Category Archives: Around home

Michele’s Opening at Sweeties

Around home, Art, Family, Local events

Sweeties-9943Michele is showing her pictures at Sweeties. They are beautiful but I am not sure what to call them, let me explain.

About a year ago – maybe a year and a half, maybe eight months ago – Michele got a Sunprint kit for Granddaughter Charlotte. If you know Michele well, you will know how hard it would be for her to not get a Sunprint Kit for herself. It just hit all her hot buttons. Anyway she did and she started playing with it right way (when I say playing, I mean playing in the deeper sense, as in playing the piano).

The process is simple: place something on a piece of bluish, sensitized, paper and put it in the sun, then develop it in water. What happens is the bluish paper fades in the sun leaving only the shadows blue. In the water, the shadows turn white and the exposed paper turns blue, reversing the exposed image.

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It didn’t take long for Michele to get interested in the mid-reversal.

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She first took the paper out of the water and tried scanning the dripping wet paper, trying to control the paper with paper towels and rags. The she tried photographing it with her iPad, and – finally – using a camera on a tripod. After about a year, the mid-process scans and photographs were hidden away in the computer and the finished – but not as interesting – Sunprints graced every available horizontal surface.

Then Michele started printing the mid-process images – eventually on Epson Hot Press  Bright, 100% cotton fiber, acid-free, lignin-free, paper – and they were beautiful. Framed, with hand torn edges, they make a striking show.

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Michele’s artist statement says, I am not big on change, even though as the iChing claims, change is the only thing we can be certain of, so it is in my nature to try to hold on to memories and bits of beauty. One of the things I love most is my garden, if you can call it that, since it is really just a tamed bit of woods in Portola Valley. I’ve noticed that every day the garden changes, just a little; something new has bloomed, something else has withered away.

Thinking we might soon be moving from our home, I started using sunprint paper as a way to record the flowers in my garden. As I did this I became fascinated with transitory images that emerged as the water hit the paper. It is a brief moment when dark and light comingle as they exchange places. These giclée prints freeze that moment during the processing of impermanent images of impermanent blossoms that grace our impermanent residence on this ever-changing planet.

Reading that statement and looking at my pictures of Michele’s opening at Sweeties, below, reminds me that we are both trying to do the same thing, freeze that moment.

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The Goats next door

Around home

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While we were at a  Woodside Highlands Improvement Association meeting/get together the other day, we were told that a Goat Family had moved in next door at The Hayfields. As an aside, when our area, Woodside Highlands, was incorporated into Portola Valley, Portola Valley didn’t want to maintain the roads which do not meet the usual standards. As a workaround, we maintain our own roads through an Improvement Association, and Portola Valley gives us an allowance for that purpose. It is local government at its best. End aside.

Anyway way, Michele and I went over to the Hayfields to meet our new neighbors thinking we might know some of their relatives.

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Because they were all working so hard, it was difficult to get any of the Goat Family’s attention, but finally Ms. B. Goat came over and chatted.

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She told us that they were not moving in and they were just here on some sort of agricultural H-2B Visa through the Woodside Fire Protection District. About that time El Jefe, a Mister B. G. Gruff, came over and suggested that everybody get back to work, so we left and everybody else went back to work.

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We are going to Portland for our nephew Jason’s wedding

Around home, Travel

Eastern Oregon -But first we are going to the Smoke Creek to see Mike Moore. The we will wander around the Eastern Oregon desert – drylands? – for a couple of days (we really don’t have much of an idea of what the area is like except that it is in the rain shadow of the Oregon Cascades). We will be back a week from Tuesday.

 

Things that go bump in the night…poor dear

Americana, Around home

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A loud bump at the other end of the house woke us about dawn yesterday morning. Both Michele and Precious Mae sat up and looked around, but that’s all it was, one loud bump. And then silence. We all went back to sleep.

When we did get up, at first, there was no sign of what could have made the noise. I would say, Here is a book that fell over, and Michele would say, No, I put it there. The whole loud bump thing was soon forgotten, that is until Michele found a Band-tailed Pigeon – Columba fasciata – dead, under a chair out on the deck. As an aside, the name columbarium – a place to store cremains, the cremated remains of humans – comes from the Latin for dove, columba, and originally referred to the compartmentalized nests for doves and pigeons. End aside. This poor dear had apparently flown into a window and killed her/his self.

We have a bird feeder out in the garden and I mistakenly bought Wild Bird Seed rather than Patio Mix and that has resulted in the birds at the feeder sorting through the seed and throwing the seed they don’t like on the ground (I guess, technically, they sort through and let the seed fall to the ground). Either way, this has brought more ground feeders into the area and that includes the Pigeons. Unlike their city cousins, feral pigeons – Columba livia domestica – the Band-tailed Pigeons are very shy. The slightest movement sends them flying and this poor animal flew the wrong way.

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All the Pigeons didn’t fly into the window, just this one, and that is vitally important.

Courtney Gonzales and I were talking about the desirability of embracing differences in people. In thinking about the Pigeon, it seems to me that embracing difference is not just desirable in itself but vital to any group prospering. Monocultures don’t do well in a changing world, they probably wouldn’t do well in a static world either, but – since the world is never static – we don’t know that for sure. As an aside, diversity is the most basic success story in the living world,  it is engine that drives evolution and, to get diversity, we have sex. At the most basic level, if we reproduced by splitting into clones of ourselves, there would be no diversity and there would be no evolution (and we would all still be proto-amoebas). End aside. Societies that are monocultural, that are pure, are not as strong as societies that are diverse.

Our diversity is what makes the United States is so powerful and it is why the most diverse parts of the United States are the most prosperous. Silicon Valley is so successful because it is so racially diverse (and I suspect it would be even more successful if it were more behavior and gender diverse). People who want to have everybody the same as themselves are really trying to make an environment that is a setup for stagnation and failure.

It is nice to remember that.