Greetings from Juanita Beach

The bad weather forecast for the weekend finally arrived on Sunday. It was drizzling when we arrived at Daniel's house for brunch with him and Cahaya, and continued at nearby Greenlake Grill, to which we walked after greeting the dogs, where we had eggs, pancakes, and hash browns among other things. Then we left Daniel and Cahaya to their chores and her schoolwork and went to Juanita Beach Park for the PNW Witches' Market, which had been infiltrated by the evangelists who show up at sports events to tell us we're going to hell, and where it rained so hard that we did a quick swing through the tents before coming home.

 

I folded laundry while we watched the Seahawks lose to the Bills, and we weren't very hungry for dinner after our big brunch, so we ate bagels while the 49ers beat the Cowboys (the Commanders had already won, so it was a good day in the NFC East, though the Ravens played a terrible game that was not televised here). Now we're watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which is still my favorite of the movies (and books), and I really miss the days when I believed Rowling had deliberately created Lupin as a metaphorical closeted gay man suffering from AIDS in a way children reading her books could understand and relate to.

Poem for Saturday and Bellevue Square Halloween

Ghost Music 

By Robert Graves 

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,

Bent-backed and blind the organist.

From rafters looming shadowy,

From the pipes’ tuneful company,

Drifted together drowsily,

Innumerable, formless, dim,

The ghosts of long-dead melodies,

Of anthems, stately, thunderous,

Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:

In melancholy drowsy-sweet

They huddled there in harmony.

Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

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It rained on and off on Saturday, so we planned around the weather -- watched some football (UW-IU, then UMD-UMN), walked to the park when it was only drizzling, and when it started to rain in earnest, went to Bellevue Square mall to look for wedding clothes and to see the Halloween decorations. We didn't know that today was the day for kids to trick-or-treat in the mall, so that plus the weather meant that the mall was very crowded, but we got to see the festivities and I found a bolero jacket at Macy's on sale for $4.96. 

 

We came home for dinner (cheeseburgers on the couch) and the World Series, which like last night was delightful since the Dodgers won, though again it was close enough to be an interesting game. Now we're watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets because we haven't seen it in half a decade and I'm tired of apologizing for the wizarding world being my comfort food when I have to see Ice Cube in Dodgers Stadium on my television. Call me when Kanye and Mel Gibson and Roger Waters and Elon Musk are actually canceled.

Poem for Friday and Beltany Stone Circle

Beacons at Bealtaine 

By Seamus Heaney 

Delivered at EU Enlargement Ceremony 

Phoenix Park, May Day, 2004 

Uisce: water. And fionn: the water's clear.

But dip and find this Gaelic water Greek:

A phoenix flames upon fionn uisce here.

Strangers were barbaroi to the Greek ear.

Now let the heirs of all who could not speak

The language, whose ba-babbling was unclear,

Come with their gift of tongues past each frontier

And find the answering voices that they seek

As fionn and uisce answer phoenix here.

The May Day hills were burning, far and near,

When our land's first footers beached boats in the creek

In uisce, fionn, strange words that soon grew clear;

So on a day when newcomers appear

Let it be a homecoming and let us speak

The unstrange word, as it behoves us here,

Move lips, move minds and make new meanings flare

Like ancient beacons signalling, peak to peak,

From middle sea to north sea, shining clear

As phoenix flame upon fionn uisce here. 

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We had nice, chilly weather on Friday, though I first ventured out in it because I needed a fasting blood draw for my semiannual lab work...never my favorite way to start a day. Then I came back, cleaned up, did some chores, and attempted to keep my cats warm in between writing irate letters to The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for being willing to let democracy die in darkness and refusing to endorse Harris. My sister is visiting our parents, so we all chatted on Google Meet in the afternoon before Paul and I took a walk to the lake and visit with the waterfowl. 

Our neighborhood had a kids' pumpkin carving event in the late afternoon with mini cupcakes, cinnamon rolls, and coffee cake for the adults, so we stopped by there before coming home for the first game of the World Series, which ended after ten close innings with a spectacular walk-off grand slam by the Dodgers. We ate dinner and watched this week's Disclaimer -- it's time for a non-misogynistic twist already -- and the rest of this season's convoluted Slow Horses. This is Beltany Stone Circle, overlooking a destroyed passage tomb complex in County Donegal:

Poem for Thursday and Burren Brachiopods

Fanore Beach 

By Ciaran Burke 

Across the dunes dotted with gentian blue, to where the shades of grey sky lie fallen on the mirror of retreated tide. 

Beyond the washed-bronze sands scribed with black calligraphy the Atlantic waves drone. 

And a foot carves the sand, a journey to the soul, waiting to be washed away. 

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My Thursday was relatively uneventful -- chores in the morning, a walk to the beach in gorgeous weather in the afternoon. All the ducks have returned from wherever they spend the summer; we saw dozens of mallards, a few wood ducks, a couple of grebes, even a coot, plus the eagles were up and about. After dinner, I chatted with three of my usual Thursday night crowd. 

After that, we watched a movie I'm not allowed to mention...fine, it was the first Harry Potter movie, which is still magical and I'll erase all trace of She Who Must Not Be Named when everyone else gets rid of Willy Wonka, Pink Floyd, and all the other antisemites. Here are some of the fossils we saw at Fanore Beach in the Burren -- gastropods, brachiopods, crinoids, corals:

Quote for Wednesday and Dunluce Castle

Cair Paravel 

By C.S. Lewis 

The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you heard it? Can you remember? 

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I had a very enjoyable Wednesday during which I accomplished exactly nothing! I chatted in the morning with my three high school friends, then ate lunch with Paul, then watched the last episode and a half of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power with Kristen. Then Paul and I took a walk to the beach and I worked on my Pokemon Go Halloween research -- Morpekos! Spiritombs! 

Over dinner, I watched the final episodes of Derry Girls with Cheryl, after which we saw this week's awesome Agatha All Along together (I must have those Tarot cards, and a picture of Patti LuPone in Glinda the Good Witch's dress -- really all of them in the movie costumes). Then we watched this week's Barbie-themed Masked Singer! Dunluce Castle, one of C.S. Lewis's inspirations:

Poem for Tuesday and Giant's Ring

The Giant's Ring 

By Robinson Jeffers 

Ballylesson, Near Belfast 

Whoever is able will pursue the plainly

False immortality of not having lived in vain but leaving some

mark in the world.

Secretly mocking at his own insanity

He labors the same, he knows that no dead man's lip was ever

curled in self-scorn,

And immortality is for the dead.

Jesus and Caesar out of the bricks of man's weakness, Washington

out of the brittle

Bones of man's strength built their memorials,

This nameless chief of a knot of forgotten tribes in the Irish darkness

used faithfuller

Simpler materials: to diadem a hilltop

That sees the long loughs and the Mourne Mountains, with a ring

of enormous embankment, and to build

In the center that great toad of a dolmen

Piled up of ponderous basalt that sheds the centuries like raindrops.

He drove the labor,

And has earmarked already some four millenniums.

His very presence is here, thick-bodied and brutish, a brutal and

senseless will-power.

Immortality? While Homer and Shakespeare are names,

Not of men but verses, and the elder has not lived nor the

younger will not, such treadings of time.

Conclude that secular like Christian immortality's

Too cheap a bargain: the name, the work or the soul: glass beads

are the trade for savages.

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To follow up the ophthalmologist on Monday, I had my semiannual dentist appointment on Tuesday. It was fairly uneventful other than he thinks I should think about using a bite guard so I don't end up needing crowns on my back teeth; I had one years ago and it kept me awake at night, so I stopped using it, and now I have to see if my insurance will pay for one of the newer thinner ones. I also worked on my Ireland photo book and started catching Pokemon for the Halloween event. 

My Voyager group watched "Repentance" which is quite didactic and doesn't care much about keeping the characters in character, but those are frequent sins of the franchise overall, so I probably shouldn't complain. I also watched a couple of Derry Girls episodes with Cheryl, this week's Arrested Development-tinged Only Murders in the Building, and the hilarious Lego Marvel Avengers: Mission Demolition. The nearly 5000-year-old Giant's Ring in Northern Ireland:

Poem for Monday and Monasterboice

Delusion Of Saints 

By Robinson Jeffers 

The old pagan burials, uninscribed rock,

Secret-keeping mounds,

Have shed the feeble delusions that built them,

They stand inhumanly

Clean and massive; they have lost their priests.

But the cross-bearing stones

Still foot corruption, and their faces carved

With hopes and terrors

At length too savagely annulled to be left

Even ridiculous.

Long-suffering saints, flamelike aspirers,

You have won your reward:

You sleep now as easily as any dead murderer

Or worn-out lecher.

To have found your faith a liar is no thorn

In the narrow beds,

Nor laughter of unfriends nor rumor of the ruinous

Churches will reach you.

As at Clonmacnoise I saw them all ruined,

And at Cong, at Glendalough,

At Monasterboice; and at Kilrnacduagh

All ruined, all roofless

But the great cyclopean-stoned spire

That leans toward its fall.

A place perfectly abandoned of life,

Except that we heard

One old horse neighing across the stone hedges

In the flooded fields.

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After a morning of laundry, the only excitement of my Monday was an ophthalmologist appointment. None of my post-glaucoma surgery follow-ups has really been reassuring; he hasn't found anything obviously wrong, but each time there's been something weird enough that he wants me back in 4-6 weeks to see if it's changed, and this time it's something that might essentially be an eye pimple or might be something more ominous, which he can't tell without a more complicated scan that he doesn't want to do unless it grows, so they're going to look at it again in a month. 

Otherwise, I walked to the beach, I watched some more Derry Girls with Cheryl, I watched the end of the Ravens victory over the Buccaneers, and now we're watching the season premiere of What We Do in the Shadows, which I have missed. Here are some photos from Monasterboice in County Louth, a monastery founded around the year 521, though the earliest surviving buildings -- the high crosses and round tower -- date from the 10th century, when it was occupied by Vikings, and whose graveyard has victims of the Great Famine and people who died in the past decade: