* never mind *

After two failed storms, the third one that began early Saturday morning and continues as I write (Sunday 6PM) is the charm.  This now rivals 1968 as my biggest snowstorm here - two monsters (by local standards) in my fifty-one years in Portland.  Drop in on the PDXsnow site for pretty pictures!  Foot-tall drifts were sealed overnight in 1/8" of ice, but the air cooled again and we're back into snow for the forseeable future - a white Christmas like I've never seen.  We have had snowfall, and perhaps even an inch or two (1990 comes to mind), but even 1968 failed to produce thanks to a warm rain on Christmas Eve and day.  For me, this really is without precedent!
The sad part is that we had high hopes of Christmas in Anacortes this year - with each forecast showing cooler weather, it's pretty much an impossible 250-mile drive.  Even Amtrak chose not to head north last night, and I'm not sure they felt any better about it today.  Therefore, I'm off all week, "stuck" at home, with snow to play in and snowshoes/skis to play with.  My wife can use the snowshoes, I'll just shuffle along beside her.  O what fun!

slow learner!

You'd think that 40 years of heartache was enough, but no - Portland again missed out on a fine snowstorm. Oh it snowed well enough, but with a 30mph south wind it was 34° and wet semi-snow most of the afternoon. We may wake up to 2" on the ground in the morning.. but that isn't good enough. I'd put money on 1/2 inch of ice for Sunday instead of the currently-expected snowstorm. I'm tired of being denied my second lifetime-best snow season!

party like it's .. 1968?

I've lived in Portland my whole life, and only one year stands out as truly wintry in a snow sense: 1968. A friend went to Hawaii for the holidays & I promised to keep a journal. It went sorta like this:

• 12/19 snow, which stuck around a few days
  
• 12/24-25 warm rain = muddy brown Christmas
  
• 12/26 Huge snowstorm w/drifts
  
• 12/30 Another one atop the first pile!  Icicles on the roof as tall as me!

It was amazing.  Now it's 2008 and I've never seen anything quite like it. We had snow this past weekend, a mere inch or three, but it hasn't left. We may get six inches tomorrow, or two, or icy rain, or ??? And another snowstorm is expected Sunday. Could it be a repeat, at last? Doesn't take much to get this old kid excited.. please visit for shots of the first event, and perhaps other events soon!

On another topic, we held a nice brunch at our home this past weekend. Friends, neighbors, co-workers and the like dropped by and brought food - a fun day!

holiday update

We've put up the tree early, so we can celebrate locally before heading north for Christmas. Warm temps means we could go high and catch a tree at 4000 feet, where the noble and subalpine firs live - nice trees for the $5 Forest Service permit! Weather forecasts are suggesting cold weather on the way; we'll see how that impacts the season. We've had little enough rain, it would be odd if we went straight to snow (unlikely at 50' elevations, but not unknown). Hope everyone reading this has a fine December holiday season!

adventure and excitement?

Well, it could be considered that.  

I declared war on back-yard-invading plants, for the first time in quite a while.  My primary goal was the blackberries, which had reclaimed a lot of territory along the back fence since I ripped them from the ground & installed the fence in 2003.  I did some fine damage to their plans today & piled plenty of debris into the recycle bin, then took a break.  I noted another task that was probably more important, and more difficult: the neighbor's bamboo had begun to sprout about 5 feet into my property, and just below a fine viburnum.  After my break I grabbed shovel, loppers and a hatchet and got to work on the new foe.  As the day waned I was exhausted but satisfied, having ripped out many tendrils beneath the surface and pushed all that I found back to the property line.  Several of the roots were over three feet long, and one massive one was closer to eight feet!  I am sure that somewhere beneath my plant, enough root remains to trouble me again - but for now I claim victory in this first skirmish!  

But oh boy do I ache...

updates?

Quiet times, with my wife back in school, daylight disappearing & plenty of cleaning up to do.  We've rearranged some furniture in the house, isn't that exciting?  Really, the most interesting stuff has come from the trees in their colorful autumn cloaks -- I'm trying to capture a falling leaf with a little (but not too much) blur in the shot.  So far so poor, at this point.  The shot at right is from my office building, testing a few camera tricks.  I used white-balance bracketing, so it took a picture & processed it with 'normal' color, a slightly cool and a slightly warm color balance.  In the case of autumn leaves, the warm balance made the colors richer but still natural.  Fun with cameras!

and now, back from the beach!

My health has been as poor as my schedule busy! The head-cold before & during the star party faded, but chills and profound lethargy struck me at the Oregon coast on Thursday and Friday. I tried to act healthy Saturday only to collapse later in the day, and a headache joined the parade Sunday morning. Thankfully, a few good meds took care of it after a while, and the best weather of the weekend hit when I was doing my best. Nothing like a sunny day on the OR coast - rarity has a lot to do with that! Now to wash out all the smell of campfire smoke...

just back from the Oregon star party..

Here's the summary version, graphic from a weather station nearby (with my annotations)
http://www.granitic.net/update/astro/osp08wx.jpg

A fine time, many new sights and a new obeserving pin -- more later, must crash..
Images at http://picasaweb.google.com/alphaPDX/OregonStarPartyXXI

ugh - bad timing

I'm home with a head-cold, when I should be preparing for the Oregon Star Party.  Nothing like being exhausted before a long drive + several days of sleep deprivation!  We'll see how this turns out.. but it's an inauspicious start.  Weather forecast is looking good, and other than some shopping we have everything we'll need. I need only get healthy!

2-2-busy..

plus my pocket-PC is missing, which had the first draft for a Waldo report.  I had it on Monday, but that doesn't count on Wednesday!  We're resting up for our pilgrimage to OSP - see the website at http://www.oregonstarparty.org - then join us!  Sooner or later, relevant posts will resume..

In the meantime, I had scratched my glasses at Waldo; I now have glare-free, scratch-resistant lenses instead.  Not cheap, but it could have been worse.

camp stories, part 1

Well, we're back from 2 consecutive weekends of camping. Both were quite fun, and quite different.

Timothy Lake is near Portland, therefore more crowded & 'used'. We arrived Thu. evening to blue skies & fairly warm wx; if we really wanted to swim this was the time.. but we didn't. It turned out that we were the only family here that day (my sister was in an adjacent campground).

Friday we hiked to the other camp & found my sister's site pretty fast; we visited for awhile then decided to take a longer walk. Without food or map, we proceeded toward Clackamas Lake; it was a pretty walk but we turned around when the lake failed to appear in a timely manner. Bugs were fairly few this weekend, but cooler air & clouds began to take over. The rest of our extended family began arriving as the day waned, but we were pretty spread out between the two camps. We visited several of them before turning in.

Drizzle and fog greeted us Saturday; good thing firewood was reasonably priced! It was too cool for swimming, and the campground wasn't convenient for other pursuits.. so we did some driving. First stop was Clackamas Lake, probably 15 minutes past our hike's turnaround point; it's an interesting jade-green lake and worth a visit. I had seen it a few times in the 1970s, possibily even paddling on a rubber raft there. From there it was on to Little Crater Lake, an amazing sight even after a couple of decades. It may not be a tiny volcano.. but whatever it really is, the color is reminiscent of the big one.

We returned to the camp, gathered our taco-salad ingredients & proceeded to the other campground, where others in the family assembled their contributions and covered the table. A fine meal followed, then the huge family photo. After a while by the fire (and three pretty poor birthday-songs to people who deserved better), we headed back to camp. Hard to believe the camp trip was already over! The next day we broke camp, headed home for 2 days of cleaning gear and clothes.. and set out again!

Images at http://picasaweb.google.com/alphaPDX/August08 -- the first half of the photos are from Timothy Lake.

no news but still talking..

Well, I have glasses again - a bit more reflective (not me the glasses :) but they'll do nicely. I also found another gore-tex hiking hat for $10, not as stylish as the mustard-colored wonder ($30) but again it'll do. I'm waiting for a classic lens to arrive for my digital slr, a Minolta 35-105mm ("new" style); that will act like a 52-156 mini-telephoto in 35mm equivalence. They stopped making these in 1990 or so (the "old" style was from 1985, I believe), but it's reputed to be in original condition. I need to stop buying lenses for a while; I nearly didn't get this but for backpacking it is small and light, supposedly like new, and a great complement to my 17-35 zoom. Speaking of hikes: my bride and I continue to recover from ailing knees (tendonitis & bursitis respectively), and our hiking season has been drastically altered.

The photo at right shows the beer* I had tonight - it fit extremely well in my hand, and bottles should Not do that! The bottle has a fine dent that feels quite spooky, like I had partly crushed it.. but like I say, it felt really nice.

* Oh, I hadn't mentioned that I have celiac disease, no wheat/rye/barley products for me. The 'beer' above is made from fermented sorghum, and I thank Anheuser-Busch for making Redbridge Ale for people like me. Five years ago when I made my own beer you'd have never heard that from me; but times change..

Aggravations & exhilirations
While on the way to replace the lost glasses, I lost a week-old GoreTex hat -- arrgh. Then on Thursday my wife and I went hiking with co-workers, and I lost a large lens-cap for my camera. Seems that things are just trying to get away from me!
On Friday, we went north to see Stevie Wonder at the White River Amphitheater - great stuff! We got back to PDX around 3AM, it's now 9 and I should be sleeping.. ah well. Legs are feeling the ache from the hike (climb!) of Dog Mt in the Gorge, where my lens-cap awaits. I'm 0-2 on lost and found (glasses & hat), so will need to shop for a new lens cover soon. Took a few fine shots of Mt. Rainier, only to find today that I had dust on the sensor. Seems that I'm complaining a lot, must get my mind right...

Fourth of July retro

We had a fine time at the Vancouver fireworks show.. mostly. We set up shop in a large field, then sat for over three hours and literally chilled as we awaited darkness. The setting moon was a fine sight. When the fireworks began our entire area was in motion -- two huge trees were blocking the view! I had expected the shots to go much higher, and the trees would be nice foreground objects, but this was not what we came for! We shifted over and saw the rest of the fine show, but many of my images were now off-tripod. Still, I liked the effect of shorter shutter speeds, so no big deal. The big deal came later, when I realized that I no longer had my glasses - somewhere in our shuffling in the dark, they unclipped from my shirt and disappeared. So the rest of the 3-day weekend I've been using reading glasses, so that was/will be an expensive loss. Check out a few of the images at http://picasaweb.google.com/alphaPDX/Fireworks

Well, thus ends June. I'm staggering along with bursitis in my right knee ("I'm getting better"), but it's been a frustrating month of not getting out to do things. In lieu of hikes and long drives, I've been taking my Sony a200 camera to work and shooting central-east Portland; click on the photo at right to get to my picasa-site. See yas!

blog one

Well, thought I'd give this a try. If you know Yes lyrics from the 90s you'll understand the title. Talk to ya later..

Note: in Oct '17 I renamed this blog to more accurately depict its content. Harsh- but I need to hear it. The former title "Entering the Mind Drive" would come from the first studio track from the half-live album "Keys To Ascencion 2".