The past week and a half or so have been rather crazy, and my list of "Hey, that's kind of interesting, I want to mull over that" has gotten unmanageably long. So I've given up on individual posts, and this is a crazy mega-mcpost of postiness +5, with excessive photos and hurried notes lacking poetry and context. :)
I would also like to issue the standard "If you wrote something interesting, cool, important, or needing my input, let me know!" disclaimer, which I have never seen anyone actually respond to.
You can also skip to the end, for a random guilt trip.
All projects should start like this! This is from anodizing. Alas, it does not look like I will keep my new acid scar. However, my leatherman is now pitted in fascinating non-structural ways. The test piece of aluminum is very mildly orange, looks about like brass. We'll have to try again to get a proper orange for That Damn Robot's thrusters.
This is Hardwick's. You know there are folktales about a guy wandering into an junk shop or pawn shop with a misspelled sign and a mysterious hunched proprieter, and he buys something that turns out to be a lamp with a genie or a magic sword, and when he tries to get back to the shop, it's gone and nobody remembers it ever being there?
That shop is Hardwick's (except the proprieter has a mohawk and lots of piercings). You can't ever get into the same row twice. Sometimes the row with the hand-forged clawed Japanese gardening instruments is there, sometimes it's the row with the danish wood-carving axes with lacework blades, or the specially blunt marble-sculpting tools, or the LEDs in strange colors that don't exist anywhere else.
I have no idea how they pass fire codes. I assume the shop just ceases to exist when the inspectors are looking for it. Hardwick's, like Boeing Surplus, is one of the Treasures of Seattle that everyone should see at least once.
I also went up to the Port Angeles Pirate Days (which
This is the Lady Washington, the most impressive of the ships. You may've seen her elsewhere - she starred in Pirates of The Carribean.
Lady Washington looking ominous on the horizon. It was a good day for pirating.
They had something like contradancing at the festival, except it was done with swords. Sword-shaped wood bits, anyway. There was a caller, and the participants partnered up and followed his directions through a choreographed mock combat. I really want to learn this. Does anyone know what it might be called?
The Bill of Rights firing on the Lady Washington.
The sails are made of long canvas strips, overlapped at the edge, so that when the light comes through them, they look scaley - pale and translucent in the center, with solid sharp borders. It seems to beautiful to be real, somehow, sharp and shining against a foggy grey sky.
The solstice, which I watched with
This river is a shimmerpale shade of green, like glaciermelt or beachglass, because it has dissolved copper oxides in it.
More coppershine.
Words cannot express how much I love living here, the way this land has gotten into my blood.
Moss and baby cedars, on the green side.
Ad arbora per aspera. :)
A landslide we had to wait a while to get around. The road was down to one sometimes-lane. Everyone got out of their cars and wandered around and made friendly noises. We kept seeing the same people repeatedly all along the mountain roads. My Internal Miniature Folk Singer got stuck on "eerie canal". The world is very small when it narrows to a two-lane winding pass road.
Right at the top of the pass. I think it needs some sheep, somehow. Rolling scrubby heathery green always needs some sheep, and a crazy guy building cairns.
If I saw these mountains in a painting someone had made, they would not strike me as very realistic.
More baby needly plants, but this is on the East side, the wastelands.
Sage and scrub. Dust, rock, nopale. There's some ache in me that only the scent of sage soothes - I spent long enough growing up in southern California to be warped by it, to learn that the scent of home was spicy-sweet and velvet between your fingers.
We found some of the greenest rocks here, and it was nice to rmove shoes and splash about.
My trunk is full of these! Tommorrow, we head out to Spokane to build a furnace and attempt to get molten copper, forgefire-bright, out of them.
I also went to a research conference in California and got to see both
It was misty enough to make all the islands waver and shine a bit, with kelp amber in the water, and sea lions and spiny prehistoric pelicans and heavy-winged cormorants and seagulls and the noise of the waves. The mainsail was plasticky, like tyvek (sp?), and the jibsail was about the texture of a tarpaulin, but the spinnaker was a billowing gossamer thing, like scarlet rice paper, and every time the wind creased it, all the creases caught the sun and spilled long shadows over it, like taku, the sword-edged stroke in Japanese calligraphy.
After that, I got to see
Conferency stuff, and then
Of course, I also managed to find a tolerable apartment and sign papers and do workstuff. Which brings me to the guilt trip (for locals anyway, though I know there are a few locals with such leet guilt-skillz they can probably manage to feel bad over this):
Are you willing and available to help me move from Seattle to Olympia July 9?
What about if something goes wrong and I end up moving the weekend after?
Would you be interested in attending a very literal-minded housewarming involving torches and lots of lampwork?
And now I'm all caught up, and can spam with impunity about building a furnace/molten metal/the wastelands. :) STrangely, I feel better now.