You say three hours, he says three days

We flew from Kauai to Honolulu to Portland, spent the night in a hotel and then began the three hour drive back to Bend.

Just this side of Mt. Hood, when alpine trees cede to ponderosas, we passed Lee the Horselogger. (Go on, click through. His rig looks exactly like that. I couldn't take my own picture because I was too busy gawking, and also wondering how he keeps his wagon from running away on those steep declines. My husband says the wagon has brakes. STILL.)

Welcome back to Oregon!

Ooooooooooo

One of our guinea pigs died last week* and has been reincarnated as a mouse.

Sweetie – the former-guinea-pig-now-mouse – lives in the wall that divides the stairwell from the dining room. For three days I heard her scrabbling about while I worked. The wall is about 10 feet from where Sweetie's sister sits in a cage; I imagine Raincloud can hear her, too, but Raincloud always has been quiet (Sweetie was the squeaky one) so I can't tell if she recognizes the sounds for what they are.

On the other hand: Sasha says that it's not a mouse, but Sweetie's ghost. She might be right; I haven't heard the scrabbling in a day or so. Maybe Sweetie just wanted to say good-bye.

Oooooooooooooooo!




*She died while we were on vacation. One of my daughter's school friends was babysitting her. I waffle between blaming him for Sweetie's death** and feeling horrified for that poor seven-year-old, who had his friend's dead guinea pig in his room for a day.

**We don't know why she died. She was four, which is I believe late middle age for a guinea pig.

Wordless Wednesday

Last Wednesday: my son in foreground, local kiteboarder in background. Near Haena, Kauai.

1/4 of the way to the sun: in the middle of nowhere

Thomas Sieverts quoted by Matthew Stadler in the Spring 2011 issue of Oregon Humanities:

"Where we live lies between the singular, particular site as geographical-historical event and the sameness of all space in the global economy; between space as a field of immediate experience and space as a distance measured solely by time[.]"

I've been thinking about this all day. It brought to mind a conversation I had at Baldface Lodge. A man trying to understand where Bend is located asked me how far it is from Portland. "Three hours," I said. Then he asked how far it is from Eugene. "Two hours," I replied, and added, to forestall further questioning, "It's six hours from Boise." Ah, said he. "So it's in the middle of nowhere!"

Bend lies in the space between two cities, Portland and Boise; it is also my field of immediate experience. For me, therefore, it's the center of the universe.

*

If Bend is three hours from Portland – speaking of distance in terms of time – then at age 40 (speaking of time in terms of distance traveled by car) I am about 1/4 of the way from Earth to the sun.

How about that.

The monstrous music that runs through our mind

Adam Gopnik writing in The New Yorker about the Internet. 

"What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. ...Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.

"A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1KYMdSL5p

Anisoptera

My daughter is studying dragonflies for school. We've been reading about them nearly every night (the Deschutes County library has a lot of books on dragonflies, turns out); after the reading, she writes or illustrates a page in "My Insect Report." One day last week she wrote this:

Interesting facts about my insect

It can't fly in cold wether.
It livs most of it's life in water.
It can fly baqurds.

The best fact of all!

It evolvd 300 million years ago – be for dinosaurs! It was as big as a crow!

She's been telling everybody about this. Before dinosaurs! As big as a crow! People are always exactly as amazed as she; they act out being dive-bombed by a giant dragonfly, covering their heads with their arms and ducking. And then they'll say (if they know anything about dragonflies at all): Imagine how big mosquitoes must have been back then!

So. As part of the report, she and I are making a crow-sized dragonfly. It has old socks stuffed with plastic bags for its abdomen and head, pipe cleaners for legs and – well, we're not sure yet how to make the wings. She thinks we should cut them out of cardboard, but I thought we could reshape wire hangers and stretch cheesecloth over them. The wire is heavy, though.

Ideas?

---

There is such a creature as the Himalayan Relict Dragonfly. It is not as streamlined a flier as the dragonflies we know; it's slow and rather uncoordinated, they say. It is more nymph than dragonfly, in fact, living for up to nine years as an aquatic insect before making its final transformation.

Scientists originally theorized that this Relict Dragonfly was a predecessor of the dragonflies we know, but now they say that the two have a common ancestor; the Relict and our dragonflies began to separate around the time the Himalayas uplifted.

Around the time the Himalayas* uplifted**! 

That makes me feel young, as a species.

(If I had to do a report, I'd call that the best fact of all.)



*About the Himalayas, Wikipedia says, "Topographically, the belt has many superlatives." I love that.
**Beginning roughly 55 million years ago.

Apparently the cougar is not in my neighborhood

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deer. Easy pickin's for a cougar.

Ten things

Ten things I admire about my mother (in honor of her 40th Mother's Day):

1. She is such a private person that she'll hate this list.

2. She can make a lovely, fulfilling meal in an empty kitchen. She's like Westley on the balustrade, exclaiming, "Why didn't you list that among our assets?" when she's cooking at my house and discovers that I also have a tablespoon of peanut butter and half a chicken leg.

3. She does what needs doing.

4. She has been married to the same man for over 40 years.

5. If I see a bird that interests me and describe it to her in even the most general terms, she can tell me its name and how it behaves.

6. She can kill a rattlesnake with a shovel.

7. She's determined to eradicate the cheatgrass around her cabin here in Oregon, Sisyphean task that it is!

8. She is still in touch with the family that were our neighbors 25 years ago, when I was in high school – three moves ago.

9. She always gives the perfect present: not what she wants, and not what she wants the receiver to want, but what the receiver actually wants.

10. She listens.

10 things

Ten things I learned from my dad (in honor of his bajillionth birthday):

1. If you make a mistake, analyze why it happened and change the way you work/live/behave so it never happens again. Then move on.
2. If you can't change the circumstances which caused you to make the mistake, accept the fact that it will occur again and mitigate it. Then move on.
3. Science fiction rocks.
4. If you want something, go get it. Don't steal it – but go get it. 
5. You can't have everything. You can have that one thing you really want, though, if you work hard.
6. Illini! Illini!
7. Schrodinger's cat is the one that's both alive and dead until you open the box, at which point it is either alive or dead.
8. People are interesting. And weird. They follow a pattern, though. They're worth analyzing.
9. Trust. 
10. My kids are totally normal.