Drive-by note to self

Hey, what's this? Something new and not dragonslayery from Mr Fforde?

 I don't absolutely swear that I'll never write an actual post here again, but it's beginning to feel that way.

Mallard Clown Car

My attempt at a gif of the amazing clown bus of ducklings that we watched emerge from under a mother mallard last week. Unfortunately, the effect is less "How adorable!" and more "I think I'm getting seasick." Blame the motion of the canoe I was in and the fact that I was too immersed in watching in amazement to take a steady stream of photos. It was, I assure you, truly fabulous and ever so hysterical to watch.

Maple Pass Photos, Mostly

It's late and I'm tired so I'm tossing some photos here for now; with luck I'll write up what should be a fascinating trip report before I forget all the details. Until then, a handful of atmospheric snaps--in no particular order as I see that blogger decided I wanted all of them immediately.

Lunch break with some stellar scenery

Birds were not particularly brilliant on the Maple Pass hike. We think this is an American pipit.

No marmots were seen but there were a handful of charming chipmunks about.

I suspect the wildflowers will really hit their stride in a few weeks, but they weren't so shabby a few days ago.

Not from the Maple Pass hike at all; this was the day before when I opted to wade into the Skagit River. It was lovely.

Back to the Maple Pass trail--one of many unidentified mountains

Lake Ann from the trail above

Please oh please note the mud and ice (well, snow) on my Bogs!

Scott admires the view on the Maple Pass trail.

Of books, birds, bees, and jam

Rufous hummingbird that has been hanging out lately

Telling stories, telling tales. Always the implication that you were trading in lies. But for her it would always be the task of getting to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling. It had been Donald's task too, in his way. Poor Donald, taken away from her forty, fifty years ago.
    Enough of this interview claptrap and chicanery. They would always want even the explanation explained! And any writer worth her salt would lead them on, tease them, lead them up the garden path. Wasn't it bloody obvious? It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life--oh so many more than we think--can never be explained at all.

--from the final page of Mothering Sunday, by Graham Swift

I wish I could identify this bee but, well, I can't.*

Graham Swift's latest book is a very slim volume with pretty heavy leading but it's an excellent little book. It reads a lot like a good A.S. Byatt, maybe like something out of Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye but more like one of the Matisse Stories. It's a book about being a writer which, maybe, is what authors write eventually. (Mona In the Desert started, in some ways, as a book about writing.) Mr Swift's novella is a fine thing, and it was a pleasure to read it over this extra-long holiday weekend.

Not that most of the weekend wasn't given over to other things. Making jam, for one thing. We made thirty-odd jars of apricot and twenty-five jars of raspberry jam on Sunday, after stocking up on apricots and on raspberries at the Farmers Market. If I could get the photos off my phone I'd be posting photos of transferring a bit more than sixteen pounds of somewhat nasty apricot "seconds" from a large box to one of the panniers on Scott's bike. Trust me when I say it was quite the impressive bit of bicycle hauling.

Oddly pale (and yellow-headed) presumably Anna's hummingbird

The business of jam ended at pushing midnight on Sunday night which led to a somewhat leisurely recovery on much of the holiday 4th. Oh, we rode our bikes for a bit, visiting Jeb, the West Seattle pony, and, thank god, finding a not-too-hilly route home. Today was the first day I didn't ride my bike since the first of May. The streak has ended.

Instead we walked to Camp Long where we saw neither owl nor pileated woodpecker, but we did find a number of charming little fledglings, including what I've had identified as a golden-crowned kinglet.

Golden-crowned kinglet fledgling @ Camp Long

There were also a surprising number of bunnies about; perhaps the owls have relocated for the summer.

One of several Camp Long bunnies seen this afternoon

*You'd think the very large and seemingly exhaustive Bees In Your Backyard would enable me to identify the bees I see, but mostly it just makes me painfully aware of just how many bees there are in North America and just how impossible it is for me to distinguish them from each other.

 

Housiversary: Scattershot Photo Edition

 

 

The traditional Housiversary meal now includes ibuprofen

The new screen frame, as it was when I got home

The frame with clamps applied to bow the frame so the screen will be tight

 

 

 

Who can expect me to concentrate on labor when there are raspberries nearby?

Close to finished: note washers!

Call me crazy but I adore that Scott used these ancient wire brads on this project.

 

Putting in the hook and eye

What I call the Vermeer: corner of the living room featuring the two newly screened windows

Housiversary 2016, Text Version

Truly vintage Bethlehem Steel wire brads used in this year's project

Today is Housiversary meaning that it was seven years ago that I got the keys to the house and met Scott here after work to look over the place as its, well, indentured servants. We had Doritos and cheap sparkling. I decided "just to see" how hard it would be to rip out the carpets and some hours later we were lugging the nasty old things down to the garage. Scott had, as I recall, managed to get a couple of windows that had been painted shut for decades to open. I may have solved the mystery of the sconces by the time we left as well. It was an auspicious start to our happy years of seemingly endless labor and unending reward chez Aurora.

 This year, lamentably, I had to spend most of the day at work and I need to be there bright and early tomorrow so Scott did most of the work on this year's project on his own and we aren't staying up late doing anything. (Some years back it was already getting dark when one of us, most likely me, said, "Hey, what do you think about starting to install all this used cork flooring we've had sitting around for the last couple of years?" I'm sure the neighbors appreciated when we stopped hammering in the wee sma's.) The 2016 project was/is window screens. After spending far too much on crappy screen kits from the hardware store, Scott figured out how to make fabulous old-fashioned screens for our fabulous old-fashioned sash windows. A fancy new dowelling jig was required, as well as a few other bits and bobs, but we were able to reuse the old screen material and of course the newly purchased wood was painted in the house green. We painted the wood over the weekend, and while I was at work today, Scott assembled the frames (the dowelling jig is his new favorite toy, I do believe), and put in some washers to hold the frames in place. (He's a darned clever craftsman, is our Scott.)

After I got home, we got down to adding the screen material, covering up the staples with some cosmetic strips of wood, adding hooks and eyes, and installing them in the window frames. (When I say "we," of course, I mostly mean Scott.) We've done only two thus far, and they need some caulking and touch-up, but I swear I heard Aurora breathe, "Finally . . ." as I looked at the first one in place. They look like they belong on an old beach bungalow. What higher praise can there be?

 

The final installation

The Arts, Literary Mostly

It is, officially, crazy hot in Seattle this weekend. It’s weeks before the official start of summer and I’ve already been shifting a sprinkler about from corner to corner of the backyard, “accidentally” becoming quite soaked while moving it out to the front-40 half an hour ago. Not only are there raspberries at the Farmers Market, there are also ripe raspberries in the backyard. Not enough to satisfy my gluttony but still, it’s crazy to have raspberries the first week of June. It’s not clear what Gradka thinks of it all; she may think it’s a little much. Or maybe she thinks it’s nice to have the proper conditions for lounging on her lounger.

None of which is so much “the arts.” No, last week, when it was not quite so hot, we biked to Queen Anne to see Kedi which was playing as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. Kedi, for those too wrapped up in this narrative to click the link, is a Turkish documentary about the street cats of Istanbul. It seems there are—and have been for some centuries—a lot of street cats in Istanbul. It was ever so slightly political since rampant development means less space for cats, but for the most part the film celebrates the cats and the people who care for them—and there seem to be a lot of people who care for the street cats. One person, a baker, casually mentions that “we all have accounts with  the vets in the neighborhood.” He mentions this as he’s applying an egg wash to some delicious-looking pastries while a cat minds its own business under a nearby counter. Possibly it was the lack of worry about health regulations that charmed me most about this film.

That’s not true. What truly moved and charmed me, possibly beyond the cats themselves, was the attitude of the people interviewed. A fisherman connects the cats to God’s love and where you would expect him to say that he cares for the cats because that’s what God would want he instead says that the fact that he gets to know these cats is a demonstration of God’s love for him. Or something like that. Trust me when I say it’s better in the film. And trust me also when I say that if you like cats, you should make an effort to see this documentary. It was fabulous.

Also fabulous was Book-It Theatre’s production of The Brothers K (Strike Zones). We went to see the doubleheader performance (in which you get Part I, aka “Strike Zones” in the afternoon and Part II, The Left Stuff, in the evening). We’d never been to a Book-It production before and the narration, which I assume is part of all their shows though that is just an assumption, took some getting used to. Once you accept it, however, it works brilliantly—at least if you are me and really love the way Mr Duncan writes. And Part 1, which takes you up until Irwin is drafted, is truly a thing of beauty. Oh, Scott was not as enraptured as I was, but even he thought it was pretty darned fine. The acting is excellent and the adaptation, while very episodic, was pretty darned flawless. I cried more than once and laughed a lot more than I cried. It was excellent, from start to finish, though I admit I left the theatre saying, “I need a drink.”

 So we spent the long interval having that drink, and also dinner, at Solo and then coffee at Caffé Ladro and then browsed briefly at Mercer Street Books before settling back into our seats at the theatre. Part II was, unfortunately, not nearly so fine. It’s the same actors so it wasn’t the acting—though I think there were more fumbled lines in the second half and I’ll just bet that acting in five hours of theatre is more challenging than watching it—and I know that the story of the second half of the book is plenty compelling so I’m not sure what exactly was the issue. Scott, who thinks about these things differently—and more intelligently—than I do, suggested that it was too plot-driven, that character development completely disappeared in the second half. I’d add that some plot threads—the mother’s backstory, mostly—were so threadbare in this telling that it would make a lot more sense to jettison them entirely. Some bits were so hacked that the story as presented on stage made no sense unless you could fill in the holes with what you remember from the book. Sadly, the horror and tragedy of the second half of the book just wasn’t present in the second play which, after the expectations built up from Part I, was particularly disappointing.  That first part, however, was amazing. Get your tickets and go see it!

 Reading, after finally finishing the tedious I Am A Cat, has mostly been A Tree Grows In Brooklyn which turned out to be a completely different book than I expected. I’d always assumed it was sort of a 20^th century Little Women in the City sort of book written for twelve-year-old girls. It turned out to have more adult themes and some pretty darned clever humor and observations. Maybe people were just more clever in those olden times of the mid-twentieth century--and, having looked for links, I see that people do consider this appropriate for twelve-year-olds. I must have been a more sheltered child. Up next, most likely, a one-off Trollope, the title of which entirely escapes me as I sit typing this up in the shade of the magnolia out back. A challenge of outdoors blogging is spiders; I've had them crawling across my camera, my screen, and my person. But no sacrifice is too great for blahdeblahblah. And there are compensations.

Cucumber martinis