Now there’s a good idea.

www.oregonnhc.org

‘Tis the season when we dress trees up in silly outfits

“Ooh, check out the conifer, it’s still green in December, let’s cut it down and put some tinsel and crap on it!” It’s like killing somebody and then giving them a medal. For Year-Round Photosynthesis.

Image from a sweet Vancouver artist’s blog.

I’ve been blogging for a whole year

Just thought I’d point that out. Some people have been blogging for like ten years. I am not one of those people. I’m more of a ‘late adopter.’ But I see no reason why I don’t deserve a beer for my 13 months of undisciplined ranting. Cheers.

Image from here. I love Oregon breweries.

10cm on Effective Microorganisms(TM)

There’s a kind, sweet woman in Austin named Katsumi, and she knows her stuff. I missed the bulk of her explanation of EM, but the 10cm notebook managed to capture these two intriguing words, vaguely Engrishy and ripe for googling. (With quotes, please…)

So, I’m not usually one to review/promote products, and it really made me cringe to put that (TM) up there, but this one just hits so many of my cultural/biological/ecological g-spots that I simply couldn’t help it.

In brief, you’ve got a guy, Dr. Teruo Higa from Japan, who somehow magically realized that bacterias and fungi and other tiny things are really good for, well, everything. So he gathers a bunch of them together, sticks ‘em in a bottle, and sells the mix as EM-1. People use it on stuff and are amazed to find that cool things happen. Snake oil? Well, yeah, if snake oil had live cultures of lactobacteria in it and, you know, actually had some scientific basis for working.

Let’s break it down. Three major groups:

In Which the Author Refuses to Apologize for the Delay

You know, because everyone loves a navel-gazing blogger. I’m not sure how many of us this planet can safely support. I suppose the correct answer is that I’ve been out there in the world (the living, breathing one) trying to figure out a new place, a new people, and precisely what my umwelt is going to be here.

And yet, somehow, the writing remains important … so I’m back like a heroin addict. Thanks for reading.

A is for Aircrane. B is for Burnside. C is for Cooper.

Today on my walk home from a temp job at a trade show for Oregon nurseries and plant growers, I passed the following businesses: an unmarked bar that serves beer and cheese fondue, a hippo-themed hardware store full of old timey doorknobs, an art supply store, a museum of velvet paintings, the best music venue in town, a Greek deli, the offices of a guy with an aircrane business, a drum shoppe, and a local restaurant which purportedly has the best buffalo wings in town. While I was at the trade show, I spoke to a man who works for a company that manufactures waterproof notebooks which

A Love Letter to Portland

Yesterday (after trying to remind myself about the fundamentals of Ohm’s Law and the analogy between electricity and water pressure) I went to this guy Greg’s block party where there was a man dressed up in a tree costume ruling the top square in foursquare, and I played ping-pong in the middle of 48th Avenue with a 10-year-old while another guy with an amp on the back of his tricycle rode around playing guitar. At the end of the street is Belmont Station,

First Stop: Deep Moss

7,700 years ago: Mount Mazama, in what is now southern Oregon, erupts. It collapses in on itself, forming a deep crater which fills with melted snow over the next 600-800 years. Crater Lake, the seventh-deepest (592m) lake in the world, is born. It is a nutrient-poor lake with no inlets or outlets, preventing particulate matter from shading the depths below.

6,000 years ago (?): The lake becomes home to Drepanocladus aduncus, a species of freshwater moss which, thanks to the availability of sunlight in the lake, was able to establish itself nearly 600 feet below the lake’s surface.

Conifers Here I Come

“If when you think of hiking here in the Pacific Northwest, you think of cool, dark, mysterious forests of huge conifers, you’ve got the right picture. The area made rainy by the Cascades, Olympics, and other Pacific coastal ranges is the Conifer Capitol of the World. This is the only large temperate-zone area where conifers utterly overwhelm their broadleaf competitors. It grows conifers bigger than anywhere else, and the resulting tonnage of biomass and square-footage of leaf area, per acre, are the world’s highest, even greater than in tropical rainforests.”

Excerpted from Cascade-Olympic Natural History, Daniel Mathews 1999

photo from here.

Magnetic North

There are certain climates which make bird migration seem completely reasonable. I have chosen to fly the 2,500 miles to Oregon so that I can reclaim via fern-gratifying mist some quantity of the gallons of sweat that I had been producing in Texas over the past twelve years. Some will say, “Too much rain!” or “Too cold!” or “Not enough sunlight!” … I will show these naysayers a dew-covered mushroom that has been nibbled upon by a newt, hand them the SPF 45 that I refuse to apply, and tromp off down some spongey trail in search of interesting bryophytes.