It's Gone Now

This morning I went by the wall and activity on the block had picked up noticeably, now a trailer with a backhoe was being unloaded above the corner here. I had to rush to my 10am Bio Anthropology class, and hoped for the best.

After my last class let out, after 2, I walked down the hill with the sunshine on my back and stopped behind the flagger on the corner and just took it all in: this corner was gone. The backhoe was directly above where the ledge had been, piles of the flagstone heaped next to the equipment, retaining walls of crumbling concrete falling away towards the street, stony earth being scooped out and away into a dump truck. What will be?

Are they shoring this corner up to preserve the wall? Or is this antique remnant of St. Mary Academy's playground garden being replaced with the battleship gray concrete panels found across the street? With no moss whatsoever. I'm going to hope for the best, shore it up, re-pour the retaining wall behind it, then put the stones back. The moss will take a few years, but I have a buttermilk recipe that can accelerate the re-colonization. I know what the odds are, but it can be fixed, just that iffy, cracked and bowed out corner.

Ay, Carumba!

...I can't put in the Spanish inverted exclamation point, but it's implied, okay?

Semana Numero Dos is now history, and I have a legal holiday long weekend to spend like a student. 'Cause that's what I am! I had some beer, and watched the last episode of my telenovela "Amar sin Limites" last night, with every woman of child-bearing age either about to pop or holding a newborn, the single women having weddings, and the people over 50 holding their grandchildren and smiling. And the evil characters living a life of shame or dead, the bad always get punished, and forgiven before they die. Now I'm down to only one show, 9pm on Univision, the costume epic of colonial Mexico, with amazing estates, horses and carriages, gowns and pirate attire, aging conquistadores and their willful children...Pasion. Pretty much sums it up, really.

School so far is amazing, I'm keeping up on the reading, and I had a chance to meet with one of my professors who is the head of the archaeology dept. for 30 minutes of course advising, she was very helpful. She was trying to encourage me to take the two statistics classes, but honestly, it's not likely, not when there's two alternatives in the Linguistics dept. that have a lot more interest to me. Math? NOW? I shudder to think. Aren't there Excel programs to crunch those numbers by now? We were seeing slides of her and her team in the 80s excavating a site in eastern Washington, and they still had to use survey equipment and plumb lines from 500 ft away. She even had to concede that GPS is the greatest tool ever, technological updates from other fields are being grabbed up in archaeology and anthropology as fast as they come along. More support for my position, I say. Excel all the way.

After class yesterday, I gave myself a thorough tour of the library, got into the PSU student access websites, found the extra material my art history prof posted for us to access, and then found the Chinese and Japanese literature in translation sections and checked out two titles from 18th century dynastic eras. Ever since I read "Memoirs of a Geisha" in 1997, I love to read these type of stories of long-lost cultural eras in Japan and China, I just get lost in the beautiful imagery and genteel mannerisms. Like I don't have enough reading to do right now?

Last Saturday I had a chance to catch up with my pal from the B-store days, Linsey, and she had a new laptop, bitemarks from a Doberman puppy/piranha, and had enjoyed her first non-retail Christmas in forever. We met at a very busy Zell's, kept a table occupied way too long chatting, and left smelling of really good homefries. Smoked wild salmon omelette cannot be recommended highly enough, so so good. She's all in Career Chick mode, which is great, she's got a great gig right now, but I wish she'd get back to writing her blog. Now that she has the new laptop that doesn't overheat and crash, the world is waiting...

Betty finally got herself another dog, my brother and I heaved a huge familial sigh. Since she quit working her part time job after Christmas, she's been cooped up in her condo and going sour fast, she didn't have anything to take her out of her deeply grooved rut. Of course, any step forward is good in this prolonged grieving process for her old dog, and I know he'll be his own little personality and eventually she'll bond with him as much as the other one. Already she sounds better on the phone, she's getting some exercise again, spending more time outdoors walking him a few times a day, seeing her neighbors going around the block, all of the fringe benefits of dog ownership. The puppy sounds like a mix of some boxer, shepherd, shorthair, tawny and about 50 lbs full grown. I told her to get some new running shoes and check the non-slip strips on the tiled stairs to the condo, he'll be a handful for a few years, pulling her around on a leash. My brother and I are so relieved.


Wild weekend, right? Maybe a trip to Best Buy to play with the computers, maybe check out the new Apple "Air", see a movie. Save the homework for Monday...such a slacker.

more moss

Just in Time

Since I've been walking back and forth each day to class, I keep going past this wall, and thinking, "I really need to bring my camera and shoot this wall, one of these mornings, these stones will be on the sidewalk."

Today, the entire block south and west of this corner was barricaded off, yellow police tape, cones, detour signs, the works.

So after I finished class, I went back there and filled the memory card, getting yelled at by guys in reflective vests and hard hats working on the other side of the street re-directing traffic. Some change is pending with this wall, and tomorrow it maybe started.

This wall was the main impetus for the Moss Project, although I've been thinking about it since November while leaf raking and noticing the amazing moss specimens glowing in the low sunlight. I felt like I was in a magical Welsh forest, here come the primeval wood sprites.
So, this is my newest garden in winter project, and saw all these camellias in bloom, and a trail of what I swore was jasmine. I had to track it down, and found this: below









So while I'm doing all this urban trekking, and in the barest time of year in foliage and bloom terms, this city is full of winter color and growth.
And the Moss Project will go on for a while...



This giant auger was getting placed as I was catching my homebound bus this afternoon...I'd have kicked myself for catching this amazing image but not having my camera with me. The antique steampunk pile driver was resting as the crew was smoothly landing this screwdriver from hell. I love this picture.

Here's another one, looking south:


So this huge build is at the base of the Hawthorne Bridge, and all this rich brown earth is being loaded onto double trailer trucks, hundreds of years of Willamette River floodwash and wharfside debris, clinking red bricks and crusts of old asphalt paving slipping down a thousand years into the pit. Welders, crane operators and hardhat conferences going on around the perimeter, and the rain starts coming down in a mist. Climate is a constant, and I get onto the warm dry bus. Will the wall be there in the morning?

Porch Season Exhibition Day

By noon, the icy fog had burned off on the east side of the river, and the air warmed from 28 to 55 degrees, because the sun broke through and won the day.

What's a Wicked Woman on the Porch to do? HIT THE DECK!

No shorts and tank tops yet, but I turned the gold chair south into the sunshine, and cracked open the Sunday New York Times, a POM peach tea, and some Fred Meyers sushi, whereupon the bontemps de soleil laissez roulez. (bad neworleanese for let the sunny good times roll)

All the dogs and their owners were out, gradually sporting shorts and t-shirts as Oregonians tend to do when it's over 49 degrees, the neighbor on the corner was doing some pre-spring gardening. The daffodil shoots are showing already, and the birch catkins are out. I love love love this 6 month spring thing here.

Of course, there will be snow, when the Pineapple Express hooks up with the arctic blast coming down the Gorge, and we get hit with some February Freezing Sleet. But that melts so fast, it doesn't really make for a full season of Winter. Under the snow will be crocuses and hyacinths coming up already. Gentle, easy river valley winters are wonderful.

The extremely low sun position does make for a short spell in the full sunshine, and the shadows are still in chilly January mode, but the first pre-season Porch Day was successful. I'm hoping it carries over into tomorrow a bit, because I'm taking my camera to campus for some winter in the park shots, and to start the Moss Project. (teaser)

The Tao of Pho

Everyone's been asking me how it's going, the school thing. And laugh at how I smile like a kid on Christmas morning. It's true, that's how the school thing is going for me, better than whatever Mary Poppins magic Santa ever left under the tree for me. I was always one of those kids who loved school, played school during the summer (when I wasn't reading under a tree) and thought August was truly the cruelest month.

It reminds me of that phase of infatuation when you don't need to eat, sleep, rest or think, the rosy sparkle cloud just carries you along effortlessly, buoyed by love and seeing the perfection of the Universe in everything.

That's how my first week of school has been. Sometimes the sparkle cloud is sky blue.

This morning I finally purchased my biological anthropology textbooks that came in last night, so we get a chance to catch up on all the reading before class on Tuesday. My first History of Prehistoric and Ancient Art class was divine yesterday, I barely got into it, thankfully a few people dropped it between Tuesday and Thursday. So for a few weeks I will be traveling in Deep Time and early history in all my classes, and reading for real what I've been gleaning from popular culture and cable TV for years. Like the 'Hobbitt' skeleton found in Sumatra that is in the center of controversy in paleo-anthropology right now; is it a new subspecies, or a child with encephalitic disease? This was on the National Geographic channel the past few months, and is showing up in my class, too. So so cool.

I'm finding out the category of anthropology I've always been the most interested in, it's called Post-processural Anthropology, uncovering the whys and hows of cultural history, and opening up the perspective to other viewpoints other than Euro-centric, Judeo-Christian, white male based. There. So now I know what it's called. (so happy)

Sipping chrysanthemum white tea and listening to classical 89.9, I find myself in a beautiful and unexpected place. There is a wonderful Vietnamese Pho restaurant near the campus that I stopped at on the way home for some lunch and chance to see the student flurry go by outside the wrap-around windows of the corner location. There are these occasions where I like to just observe and witness the whole picture and experience, to make it real each time while still marveling that it's happening. The restaurant was very busy at 12:30, and there were 5 or 6 women my age doing the 'table for one' thing, so I ordered a beer and the Bun Ga (chicken with vermicelli and the cilantro-mint-sprout-cucumber-carrot melange and sweet vinegar-chili sauce) and just relaxed. What a week! What a great beginning! Such a happy kid again. What a strange trip the past 12 months have been, and I could not have foreseen being here, now, doing this, from where I had been last January 11th, closing stores, ending so completely that 10-year phase of my life. It was a vast void of misty uncertainty to me then, what would start February 1st 2007. I like fog, I'm comfortable in it, can maneuver fairly well, and wound up here doing what has always been my greatest wish---going to school. Finishing school. Learning for real. And today the sparkle cloud is sunny yellow and gold, warm all around me, and stretching ahead as far as I can see.

Rainless in Portland

STOP THE PRESSES

Dawn breaks without rain today, I can trudge up the hill to campus with my face lifted to the mist lingering on the West Hills, the building facades blushing rosy and gold, looking like I feel; vintage but restored, in my best light, ready to face the busy day.

And already I'm behaving like a student, I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to drop my Asian Women's class and take an Ancient Art History class instead, more lecture and note taking instead of grooming to be a TA next term and too much outside of class group meetings. And one more degree requirement taken care of, so I just hope the prof lets me squeeze in as a transfer student because the class was already closed online. (push push push)

I was telling my friend how I leave the house earlier than I need to in the morning, so I can sit in the student lounge before class starts and catch my breath, journal a bit, and observe the current student body. How is student life the same as I knew 20-some years ago? What are all the ways it's radically different? In what ways do they look differently, the changes of fashion and the return of fashions that lull me into thinking it's still the '70s. One thing I felt is that "my whole life is still ahead of me" feeling, and I am caught up in it as well. I don't want to waste time being bitter or sardonic, this is a fresh bag of salad I'm opening this year, let's be ready, let's be as unbiased as I can, open to the experience.

Amazing---blue sky out my north window, a small 'V' of high-flying geese, squirrels and crows in a stand-off in the back yard. It's great to be in the right place at the right time.