Steens 2010

It's the annual trip to the Steens and Alvord Desert for the Moon Festival!

(It occurs to me that I did not post the photos from Steens 2009 last year; they're on facebook, but maybe I'll eventually put them here too. For Steens 2008 and beyond, see this.)

The Good Prince and I took it easy. Did a little driving around, watched the moon rise, took advantage of Sven's preparedness and went along on the Malheur Cave tour, napped, played pool, and ate. What else is there to do on a vacation?

All photos are point & shoot.

So you've got to have the standard I was at the Malheur Refuge shot...yeah, it's really blue like that:



And of course I can't resist the grass shot:



Still can't help myself:



Gotta have the cows shot too:



Grass gets two, so the cows gotta get two, too:



At one point, we came across some cows being loaded onto the truck and I said "well, we know where those cows are going." The Good Prince replied, "yeah, well, I can see that they're going into the truck..."

After our encounter with the cows, we arrive at the Alvord playa, right around dusk:



And the moon rises...as scheduled:



Here's an unscheduled visitor kicking up a lot of dusk:



On the beach? (Hand-held at 2 seconds, it was pretty dark.)



On Mars? (Hand-held at 3 seconds.)



In Oregon! This is a lava tube cave, owned by the Free Masons who hold a jamboree here regularly:

Steens 2008!

We didn't quite get enough of the Steens last year (see this and this), so we went back again.

Actually, one of the people we met last year (at the hotel) was quite the story teller, and he mentioned watching the moon rise over the Alvord Desert. So the Good Prince and I invited a few friends and the whole gang, plus a couple of chicken hats, headed east for the Moon Festival.

This was hand-held at 1/60:



(Disclaimer—bad compression by blogger, not by me.)

On the drive from Frenchglen to Diamond:



Around Diamond Craters loop:



Also between Frenchglen and Diamond:



Hmm...can't remember exactly where this was, but still around Diamond (population 5):

The art tour

I decided to take the day off and go visit the Buckman Art Show and Saturday Market. Mostly, I just wanted to have a little R&R, which I haven't had for a couple of weeks now, between taxes, my regular projects, and yard work. Also, I was hoping to find a night light for the guest bedroom, and maybe anything else that might suit my fancy.

I didn't find a night light, and didn't spend much money. Bought a small print from Theo Ellsworth, whose work I saw at the Everett Station Lofts a few months back and really liked; he's at Saturday Market, which really surprised me. Bought a little card for the Good Prince (it's our anniversary!) from Carye of Red Bat Press, and a pack of mice cards drawn by the students at Buckman Elementary. (And I did sneak in a little work on the Portland Open Studios web site.)

The Random Movie (from a few nights ago) was Married Life. A rather different take on friendship, love, and marriage. Not sure that it's for everyone, but I kind of liked it.

MiT, 1st senior, day 6

It seems like I've gone from day 4 with senior #1 (my Mercury) to day 6, but actually, the last entry was mislabeled; it should've been day 5. Day 4 was attached to 2nd senior day 4.

It was a beautiful sunny day here in Portland and when I arrived at RSM, I found my Mercury sitting outside enjoying the sun. We ended up staying out for a little bit as she chatted with other residents and got a late start on the watercolor session.

She's so very keen on impressionistic sunsets and wanted to another today (her first was also a sunset scene). Except today, she got 1/2 way and suddenly leaned back in her chair and announced "I'm tired." I guess she had a pretty social day, sitting outside and visiting with people, which was good, but it wore her out too.

As I'm getting to know her better, I'm forming more ideas for her book. At this point, I don't think I'll use the first 2 prints we did with her. I don't think her heart was in their selection and they probably don't mean much to her.

The highlight of the day was the talk at the museum on the Persian poetry that inspired so much of the Persian miniature paintings. The speaker (Richard Davis) was a great speaker, funny and knowledgeable. Only it was too short!

Studio re-org, among other things

The "other things" were the Once In A While Dimsum Lunch, and a Museum visit. It was also my library gig day. But I managed to make a choice and bought 3 (cheap) shelves for my studio and started putting one together when it became dinner time. Then it was off to the Random Movie, which was There Will Be Blood. In other words, no work was done in the studio today.

I'm not sure about this talk that There Will Be Blood is the BEST movie ever made; it was good for sure, but I don't know about the best ever. The sound track was really good though, and in fact, I thought it was a bit distracting. I kept on thinking, I should be listening to the music without the movie...

A chicken hat kind of day

Had to get up really early today to make it to the Met Opera Simulcast at Cedar Hills this morning. We decided to have breakfast at Tom's, and past experiences with the Simulcasts have indicated that an early arrival is best for best seating. Plus I didn't get very good night sleep last night—had a cup of coffee at around 10pm, which usually doesn't bother me, but knowing that we had to get up early in addition to the coffee probably did me in. But the chicken hat enjoyed the breakfast at Tom's, and the opera. Read about her exploits here.

Spent the rest of the day in a big of a haze. Got home from the opera in time to have a late lunch and clean up, and after that, it was phone calls and emails concerning a couple of sales (a painting at Rake and a print off the web site). Questions from buyers, over payment/refunds, etc.

I had intentions of finishing pinning and basting this afternoon, but somehow, I never got there.

The Steens, Sept 29 - Oct 4, 2007, part II

OK, work first -- worked on the exhibition proposal for the show at the G&V Walters Center for 2008. It's more or less done, I'm just waiting for 1 last image to show up. And if it doesn't arrive tomorrow, I'm going ahead without it. Also decided to go with spiritone for web host. They're local, they're nice to non-profits, and they've been easy to deal with for all the web sites that I've done for other people. This will take care of the problems I sometimes have for hosting my web site on a computer at home -- like when our modem went down just as we were leaving on a 2 week vacation last summer.

So, the Steens trip. The 2nd day, we just drove around the Malheur refuge area. Went to the Refuge Headquarters (sounds so official) and the museum, and then drove around on the self-guided auto tour. (All these photos were taken with the phone camera still.)

Every couple hours, we had to loop back to the Refuge HQ because that was the only place we had cell phone reception, and I had to check to see if my Tuesday night class at IPRC was going to go! (As it turned out, not enough people signed up and the class didn't go.)

But anyhow, this is the view at the parking lot at HQ. Across the marsh, but you can't really see it in this picture, is Malheur Lake. There's a telescope set up in the HQ and you can see the pelicans gathering on the lake. Otherwise, you can barely even see the lake.



Close to the HQ is the Sod House Ranch where we stopped to take a look. Just so happened that a volunteer archeologist and his wife arrived at the same time and he offered to give us a tour. A couple of the cows at the Sod House Ranch:



I think these two were from the Buena Vista Lake which is dry right now. They actively manage the lakes to make sure the correct proportions of certain types of plants grow.



So it's just kind of marshy right now:



Late in the afternoon, we came across a couple of 'real cowboys' (horses & bandanas!) with a herd of cows:



That's it for the Steens. Looks like we're going back next mid-Sept for the Mid-Autumn Festival alright!

The movie tonight was The Kingdom. Lots of plot holes!

The Steens, Sept 29 - Oct 4, 2007, part I

Hang on to your seat belts, here's a tour of the Steens & some sorry excuse on why I haven't finished my print, sent off my exhibition proposal, and written in my diary, for the last 4 days --

We've talked about visiting the Steens for years but never quite made it until now. Usually, by the time we think of it, it's WAY too late to get a room. This time, we were a bit more flexible and actually tried for 4 other weekends before we were able to find a room for these 3 nights. We stayed at the Diamond Hotel in Diamond, population all of 5 but about to become 6 because one of the residents is pregnant!

For those of you interested in county information, here's the official Harney County Oregon Blue book page.

We left Portland around 9:30am on Saturday. Took I-5 S to OR22, which joined OR20 which then took us all the way to Burns, the 'major' town in SE Oregon (population of less than 3000). From Burns, we made our way to Diamond via 78, 205, and then the Diamond Loop. We actually missed the hotel on our first pass through -- how's that possible, you ask, in a town of 5 people? Well, because the web page gave the address as '10 Main Street', when there was no 'Main Street' marked anywhere...it was the ONLY street in town. And it was a very short street at that!

We eventually arrived at the hotel around 5:30pm, in time to unpack & clean up a bit before joining the other hotel guests for dinner at 6:30pm.

(More about the dinners later.)

After dinner, we borrowed a flashlight from the hotel and went out for a walk. The stars were beautiful, of course. The moon hadn't risen yet, so it was quite dark. We walked for a little bit, turned and waited for the moon to come up. I heard all this rustling in the tall grass to the side of the road, turned the light on the moving grass, and waited to see what creature was going to emerge. Finally, a head poked out, and I saw that it was a BIG, BLACK head. Then a BIG, BLACK shoulder, and then a BIG, BLACK body...and it just kept, on, coming.

I thought, Oh My God! It's a BIG, BLACK, BEAR! Well, you can laugh about it now, but it was a cow, of course. Despite my best rational efforts, I do feel spooked being out there in complete darkness (the flashlight doesn't really do a whole lot for you), so we didn't stay out too late.

The next day, we followed the advice of the guests already there and decided to do both of the Steens loops -- the one at the top of the mountains and the one that runs around the bottom. We also followed the advice that we probably can't do the entire top loop in our little city car, a low clearance Saturn, so we went up the north rim and turned around and came down the north rim as well. In fact, we couldn't quite make it to the top, it was quite steep (with snow on the ground) and we had no chains. But we got pretty close, and here's one of the view points.

(These are all taken with the phone camera...why didn't I use my new Rebel? Well, that would be another Stupid Human Tricks entry.)

I was facing north here in the first shot, and then turned to my right for each subsequent shot.



The Steens rise very slowly on the western slope but drop off very abruptly on the east side. So I'm looking into the valley to the east.



In this shot, the white oval shape at the top right is the northern end of the Alvord desert.



Here you can see more of the Alvord desert.



And I'm facing south at this point.



The gentle western slope...



The gentle Mike...



The gentle car...



And that, my gentle readers, brings us back to right before the first shot.



We came down the north rim rather than making the complete loop around the top and headed south to the town of Frenchglen. Frenchglen is probably about the same size as Diamond, or maybe it's twice as big, but how would you be able to tell?

There is the Frenchglen Mercantile...



...which was not open when we were there because the person running the store had to be over at the Frenchglen Hotel to serve lunch, because it was lunch time. We peeked into the store, and there were maybe 3 shelves of merchandise...it was all a bit lonely looking.

And that lunch was an experience all in its own class -- it was the crankiest , most ornery service! We walked in, and not only was there no greeting or smile (in return for our greetings and smiles), there was no 'sit anywhere you like', 'menus are on the table', etc. You just stood around while she ignored you, until you finally figured out to just sit down. One of the diners asked for menus (their table had none), she said 'on the table' with that are-you-blind-or-stupid tone of voice. When we said 'thank you,' there was no response. She never once smiled at anyone, said an extra word (kind or not), or was the least bit pleasant to anybody in the room.

In a lot of ways, it was all part of the experience, but I was so happy that we were staying at the Diamond Hotel and NOT at the Frenchglen Hotel!

Besides the hotel, the general store, there was an empty house in Frenchglen:



After lunch, we continued on to Fields (SE of Frenchglen), to have a 'famous chocolate milkshake' which so many people rave about. Sadly, I have to report that I thought it was a lot of nothing.

From Fields, we headed north to loop around the east side of the Steens. The road travels between the mountains and the Alvord Desert; hot springs dot the roadside. I wanted to go out to the desert itself, but found no roads that I could recognize as public roads, everything looked like a private driveway. As it turns out, there was one difficult to find road, which we completely missed, so we did not get out to check out the desert surface. But I guess that's what next time is for. And there will be a next time, more about that later.

Anyhow, we stopped at one of the hot springs. This was taken right at the side of the road...



...where the hot spring water comes bubbling out:



Here's another shot:



There's a little tin shack a little further away from the road; it's set up for soakers and such. There were people soaking in it so I didn't take a picture. We walked a little further on and here you can see the desert in the distance. I'm not sure what the white stuff is. Not very far from the Alvord Desert, there's a town called Borax Works, I assume there's borax there, and maybe that's what this is too?



That was pretty much the tour for the first day. We got back to the hotel, had dinner along with the rest of the hotel guests, went out for another walk in the dark, and called it a night.

Now, about those dinners at the Diamond Hotel --

1) They're pretty delicious, but you've got to like beef! Steak the first night, beef stew the 2nd night, and lasagna (with ground beef) the 3rd night.

2) They're communal -- everyone sits down at 6:30pm at 2 large tables and eats family style. These dinners were really half the fun, you never knew whom you'd be having dinners with, and we met some interesting people with wonderful stories and great suggestions on what to do and what to see. Some of them have been going for years and knew a lot.

As it turns out, the woman who used to own the Mockingbird Gallery in Bend (she recently sold it) takes a bunch of her gallery artists to the Diamond Hotel once a year, and they just go out and paint, and several of them were there while we were there. And besides me and them, 2 other photographers showed up, one of them recognized me (we later figured out it must've been from OCAC). The man who owns and runs the hotel also owns and runs a ranch, which is not too surprising. But turns out, he's got an art degree too. A couple of his oils hung in the dining room, and one of them I really liked.

One of the things that came up in our conversations about the Alvord was the subject of the moon rising over the desert. Now, this sounds like a very lovely thing to see! Plans are underfoot [underway & afoot?] to return for the Mid-Autumn Festival (Aug 15 on the lunar calendar) for next year...

Part II tomorrow.

ART exhibit, library, & taiko

As expected, I didn't work on my print today. Spent most of the day in town, delivering a piece to the Artist Repertory Theater's exhibit, helped Jim with the exhibit at the library, and then went on to a behind the scenes talk by Portland Taiko.

I had resisted going to the Portland Taiko concerts for many years, for a couple of reasons. The one free concert I attended, many years ago, all the pieces sounded the same and everything was so LOUD. After the first piece, I was more or less done. But a good friend is really involved with them and invited me to this behind the scenes talk, and they're really expanding what they do. They're working with a couple of different artists for their fall concert, a public artist to design the set (and she's also a founding member of Portland Taiko), and a composer who's also performed with a community taiko group before. They showed a few of the pieces that they're working on, and one of them was particularly wonderful -- they're using paper as instruments. Not paper mounted as drum skins, but just the sounds that paper makes when they're folded/opened/struck/scrapped/whatever in different ways. That should be a wonderful piece to see in concert.

Oh right, my birthday present arrived in the mail today -- a copy of the Holy Qur'an. (Something I've been meaning to read since the late 80's and am finally getting around to it.) I may have to start a 'Reading the Qur'an' blog to complement Mr. 5000's Reading the Bible blog. (But then again, maybe not.) The introduction alone is 65 pages long, so it may be a while before I actually get to the Qur'an part.

What I like about myself, part II

Hey, Day 4 of my 48th year passed without any further injuries or insults to my person! There were a few close calls as Anjali and I hiked around the trails along the Columbia Gorge, but no injuries. Had a really fun day out hiking around, and I wish I remembered to get photos at Oneonta Gorge. And next time, I'd go prepared to go through the river to get behind the log jam!

So, part II of what I like about myself:

8. Dang, I'm going blank again. ... ... OK, got it -- I enjoy spending time by myself. I like going out to eat, or going to the movies, by myself. I like spending the whole day in my studio by myself. (But I like having company too.)

9. I'm willing to try most things at least once. Although I drew the line at chicken feet. I've never wanted to try chicken feet.

So close, yet so far...I'm not coming up with #10! Part III, coming up tomorrow.

The movie tonight was Hairspray. It's very different from what I remember of the original movie. It seems like a whole different story line all together. And I didn't care for the music as much. It was still fun though.

More on other artists

I guess that's how you can tell that I'm not crazy busy right now, I'm actually getting out to see other artists. Suzy Bennett invited me out to Corbett to see a show (in a barn!) of her and 2 other artists' work. I didn't know what to expect, but what a treat! Unfortunately, I didn't bring a camera, and it was pretty dark inside the barn. These are from my phone. Here's the barn:



One of the artists, Joseph Schneider, makes collages and sculptures from found objects. And this is an altarpiece above the staircase as you are walking up, and you see it as the stairs make a 90 degree turn:



And here you're upstairs, and these columns reach up to the roof of the barn:



Here's a detail of the columns:



A dome above the staircase, right where it makes the turn:



Here's the really neat project, The Doll Cathedral -- a Gothic cathedral made of Barbies, Kens, GI Joes, etc. You MUST go there and read about how this project came about. It is estimated to be completed in 2012. You can donate old dolls too. And here's his homepage, with more images of the cathedral and also his other work.

Got back to Portland in time to go to Katy McFadden's open studio. Her garden is, as always, fabulous, and her sculptures are wonderful. I don't see how she can keep up with the amount of work she gets done AND keep her garden going too. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures today. I did get there pretty late.

One earwig is just a bug...

But hundreds of them make a horror movie! But we'll come back to that later.

Visited Sara Swinks ceramic studio this morning. She's having a show at Guardino this month and I wanted to do a piece on her for the Portland Open Studios blog. Spent the afternoon writing. It's amazing how long it takes to write a short little 3-4 paragraph thing on someone else's exhibit or creative process. Her work is gorgeous. Looks like 3 more people with shows in July, so more writing coming up. I haven't put in my own little blurb for the Rake show yet, but since I'll be in 2 more shows in July, I thought I might wait.

And we tried yet another new restaurant tonight, 2 in a week, how can we stand it? Pho Nguyen's, a Vietnamese noodle place, obviously. It was decent, fairly similar to most pho places, but not as exciting as Pho Van's, still the best place around town.

Back to those earwigs -- I went out last night with a flashlight, and found that the veggie starts were covered, I mean COVERED, in earwigs. Earwigs everywhere, on the leaves, on top of each other. It was a truly disgusting scene. I went to the Oregon extension services web site, and they didn't even list earwigs as a common vegetable garden pest. But if you look up earwigs, you do find that they can be a pest in the veggie garden. Suggestions for control? Put out pipe segments to collect them, I guess they like to crawl into dark places, and then dunking them in hot water. I put out pipe segments, but now I think other bugs might go in there too, so I probably won't use this method. Same with the rolled up newspaper. Other suggestion -- catching them and drowning in water; although the person suggested this said it took days for them to drown.

So I'm opting for squishing them, probably the most humane way to kill them. So that was what I did tonight. I'll probably have to do this every night for a while. There were lots of other bugs crawling around, but I didn't see them eating the veggies, so they're probably ok.

So here's a photo of my bug eaten bok choy. This and the rest of the photos were actually taken last night, after 9pm, with my cell phone camera.

The poor little bok choy. This actually reminds me of a famous (fictional?) Chinese woman from around the turn of the last century. Her nickname was Xiao Bai Cai, which means Little Bok Choy (bok choy is the Cantonese pronunciation of bai cai, meaning cabbage). It sounds much more endearing in Chinese, really. I can't remember why she was famous now, but she was probably a beautiful orphan sold to some family, and she probably fell in love with the wrong guy, and had a tragic life. Chinese stories involving women tend to be that way. But seeing how a baby cabbage is rather vulnerable, maybe the name had some symbolic meaning that I hadn't realized before. Who knows, maybe I'll be painting bok choys and earwigs next...



Here's my little 10" tall mountain laurel, Red Bud.



My climber, Coronation, leaning into the weeping blue atlas cedar...I think that's what it is; when I'm not working in the garden very much, I tend to forget the names of the plants. But they all come back once I'm back in the garden again.



I got this garden bench in 2004, brand new, for $19. That's right, less than $20. I thought it was a great deal. But now that it's been sitting out in the elements for a few years, the wood looks quite worn, and I'm afraid to sit on it, I think it's going to break.

Work, walk

Spent the afternoon working on Margaret's web site. Fixed all the quotes, apostrophes, italics, etc. Still have more photos to retouch, and still need to fix the pdf files. I'll probably keep working on them tonight.

Decided to skip the Portland Open Studios meeting tonight. I've had 3 meetings since Tuesday afternoon, and I have another one tomorrow, and this one seemed the most expendable, since I already know what I'm supposed to do. I did call to talk to Bonnie about it. Had an early dinner and went for a long walk.

This is an one hour walk that Mike and I used to go on about once a week until he fell off his bike and hurt his back about a year and half ago. Since then, we've done it maybe once. Anyhow, he's working late tonight, and so I went out with my cell phone camera around 8pm, and took pictures along the way. I'm really pretty impressed with how well the camera did with the late evening light. It's a Sony Ericcson Walkman.

Here I am just getting started. We're part way up Mt. Sylvania. Mt. Hood is visible, but not in this picture. (The camera isn't that good, and of course, no filters.)



We're about 2 blocks from the Portland & Lake Oswego boundary. So here's about where the city boundary is. I'm probably standing in Portland while taking a picture of Lake Oswego.



From our house, it's uphill for about 20 minutes or so until you reach the summit. Here I'm getting close to the summit. This road T's into a loop that goes around the park at the summit. You can get a good view of the fireworks on July 4th at the park.



Here's the edge of the park, which they do a nice job maintaining. This is Lake Oswego. Some new houses went up a couple of years ago while we were still walking here weekly, and they were all million+ houses. We're on the other side of the tracks.



And here's a mountain laurel, one of my favorite bushes. I have one, too. A little tiny one, and it has some blooms on it too.



So what goes up must come down, and I've come quite a ways back down the hill. I'm standing in front of a house we looked at way back when we were looking. (It's off the picture to my left.) But the house was smaller, on a smaller lot, and more expensive. Plus taxes in LO are higher than Portland. But it is nicely situated though, with this park right in front.



And what goes down must go back up, and I'm looking up the road that I looked down on in the first picture, so I'm almost finished with my loop here. This was around 9pm and there really wasn't much light any more.