Greetings from the Gilded Age

Yet another quick post in the middle of packing to go visit Adam and Haley in Massachusetts! Daniel's dog seems to be all right but requires gabapentin for pain control and to try to keep her calm so she doesn't keep reaggravating her injury. Most of my day involved laundry and travel-related chores, though we did walk a bit in the heat to see the birds (and very briefly a beaver). Two people from my Trek group weren't around, so the rest of us just chatted. 

The All-Star Game had started by the time I was off the call. None of my favorite players had a memorable game, but it ended with much excitement since the AL tied up the NL in the ninth and they had a mini home run derby to decide the winner. Afterward, we watched The Buccaneers, whose version of Consuelo Vanderbilt I like better than The Gilded Age's though I'm worried about their Jennie Jerome. Why geese are not popular with boaters in my neighborhood:

Poem for Wednesday and Salish Sea Birds

The Kingfisher 

By William H. Davies 

It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,

  And left thee all her lovely hues;

And, as her mother’s name was Tears,

  So runs it in my blood to choose

For haunts the lonely pools, and keep

In company with trees that weep.

Go you and, with such glorious hues,

  Live with proud peacocks in green parks;

On lawns as smooth as shining glass,

  Let every feather show its marks;

Get thee on boughs and clap thy wings

Before the windows of proud kings.

Nay, lovely Bird, thou art not vain;

  Thou hast no proud, ambitious mind;

I also love a quiet place

  That’s green, away from all mankind;

A lonely pool, and let a tree

Sigh with her bosom over me.

-------- 

I had a nice, fairly typical Wednesday on a cool and overcast summer day. I talked to three of my high school friends -- the fourth who is usually on this call is in Maine with her family, including her middle daughter and my younger son, who went kayaking today with Pepper. Then I ate lunch and watched the second half of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies with Kristen and Laurie, with much mocking of excessive warg battles and Thranduil's hair, though I still think the dwarfs deserve better. 

We took a walk to the beach in the late afternoon, much less crowded than earlier this week when it was in the 80s, then had veggie pierogis and kielbasa for dinner. Then we finished watching A Murder at the End of the World, which is dark, intense, humorless, very well acted, and I can't decide whether to file it under procedural or dystopia but it certainly held my interest. Birds we saw on the puffin tour including rhinoceros auklets, common murres, eaglets, kingfisher, osprey, oystercatchers, and gulls:

Greetings from Puget Sound

Tuesday was Paul's and my 35th anniversary, so after a morning of necessary stuff, we had eggs benedict for lunch then drove to Edmonds. We took a walk on the beach (there were seals!) and along the marina, then got on Puget Sound Express's Swiftsure, the same boat we've taken on whale watching cruises, to go on a puffin cruise! This is the company that serves homemade blueberry buckle during the boat ride into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, so we had that and hot chocolate in the mugs we purchased on the whale tour during the very bumpy ride to Protection Island. 

We saw puffins, rhinoceros auklets, black oystercatchers, guillemots, murres, harlequin ducks, cormorants, ospreys, adult and juvenile bald eagles, kingfishers, and thousands of gulls; we also saw adult and juvenile seals and a sea lion. We weren't very hungry after all the snacking on the cruise, so we came home and had sandwiches while watching an episode of Ironheart and another of The OA. These are just a very few photos of the most exciting birds -- there were several people on the cruise with $10,000 cameras and lenses, though not me -- marine mammals and more to come!

Poem for Monday and Port Orchard Waterside

Against Boredom/Toward Warmth 

By Jane Wong 

Boredom, my mother warned me,

  is for the rich. And so I became amused

by tying grass together with grass,


by ants carrying their dead, by bending

a spoon as far as it could bend.


I spent days imagining my back

as a spoon bending and the men

  who would watch me bend.

I even avoided laughing

to save energy.


I imagined having a fit of laughter

one day and lighting

a whole house


with it, keeping heads warm

with the trill of it.

I dreamt of being

  a radiator, waking the ribs

of all the boarded up houses

  you’ve lived and lazed in.

-------- 

My Monday morning was all about laundry and other chores that got ignored over the weekend. Then we had lunch, finished up a bunch of work, and went out to CVS to pick up a prescription and to Safeway to do the food shopping we never got around to on Sunday. It was quite hot for this area, 85 degrees, so we didn't take a long walk, and the ducklings and goslings were hanging out in the shallows where they usually sleep at night. 

Around dinner, we watched the great 11-inning Orioles-Rangers game that the Os ultimately won. Then we finished the fourth season of The Bear, in which four of the major actors give tour de force performances but I feel like the supporting characters get short shrift, the women this season in particular, so I want a fifth season. Now we're watching more of The OA. Some photos of boats, flowers, and a heron from Port Orchard on Saturday:

Greetings from British Columbia

My Thursday started very early and involved two ferries (Edmonds-Kingston and Port Angeles-Victoria) with an hour and a half drive in between, plus crepes at the Pink Pony Cafe, glimpses of the Olympic Peninsula and of seals and starfish, and going through customs, and that was all before we arrived properly in Canada in the afternoon at the Empress Hotel, where Daniel and Cahaya are getting married on Saturday! 

We walked around the waterfront in Victoria enjoying the boats, the sea planes, the beautiful gardens, the poutine trucks, and the tourist shops before meeting my parents for dinner, and the sky isn't fully dark even though it's 10:20 p.m. We have a beautiful room overlooking the harbor and the front of the hotel is decorated for Pride. Adam and Haley just landed at the airport and Nicole is coming tomorrow. Here's our day in snapshots:

Poem for Wedneday and View Above Seattle

Space Needle 

By Kristin Fogdall 

for Stephen 

If each foot took us back a year, the dark below would be immaculate, like a hole

in space, instead of stars,

or a jar of colored glass

someone shook

and scattered in a dream.

But from this height,

our childhood town

spreads out, a silver galaxy,

and tourists peer

into the giant metal scopes.

I scan the towers, walls

of windows, one small pane:

sofa, tiny people

face to face—a man

and woman talking,

as they may do every day,

or perhaps this is

the last time, or their first.         

The lamp she crosses to

dims the room a darker gold.

It’s like watching movies

on the wall at home

where we cavort across

some stretch of sand:

I want to step inside the frame

and take my own hands,

and look into my eyes,

and see what’s true

and what’s idealized.

What should we try to be?

If we looked down

through time instead of sky,

would we see ourselves

behind another pane—

our faces gazing back

through days or years,

until we recognized that room,

the lives we’ve lived in all along?

The wind is off the Sound,

and makes no sound

except a ruffle

at the rail edge.

On the tiny street below,

a man is working on the road.

Alone behind his truck,

lit by a magnesium haze, he turns

a little orange wheel,

some apparatus out of sight.

He is the perfect

model of a man, which means

we love his task in ways

that he cannot, and wish

to close the shutter on

the stars, our years, with something

like his gesture of repair.

-------- 

It was over 90 degrees again on Wednesday and I was still woozy from whatever knocked me out the day before, so I slept late, talked to the 2/3 of my high school friends who weren't in town for the previous several days, ate very little, and watched the first half of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with Kristen. I didn't feel up to walking to the beach, but we did walk on the dock in the heat. 

I watched most of the Orioles game with Kate and put on The Acolyte with Cheryl when the baseball went into a rain delay (still not sure where that series is headed, and it only has one more episode). Now we're watching IF, which is a sweeter movie on the same theme as The Imaginary with several excellent actors who made the material better. Some photos from the top of the Space Needle:

Greetings from Ballard

Sunday was a very pretty but very cold day with wind chill near freezing. We had a quiet morning watching the Orioles preseason game, ate an early lunch, and went to Golden Gardens Park, which has a long beach on the Sound and wetlands with a beaver dam and many ducks. We saw a few small crabs and anemones, plus a few parasails and boats, but it was too chilly for many people in the tidepools. 

Since we were nearby, we went to the Hiram Chittenden Locks in Ballard, where the main lock was closed for maintenance so there weren't any boats, but there were dozens of herons in the nests above the fish ladder and a couple of seals in the water, plus lots of daffodils in the garden. Since we were in Ballard, we stopped at Scandinavian Specialties for cheese and lingonberries on the way home.

 

We just finished watching Ridley Scott's Napoleon, which has performances considerably better than its screenplay (I see why the French were so pissed off) but is paced pretty well and has elaborate city and battle reproductions. The movie makes Napoleon out to be a loutish idiot yet ignores some of the worst things that happened under his command. At least Phoenix and Kirby have good chemistry!