Musings

Rainy all day, sometimes more than at other times. And here’s just about the last snow (right of center) we saw from our various vantage points as we went down the gorge to the Rose City.

All this rain means…tada! Waterfalls. This is Horsetail Falls.

And this is the better known Multnomah Falls. There are pedestrians on the old road bridge…and no longer any cars.

From the natural history display: an osprey. (Photo especially for those who’re tired of landscapes.)

Portland is a city of treasured neon, or at least I have the sense there’s plenty of neon here, and some of seems to be historic…or perhaps just retro.

This is not our hotel, and if we didn’t have a reservation, I still don’t think we would have been tempted. See note above. Just to be clear, we have two, count ’em, two color TVs in our room (it’s like a studio apartment, BTW).

Powell’s City of Books: of course we visited. And we traveled via street cars (trams), on complementary tix from our hotel. The Rose City is so green and hip.

I have never before seen this abbreviation, and I’d rather it disappeared. Only two-thirds of the shelves had it; the rest had the full spelling: archaeology. Much classier. And, besides, there was room for the other letters…so, why? Why?

Posted at 9:53 PM | Comments Off on Rainy day adventures

Fronds and frond-iness. A frond is a leaf or leaf-like plant part. These fennel fronds trace such delicate imagery.

Posted at 7:25 PM | Comments Off on Leaf-like

Backlit helicopters.

Posted at 8:25 PM | Comments Off on ’Nuff said

Tiz the season.

My mother called these zipperskins. I don’t recall hearing this term elsewhere, yet I can’t quite believe it was her personal language quirk.

Posted at 9:16 PM | 1 Comment »

Just watched RWarnock on Reidout. The interview was at a pre-Covid favorite hangout of ours, the Democratic stronghold Manuel’s Tavern*. Joy knows how to say it—like instruction manual. No kidding. Don’t know why, but that’s the way it is.

So, the berries in the left package were priced at a premium, yet I couldn’t tell much difference between the sizes of the berries. In truth, I don’t think the left packages was worth one-third more….

Election Day tomorrow. Hoping for truth there, too.

* Stronghold as in JFK, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and similar, along with uncounted state and local officials and candidates.

Posted at 8:05 PM | Comments Off on Truth

As far as I can recall, I never rode in a panga (by any name) before our trip last month to the Galápagos. Already, I miss those days! This was a penguin-watching expedition…oh, with pelicans and, what was it?…frigate birds…whatever. Note the volcanic cone in the background.

Panga in my Apple-dictionary (very fruity) is a large African machete-knife. I think “panga” is used widely in Latin American, at least on the west coast, for this kind of inflated boat. The Apple-world needs to self-update. IMHO 😎

Posted at 8:15 PM | Comments Off on Panga

Another glorious sunrise.

Clockwise: husband coffee, wife coffee, husband batman oreos. Actual breakfast followed.

Commonly described as resembling a “Chinese coolie” hat, feast your eyes on Sombrero Chino, the destination of our immediately-after-breakfast walk. [When will this island be renamed for PC reasons?]

It began with a panga tour along a section of the lava-liscious coast, searching for wildlife.

Aha! Close view of a Galápagos hawk. Truly special to see it like this.

Wet landing, then part of the walk was on coral bits. This is the first time we’ve seen concentrations of coral like this.

Lava flow, cooled in place on its gravity-fed descent.

Water meets lava.

We spent some time watching the land iguanas emerging from this space between rocks where they had huddled together for warmth through the night (it was still early). They would stop almost immediately, perhaps doing internal iguana-yawns. Here are two adults and two young.

Back aboard we had lunch followed by our check-out briefing. Sad to contemplate the end of our fabulous excursion in the eastern Galápagos, the part with the older islands—older geologically, so more soil development in general, enabling more diverse plant life.

Afternoon dry landing on Cerro Dragón. This beach had teeny shells and sea urchin spines. Those are the fat tubes in Gustavo-the-Guide’s hand. He said his father and his contemporaries used those spine chunks on slate in school, and thus the common name is pencil sea urchin.

The tide was out a bit, exposing a sandy area with many hermit crabs, mostly not seen. They did leave evidence, not only their burrows, but also these sand balls. They take in the sand, filter all the organic matter that’s in it, then spit out the sand in these little balls.

Sleeping/resting dragon.

Brackish pond.

Stilt? Already forgot.

It took Gustavo’s sharp and well-trained eyes to spot this katydid, right by the trail.

Mature male land iguana. “Doing what they do best,” as Gustavo said.

Mature male iguana in “our” trail. Burrow nearby. Linear patterns in the sand are tail drag marks.

Finch.

View to sea.

Bartender Javier’s preparations are underway for the goodbye meet-up and toasts with the crew. Scarlett the Cruise Director once again went along the crew line-up, detailing their responsibilities and names. [This also helped us with tipping before we disembarked.] Several of us short-timers made a little speech of thanks. I did one in Spanish on behalf of all of us; my Spanish, although still stilted, has come back relatively rapidly after, what?, perhaps twenty-five years of disuse. Good for my brain.

Best tomato soup I’ve ever had. I am not a Campbell’s fan. This has no cream, and includes potatoes. The crew kindly used Google translate to make and print a recipe for several interested guests. The first ingredient was a certain amount of “dad.” Someone among us was clever enough to realize this was a translation of “papa.” While, of course, not an incorrect translation, it was the wrong one here. Papa means papa/dad, the Pope (as in Father), as well as potatoes.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Renaming ahead?

Late this afternoon we had a storm cell/line come through and when it was in the final dripping stages, I snapped this of an upper section of the fennel forest out front. I like that: fennel forest.

Posted at 7:55 PM | Comments Off on Alliterative Apiaceae

I know of one bed of this plant (although my identification skills are abysmal) in our neighborhood, and I don’t remember this plant from elsewhere [really, why would I?]. My magic identification app suggests this is Houttuynia cordata, which is native to greater Southeast Asia. The app indicates the Chinese name translates as “fishy-smelling herb” and the Japanese name literally translates as “poison blocking plant.” These are far more…entertaining…than “the plant that spreads rapidly and keeps a slope from eroding,” which might be a colloquial name chosen by observers of this bed.

Posted at 8:11 PM | Comments Off on Not my type

For a short while, after visiting the UN when I was about ten, I thought I wanted to be a simultaneous translator. Of course, I only knew one language, and that rather irregularly. The simultaneous translator idea didn’t last long, BTW. Still, I have retained a curiosity about language.

So, an article this week was right up my alley. It’s by Timothy Snyder, in the New York Times, dated April 22nd, and titled, The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word.

The new word is “рашизм.” And it’s Ukrainian, if you didn’t catch that; written Ukrainian uses Cyrillic letters, like Russian, but it’s not Russian (duh). Roughly, рашизм translates as “Russian fascism.” The article is about how much that translation skips all the cleverness folded into the actual word. Lesson: plenty is missed in translation.

First, рашизм’s seriously multi-lingual, including English. So clever, so complicated. Go to the article (apologies: paywall) and learn all the intricacies.

One thing I didn’t know, while English refers to Russian and Rus (red), etc., with the vowel u, in Ukranian and Russian the vowel is o. I had no idea (why would I, actually?). (And it’s more than o, actually, as Russians pronounce it like an a. Surprise.)

And now, we have handy pocket translators, good for a giant assortment of languages. I have not checked what mine makes of the Ukrainian рашизм.

Posted at 8:19 PM | Comments Off on Parse details carefully, repeat