Spring into Fall

It may be a pity, but I don't look out the side window of our living room often. I open the drapes every day, but I usually am actually looking at the drapes, since they have an unfortunate tendency to come crashing down on my head, followed by the curtain rod, which may be a cheap Ikea curtain rod, but hurts no less when it comes into my skull at three times the speed of sound. You can see why proper vigilance is necessary when opening the drapes.

So I was not a little surprised, and very excited, when, yesterday, overcome by the glory of the beautiful, wonderful, lusciously warm, one-last-summer-fling weather, I flung all the windows open and realized that one of our ubiquitous overgrown bushes on the side of our house was quietly celebrating in its own way.

I haven't left the house yet today, but I am under the impression from those stern weathercasters that it is much, much colder, and I certainly haven't seen the sun, even though my studio is in the sunniest corner of the house. And I'm not terribly sad about that, because summer has been a houseguest much longer than usual. But I'm glad I actually stopped for a moment yesterday and really appreciated the niceness of it all.

This weekend, Al and I are thinking of taking a jaunt into the Shenandoah Valley in the hopes of seeing some fall foliage and to welcome Fall, who has been running a little late and a little disheveled and a little scatter-brained, and just because of that, is a kindred spirit of mine.

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the first full day of my first road trip, and these photographs are from that first day. I took the photos from Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, a place I just happened to spot on the map and decided to drive through on a whim, instead of covering the same distance on the Interstate. Shenandoah is such a charming word, isn't it?

As always, these photographs can't even begin to do it justice. I can't remember what I did last week, but I can remember the other people I saw on that road; the things I didn't take photographs of, but should have; the exact feeling of awe that overcame me when I realized how lucky I was to be in such a beautiful place. It was stunning. Glorious. Magnificent.

I hope your day is just as magnificent today.

Happy Fall, Happy Day of the Dead, Happy All Soul's Day, Happy November.

Oasis in the Desert

Northern Nevada is a different kind of desert from that of most people's imagination. The only cactus I've ever seen there is the one I tried to grow in our greenhouse window as a kid. I killed it by overwatering it. I think I watered it once a week. Ungrateful little cactus.

I grew up 12 miles north of Reno, in a community called Stead (technically in the Reno city limits), half a mile or so from the Stead airport, where the Reno air races are held. The land is mostly brown dirt, and the main vegetation is sagebrush (this is our neighborhood around 1988, shot by my stepfather from a glider).

Sagebrush smells incredible in the rain, but as you can imagine, there's not a lot of rain in the desert. I am sure that experts would tell me that there is a lot of life that I don't see, and I am sure they'd be right, and certainly the mountains have a lot of beautiful trees. But that's what the Nevada desert is to me. Dirt and sagebrush. I think it's beautiful. But it isn't what I'd call lush.

Stead and the surrounding area have grown substantially since I moved away in the early 90s, so much so that the last time I flew into Reno after dark, I had no idea I was flying over my own neighborhood. The lights of Stead had more than doubled and the whole mass of lights had changed shape, from a long recognizable strip of populated land to a shapeless blob (these are some of the new houses).

A lot of that growth is warehouses; for whatever reason, the area seems to hold appeal for large national companies, perhaps because the land is cheap, or because there is a railroad spur out there, already in place. So imagine my surprise when my mother, on my road trip, insisted that there were wetlands out in the desert. And she drove me back behind some warehouses, which cover the land where we once went dirt-bike-riding.

I knew there were no wetlands out there. It's the desert.

I was wrong.

These two photos are walking distance apart.

Thanks to the Nevada Army National Guard, the Bureau of Land Management, the Lahontan Audubon Society, and a host of other organizations, there have been 1,800 acres of wetlands out there, known as the Swan Lake Nature Study Area, since 1999. The marsh was already there, it seems, unknown to most and therefore unappreciated, and in need of some protection.

It is quiet, and peaceful, a true sanctuary.

More than 150 species of birds have been spotted there.

So let me please take this opportunity to say I am really sorry about the "indiscriminate use by dirt bikes." I had no idea we were disturbing the birds. I really had no idea there were any birds.

Thank you to those people who worked so hard to conserve an incredible resource. (The world could use more people like you.) As much as I love the dusty majesty of the high desert, it is sweetly enchanting to know there is this secret greenery tucked behind the warehouses and the sagebrush.

Things overheard on the road trip

"Guess what? Your car goes 95!"

"They didn't say the speed limit was 40. They said the highway was 40."

"Wouldn't it be great to have enough money to buy stolen art?"

***

If I'm absent a great deal this week, from my own blog or yours, please forgive me. The FantaSci convention, at which I've rented a table to sell my paintings (live and in person for the very first time!), is this weekend, and I'm starting to hyperventilate. So many things I never even knew I had to do, so many things I forgot I had to do, so many things I just plain have to do. So little time.

And yet, I think it's going to be great fun. If you're in the area, please stop by.

Toes in the Water

It's a little overwhelming, really. I have 926 photographs from my road trip.* That doesn't count the 20 to 30 I already deleted. So it may take me a while to go through them all thoroughly, and I certainly have no intentions of making you all look at 926 photographs, anyway. But perhaps you'd enjoy a quick taste, with a heartier sampler to come.

On this trip, I...

... made the acquaintance of a barn kitten at the Laura Ingalls homestead...



... snapped only one good photo at Mount Rushmore before the camera battery died....



... discovered, at least once a day, why so many people call summer "road construction season"...



... drove through a forest fire...



...almost ran off the road a few times because the Columbia River Gorge is so incredibly beautiful... my photographs don't even come close to doing it justice...



...found myself - or my tattoo, really - to be an object of fascination...



...spent some time traveling alongside a future meal...



... learned that small town America doesn't just exist in the movies...



... found our next house, a nice little fixer-upper (good road access, potential for a ski ramp in the back yard)... hey, real estate near Steamboat Springs isn't cheap...



... learned the answer to the question, "Mom, why do you think that field over there is so yellow?," once we got up close...



...met a retired Thoroughbred, although, really, he wasn't all that keen on meeting a bunch of strangers...



... and whole-heartedly disagreed with the statement that once you've seen a sunset, you've seen them all, because, oh, my, oh, my, this might just have been the best sunset I've ever seen in my entire life.

I also spent a lot of time lamenting that, with such a tight schedule, I didn't have more time to get out the car and take better photographs. I suppose I'll just have to go again.

* That's approximately 1 photograph for every 7 miles driven, which, honestly, doesn't seem like that much to me, when I look at it that way.

Literary Love, Endless Highways and Stone Presidents

I am heading out west for a three-week road trip in a few days -- it will be a mad rush to a cousin's wedding in Portland, then to Reno with scattered stops along the way for lunch and coffee with friends, to my mom's house to pick up a bunch of boxes of my old belongings and things that belonged to my grandmother, then back to Virginia with my mom to keep me company, in a race to get her to the airport so she can fly back home in time to get to work six days after we leave Reno.

Somewhere out west.

It's just over 6,000 miles round trip.

Why a road trip? Well, we have a car that gets fantastic gas mileage (so that, actually, gas will cost about the same that it did on my 2002 road trip in a Jeep Cherokee), plane tickets are very expensive these days, and to take two trips with two plane tickets, or even one plane ticket to Portland, plus a rental car to drive to Reno and back to Virginia would end up costing far more in the long run, by my calculations. Plus, I'm just tired of flying. I've been flying my whole life, but I think passengers are getting meaner and nastier to each other, customer service has gone way down, and personal passenger space has become inhumane, even before people start putting their seats back into my lap (a practice I think should be banned except on red-eye flights). I plan to travel all over the world in my life, and that will certainly involve flying, but why torture myself if I don't have to?

Anyway, I'm going on this road trip, and I am a bit nervous and a bit excited and a bit reluctant and a bit delighted. I'll get to see lots of friends and family I love...

I think this is my dad.

...and meet people I've never met but can't wait to meet, and see scenery I've never seen before and add to the list of states I've visited (Montana, maybe? Idaho? South Dakota?), and possibly see Mount Rushmore and maybe step foot onto the Laura Ingalls homestead and definitely visit Powell's City of Books, which I've longed to visit ever since I first heard of it years and years ago.

Highway 36 in Northern California

And I'll have hours of thinking time on the way out west, which will be nice. I've spent a lot of time getting music ready to download onto my new iPod. But, even better, I've found LibriVox, a magnificent site of free recordings of public domain literature (a big thank you to all the people who are willing to donate their time and energy to make something like this available to the world).

Now I have downloaded so many hours of books and poetry that I might not be listening to any music at all.

* Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
* Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts by Frank Richard Stockton
* Treasure Island and Foreign Lands by Robert Louis Stevenson
* Mountains of California by John Muir (for when I'm driving through those same mountains)
* Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
* Gawayne and the Green Knight by Charlton Miner Lewis
* Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
* Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats
* Ulysses by James Joyce

and finally, a bunch of poetry by Christina Rossetti, T.S. Eliot, Edgar Allen Poe and Tennyson.

This, my friends, is why I am so excited to have an iPod. Because now I will be a captive audience for all those books I've been meaning to read. There were so many more to download, and so many authors, including Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and on and on. I'm still not sure I'm finished downloading; I'm torn between Mansfield Park, Moby Dick and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

So this brings us to the burning question of the day: if you listen to a book, can you then say you've read that book? Ah, modern technology and the dilemmas it poses.

And now back to the road trip -- I don't have a laptop and will have only sporadic access to any computers, so I'll be out of sight for a while, but I will be back in mid-August with, I hope, lots of photos and some tales to tell.

(Like the time I was driving through New Mexico, in the middle of nowhere, listening to the song "The Lighthouse Tale" by Nickel Creek, when, in the middle of desert that stretched as far as I could see, I passed a street sign for Lighthouse Lane... mere coincidence?)

OH: and I almost forgot, for those who are as fascinated by word roots and meanings as I am, here is a site that looks into the linguistic and mythological origins of the names of the characters and other words used in the Harry Potter series... J.K. Rowling clearly put a lot of thought into the names she used.

Alison's Pocket-Sized Internet Travel Guide

Al and I are heading to Philadelphia (New Jersey, actually) for Father's Day, and we'll get to accompany my sister Olivia to her very first Phillies game, which is an honor and should be great fun. I just can't wait to see her. She's such a joyous baby.

I've been painting away, so I haven't been exploring the Internet as much as I usually do, but here's a few new lands to visit:

VisuWords: I already use Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com on a daily basis, but this may become my new favorite tool. Be warned, though: it requires a strong Internet connection. (Via StumbleUpon, which itself is a terrific tool of serendipity, like browsing in a never-ending bookstore. If you sign up, I'm radiogirl.)

Arts & Letters Daily: A collection of links to current articles of an assorted variety. I feel smarter just looking at this page, much less reading the articles.

My Drinking Bunnies: a fantastic stop-motion music video. (I don't know where I found this link, so I can't give credit; if it was you, my apologies.) The song is okay, but the construction and execution of the paper sets and characters are awe-inspiring and brilliant. (While you're in a stop-motion mood, there's the United Airlines dragon commercial. If you haven't seen it already, go watch it immediately. In fact, it's the kind of thing I think I should start every day watching.)

Poo-tique: my, oh, my. I can't believe I'm posting a link to a site that involves poo... but you just have to go check out this paper made of elephant dung. (Via Daily Candy.)

Enjoy and have a great weekend, my friends.

How I Spent Memorial Day Weekend.

For the first time since I can remember, I spent it at memorials. Well, actually, not Memorial Day, but part of the weekend.

My husband's best friend and his girlfriend came into town -- well, to Washington, D.C., where they grew up -- this weekend, and we went to visit them to celebrate birthdays and to see the goings-on in the big city.

We started with a party at a bowling alley:

which was far more fun than I even dreamed, because I-of-the-perpetually-aching-wrists actually bowled and got as many strikes in one night as I have in my entire life, I believe (three). I still didn't score very high, but I have proof that for one entire frame, I was winning:

(That's my "A" there at the bottom.)

On Sunday, we took the Metro into D.C. to see the Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Rally and watched more motorcycles go by than there are people living in my hometown. Or so I was told. I didn't actually count.

That's the State Department behind these bikes.

Here the participating bikers wait to begin the ride:

They rode fairly well spaced apart, but it was a constant stream:

There were other spectators, too:

After the rally, we walked down the Mall past the Washington Monument

to the World War II Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. I had never seen either one before. The difference was intriguing. I don't have any good pictures of the WWII Memorial without strangers in them, because it was packed, and quite a few of the people were sitting around the fountain in the middle, soaking their feet and talking. It didn't feel disrespectful, but it did feel very summery. The Vietnam Memorial, in stark contrast, was solemn and quiet -- except for a brief moment when a man in a tank top put up his trumpet and played "Taps." I took one picture only:

My kind of tribute. I don't know which name on the wall is yours, but here's to you, man, whoever you are. Cheers.

Just Step to the Left

Sometimes I need a reminder that beauty is just a matter of perspective:

Just look at it from a different angle, that's all. Or look a bit closer, or from a bit further away. Or take a few steps to the left or right.

And suddenly, the same thing looks totally different.