In which I sail the bounding main

I didn’t post last Wednesday, and that was because I was in Bar Harbor, Maine, during a cruise to New England and Canada. So, for this post, I’ll just cover my cruise.

Our ship left on Sunday, October 23rd, from New York City. So, on Saturday, I was flying to New York. My flight left really early, at 6:15, and both Wayne and I overdid it by arriving at the airport at 4 AM, when I meant to try to get there by 4:15 or 4:30. The airlines and security were quick and efficient. I spent a longer time waiting for my coffee at Portland Coffee Roasters (conveniently located right outside security). I had an uneventful flight to Minneapolis and then another one to La Guardia Airport. My old friend Ray’s flight had arrived early, so he came over to my terminal and then we got an Uber to our hotel in Flushing. We had originally booked into a different hotel. Ray had picked the hotel based on its being near the airport (an interesting decision; if it were up to me, I’d have picked one in New York so that we could walk around, since we arrived in the late afternoon). However, that hotel closed before our trip and we were transferred to a Fairfield Inn in Flushing. Yikes! I think that was one of the scariest areas I’ve ever been in, and I’ve walked all over Manhattan late at night.

As we arrived, I went inside but noticed that Ray was delayed. I finally went out and saw he was looking for something. When he came in, he said he must have left his backpack at the airport. I was horrified, but he said it didn’t have anything important in it, just some shoes and clothes. Considering how creepy the neighborhood was, we decided to order some food to be delivered, so after looking at the options online, we went downstairs to see if the hotel had any recommendations. They handed us two menus, one from an Italian restaurant and one from a Chinese restaurant. We ended up picking Italian. As we were sitting there, an Uber driver came in with a backpack and said, “I think someone here left this.” Ray wasn’t paying any attention, so I said, “Ray, is that your backpack?” It was. Our Uber driver had sent it back to our hotel with another Uber driver. We never thought we’d see that backpack again.

The food was okay, but the consensus, now that we have returned, is that Ray ate something that night that gave him an unfortunate condition caused by contaminated food. He struggled with it several days during our trip.

In the morning, an Uber picked us up around 10:30 to go to the ship. The cruise lines was Norwegian. I have gone on cruises before, but not recently, and not on one of those huge ships that are like a floating hotel. This one was 16 levels and held 4000 passengers. We had lunch at one of the free restaurants and then got acquainted with the ship. Although Ray had a fancier room than I had, the only difference we could tell was a few inches in the bedroom area (he had two one-foot square tables on either side of the bed; I had one one-foot square table and one half as wide) and a much larger bathroom. In the evening we attended a mediocre comedy magic show. The magic was elementary, and the comedy was lame. This was about what I expected from most cruise line entertainment.

The Breakers, the Vanderbilt “cottage”

The next day we awakened in Newport, Rhode Island. The weather was not with us. It was rainy and foggy, and the water was choppy. We were supposed to go on a land and sea excursion, but it was cancelled because of the weather. We took a free trolley and got off at the Cliff Walk, where we walked a little bit, and then we walked down to the Breakers, the Vanderbilt mansion that was the family’s “cottage.” Ray excused himself a couple of times after we had coffee in the gift shop and returned to say he needed to go back to the ship. This was the first occurrence of his problem. I toured the house, which was really over the top as far as ornateness was concerned.

Then I had an adventure trying to figure out how to catch the tram back to the transit center. The tram driver had said to be sure to cross the street to get back, so I wasn’t sure if the tram would make a circle or not. I couldn’t find any tram stops with the green circle indicating the free tram. It turned out that I could have been picked up at one with a blue circle. I finally walked all the way back to the one I had gotten off at, only to find it was blue. (I had passed three or four blue ones.) Then I was bypassed by a full tram. Of course, two buses finally came at the same time, one from the wrong direction that was definitely a green tram and a bus from the right direction whose number I couldn’t read. Making a split decision, I crossed the street to the green tram. When I asked the driver if she was going to the transit station, she said, “That was the bus that just passed.” However, she said she would go there and ended up taking quite a few people from our ship, who got on later. By the time I got back, I was too tired to walk the 1/2 mile to the shopping area. I put in more than 23,000 steps before I even got back to the ship.

That night was our reservation to one of the specialty restaurants not included in the regular cruise price, but my package included two free dinners at the specialty restaurants (and Ray’s included one). We selected the seafood restaurant as one of our choices. It was excellent. I found in general that the free food on the ship was mediocre, although slightly better in the restaurants than in the buffet, but the specialty restaurants were very good. (This was not my experience on Holland America, where all the food was excellent, or on Viking, where it was superb, but that was 20 years ago. Things may have changed.) Then we went to a dueling piano show that was pretty good. They did their whole show from requests and got the audience to sing along. It was lively.

We awakened to another foggy day and arrived in Portland, Maine, during the morning. By the way, we still saw fall color in these areas, but because of the fog and gray skies, I knew the color wouldn’t come out in photos. We especially saw some nice color in Bar Harbor and in Acadia National Park, but in Canada, the leaves were pretty much gone.

We had a leisurely morning because our excursion didn’t leave until the afternoon. However, on the way down to the pier, I got a sharp twinge in my knee that made me worry about taking the excursion. Ray went off to the Walgreen’s a few blocks away (the ship had nowhere where you could buy over-the-counter medication) and got lost coming back. We had just had an argument the day before about whether he had a bad sense of direction. By getting lost, he made me win. He hadn’t come back when they were lining people up for the bus, so I had to get out of line and go into the visitor’s center to ask the address of where we were. He arrived after I was on the bus, but I had kept a seat for him and told them he was coming.

The famous Portland lighthouse. At our first view of it from a little farther away, Ray couldn’t see it at all and I could barely make it out because of the fog.

Again, the weather didn’t really cooperate with us, so we saw a rather blurry Portland lighthouse (at which stop I had my first lobster roll—yummy!) and a faint impression of the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport. Luckily, for my knee, the tour was almost completely a driving tour. In the evening, we couldn’t find anything we wanted to do, so we watched the new Downton Abbey movie on Ray’s TV.

The next day we were in Bar Harbor, Maine. We both had a tour to Acadia National Park but at different times. I also had another afternoon tour, but the ship had shifted the time for the first one so that I couldn’t do both. I canceled the second one, especially since Ray’s whale watching tour had also been canceled.

I went down early, because I was worried about how the tendering was going to work. Nothing much in town was open yet, but I got a coffee at a bar on the waterfront and called Wayne. Because I didn’t purchase a fancy internet package, I had only 150 minutes onboard, and the system was slow, so I kept those minutes to post my book blog and do my check-in for my return flight. We also had no cell phone reception from the ship, so I had to call home from shore.

Acadia was beautiful, but we were unable to see any of the promised views, again because of the fog. However, it made me want to return to the park under different circumstances. It began raining in the afternoon, too, so that by the time I returned to the ship, I was soaked, mostly because of having to stand in line in between two shelters to get back on the ship.

In the evening, we found the library, which was one of the few places on the ship that was quiet, so we played cards before dinner. (We did this several times until someone stole both decks of cards from the library, and then we had to resort to dominoes.) Then we went to see a high-energy dance show called Burn the Stage that was pretty good.

The St. John River where it meets the bay and runs backwards during high tide

On Thursday morning we awakened in St. John, New Brunswick, to another foggy day. We had to get up very early because we had an excursion that met at 7:45 AM. It was a bus ride around the city, where again we had difficulty seeing any views. We did get to see the place where the St. John River meets the bay and flows upstream during high tide. After the bus trip, we found a Tim Horton’s and got coffees. I had to borrow Ray’s phone to call Wayne, because it turned out that my phone doesn’t work in Canada.

In the afternoon, it finally turned nice, but I wanted some rest because my knee had been hurting me, so we retired to our rooms. Just before we were supposed to leave port, I heard bagpipe music. I looked out the window but didn’t see anything, so I went back to my bed, where I had been reading. Then I heard applause, so I put on my shoes and went outside. There was a bagpiper in full regalia piping us off. He had a boom box that played the other parts to the songs he was playing, and his selections were quite diverse. I kept trying to text Ray (on the text and phone package that we paid $10 extra for) to come look, but he never got any of those messages. Being on the other side of the ship, he missed the piper. I took a picture of him, but it’s not a good one, because it was just through a crack between the lifeboats.

We had dinner at one of the free specialty restaurants. It was okay. Most importantly, I had a small amount of dim sum for the first time in several years. (I love dim sum.) That night the wind and waves picked up and there was a lot of howling going on all night.

The next morning I wanted to sleep in a little because we’d been getting up early, and the ship didn’t even dock in Halifax until 10 AM, but Ray had his heart set on Eggs Benedict, and the nicer free restaurants that served it closed at 9 AM. See what they did there? Forcing late sleepers to go to the cheaper buffet? So, no sleeping in for me.

The weather in Halifax was finally beautiful although very cold. This was the only day that I was glad I had purchased a down jacket before my trip. Since it was a long time since my last cruise, I had forgotten how they take your luggage away the night before your departure, so one of my goals was to find an inexpensive bag to throw my nightgown, etc., into the last morning. I found it at the immigration museum gift shop, which was in the pier at Halifax. Ray and I had a nice long walk around the boardwalk, where we had glimpses of the U. S. S. Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which was in port, and a lovely harbor.

Our tour around Halifax in a finally lovely day was interesting, especially since we saw the cemetery where most of the the victims of the Titanic were buried (except those shipped back to their relatives). That same cemetery also held victims from the Halifax explosion, but we didn’t go to see them. However, we heard all about both incidents. I thought Halifax seemed like a city I would like to live in.

Ray on the way out of Halifax. We finally got a nice day!

I was ready to stay in my room that evening, but Ray seemed determined to be constantly active, so we went to hear a guy named Simon sing in one of the bars. The entertainment floors of the ship were really frenetic. This guy had a delicate voice, and having him sing in a bar that was open to a bunch of other entertainment places was not a good venue for him. Also, he seemed to be phoning it in, talking so quietly that we couldn’t understand him and very obviously faking his way through some songs.

The next day was at sea, and of course, since we were no longer sightseeing, the weather was beautiful. It was our evening to have dinner at the French restaurant, and the food was excellent. They played a little trick on Ray. They served all the food in these silver salvers, and they popped the tops off of all of them at the same time at each table. But when they opened Ray’s Coq au Vin, nothing was on the salver. Apparently, they do that to everyone who orders it. I ordered lamb, although the choice was difficult.

That night, we were supposed to have tickets to Six, a Broadway show about Henry the Eighth’s wives, and I’d been looking forward to it all week. They had cancelled the performance we originally signed up for and rescheduled it for Friday and Saturday. We wanted tickets for Friday, but they were sold out before we saw the announcement that they were available, so we got them for Saturday. Well, the performance was again cancelled. So, no Six.

Although my trip home went well, it was exhausting. I was up at 6:30 AM EDT, and didn’t get home until 9 PM PDT. (If you can’t do the math, that’s 17 1/2 hours.) Ray’s flight left an hour or so before mine from the same gate, and by then I was so tired that I felt it through my whole body. The flight to Washington, D. C., seemed very short, so perhaps I fell asleep. Then I had just an hour to get from Terminal Z to Terminal D, but luckily there was an odd transport that looked like a hallway with seats, that drove us from one terminal to another on the same paths as the airplanes were using to get to their gates. Although I got to my gate fairly quickly, they were already loading my flight. It’s a seven-hour flight to Portland, and it went very slowly. I finally started watching a movie, but I wasn’t finished with it before we landed (King Richard starring Will Smith; I hadn’t realized it was three hours long). Then, no luggage. It was delivered yesterday afternoon to my house.

I thought I came home with a cold, but this morning I feel as if I’m just reacting to all the pollen in the air, because I am drier and I feel better.

My cruise was an interesting experience. I had a lot of fun, although I could wish that the weather had been better. I felt that a ship this large was pretty overwhelming. Too much was going on at the same time. The entertainment floors were frenetic. It was hard to compare this cruise with the other ones I’ve taken, because those were so long ago and in much smaller ships. But I would rank this one after Viking and Holland America. Ray said his recent Princess cruise was better quality, but he seemed to be more satisfied with things than I was.

One thing I noticed especially was that Wayne and I started cruising because, although it seems expensive, everything is paid for once you get on the boat. Well, this may be a general change in cruising, I’m not sure, but they were really out to get us to spend every penny that they could get. We felt that the talk and text should have been included, for example, for how are people supposed to communicate with each other? The phones in your rooms only work if you’re both in your room. On my previous cruises, soft drinks were included in the cost, but not here. Also, frankly, the free restaurants still had very good food in my previous cruises (and all the food was free and superb on Viking, which also includes beer and wine at dinner). Not so with this cruise.

And by the way, the “movie theatre” was in the atrium surrounded by and open to Starbucks, a bar, and all the information desks, as well as the IT area. Obviously, we never picked a movie as one of our activities.

On the other hand, the staff was very friendly and helpful. There were a very few examples of bad service, mostly from the IT desk and Customer Service, but by and large, people were falling all over themselves to help you.

Cool, with Russian food

This week the county reports 23,890 confirmed total Covid cases, 1441 probable cases and 441 active ones. There have been 274 deaths. The rate of new cases per 100K is 194.1, and the rate of new hospital admissions per 100K is 7.

I went from wearing t-shirts for the first time this summer back to sweatshirts this week. The temperature went down gradually, sunny and in the 80’s on Wednesday, down ten more degrees by the next few days, and then on Thursday and Tuesday it poured and was quite a bit colder. Today, it looks like it might be warming up.

We watered all the orchard trees on Wednesday and the raspberries on Thursday and Tuesday, right before the rain. The irrigation system we installed on the veggie garden isn’t working quite right. I think it’s because it came with a higher grade soaker hose, which, instead of running down the middle of the garden like I planned, we ran along the edges and Wayne fastened it in. That meant we had to extend it, because it only soaks a path about a foot wide, so we have to run it around the other side, too. We did that with lighter weight soaker hose that squirts a bit more easily. That seems to affect how the heavier hose works, because we get just small drips out of it and not enough to wet the dirt. Wayne has tried a few things, but I think we need to replace either the lighter weight hose with heavier or the heavier with the lighter so that any pressure that gets into it is equally dispersed. I priced some heavier hose at Ace, but it was very expensive, five-foot lengths for $30. We need at least 20 feet of it. I would order the hose from the place where I got the irrigation system (I keep wanting to write irritation system, which seems more accurate at this point), but last year I ordered the system in the spring and didn’t get it until fall, but they didn’t tell me when it would arrive until after I placed the order. I don’t want to order a bunch of soaker hose and get it in September. We’ll make a trip to Home Depot.

About mid-week I tried something on the spur of the moment. I already had tentative plans with Deb for Saturday, and Wayne and I had talked about taking her out to eat before she moves back to Michigan. I decided to take a look at what Kachka, a Russian restaurant in Portland, was doing. We had only been there once, several years ago for my and Katrina’s birthdays, and at that time, reservations were several weeks out. I looked to see about takeout, but saw that they had moved, and they had rooftop seating where each party has its own tent. So, I checked to see if I could get a reservation, and I could. On Saturday afternoon, we picked Deb up from her appointment and went to Kachka.

My purple rose

The restaurant specializes in lots of small dishes that everyone shares. We decided to get that as well as a bowl of borscht for Wayne and some dumplings for me and Deb. It was very good, but I have to say pretty expensive. It was pleasant out there but very windy.

We were treating Deb, but then she wanted to take us out for dessert. So, we went to a Russian store and deli and picked out coffee and cakes. Then Wayne paid while she was looking around. He does that, and it’s not really fair to the other people who want to treat. This might be the last time I see Deb for a while, as she is moving back to Michigan at the end of the month. I had four friends here, and now I’m down to two, as Shawn moved to Utah the year before last.

Snapdragons

Nothing much else is happened, except that Wayne’s hearing aids work great when he has them in, and he has started back at physical therapy, which helped his knees a lot when he went there before. About the hearing aids, he almost lost one on the first day, which has made him paranoid about wearing them in certain settings, thus more likely to forget to wear them. You can’t see them at all in his ear.

I also started taking my art makeups, because I have at least six to do, seven if they gave me a makeup for the holiday instead of putting off my payment. I scheduled two with Oksana, since Sarah only teaches the class I am in. The first one is this morning. I like Oksana, from whom I took a makeup class a few years ago and would have signed up with except that Sarah came back the day I was supposed to take my first class with her. The other teachers I’ve met at the main branch are ones I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to get into Oksana’s classes because there are a lot of Russians in the area, and Oksana speaks Russian.

Two colors of dogwood blossom

On the gardening front, my purple rose bush has just produced its first blooms. They are more red than purple but still pretty.

My snapdragons are also out, as are the blossoms on my dogwood tree. They’re supposed to be all pink, but for the first time this year, the ones lower down seem to be white. Maybe they’re not getting enough sunshine.

I hadn’t seen anything of the ducks in several weeks, so I thought they had gone, but yesterday afternoon I heard a lot of loud quacking in the direction of the pond. I went over to look and saw the female followed by at least eight ducklings!

And that’s it for this week.

Bye bye birdie

On Wednesday night last week we took my sister out to dinner for her birthday, meeting my brother Mark at the restaurant. We had a good time, but as we were driving out of her driveway after dropping her off, Wayne stopped the car. It turns out he had noticed a bird on the driveway when we picked my sister up but thought it was dead. On the way back in, he saw it move.

The little birdie in the box. He was quite scared at first, but after we gave him a blueberry to eat, he calmed right down and just sat there.

We fetched my niece Katrina, thinking we just needed to turn it over, as it was on its back. However, when we flipped it over, it fluttered helplessly and flipped back over again. Its wing was obviously hurt. Wayne thought he may have hit it on the way in to pick Sue up, but Sue later said she thought the cat that hangs around their house got it.

We picked it up and put it in a shoe box then tried to find someplace to take it while Katrina attempted to identify it. It has a fairly common coloring on top but a beautiful greenish yellow or yellowish green belly, so we thought it was a juvenile western tanager.

It seems that there is nowhere to take an injured bird in Southwest Washington. I started out with an organization with a local phone number that seemed promising, but they said they only took parrots. I found an emergency number in Portland, but when I called them, they said they were remodeling and the fumes from the new carpets would be harmful to birds. So, they advised us to keep the bird hydrated and warm and take it to the Audubon Society in Portland in the morning.

So, that’s how we spent Thursday morning. We left him at Katrina’s overnight and then picked him up at 7:30 AM. (Rush hour! What a good time to drive to Portland!) She reported that he had eaten three blueberries and four crickets and had drunk some water out of an eyedropper. The Audubon Society opened at 9:00, so we took Luke in the hopes of making his Play and Train at 10. We arrived there about 8:50, during which time Luke was making a fuss but we were unable to pull over. The poor puppy had diarrhea in the wayback of the car. We took him out and cleaned it up as good as we could and then turned the bird over at 9. They gave us contact information for inquiring about the bird’s progress, which we gave to Katrina, because they said that if he recovered, they would release him at her house, and we thought they might want to arrange things so that the kids could watch.

We got back to Battle Ground in time for Luke’s Puppy Play, but Wayne said he was covered in poop, so we went home. When I took Luke out of the car, though, he was fine. We could have taken him to Puppy Play after all. The back end of the car was another matter.

Much of my week was taken up with cleaning the house for the advent of the Cirque du Schimmelman, which is what we call my youngest brother’s family. They are making a family trip to California, where they are dropping off their oldest daughter, Áine, at design school in L. A. Aside from cleaning and cooking, the only other things I did were go to art class (where I have finished painting all the spots on the starfish and now have to go back and do some second coats) and walk in the park with my friend Christine and her dog Duchess on Friday morning. Friday afternoon I spent making potato salad. Since I was going to have 14 people for dinner, I figured to keep it easy by grilling hot dogs and hamburgers and serving potato salad and other salads. My sister-in-law Nancy said she would have everyone over for dessert. Of course, they wanted to show my brother Steve’s family their beautiful new house.

Part of my dinner guests at my dining table. From left, my sister-in-law Nancy, my sister-in-law Mary, my niece Nadia, my sister Sue, my great-niece Mischa, my nephew Will, my brother Steve, and my brother Mark. Missing are my niece Áine, my niece Katrina, Katrina’s husband Ares, my great-nephew Søren, and my husband Wayne.

As usual with the Cirque, they gave us an original ETA of 3:30, revised it to 5:30, but didn’t actually show up until close to 6:30. By then we had the grill going and we all dove into eating. Sue had brought corn on the cob and salad. By the end of the evening, everyone had gone through 16 hamburgers and about 8 hot dogs. Unfortunately, they only ate half the potato salad (we’re a little sick of it now). We all had a nice time.

The dessert trip to Mark and Nancy’s turned into a little more of an adventure than expected. We took three cars over from our house. Nancy and Mark left first, about a half hour before anyone else. Then Katrina and her family with Áine as an extra went in their car. We took all the rest, which meant cramming five people into our car.

Nancy had about eight desserts there (oh my god, Weight Watcher unfriendly!), and we all had more than one kind, even me. We had been there for about an hour, and people were being toured around the outbuildings by my brother when Wayne started fretting about Luke being locked up for too long. He decided to pop home and take Luke out. We only live a few minutes’ drive away.

Well, everyone came in and Katrina and company went home, taking all the kids except Will so that they left exactly the same number to go home in our car. I could tell that Nancy was getting a little antsy. She started saying maybe Wayne didn’t realize he was supposed to return and get us (of course he did). She suggested taking us home herself, but I was worried we would miss Wayne on the way, so I tried calling him. No answer at home, and he doesn’t have a cell phone. I called three times telling him he didn’t have to return to get us but to please call to let us know he got the call. We waited a while longer, but Nancy decided he hadn’t listened to all of the message and had gone to bed. I was sure that wasn’t something that Wayne would do and that returning home would not work out right, but Nancy is a very forceful person. She finally ending up getting us all into her car.

As we pulled out of the driveway in the dark, a car was right there, and I said, “That looks like our car,” but it went on and Nancy said, “There are lots of blue Subarus in the area.” Of course, it was our car. We got home to find no Wayne and no Luke, and we found out later that Wayne had come up to turn into the driveway but hadn’t been able to because of our car, so had continued on instead of stopping because a car was right behind him. He turned around and came back but missed the driveway and had to turn around again. Then, of course, he arrived at their house to find we were gone. He got home about 10 minutes after we did. If Nancy could have waited exactly one minute more, he would have driven into the driveway before we could drive out, and he wouldn’t have had to make a useless trip.

Steve and company continued on their merry way about 11 AM the next morning, and we received pictures from them on the beach later that day.

That’s about all of note that happened this week.

 

All over the place

Because I had guests this week, I have been on the run every day and have lots of pictures. This was a particularly fun visit because of all the places we went.

On Thursday morning, my friends Ray and Karen and I left for Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, picking up Deb in Clackamas on the way. I thought it was going to be interesting, because none of these people had ever met each other before. They just all knew me. But everyone got along very well.

On our way down to Ashland, we stopped in Albany to have lunch. We had intended to eat a Novak’s Hungarian Restaurant, but they had had a fire and were closed. So, we ate at a restaurant where we stopped last year, Brick and Mortar Cafe. While we were waiting for our table, we walked down the street so that Karen and Ray could see the reconstructed carousel.

We arrived in Ashland about 5:00 PM and checked in. We stayed at the Tudor Inn, the same place as last year, but not in the old motel part of the inn. Instead, we were in rooms across the street, which were much more expensive because they were fancier and this was during the high season. Between my room and Deb’s and next to Ray’s and Karen’s was a little sitting room that seemed like it was just for us, even though it was open to the other guests and had an exit off one end. It was nice, but if we go next year, we’ll try to get in the motel again. The opulence isn’t really worth the difference in price since our original rooms were just fine and neat and clean, with everything new.

Then we went to get our tickets at the box office, had dinner early, and wandered around town until our first play started at 8:00. I thought that because it was high season, the stores might stay open later than 6:00, but just like before, most of the stores closed at 6:00 except the Bloomsbury Bookstore (a very good bookstore).

Our first play was All’s Well That Ends Well in the Elizabethan Theater. The reason we chose to go during the summer this year was so we could attend the open-air Elizabethan Theater. And now I have to confess to a certain amount of idiocy, because although I knew we were going to an outdoor theater, I didn’t put two and two together about the forecast temperature until I walked into the theater and saw they were selling blankets. I hadn’t even worn the layers I could have worn. And, although I had told my guests way back when that it was open air, they had apparently forgotten. What made it worse was that when Ray checked the forecast before coming, it was showing hot temperatures for his whole visit, so he didn’t even bring a jacket, just a fleece vest. (His only souvenir of the trip was an Oregon Shakespeare Festival sweatshirt, which he bought first thing the next morning.)

I had only read the play a few weeks before departing and noted it wasn’t one of Shakespeare’s best. Plus, I was curious about how some of the ideas would go over with a modern audience, particularly the ending, where, no matter how jerky the man had acted throughout the play, the happy ending was his marriage to the heroine, or more accurately, his falling in love with his wife. The play was entertaining, but we weren’t sure we liked some of the artistic decisions. The costumes were very weird, sort of a cross between Elizabethan and 19th century, with some 20th century thrown in. A very odd choice was made in Helena’s costumes to dress her like an Elizabethan boy at some times (well, a stylized Elizabethan costume) and in overalls at other times. I don’t mind the idea of placing a play in another time period, but I would like them to make up their minds. I thought the costumes were more distracting than otherwise.

The audience did boo Bertram during the course of the play, and of course, he was the reluctant groom who ends up in a supposedly happy marriage with Helena at the end. I guess the audience most likely would not have booed him in Elizabethan times.

The experience was a good one, but we froze our butts off, not being smart enough to buy blankets. As always, it was better to see the play for me than to try to read it, but this play is not one that has beautiful speeches in it.

These were the turkeys in the park that let me walk up to within four feet of them before they started casually strolling away

In the morning, we strolled around Limpia Park for a while, but we didn’t realize until we bought a hiking map later in the day, just how extensive it is. We could see there was a big gate farther in, but we didn’t go that far. In part of the park, they were preparing for two events, and in another part, we saw a bunch of wild turkeys. They let me go quite near to them.

The Elizabethan Theater with the first setting for Macbeth

The next day, we had two plays to go to. One was As You Like It, which took place in the larger of the two other theaters. As You Like It has never been one of my favorite plays, because it just seems disjointed to me. In addition, I seldom very much enjoy the humor of Elizabethan times, although like other things, I often find it funnier in performance. There were also some interesting costume choices in this play as well as some annoying stylized movements at times, including at the opening of the play.

We all went to see Macbeth, which was the final play for me and Deb, the one I was most excited about seeing. This play was more traditionally staged except that they moved some scenes around for no apparent reason. I don’t have the play memorized or anything, but it was pretty obvious when they started the play with a fairly boring informational scene (a discussion of what was going on with the king) instead of the witches. I am not sure what would lead them to make such a decision to start the play that way instead of eerily, as it was meant. However, the witches stayed on the stage for most of the play, observing and adding to the eeriness, and that was a good decision. We all liked this play much better.

The North Mountain Park Nature Center has paths and benches and deer grazing on the grounds.

The next day, only Ray and Karen had a play and that was in the evening, Alice in Wonderland, so we had the day to kill. Karen decided to stay in and write postcards, etc., while Deb and Ray and I went out exploring. First, we took a very short river walk. Then we went across the road to the North Mountain Park Nature Center. Finally, we walked a couple of miles on the Bear Creek Greenway, which is part of the Pacific Crest Trail, although at that point it was not in the mountains.

Recently, I heard of a new movie by Kenneth Branaugh about Shakespeare. I found out it had come out in 2018, but I couldn’t find it playing anywhere in our area, although I looked for it several times. To my delight, it was playing in Ashland. So, Saturday afternoon we all went to the movies. It was a very good movie, and I was happy to see it in a theater, because it had some nice panoramic shots.

Deb and I decided just to hang out in our rooms on Saturday night, although we went for dessert to Mix, a delicious bakery in Ashland, where we made a point to stop several times. We always split our desserts so didn’t feel too guilty about it. So, a quiet evening. Ray and Karen reported that they enjoyed their play and thought particularly that the costumes were very inventive. They also said that the few degrees warmer temperature made it much warmer in the audience, and they didn’t put their coats on until intermission.

Crater Lake

Early on Sunday morning, we got started, because our plan was to visit Crater Lake on the way home. We found out that only one road is open so far into the park, and that was the south one, which meant that we would have to backtrack on our way out rather than being able to come out farther north. The lake is simply breathtaking, so we were happy to have come even though it meant that we got home rather late. We took a picnic lunch with us. You could only drive up to the Rim Village and a bit beyond to Discovery Point to view the lake, although if we had had more time, we could have hiked farther.

We got home after 9:30 and discussed our plans for the next day, which turned out to be another long driving day. It was to Seattle, where we wanted to visit Chihuly Gardens and Glass. I have been wanting to see a Chihuly installation since I first looked at one online years ago. I have seen a couple of pieces of his in Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids but have not been in a city where a garden was installed.

We met up with my brother and his son for lunch at Chinook’s. Delicious. Then we went to the gardens.

One of the exhibits in the Chihuly gallery outside the gardens. To give perspective, this was two full-sized boats (you can only see part of the second one on the left) filled with objects resembling sea life.

The work was beautiful, but I was a little disappointed because the garden was so small, and he only used a few different shapes of items. Particularly, there was no water installation, and I think the things he does with fountains and ponds are among his most interesting work. However, the gallery, although only of a half dozen or so rooms, was very beautiful.

After we left the gardens, we wandered around Seattle Center for a bit, and had a cool drink. Then it was time to hit the road, at about the very worst time possible. I ended up in a traffic jam for about an hour on the way to Tacoma, but after Tacoma, the rest of the way was fine. I think it took about twice as long to get from Seattle to Tacoma as it did to get from Tacoma to Seattle.

On Tuesday, my guests opted for a visit to Portland. We drove to the Cascades Station of the Max train, took the train into town, and walked to Powell’s books. I bought a handful of books. Then we had lunch at Deschutes Brewery and took the train home. For once, we were home by about four, so we had a lazy evening, just going out to dinner.

Wednesday morning I took my friends to the airport. Later in the afternoon, I went over to visit my brother and sister-in-law, who are now moving in to their new home in Amboy. They moved up from Berkeley a couple days ago.

So, it was an exciting week with lots going on.

 

A visit to Crystal Springs

Here are some of the rhododendrons and other plants at Crystal Springs Garden.

My pictures this week are from my visit Friday to Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden in Portland with my friend, Deb. We originally planned to go a few weeks ago, but it was raining that morning. That might have been a better plan, because this week got really hot, with record temperatures in the 90’s. That was the temperature on Friday, and many of the poor rhododendrons looked a little wilty. I expect they’re not used to those temperatures so early in the year. I am not a hat person, but I took my garden hat and was happy I did. However, the garden was beautiful although small. We spent about an hour wandering around in it. Lots of ducks were there with their ducklings, apparently not afraid of all the people. At one end of the park that was a little less trafficked, we saw a bunch of duck families, including one duck couple with 16 ducklings.

In the middle of the picture at the back is a little waterfall.

After that, we went to a terrific restaurant called Tasty n Daughters. It was a sort of brunch, Mediterranean, North Africa kind of place. They explained that they meant you to share dishes, so because Deb is a vegetarian by preference (that is, she doesn’t refuse to eat meat but tries not to), we went that way. We shared their cast iron fritatta, which had nettles, cheese, and leeks in it, delicious, but even better was the Shakshuka roasted pepper and tomato stew with baked eggs. Yum, yum! It is the kind of place that you want to return to just to try more things. I am particularly interested in the Manti, Turkish beef and lamb dumplings in a garlic yogurt sauce, or the Moroccan chicken hash.

There are lots of picturesque little bridges in the park. And another waterfall on the left and ducks off to the right.

That’s enough about food. You can tell I’m on Weight Watchers. One of the problems with the program is it forces you to think about food all the time, which was why I quit it the last time (and gained back all my weight and more). I have lost yet another pound since last week. A little bit at a time.

On the way home, I was led astray by my GPS. I have only been to Deb’s house three times. All other times, we have met somewhere else or I have taken the train into Portland. I am fairly sure I could get there without GPS, but I am hazier on the way back, which presents with less obvious turns, so I was using my GPS. I was on my way back the usual way, when it told me there was a traffic jam ahead, not surprising on a Friday at 4 PM. However, instead of just telling me that, like it usually does up here, it recalculated my route automatically and sent me farther north instead of directly west to get on the 205. I could have just ignored it, but as I said, I was hazy on the way back, and I thought it might actually save me some time. But of course, the downside was that as soon as I followed it, I had no idea where I was. And, the next thing I knew, just as it was about to turn me back west toward the freeway, it recalculated again. Well, of course, at that time of day in Portland, there are going to be traffic jams everywhere, but in hindsight the most sensible thing would have been for me to get onto the 205 as early as possible.

I started out in Clackamas, which is southeast of Portland. I ended up going north all the way to the junction of 84 and 205, which is in northeast Portland, where I ended up around 5:15 (keeping in mind that it usually takes me about an hour to go to Deb’s). Just blocks from the freeway, I got stuck in a traffic jam trying to turn left on Sandy Blvd. for 45 minutes. I had only six blocks to go to get on the freeway, but the traffic was gridlocked on my side. We had no protected left, so what would happen was that you would work your way, one car a light up to the light, and then when it turned green, have to wait until the oncoming traffic got across, many of which turned in front of you to take up the remaining space on the street you wanted to turn onto. You would then have to wait to see if a space opened up. When I finally got one car back from the intersection, the woman in front of me sat there through three lights without moving instead of squeezing herself into what little space she had just so that our line could move. When she finally went, I went, too, and sat blocking traffic for a short while. That was not nice of me, but our line of traffic wasn’t moving at all. The others were moving a bit more, and it just wasn’t right. In fact, cars were driving past us straight across the intersection, turning around, and coming back the other way so that they could make a right, and it was those cars that were taking up what little space was left in the lane ahead, preventing the left turners from going anywhere.

I got home around 6:30. So much for my GPS.

The rest of the week was fairly normal, except that those of us who are in the doggy Relationship Class all got an email on Saturday saying that we are also required to go on the pack walks. This was a surprise to me, as Luke and I have been going to the Relationship Class for over a month now, and no one said anything to us about it. We tried to go on the Monday night pack walk months back when our trainer sent us to the class and we got kicked out of it. It was a 2.6-mile walk, after dark (which it would not be now), but it wasn’t the distance that made it difficult so much as the pace. They all walked much faster than I could. On the way back, I just told them to go without me, but Ash, one of the nice trainers, stayed back with me.

A lake with a bridge over it

So, I’m not going on that pack walk, but we have been to the Saturday one twice. It is a much closer distance, just around the corner and up the block to a school playground, but they still walk very fast. The owner of the dog training place said we could drive to the school, where they do further practice with the dogs, but the problem with Saturdays is that Wayne and I take my great niece to taekwondo. To do both, Wayne has to drop her off, drop me and Luke off at class, pick Mischa up, take Mischa home, and then come and get me and Luke after the pack walk. Up until we got the email, he’d been picking me up after Mischa’s class and then we all went home together. In any case, if I wanted to do the pack walk, I would not be able to get a ride to the school because Wayne would be taking Mischa home. I’d have to walk with the fast walkers.

So, I stopped the owner after class on Monday night and told her we had to rearrange our Saturday schedule to do the pack walk and I wouldn’t be able to get a ride to the school, so I asked her could I walk at my own pace. She didn’t really answer the question. Instead, she said that I could skip the pack walk, because I was a dedicated owner. She said she wanted the Relationship Class people to be doing more with their dogs than just coming to class once a week, and doing the pack walk would get them more involved. She said to come when I could. However, I feel as if I should go, because one other dog owners was very upset about the requirement to do the pack walk because of her age, and she will notice if I never show up. This is the problem with sending out an email like that and then making exceptions. The owner could have strongly encouraged people to do the pack walk rather than telling them they had to. She said, in fact, that several people had quit the class because of the requirement. Perhaps, though, that lady who was upset will give me a ride occasionally, from class to the pack walk, because she has decided to drive over.

The rest of the week was fairly normal. We went hiking but just to Lewisville Park because Maja had other things to do that day. She brought along a young friend. On Thursday, I began painting the coral in my starfish picture, and it seems to be coming out very nice. Saturday and Monday were dog-training days, and Luke seems to be getting over his teenage years and behaving better in class. In fact, the misbehavior of one of his puppy pals during the Monday class made me feel a lot better about Luke, who did everything fairly well, only breaking his sit or down a couple of times when several other dogs did, too. That other puppy was rolling on his back all over the place and broke several times every exercise. (If the Russian trainer was still there, he would have gotten kicked out for sure!) Luke is also behaving better at home. Now most nights he sits patiently on place while we eat dinner, because he knows if he is good, he will get some of our leftover food. If we have something he shouldn’t eat, I give him a cookie instead. He seems to understand this and is very good.

Our schedule has changed because Luke’s puppy play days have changed from Monday and Wednesday to Tuesday and Thursday. This means that I haven’t been going to the Y for water aerobics, which was what I sometimes did on Tuesday mornings. I could go on another morning, but it’s now hard to find a morning that I’m not doing something, except Friday, and I want to keep Fridays fairly free. It’s nice to sleep in occasionally.

On Tuesdays and Thursday now we drop Luke off at puppy play and then do our grocery shopping and errands. If we get them done, we go to the library and read until it’s time to pick him up. We are doing this to try to avoid making two trips to town in a day if we can. We also had to move our mini pack walk with friends from puppy class from Thursdays to Mondays, which means that Luke has to go with me to Weight Watchers and wait in the car, then we arrive 45 minutes early to the park for the pack walk. This week, during that time, we practiced sits, downs, and moving downs. For the moving down, I have to throw his leash on the ground and say “Down!”, at which point he is expected to lie down. I am supposed to keep walking while he does this and then call him to heel beside me. What actually happens is that I throw my leash on the ground and Luke does nothing until I stop and step on it. Then he will slowly, very slowly, very reluctantly, go down and we can complete the exercise. Not exactly a moving down, more like a stopping down.

Getting in the spirit

I got my weekdays mixed up Wednesday morning and posted my Thursday book blog review instead of this blog, which is what I usually post. So, this week this post goes out on Thursday.

This week we have had beautiful but cold weather, sunny skies every day but cold, cold, cold. If it had been raining, we undoubtedly would have snow. Mt. St. Helens is looking great, because with the recent rains, it got back its covering of snow. It is a perfect week to go out and finish up my garden, but instead I have been working on Christmas cards, wrapping presents, and getting packages ready for the mail. These days, since we live close to much of our family, we only ship out two packages, but I still try to get them into the mail early. Since the post office was closed yesterday because of President Bush’s funeral, I made it my goal to get my packages ready to go into the mail this morning. We have one more nice day before it clouds up, so I hope to do my garden tomorrow.

On Tuesday, we went out to buy a Christmas tree. This year, for the first time since we moved here, we were planning to buy it from a lot. Last year, my niece’s husband was unwell so couldn’t help us and we went with my sister. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been around when they cut the tree the first year we were here, so I didn’t realize how much work it was. Because we are both geezers, my sister had to cut the tree, and I vowed never to have that happen again. We would have accepted an invitation from my niece and her husband to go get a tree with them, but none was forthcoming, so we went out looking for a lot.

Our scrawny tree next to a nice warm fire

We had been hearing on the news that Christmas trees are scarce this year, but it was hard to believe they would be hard to find here. Heck, there are Christmas trees everywhere. Of course, lots of people around here cut their own trees, go to a U Cut, or even cut them in the Gifford Pinchot Forest, but still, last year and the year before, there were several tree lots on the way down state highway 503 to Vancouver. This year there were none, and we didn’t know where else in Vancouver to go. I didn’t want to go to Home Depot, because my theory was that they were more likely to have purchased their trees far away and they might not be fresh. We ended up buying one in a tiny lot in Battle Ground, the only one we could find besides those in the grocery and hardware stores. It is tall, about nine feet, but it is kind of pathetic looking compared to our previous trees. It’s branches are far apart, and it looks kind of skimpy for a Noble fir, and it’s lop-sided. Although it was much cheaper than any tree we could have bought in Austin (and in fact, we never bought a tree that big in Austin), it cost about twice as much as any tree we have bought since we moved here. I have tons of ornaments, so it will be interesting to see if I can get them all on the tree. Once I finish spreading alpaca poo and more dirt on my garden tomorrow, I’ll start decorating.

Last Saturday, my sister and I went to a Christmas concert in Portland. Our friend was singing in the Portland Choir and Orchestra concert. Last year, I thought the program was a little dull except for the Bells of the Cascades, whose director is a delight to watch, full of energy and practically levitating off the podium. This year, although the choir sang more traditional songs, the arrangements were really interesting, and some of the songs were quite beautiful. And the Bells of the Cascades were there again.

Luke has not only graduated from puppy class, he has been asked to join both puppy and adult class for the last few classes of the year. We went last night for the first time. I thought he could handle two classes, but wasn’t sure how well he could handle two in a row. However, he did really well, almost better than the adult dogs, just because he has been taking class for so long. We have quite the little puppy pack going now, with three other dog owners joining me and Luke once a week for a pack walk.

Last week, my great niece Mischa came with us to puppy class. She enjoyed it, so if she thinks she can bear getting up that early, she might go again while we are still in puppy class.

We no longer need to take a leash with us when we take Lukey out, as long as we have cheese in our pockets! In fact, even the promise of cheese gets him back in the house when we have gone out for short runs. I only take a leash if I think we may be walking on the road, as he tends to go toward traffic.

In art class, I am still working on my sky, whereas my sister has almost finished her picture of an owl. Actually, she has almost finished two pictures. Hmm. Well, it is not a race, as my instructor keeps telling her. I guess I’m going to have to get used to taking three or four months each to do my paintings, while she finishes one a month. It is a secret from my husband (who does not read this blog) that a woman in my class who does beautiful pictures of dogs has agreed to do one of Luke for me to give Wayne as a gift. It doesn’t look like it will be done for Christmas, but it will make a good birthday gift. Tonight, we are both doing makeups, so we will be in class from 4:15 until 8:30!

 

Peas, mushy and otherwise

This morning I went out to water my garden and saw that my peas are coming up. Yippee! However, I think I made a mistake with the peas as well as with the large vegetables. The packet said to plant them in a row and then thin the plants to two inches. Instructions on the internet said to plant them at two inches apart. I had a bunch of peas in the packet and not much space, so I went ahead and followed the instructions on the packet, just made a little trough at a half inch deep and rolled them all in. I thought that instead of throwing out the thinned plants, I could give them to my niece and sister to plant in their much larger garden. (Theirs takes up probably close to an acre.)

Those little green things behind the onions are my pea sprouts.

However, my sister tells me peas can’t be easily transplanted. I think I would have done better to plant them spaced two inches apart and keep the rest of the peas in their packet for next year. I’m doing this sort of blind, I guess. I had gardens years ago in Michigan, but all I ever planted were tomatoes and beans from seed. One year I tried zucchini and eggplant but my zuccini rolled right over my eggplant. In any case, I had lots of yummy beans and tomatoes out of that garden, but it wasn’t diverse or hard to take care of.

Our last day of nice weather was Thursday last week, a day that got very hot. I had been inside and was not aware of how hot it was, so I suggested to my husband that we put together the bench kit that he bought to go next to the pond. We loaded the parts and tools into the car, and I drove down to the orchard and backed in there next to the pond while my husband strung electrical cord down to the pond. However, once there, I realized just how hot it was. It was almost 90! We were working in an area with no shade, and once we carted all the pieces down to the pond and I helped him get started, I realized I was going to have to go back into the house. He said he could do the rest himself, but he must have been too hot, too, because he didn’t finish. Everything is still down there partially put together. But after several days of cold, dark weather with rain expected but not much materializing, we are back today to cool and sunny days, so I expect he’ll finish putting the bench together soon, and I can help him.

Another of his projects didn’t go so well, though. He took down all the things on one side of the garage, and a week or so ago, he put up aluminum shelves with a wooden top, waist high to be a work table. His intention is to hang pegboard along the wall for his tools and to hang a light. It all looked very nice.

The last few days he’s been working on the light, which perhaps he should have done first. I say this because yesterday I heard a terrific crash out there and went out to see what had happened. He had been using his new shelving to stand on the edge and work on the light. He moved his foot over from the corner, and the aluminum couldn’t support his weight. He crashed through, ruining one of his shelving units. Luckily, he wasn’t injured. He got hurt much worse by the pond by getting into some stinging nettle. He didn’t say anything about it at the time, and I was gone that evening, so he told me about it when I got back. He had tried to treat it with antibiotics instead of washing it off and smearing it with a paste made from baking soda and water. I did that and it helped, but it would have helped a lot more if he’d told me about it right after he did it.

Last week, my hike with my neighbor was a comedy of errors. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had thought before we left that if we decided to return to Battle Ground Lake and hike the outer trail, I would remind Maja that she bought an annual pass to the park last time we went. We did decide to go there, but I forgot about the pass, so we ended up having to pay for a day pass. That was $10 when the annual pass was $30, ridiculous! To compare, the pass for the National Wildlife Refuge that we went to the week before was $3.

To make it worse, once out of our neighborhood, I started to drive the wrong way and had to turn around. Then, when we got to the park, I drove right past it and had to turn around again! When I passed it, we discussed going to Lewis River Park again, but we were right next to Battle Ground Lake, so we didn’t. My head must have been in the clouds that day.

The All Trails app said the outer trail loop was about three miles, but my Fitbit said it was 1.7 miles, one of our shortest hikes but more than half of which was uphill. I think the longer distance must be in hiking both the inner and outer loop, but we could see no explanation of that anywhere on the trails app, and by the time we finished with the outer loop, we were ready to stop. We have started going to lunch afterwards, and that makes our expedition take up a good portion of the day. My neighbor said she had gotten so that she didn’t do anything after she got home. That’s about right for me, too.

Our friend Ray is coming for a visit in June from Denver and we talked a little more about what we were going to do during his trip. We ended up making some hotel reservations on the beach for a couple of days, and we will do day trips from there. I don’t know if my husband will decide to come or not. Right now, he seems mildly interested in the idea of taking the Oregon Coast Pacific Railway, which is one of the things we want to do. But who knows what he’ll decide to do when the time comes. If I knew for sure he was going to cop out, I might think about inviting my sister to come along. The problem is knowing what he’ll decide to do. Oh well, Ray and I have done plenty of travelling by ourselves over the years. We also talked about doing the Tillamook cheese factory tour. If it was their ice cream factory, my husband would be more likely to come.

In art class, I have painted all of the background to my picture and the sea, and the foliage in the foreground. I spent most of this week’s class doing waves. All that is left is to paint the trees in the foreground and perhaps do some more touches to the foliage. A woman and her daughter in the class told me they don’t want me to paint the trees, because they like my picture the way it is. Unfortunately, there are some aspects to the picture that aren’t quite right that the teacher and I didn’t worry about because the trees were going to block them out. In particular, the sea is slanting in just a little bit, so that it looks like a tidal wave is about to wash away the town of Cannon Beach. That won’t be as obvious when the tree is in the way.

Finally, on Friday during the cold and gloomy weather, I took the train into Portland to attend the Oregon Potters Association Ceramic Show for the second year in a row. We decided to go on Friday because we thought it might not be as crowded, but we were wrong. It was even more crowded than it was last year. I like looking at the pottery, but once too many people get in one place, I start to feel uncomfortable. We saw all the pottery, and I bought a few pieces for gifts, but we didn’t stay long, only about an hour and a half.

Then we went to eat at the food carts, particularly to the Frying Scotsman to try their fish and chips, or in my case, fish and mushy peas. Very good. My husband is always in search of good fish and chips, so I will have to try to get him down there. He will not like, however, the fact that there is no place to sit to eat. In Austin, food carts are very popular as well, but almost all of them have a group of picnic tables to sit at. The ones in downtown Portland do not. I think that most people take their food back to their offices, but the food carts are popular with tourists, too. We found a low wall to sit on a block or so away. I saw lots of people buying food but not many people standing around eating it, so I’m not sure what they do.

It was a shorter than usual day. After lunch, we bopped around town a little bit, saw some things in Chinatown. But then I took the train back and got home around three. Usually after these expeditions I don’t get home until about six. The sky looked very foreboding as I was leaving, but it didn’t rain.

 

 

A week of frivolity

As much as we have enjoyed living here in this beautiful country, we have sort of fallen down on the job when it comes to entertainment. My husband seems to prefer to stay home versus almost any other type of activity. So, it was nice that this past week we went on a couple of different outings.

Last Wednesday was my birthday, as I said before. I had art class, during which I made a color wheel. It was a little difficult because my yellow paint didn’t seem to be doing its job. The way a color wheel works is that you have your basic colors, red, blue, and yellow, in circles each one third around a larger circle. Then you make the intervening colors by mixing. If you are going between yellow and blue, for example, the first circle after yellow is supposed to be a mix of two dots of yellow paint and one dot of blue. The second circle is supposed to be equal parts of yellow and blue, and the third, the one next to pure blue, is supposed to be one dot of yellow and two of blue. I had a model I was trying to match, but in the cases where I was mixing yellow, to match that model, I had to use a lot more yellow paint, six dots of yellow instead of one. It wasn’t altogether clear to me whether it was more important to match the model or to get the paint percentages right. Now that I think of it, I probably was supposed to get the paint percentages right and use whatever colors I got from that. Between the red and blue, I didn’t have the same problem.

Finally, you do triangles of the opposite colors to get browns. My browns didn’t look anything like the model browns. In one case, a brown looked like a green. I think this had to do with my yellow paint being weak or something. Someone more experienced would know, but my teacher wasn’t clear about these problems. In the next class, I will trace a picture of flowers that is another paint-mixing exercise.

After art class, we went out to eat. My only rule for my birthday, usually, is that I don’t have to cook dinner. I don’t even require a fancy restaurant. That evening we went to McGrath’s Fish House, which is an okay fish restaurant. I don’t think there are any really good ones short of Portland. It is much better than Red Lobster or Joe’s Crab Shack, but that’s about all I can say for it (and I actually like Joe’s pretty well, but only for crab). My highly recommended halibut was nice and fresh but needed a little something, and Wayne said his highly recommended salmon wasn’t as good as my halibut. However, what with getting a birthday gift that I wanted and going out to eat, it was a pretty good birthday.

The best part of my birthday was Friday night, an event that we had all been looking forward to. When it was my niece’s birthday in August, she asked to go to Kachka, a trendy Russian restaurant in Portland (a city with lots of Russians). It turned out, however, that we needed reservations at least two weeks in advance, so we couldn’t go. We went to her second choice instead, but at that time, planned to go to Kachka for my birthday. It was me, my husband, my sister, my niece, and her husband. As the menu and my niece suggested, we had lots of zakuski, which we all shared. If you actually bothered to look at the menu, we had Moldovan eggplant, Baltic sprat buterbrodi, salo, the meat and cheese board, khachapuri, Siberian pelmeni and sour cherry vereniki, golubtsi, bread and butter, and assorted pickles. My husband also had the borscht. Even though I’m usually not a big pickle eater, every bite was delicious. My sister and niece also had vodka while the rest of us tea-totaled. If that wasn’t enough, we all had dessert (mine was plombir sandwiches) and either coffee or tea. I had some delicious chai.

My only complaint was, why does every new trendy restaurant have such uncomfortable chairs, sometimes the same uncomfortable chairs as the other trendy restaurants? They always look really nice but they are really horrible to sit in. Do no restaurant owners ever sit in their chairs before buying them, or do they just buy them for the looks?

That was a great evening out even though we missed Game of Thrones night this week. Our weekends are going to be heating up as we approach the holidays, so I suspect Game of Thrones is going to go by the wayside a few more times.

My niece is hosting her husband’s huge family for Christmas, so she doesn’t want to mess with Thanksgiving this year. So, my husband and I decided to offer to host. We will be doing everything, but we will do it on Friday evening instead of Thursday so that my sister, who works every holiday, can come. We made this offer that night out, and everyone decided it was a good idea. (I wasn’t sure before that if my niece wanted to skip Thanksgiving altogether or just didn’t want to do it herself.)

Finally, yesterday, which is cheap day at the theater, we saw the new Murder on the Orient Express. I was worried about it, in particular that they would change the ending. I also didn’t see how it could stand up to the star-studded 1974 movie. It did, but in a different way. They interjected more action and made Poirot a little more of a physical detective than Christie probably would approved of. They also changed some of the characters, while preserving their names. Oddly, Count and Countess Idreni, played originally by Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset, hardly even appeared in this production. It was like they kept forgetting they were on the train.

Hillary “playing” Candy Crush Soda Saga.

There was a difference in the substance of the casting, this version going more for popular stars rather than screen legends (an exception being Judi Dench and a couple of other actors), but overall, I think it was a movie that was effective in its own right, going for an emotional impact at the end.

Finally, it’s time for a picture. My husband and I aren’t the only ones being amused this week. My cat, Hillary, has developed a fascination for Candy Crush Soda Saga. She seems to care less about the original Candy Crush game, but whenever I get out Soda Saga, she comes over and one time even reached out her paw to touch the screen. So, here is a picture of Hillary on my iPad playing Soda Saga. She likes the fish.

A week of sightseeing

I spent this week entertaining my guest from Houston and boy, am I tired! Yesterday, we dropped her at the airport at 6:15 AM, and after doing a few chores around the house, I lay down and fell asleep for four hours.

My friends on one of the many bridges across the Williamette River in Portland. The bridge we were standing on is a new one that is just for walking, biking, and mass transit.

The first day of our visit was cold and rainy, and we again took the North Clark County Scenic Drive. Of course, it began raining when we got to the waterfalls, so we ended up skipping the one that we so far have always skipped for one reason or another. We were happy to return early for a pot of tea and a seat before the wood stove.

On Friday, we had a few rain gusts, but it eventually became sunny. We met my Portland friend in Portland for a visit to the Pompeii exhibit at OMSI. After we saw the exhibit, we walked around downtown Portland and of course visited Powell’s books. By the time we got there, I was just ready to sit in the coffee room, but I did buy a book by John McPhee about Alaska called Coming into the Country.

Cannon Beach, with its famous monolith

Saturday we went to the beach. We drove out to Astoria, went up to the tower above the city, and then drove down the coast as far as Cannon Beach. We got to see what each of the small beach communities was like. I confess that I still prefer Gearhart, where we were this summer, because it is quiet. The beach at Cannon Beach is very nice, though. Seaside is crowded and full of arcades for the children.

At a viewpoint on the way up to the mountain. It was a gorgeous day.

My husband went along with us only on our Sunday expedition, back to Mt. St. Helens. He only went because I asked him to, as I was already very tired and wanted him to drive. As usual, he was not much help when it comes to entertaining visitors. It was a beautiful day, so we got some nicer pictures of the mountains and had the opportunity to listen to an interesting presentation by a ranger.

Monday started out with a doctor’s appointment, but then my friend and I continued out along the Gorge. Normally, I would want to take a visitor to the old highway between Vista House and the falls, including Multnomah Falls, but all of these sights are closed because of the Eagle Creek fire. So, instead, I decided that it might be a good time to investigate the Maryhill Museum of Art, which is way down the Gorge. My original plan was to drive there on the north side of the Gorge, on highway 14, and back on the freeway on the south side of the Gorge, but our GPS kept trying to force us to go to the freeway, and so we had no idea how long it would take us to drive out on highway 14. Finally, we decided to cross over at Bridge of the Gods, because who could resist driving across that bridge? It is really spectacular, an old, narrow bridge that people can both drive and walk across.

Maryhill Museum of Art

Maryhill museum is small but packed with interesting exhibits. It was originally the house of railroader and highway advocate, Sam Hill, who was trying to establish an agricultural community out there. But he bought property just a little too far out on the dry side of the mountains, and the community failed before he finished building his house. Eventually, he decided to make a museum out of it and got contributions from his friends in European royalty.

The museum has rooms with Russian icons, Grecian urns, gilt furniture and other artifacts donated by the Queen of Bohemia, chess sets, an entire room of Rodin sculptures, and what interested my friend most, the Théâtre de la Mode, which is a display of 24-inch wire mannequins dressed in beautiful gowns that the Parisian designers used after World War II to present their creations to women in the United States. The collection was believed lost, but the mannequins were salvaged from a store basement in San Francisco and their elaborate settings restored. It’s a very interesting little museum and well worth the visit, even though the trip is long and there is nothing else out there except a winery.

My friend left early yesterday morning, and now I am just trying to get back to normal. We had a beautiful week, but yesterday it started raining again. Art class today!

 

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

You can’t always see those mountains through the trees.

It’s a gorgeous day today! Yesterday, the high was 51, and it rained almost all day. We had a fire in our wood stove. Today, the high is supposed to be 81. I had an early morning appointment, and the air was fresh, the skies sunny. Now, I’ve had to remove my sweatshirt for the first time since October and won’t be wearing two shirts today for the first time since November (when I figured out what was needed to keep from having to crawl in bed every day to get warm). Here is a picture of our deck this morning. If you look carefully past the trees, you can see mountains.

For those of you who can’t wait to hear the latest renovation news, we haven’t done anything this week, but my marmoleum samples finally arrived. I picked a deep but bright blue called adriatica that only has a few speckles, light and dark (I could have used more speckles, but this was the best color) and looks lovely with our grayish green-blue walls. It will be very dramatic. On Tuesday, I heard from our contractor, who has been on vacation. He said he had found a vendor of marmoleum who has installers, and he is just waiting for pricing information. Yippee!

On the down side, we developed a leak under our kitchen sink last week. Every once in a while we would find a small puddle of water on the floor in front of the sink, and then open the cabinet door to find a puddle inside. Of course, my husband did nothing about this immediately, because that is not his way. I put a towel under the cabinet door to avoid wrecking the hardwoods any more than they are already wrecked (most lately by his dog having an accident and then him not cleaning it up right away—I wasn’t around). Then my husband ground up my pestle in the garbage disposal. I had only used it once. It was in the sink, and he must have taken out the drain plug without putting the drainer in immediately. The pestle fell down into the garbage disposal at some point and then he turned it on. I know I didn’t do it, because I always have either the plug or the drainer in the sink to avoid extra garbage going down, because we compost most of our garbage. We only use the disposal when the sink gets clogged up with the particles that we haven’t captured in the drainer. This saves our septic field from filling up too quickly.

So, the pestle, which was made of porcelain, broke, and bits of it got into the disposal and broke it. Then the drain got plugged so that we couldn’t use the sink. I finally got on the phone and started to try to find plumbers, but it wasn’t easy, because they are all busy putting plumbing into the new houses that are going up in the area, from people moving out of Portland because it is too expensive to live in. My contractor told me I could call his plumber, but my husband finally went out to buy parts and fixed it himself. In Austin we went without a garbage disposal for years, during which he wouldn’t let me call a plumber (he was always going to fix it sometime), so this is an improvement.

We started back at our unpacking last week, because we finally got tired of waiting for our contractors to come back and clean up their junk in the basement. My husband spent a day tidying up the basement, and then we started hauling our bookcases out of the storage room. They can’t make the corner from the storage room to the big room downstairs, so we have to wheel them straight across the hall, through the guest room, out the sliding glass door, down to the other sliding glass door, across the wooden walkway for the sauna, and in the door to the big room. You can see why we wanted to wait for a day when it wasn’t raining. Then we had to clean them up and put them into position. We got all of a set of 10 cherry library shelves (with a crossbar and a ladder) out of the storage room. Unfortunately, they cannot occupy one wall like they did in Austin, nor can they have their top shelves added on. But we set up half of them on one wall, and will be setting up the other half on the other wall. We still have three black bookshelves to move out, and then the bookshelves will be done, and I can start unpacking the books.

Also in the shelving category are our DVD/CD shelves. My husband moved them up from the basement last week and attached them to the walls in my office. Then I unpacked all the DVDs and put them away (alphabetically, of course) and the CDs that were on the shelves before. We have hundreds more CDs, though, that used to be in a 300-CD jukebox that broke. We will have to figure out what to do with them. So much for jukeboxes. That one held up only a paltry 15 years. I still have the 5-CD player that my brother sent me for my birthday 20 years ago, and it works perfectly well. I also have my record player. Yes, I do, and my record albums, which I understand are becoming chic these days. We’ll have to figure out a place for those, too. I do play them sometimes.

Hillary watching birds

It took me a while to figure out what my cat was doing every morning, but I finally did. She stands just outside the bedroom drapes, which are closed in early morning, and watches the birds in the feeders. If it’s a cold morning, she sits directly on top of the heating vent you can see there in the floor. We put a feeder out months ago, but it is only in the past three weeks or so that we’ve seen any usage made of it. I thought it was too close to the house, since we hung it directly under the eaves outside our bedroom window, but that doesn’t bother the chickadees, and they love the suet that is next to the feeder. If I want to get other birds, I’ll have to hang another feeder farther from the house. Sometimes a few small gray birds are on the deck eating the seeds that the chickadees dropped. I think they are bush tits. We had tufted titmice in Austin that hung out with the chickadees, but here I have only seen these little gray birds. The chickadees here, by the way, are lots bigger than the ones that we had in Austin.

If you are waiting with bated breath to hear about my art class, I finished my flower last week, but I forgot to take a picture of it, as requested by Naomi. My flower is okay, but I think my sister’s is much more striking (although our instructor has labeled us the one who doesn’t follow instructions [my sister] and the one who does [me]). I think this is because my sister traced the outlines of her flower petals when the instructor told her not to. I will try to remember to take a picture of my flower today.

Now the instructor has us doing another exercise. The first one was interesting, but now that we have done real pictures, the exercises are boring. This one is drawing everyday objects from the basic shapes. That is, ice cream cones from cones and spheres, etc. I think the school is wise to alternate exercises with opportunities to draw pictures.