boolie

Not Weather Sealed

I had been using the Canon EOS 20D steadily for a couple of years when a sudden gust of wind on a ridge sent my tripod tumbling and introduced the camera and lens to the rocks of the Cascades. The lens was smashed to bits but fortunately the only severe damage the camera sustained was to the flash housing. I didn’t use the on-board flash so I didn’t mind its loss but the gaping hole at the top of the camera made things difficult for someone who loves to shoot in the rain, the camera wasn’t weather-sealed even in the best of times. My solution when using it in the rain was to hold a thick plastic bag on top, durable holdovers from the campus bookstore when I was in school. I still have a couple of the bags although I tend to use Tom Bihn stuff sacks to protect my equipment these days. I have a full-on camera cover but they aren’t so convenient.

My low-tech solution worked, I used the camera heavily for several more years until the shutter packed it in while I was hiking with friends on Mount Rainier. I’ve hung onto the broken camera for sentimental reasons over the years, but it’s time to say goodbye as there’s no reason to take it to Arizona with us. I took it out for a quick photo session before we say goodbye.

Goodbye Irvington, I Love You

Sixteen years ago it was time to move.

My wife had changed jobs and we needed to find a home with a reasonable commute both to her job in Portland and to mine in Beaverton to the west. We found a wonderful realtor who knew the old neighborhoods and patiently showed us our options as we tried to get a grasp on life in the city. When our home in Salem sold, there was one house that stood in a neighborhood called Irvington, a name which meant nothing to me then yet so much to me now.

I had never lived in a city before so I was nervous about our new life but I need not have been. At first I loved being able to walk to Portland’s light rail system, MAX, as there was a stop near work and I no longer had to deal with the stress of driving every day. But I also fell in love with the old trees, the unique old houses, the old garages, the variety of people, the variety of landscaping, the ability to walk to shops and restaurants.

I fell in love so deeply it became hard to imagine living in the suburbs again.

Then nine years ago we got a dog. The neighborhood I thought I knew opened up to me in new ways. There was the dog park at Irving Park, and Irving Park in general, as back then the pup was up for wandering around the park as a whole. What a beautiful little gem just a few blocks from our house. But it was the walks after we left Irving Park, where I let Ellie wander wherever she wanted through the neighborhood, where I began walking down streets I had never walked down before and fell in love with the art with which people had decorated their homes and yards. There was an artist a block south of here that created a little dragon out of tile and concrete in front of his house, that I had seen on my way to the train, but it was only after Ellie started taking me farther afield that I saw the much larger dragon he had created at Irvington School.

I started taking a camera with me on all our long morning walks and began documenting some of my favorite pieces of art near the sidewalk, the urban wildlife, the urban flora, the paintings, the murals, the poetry, the fleeting chalk drawings, the Jedi, the bird van, the tree art, the stepping stones, the totems, the wishing tree, the desire for peace. And of course the dragons. This is not a community of artists, though there are artists here, it’s a community of families who feel free to express themselves.

Like the damaged eye of the dragon at the school, time takes its toll on all things, neighborhoods included. It was getting pricey when we bought in but it’s much more expensive now. A while back it was designated a historic neighborhood to try to keep the old homes from being demolished and replaced with large modern homes, but that can also keep out the higher density housing that provides more affordable options. Irvington has been wonderful to us, but it has excluded people in its past, and I want it to be as good a home to as many as possible as it has been to us, for it to embrace the strength of diversity.

Thank you Irvington for changing my misconceptions about urban neighborhoods, for giving me a safe place not just to live but to explore. Goodbye, I love you.

Lurking

Looking forward to the various reptiles that await in Arizona but disappointed this won’t be one of them.

Goodbye Irving Park, I Love You

As our move to Arizona draws close, let me say goodbye to some of the things I’ve loved about our time in the Pacific Northwest, starting with Irving Park. When we moved to Portland 16 years ago, we only had cats so we never considered how close the house might be to a dog park. When we adopted Ellie in 2009 and trained her to go off-leash, it was a delight to discover a dog park was only a few blocks away. After not stepping foot in the park until then we’ve visited twice a day, every day, since. In the sun, in the fog, in the rain, in the snow. Not the ice, Ellie hates the ice.

These days Ellie keeps her evening walks short so we go up to Irving Park but not all the way to the dog park, but most mornings she wants to make it up the hill. More to meet the owners than the other dogs, both because she adores people and because she never misses an opportunity to try to convince someone to give her a treat. After that we head out into the neighborhood, occasionally she wants to go straight home but usually she’s up for a longer ramble, even at 14 years old.

The trees started blooming a couple of weeks ago so I took advantage of a sunny morning to get one last picture of Ellie at the park. A variety of trees ring the paths of the park, some giants from long ago whose lives were spared when the area was carved from the forest. A handful of years ago I deliberately traded a lot of my hiking on the weekends for long walks with Ellie when I realized our aging pup would still go on long walks if they were in the morning, and while I miss the hiking I wouldn’t trade my time with Ellie for it.

Thank you Irving Park for many great memories with this greatest of pups. Thank you to all who helped create and maintain the park over so many years. Goodbye, I love you.

📷: Sony A6500 | Sony-Zeiss 24mm f/1.8
🗓️: March 11, 2018

Not for the Squeamish

A female American kestrel pulls apart what looks like a mouse at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge on a winter morning in 2006. There are a couple of species of mice at the refuge that I’m aware of, deer mice and Pacific jumping mice, but I have no idea which this is (was). Some predators at the refuge swallow their prey whole, while others like kestrels pull them apart and eat just the parts they want and toss aside the rest.

Thrashing Brown

Love the yellow eyes on the brown thrashers, taken in 2006 at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina.

The Adorable Samwise

Roar of the Little Lion

I decided it was finally time to tell Sam that we are moving to Arizona. He took it well.

In the Shadows

A coyote pauses in the shadow of a dense thicket of blackberries, invasives that are widespread across parts of the Pacific Northwest including Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in Washington. The coyote was next to the parking lot at the trailhead for the Kiwa Trail, I got to see and hear it howl in the sunlight before it sauntered up to the blackberries and started down the trail (which was closed to humans, I watched the coyote from my car).

What Matters

If our rental application is approved, we leave for Arizona in a week-and-a-half.

A week-and-a-half.

How can it be that it is time to say goodbye to my home? But it is time. I’m planning to write goodbye posts to a few of my favorite parts of life here, tributes to a place that I have loved to my very core, but I don’t want to give the impression that just because it saddens me to leave the Pacific Northwest that I’m not excited about exploring the Southwest. The Sonoran desert has a unique beauty all its own and I have much to learn on many levels and I’m eager for the journey to begin. I wish I was already there.

But even if the job was in a place I wasn’t excited about, what matters most is our little family will be together.

When our plane landed Saturday night and we took our phones out of airplane mode, my wife had texts from our pet sitter that she and our three cats were at DoveLewis, our emergency vet. She had prepared Ellie’s pills by covering them with pill pockets, but when she let Ellie outside briefly to go to the bathroom one of the cats ate all of Ellie’s pills. With a long history of pet ownership this is not our first brush with an accidental poisoning, I shudder to think how many things Ellie ate in her first months with us as we learned the hard way just how low the bar our pup sets for what qualifies as food.

And of course when I started this blog 12 years ago one of my first posts was about our cat Templeton swallowing a sewing needle right before we were leaving for a trip. Accidents happen, I’m sure all pet owners (and parents) have their own stories.

Thankfully she got all three cats into their carriers (trust me, this is no small feat) and took them to DoveLewis so they were already getting treatment by the time we arrived. It would be easy to panic in a situation like this but I’m grateful she did exactly what was needed.

We suspected Boo was the culprit but until we knew for sure all cats were getting treatment. They gave them medicine to get the cats to throw up but only Trixie cooperated, and she didn’t have any pills (or pill pockets) in her stomach as we suspected. Sam and Boo weren’t revealing their secrets and neither was talking so we left them overnight after talking with both the doctors there and the experts at the ASPCA poison control hotline (1-888-426-4435), while we took Trixie home with us.

The brothers were given charcoal to absorb as much of the medicine as possible, Sam never showed any symptoms but overnight Boo developed an elevated temperature and was anxious and over-reactive, one of the effects the ASPCA predicted, confirming our suspicions about the identify of the pill thief. Those symptoms cleared up by morning and by 2 p.m. they were cleared to come home.

At this point we’re just monitoring Boo, he only ate half his food last night but ate most of it this morning although it took him two passes. He’s been a bit lethargic but not frighteningly so, he could just be recovering from everything he went through physically and emotionally. It could be because he’s upset I recycled all his Boo Boxes. He’s asleep on my legs at the moment, I hate to disturb him but the dog must be walked and I have more to do today than I have time to do.

I’m thankful for my little ones, and so very thankful that we have the income to afford treatments like this when something goes wrong. And I’m deeply thankful for everyone who has looked after our little ones during our stay here, from the sitters to the doctors and everyone in between. We’ll have to find new people in Arizona to fill those roles, and will want to know a good emergency vet before we leave Oregon, one of the many little tasks to be done.

But for now we’re all together and that makes me happy.