he can’t resist a little red, orange, and yellow too. Such a conflicted personality he has

So now you know all I know about how to create cohesive designs. Small insights here and there, but mostly I’m totally winging it. Do you feel like these pictures give you some sense of what we’re trying to do with our space?

It’s hard to say much about a place like this. It’s very magical and very foreign.

Click for a larger view. This is one one Olympia’s local characters. He carries his cats around with him on his bicycle, and I see him panhandling around the West End most days. At first, I didn’t approve at all. Living on a bicycle is no life for a cat, I thought. But as I saw him around more and more, I saw that these cats really love him. The black one will sometimes ride on top of the kitty carrier attached over the back wheel, and one day I watched him climb from the kitty carrier to the man’s shoulder and ride around a parking lot perched there happily. I’ve wanted to give the guy some money, but I think that giving gifts to someone who has no means to reciprocate is demeaning. Finally it occurred to me a couple days ago that paying someone for pictures is a socially acceptable model, and I asked him what he would charge me to take a few pictures of him with his cats. An interesting conversation followed, which I wish I had pursued further, and these pictures.