Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
One of the last pictures I took of Ellie in the dog park at Irving Park before we had to leave my beloved if war-ravaged Portland. So thankful for our many years in that wonderful city and the Irvington neighborhood we called home.
📷: Sony A6500 | Sony-Zeiss 24mm f/1.8
🗓️: March 11, 2018
Friday thunderstorms moved through and we got drenched, with more steady rains on Saturday, and even a short shower this morning. You can hear the desert singing in the rain as the cacti soak up and store what they can, the washes fill and flow, and harbor seals come out to play.
📷: Canon 7D II | Canon 500 f/4 + 1.4X
🗓️: October 7, 2017
Templeton in our backyard in Portland, I was playing around with the macro lens. I have a number of pictures of him but I wish I had an order of magnitude more, the charming little fellow changed my life.
📷: Canon 20D | Canon 100mm macro
🗓️: July 30, 2006
A wet image for today as we’re getting much-needed rain in the desert, a look back while looking down from the overlook on the Horsetail Falls Trail in the Columbia River Gorge. This location certainly triggered my fear of heights so it was a crawl out, quick picture, crawl back, start breathing again. I was never in any danger, just my brain thought I was.
📷: Sony A6500 | Sony-Zeiss 55mm f/1.8
🗓️: May 7, 2017
Our last Christmas in Portland was a white one, a growing fear my job search was going to take us away from Oregon heavy on my mind as I wandered our frozen neighborhood. The dragon sculpture at Irvington School was covered in frost, some of its tiles have positive messages and I focused in on this one. If we were going to have to leave the place I never wanted to leave, I was grateful for our time there no matter where we ended up. Two months later I accepted the job offer that brought us to the desert and six years later I’m still deeply grateful for where we were and where we are.
📷: Sony A6500 | Sony 16-70mm f/4
🗓️: December 26, 2017
I’ll be posting more frequently the next few months and I feel I ought to explain why.
Last year after we adopted Bear I was caught off guard by how intensely homesick I suddenly felt for Portland (this is Ellie and I playing in the snow in our backyard a decade ago). It’s not that I hadn’t missed Oregon before — you can’t love a place as much as I loved the Northwest and not miss it when you leave — rather I missed it in the same way I’d miss the desert if I could snap my fingers and give us our old lives back. But I’ve never had a problem mourning the beautiful things I’ve lost as long as it doesn’t keep me from loving the beautiful things I have and have gained. And if you’ve followed me long you know how much I love the Sonoran Desert.
Something else was going on.
A big part of it was I had been having trouble sleeping, leaving me physically and mentally exhausted. Bear was more of a challenge to integrate into our lives than Ellie had been. Sam died around the same time, not that any of their death’s have been easy but I always knew his would be hard. There was pandemic fatigue, the school shooting in Uvalde, the stress of a car commute after so many years taking the train, an especially challenging project. To top it off I got sick twice and had to miss a week of work each time, burning off a huge chunk of my time off, time I usually spend letting my mind spin down. And even though I try to live in the moment and am keenly aware of how good my life is and how many people are genuinely suffering each day of their lives, I still reached a point where I couldn’t keep going and needed to find a way to retire.
Thankfully my boss offered an option to take a leave of absence instead and I took him up on it. Tomorrow I start my four month break and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to step away and recharge. I may not get to play with Bear in the snow as I did Ellie, but he is about to start going on a lot more desert hikes. Looking forward to doing more photography and editing old pictures, my backlog goes back many years (including this one!).
A jumble of driftwood and rocks and organic debris at Oregon’s Yaquina Head in the fall of 2017. I have no interest in endless stretches of sandy beaches but rocky coasts that cradle a diversity of life are a balm to my soul. This was supposed to be the start of more frequent trips to the coast to focus on tide pool photography but it turned out to be my last, as a few weeks later my team got laid off and the wheels were set in motion that months later would bring us to Arizona. We’re a little short on oceans in the desert and since I don’t like to fly I won’t be visiting the Northwest anytime soon, but I do still have many unedited images from my years there and working on them lets me revisit my old home.
I’m sure this will end well.
I’ve posted similar shots of Ellie before, sitting beside the dragon at Irvington School in December 2017. Originally I meant to post it to mark the four year anniversary of leaving our beloved Portland, and when that date passed the anniversary of our arrival here in the desert, but I was pretty tired after work each night and the posts went unwritten. I was in the middle of writing it yesterday under the better-late-than-never philosophy when my wife came in and said the black lab being fostered up in Cave Creek she had her eye on was still up for adoption, and he was cat friendly, and we could meet him that afternoon …
… and we pick up 6 year old Bear in an hour to bring him home. Rather than nattering on and never getting this up I’ll just say how grateful I am for every moment I got to spend with the goofball above and how much I’m looking forward to getting to know the newest member of the family.
Congratulations to Helio Castroneves for winning his 4th Indy 500. I loved him from the start as a rookie but all those pictures are on film waiting for a rainy day to be scanned, this was the last time I saw him, at Portland International Raceway in 2001. Our paths diverged so I never got to see him race in person again but so happy to see the success he’s had during those years, don’t think you’ll find anyone who wasn’t thrilled to see him join the rare club of 4 time winners.
Boolie 