Day Twenty - All's Fair

Tonight's my last night in Washington for three weeks. Bright & Early tomorrow morning I will be winging my way across these United States to far off Missouri where kith and kin await. Alas, Kristin will not be able to join me for a couple of weeks, so tonight we took the opportunity to visit the Puyallup Fair. So tonight you get another image of Kris and I having a bit of a lark before our brief (but all too long) separation, and a video of us on the carousel.

Tomorrow... tomorrow is all about multiple connections at unfamiliar aerodromes... not to worry though, I have layovers at each in excess of an hour, so I've plenty of time to get to my new gate. Billings, Montana then Minneapolis Minnesota and finally Kansas City, Missouri await the trod of my travelling toes...

Day Nineteen - Fly me away...

I'm heading out to Big Mo. Updates will be infrequent 'coz the parents are on dialup and Blogger's slow on the dialup. But I'll be taking a pic a day and post 'em when I can. Fear not...

Day Eighteen - Warrrior Poet

This one's a photo manipulation. During a power outage awhile back, Kristin & I huddled around the oil lamps and fireplace and donned our warmest robes (hence the lighting and the hood) and Kristin took a bunch of pictures, playing with the low-light settings on the digital camera. So this one's a joint effort, photo by Kristin, Photoshop by Scott.

Today was kinda' dreamy anyway, so this really is fitting. Kind of went through it in a haze and now I can't sleep (again) and looks like I won't be anytime soon anyway (again) so here it is 3:00 am or so and there's no sign of the Sandman. But that's ok, if I see him, I got my trusty Lightsaber!!!

Day Seventeen - Date night

Kristin & I visited our favorite fish & chips joint in Gig Harbor and went to see Stardust last night. It was a good movie, good food, a great chance to unwind from some of the stresses of the day...

My beloved wife...




And a pic by my beloved wife...

I swear there are a thousand photographs of my feet floating around...

Day Sixteen - The Web

Sorry for posting late. It was a difficult night last night...



It rained yesterday morning, tumultuous downpour from leaden clouds. Then, of a sudden, the sun split the clouds with brilliance. Small water droplets shone like diadems on the web of a spider or the petals of the last few daisies for the year.


It was breathtaking and I thought I'd share...

Day Fifteen - Reading Material

It's raining. Which means it's time to curl up with the cats and read a book.

Day Fourteen - Accidental Florals

By my reckoning, this was our third gardening season here at the house and we've had a real spate this year of Flowers We Didn't Plant! It stands to reason that bulbs will lie dormant for awhile and then spring up where no flowers were before, so that explains the narcissus and gladioli, but this year we also got some odd things like petunias, pansies, and poppies where none have been for the past two years. So in a really lush year, the garden's color-scheme was interspersed with rogue flowers, adding a delightful bit of randomness to my plantings!

Day Thirteen - Tying the Knot

Yeah, I know, Kristin and I tied the knot a long time ago.

Literally.

Because the jeweler messed up the ring order we didn't have rings when we went to see the Justice of the Peace that morning. In fact, we'd been under the impression that all we'd be doing with the JOP was signing papers and I dunno, raising our right hands or something. In retrospect, that's a little silly, but my mind was on the later ceremony we were planning that same day for family and friends at which my cousin Chris was officiating. (Incidentally, the upshot of that is that I was legally bound in matrimony with my cousin's wedding band, and Kristin with her engagement ring, but I digress).

On the way from the JOP to the wedding, we received a call from the jeweler, the rings had arrived, and we could pick them up on the way!! Swell, except we hadn't written a ring-exchange into the ceremony Chris and I worked out. In it's place we had a whole handfasting/knot tying with tartan thing. And that's what we did! The pictures after the fact of us putting the rings on, posing for the camera was the actual ring exchange! If you look hard enough at the earlier wedding pictures and group/family photos you can see her wedding ring on my pinky finger! Too much fun.

Anyway, next Saturday, I will be winging my way across the country to Missouri to visit my parents. As most of you know by now, my dad is ill and I want to see him... and hug him... and talk to him and stuff. My nephew and my mom's birthdays too will be celebrated and the family will be together, which is going to be wonderful. I didn't think I was going to get to do that this year. Two weeks later, Kristin's vacation time from work will kick in and she'll fly out and join us.

The day she arrives in Kansas City, I have made plans to spend a day together at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. After that much time apart and with everything going on, some time alone together will be just the ticket. It is doubly apropos inasmuch as that is KC Renfest's 'Pirate Weekend' so I'll get to wear my pirate outfit after all! (It's strange how things work out sometimes...)

This is all a long way to go to explain the picture above, but you've stuck with me, and I'm happy you did. The above knot, tied around my favorite crockery jug is called a 'Turk's Head' knot. Back in the day I used to be quite a rope-guy... a mountain climber, get your mind out of the gutter. Anyway, this knot is mostly decorative and I'm making it as practice for a rather piratey bracelet for my beloved wife to wear to the festival and while I'm gone. Tying the knot... one more time.

Day Twelve - Stopping Your Gob

Sums up my mood today: Bright, Sweet, Manic, Mercurial and 'Everlasting'... 'cept not really.

Yeah, I don't know what it means either...

Day Eleven - My "Get Out Of Purgatory Free" Card

On a high shelf in the oubliette of my study, between the shaker of sand (for calligraphy), a silver box full of oddments and a mortar & pestle currently being used to hold quills, sits an odd little bit of history. This, my friends, is my own personal indulgence. Every good Lutheran boy should own one.

Why?

Because on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther affixed to the door of the Wittenberg castle chapel, his famous (or infamous if you're Catholic) 95 Theses, a shot across the bow of the earthly conceits which the Church had interposed between man and God. One of these unwelcome impositions was the selling of indulgences, or forgiveness for sins in exchange for cash to fund the building programmes of the Holy See. It was the dyspeptic Dominican friar Johan Tetzel coming to town to hawk his holy wares that served as the final straw that found Luther sneaking into the churchyard that cold autumn morning and driving a nail into the heart of Holy Mother Church. The first crack in the monolithic church and its hierarchical stranglehold on both Christianity and the principalities of Europe. Soon, Calvin, Henry VIII and others would slip through and widen the cracks that emanated from the nail Luther drove into that door in Wittenberg.

So you see why - when given the chance - I just had to buy one. In this case the money didn't go to build St Peter's (It's already finished, though a suppose a tithe might've gone to its upkeep, I honestly don't know) it went to a bunch of very nice monks at a Discalced Carmelite shrine & Monastery in Wisconsin.

It's commonly thought - as you'll see if you click the 'indulgence' link that the practice of selling indulgences is a thing of the best-forgotten past. Alas, no. It remains a part of Catholic Doctrine, just a part that isn't talked about all that much...

See? You learned something today.

Day Ten - Arachnophobia

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Chelicerata
Class: Arachnida
Order: Araneae
Family: Agelendae
Genus: Tegenaria
Species: Tegenaria Agrestis

Common Name: The Hobo Spider

This is a glass 'beecatcher' which I keep on my back porch as a control against hornets. For those who don't know, the beecatcher is an old method of controlling hornets and other stinging insects. The top is corked and the bottom opening is raised to allow a resevoir of sweet liquid (I use applejuice) to reside, acting as bait for the yellowjackets that infest my yard. This one was empty and uncorked, but all the same it seems to have captured a spider.

It is a common misconception - especially among physicians apparently - that this big fella is a 'Brown Recluse', despite the fact that the things simply cannot survive our wet winters and therefore avoid the Northwest like a plague. The Hobo Spider is sometimes also referred to as the 'agressive house spider' which is a misnomer. Apparently this happened because the 'Agrestis' in the name made some ignoramus back in the day confuse Latin for English and mis-translated that as 'aggressive' when it really only connotes 'Rural'. Along with the Hololena, these spiders are also commonly referred to as 'funnelwebs' because of the shapes of their webs.

They do bite, and it's painful and tends to cause a sore to develop, but it's not fatal to a healthy adult. If you're good I'll tell you the spider story for Halloween... it's a good'un.

Day Nine - Lost History

Caught up at last!

There's something wrong with this picture...

Lately I've been reading popular histories of the Second World War, mostly to bone up on basic knowledge of the time period before delving into a more serious study of specific aspects of the time period for a novel I'm contemplating. I just finished Rick Atkinson's book 'An Army at Dawn', which I liked a lot despite some of its quirks. After that I was planning on reading Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose... except that 32 pages in, the book skips to page 65, eliminating most of the detail of the hedgerow battles post-D-day. Not a good thing.

So I spend the day on other pursuits, but mostly hunting around for the receipt so I can exchange the daggum thing for a book with all it's pages.

Amusingly, I spoke at length with my dad today and he too owns an Ambrose book in his library that is not only missing pages, but whole chapters are out of order! He keeps it around for it's novelty and because he bought it at a library sale and paid maybe a buck for it. I knew that there had been a furor a few years before he died about the purity of his research, but shuffling pages and chapters in hopes that we won't notice seems a bit extreme...

Day Eight - Gaffer Applewright

A glimpse of the future, perhaps?


This past weekend I was blessed with the opportunity to meet a man whose reputation truly precedes him. Gaffer Applewright is a fixture of the West Coast renaissance faire circuit. He came to Shrewsbury this year to present not only his trademark 'apple trick' (a story he tells as he cuts an apple in a way that makes it come apart like a puzzle) but also a speech he called "Cabbages & Kings" which was a summation of Elizabethan history. He's a fascinating man with a wise and gimlet eye, a quick wit and a penetrating mind. So it was that I felt greatly honored and somewhat taken aback when one of my companions pointed to him and said "that's going to be you in thirty-odd years!" I can only hope so.

After his speech we had some time to discuss the politics and oddities of renaissance culture, from the search for a cure for scurvy to the nuance of Elizabeth's reign. It was the pinnacle of my time at Shrewsbury Faire.

Day Seven - Fire on the Mountain...

This past weekend, we (my guild of Renaissance Actors) were invited to attend Shrewsbury Renaissance Faire as participants. Unfortunately, the faire is far beyond the reach of such mundane essentials as WiFi - or even basic cel-phone coverage. Ergo, this weekend's pictures will be post-facto. I'm sure we'll all survive our disappointment...



The photo above is a rarity, or at least I intend for it to be, inasmuch as I didn't take it, my friend and fellow actor Becky did. However, more than any photo I actually took this past weekend, this one pretty much sums things up so here it is. There was a forest fire burning through most of the day Saturday and all night into Sunday morning. We were told that the rangers and firefighters were near at hand and that we would be told if we needed to evacuate and we were to 'go about our business...'

Friday night had been very cold for tent camping with temperatures in the low forties and heavy fog greeting us as we awoke. The night of the fire however we could feel the warm winds blowing down out of the hills. All through dinner and into the dark watches of the night, we could see the distant ridges limned with orange flames, picking out the topography of the billowing plumes of smoke in crimson and gold. Through the night, one at a time and sometimes in groups we would emerge from our tents to look out across the dark miles that seperated us from the conflagration. It was an uneasy night for everyone.

300+ acres and some firefighting equipment have been destroyed and last I heard it still wasn't under control.

Day Six - Reflections

A fair question: Why do I do this?
My friend Cassie introduced me to this idea, the Project 365 concept, not intentionally, but rather by example. It's a neat idea: a photo a day that sums up your day in a single image, a photographic diary, posted for all to see... but that's not really why.

It occurs to me that I already have a couple of blogs, do I really need another one? One that on the one hand invites the viewer so intimately into my world and on the other hand is filled with images and half-glimpses of my world that even my wife might not even be able to decode unless she looked back and realized after the fact why I was taking pictures of my feet that day, or the toadstools, or whathaveyou.

Andre Condrescu famously warns that the exhibitionists are beginning to outnumber the voyeurs, and that is an unstable paradigm. He's right. But this isn't about exhibitionism.

Simply put, this is a time I feel that I need to document. I've a feeling that more will happen between now and next September than has happened in all the time that has accumulated since I left High School. My life has entered a phase where I don't know from one day to the next what challenges I or my loved ones will face. What I now look back and see as a period of relative peace is passed. This is a place where I will chart the course, and later come back to see how it happened.

Also not a little of what I call imagining out loud will happen here. I don't pretend that my reflections will mean anything to anyone but me. Look if you wish, turn away if you don't. I'm not an exhibitionist. This is me, this is who I am, this is what's happening, and this... this is 24/7/365.

Day Five - Caterpiller wanted, must provide own hooka.

Whilst wandering aimlessly through the garden this afternoon, I happened upon a proper toadstool ring. Yes, a fairy gate, entrance to the realms beyond. You could almost hear the elfin laughter from the surrounding trees as I stood, gobsmacked by their creation...


Anchoring it is the granddaddy of all toadstools. Seriously the thing is the size of a soupbowl. You could almost see the help-wanted sign hanging there, begging for a caterpiller to take his ease and blow smokerings at little blond girls happening by.


Interestingly, there was a bit of a learning curve taking pictures of the thing. Who knew that a faery ring could be so lacking in visual stimulae? I took a stepped-back picture of the thing and it just looked like... well, it looked like nothing. No magic in that picture, which is why you won't see it here!

Day Four - Still life with Alchemy and Black Magick

4 September 2007 - "Still Life Day


The one an alchemical potion, capable of the miraculous transfiguration of the primordial clay that shuffles into the kitchen every morning into a thinking human being. The philosopher's stone in a ceramic mug. Eternal youth... at least while the buzz lasts.

And my omnipresent gargoyle, which sits on my belt like a constant reminder of the persistence of the modern wizardry that blesses and curses us, so entwined in our lives that we cannot conceive of a world before they attained rule of us. Cellular technology operates on the darkest of magical principles, teasing you with the ability to instantly obtain an illusion that you're connected to far away events, far away people who are beyond your aid, beyond your reach. Alexander Graham Bell's demon gone mobile... blessing and curse, a dreaded ring eagerly anticipated, and the news never good.

My two leashes, the threads that tie me to the rest of the world. One a blessing, the other a curse, and which is which I cannot tell you at any given time.

Day Three - Costuming Day

The Portland Pirate Festival is coming (follow the link) and since it's put on in part by some friends of mine I felt I would be remiss if I showed up in civilian attire. Alas, nothing in my costume trunk is very piraty. So I've decided to design and execute a proper 18th century gentleman's frock coat (suitably scuffed and faded to lend it the air of the scallywag) with all the voluminous folds that flair out properly when you spin to parry and riposte the attack of the man sneaking up behind you... (ahem...) Also a proper brocade waistcoat similarly abraded and stained. I figure I'll be playing a learned gentleman driven to piracy by hard times and the accusations of a more powerful enemy. Sort of a piratical Jean val Jean. What fun!

Day Two - Barefoot Gardener

2 September 2007

Spent a good part of the day doing nothin', pounding the keyboard, cleaning up cat puke. Then late in the day wandered out and discovered it had been a gorgeous day I'd been missing. What a waste. I took some cookies and milk outside and lay in the hammock, watered and weeded in my bare feet. It felt good. One of the last days I'll get to do it for the year, I think... the rains are coming. I can feel it at night, the summer is dwindling.

Talked to Mom & Dad on the cell phone as I was watering the flowers... it's always good to make the connection from the things I love back to the people I love.

Day One - Sunset Over Gig Harbor, WA

1 September 2007

I spent the day wandering around Tacoma with Kristin and stopped for groceries on the way back. I took a lot of pictures today, searching for the nuance of this project, trying to figure it out, what epitomizes a day spent with the one you love? Then I stopped looking through the camera and looked up...