Lavender, with bumblebee

 My backyard.

 

Wy'East, from OHSU

 Seen from the 7th floor of Kohler Pavilion. In the foreground, the arm that suspends the tram; OHSU's South Waterfront buildings in the middle distance. This mountain was one of the very first things I saw when I got off the airplane on my arrival in Portland, back in 1982.

 At higher magnification, the peak seems to hover over SE Portland...

Take care, old friend.
 

Cannon Beach, Ecola Creek

 

The Oregon Coast: beautiful to look at, difficult to photograph.

 This is the headland at the north end of Cannon Beach. The water in the foreground is Ecola Creek. We just learned, this last weekend, that Ecola is a Chinook Wawa word for whale.

 I am leaving behind a lot of history that I never properly learned. It wasn't my history, but then what is? so that's no excuse. Resolve to do better in Thailand, which will be a good incentive to learn the language as quickly as I can. I'm already frustrated by the lack of English-language sources around things like the canals of Chiang Mai.

Willamette Falls

 Willamette Falls from the Arch Bridge

 

What, no crows?

 Like... ummm...

A little scary, yes? Don't worry, it's just this:

Artwork around the corner from my house.

 As far as I can tell, there are no crows in Chiang Mai. There are crows in Thailand, a few species in fact, but evidently they have not taken over the urban environment the way Pacific NW crows have. No giant murders roosting in the downtown buildings and streaming across the sky at dawn and evening... 

I don't have any pictures of Chiang Mai birds (birds are hard to photograph!) but I did a little exploring with the help of the Merlin Bird ID app. One of Merlin's nice features is it can identify birds by sound. Sadly, the database is not very complete: it said it could only sound ID about 30% of the birds in the Chiang Mai area.

Anyway. Boring birds first: rock dove (pigeon), common myna, red jungle fowl. No, seriously. People all over Chaing Mai keep chickens in (and out of) their yards, and a lot of them look just like this: 

(image from Wikipedia)

Very close to wild type.

Spotted dove: this is a SE Asian endemic, very common in the city, and seems to coexist easily with the pigeons. This was the first bird I got by sound ID, the very first morning in the city. Picture from Wikipedia.

 

 Red-whiskered bulbul

 

 Also ID'd this one by sound: it seems to be quite common. I did get a good look at one but this image is also from Wikipedia.

Common kingfisher. I actually ID'd this one by sight. Can't mistake that flash of brilliant blue. Wikipedia image

 

Oriental magpie-robin (this is a very strange name for a bird, in many ways): also ID'd by sound but I did get to see one. Wikipedia image.

Miscellaneous swifts and swallows, all along the river: couldn't get a good enough look to tell what kind, and sound ID was not helpful.

And this:

 

This purports to be an Asian Koel. These birds are apparently everywhere in Chiang Mai: any place, any daylight hour, you're likely to hear them. But they're fiendishly hard to see! Merlin and other sources describe them as preferring the interiors of large trees with thick foliage - you don't see them sitting out on telephone wires, or anything like this.

This led me to declare, about three weeks in, that there is actually No Such Bird. I complained about a recurring auditory hallucination and muttered darkly "Birds aren't real..."

We did finally see one on our last full day in the city. 

Back in Portland, I saw an old friend today whom I'm really going to miss...

This fella lives at 18th and Alberta and has watched over the neighborhood for many years.

Take care, buddy...

View from my office window

 looking almost straight up

A rare sunny January day in Portland. This view inspired my poem "Paper Birches."

What to keep, what to keep...

 A couple times per year, I go through all my stuff. By "stuff" I mean desk ornaments, trinkets, all the little things that decorate my personal/work space. Some things I like to have handy, to run my fingers over when I'm thinking, or just idly. Some I like to have around, but don't need to have within sight or within reach all the time.

Items get rotated in and out of storage, though there are a few that are always on my desk.

Winter break and New Year is one of the times that this usually happens; another is during summer, when I have some free time and the days are long. This year, it's all different. I'm looking through my stuff and deciding: what am I going to keep?

"Keep" means - eventually - "take to Thailand." At some point there will be a big crate or something shipped over. For this trip, we're of course limited to what the airlines will carry without charging us an arm and a leg (not much). So really, it's premature: nothing need be disposed of yet, and I can wait to make these decisions until after the pathfinding.

But that doesn't mean I don't think about it. 

Willamette

 Before you read any further, say it aloud: "Wi-LA-mut"

The name is apparently either Clackamas or Kalapuya in origin, and one possible meaning is "Where the river ripples and runs fast." This river has been my companion in many contemplative hours.

Looking west across the river: Steel Bridge to the right, the north end of Waterfront Park across the way with downtown beyond. I'm standing on the Esplanade, at the top of the stairs leading down to the Steel Bridge's lower deck and pedestrian/bicycle crossing.

Looking south from the same spot: Burnside Bridge in the middle distance. Stormy day.

The Tilikum Bridge seen from the east end near OMSI. Public transit, bike, and pedestrian only.

To me this bridge represents so much of what we aspired our city to be. At the same time, how far we've fallen. I don't see funding for a project like this being available again any time soon.

Visiting Tilikum reminds me... three lines of my poetry are engraved in sidewalk blocks alongside the Orange Line light rail that passes over this bridge. One is at this stop: "electric lines charged full of souls."

Looking south from Tilikum. Ross Island Bridge, Ross Island, and the Willamette.

At the coast this summer

 The sun was setting...

...and the reflections twinkled like candles underwater

This was at Rockaway Beach, a little north of Tillamook.

My beautiful, but sociopathic, rosebush

I am serious. Every time I go near it, it tries to kill me. It's an heirloom variety, smells wonderful, has razor-sharp hooked thorns.

These photos are from August 2021, the first day of rain, the drought-breaker:

 

It starts blooming in May/June and would bloom straight through the summer if I watered it. Since I don't, it usually goes dormant when it gets really dry, and then starts up again in the fall. This photo is from December 2021:

The water tower in the background is a local landmark.