Almost the Solstice

The June sun is blindingly bright in the early evening, and higher in the sky than noon in December.  I know this is true across the country, but our extra degrees of northern latitude add an intensity to the light at Solstice.  No wonder people go slightly crazy, and anyone who has to get up early is sleep deprived this time of year.  There's always neighborhood noise outside when I'm trying to get in my 6 hours and 58 minutes of sleep. The alarm goes off at 4:40, and the birds have been chattering for a hour.

Watering pots becomes a big chore in June.  The fig tree still doesn't have enough leaves to shade the bonsai collection, and the plants appreciate a drink twice a day, especially these beautiful old larch trees in the shallow container.  I gave them a spring haircut the other day with the Japanese bonsai scissors my friend Candi gave me last summer.   There was something about using that fine, specialized tool that made me want to slow down and do a more careful job. Which of course is the whole point of bonsai.

How to have a Fitbit

There was a recent article in the New Yorker magazine about treadmill workstations. The office worker stands and walks s-l-o-w-l-y on a belt in front of an ergonomic desk, with everything they need in easy reach. Maybe you get to sit down for coffee breaks.

The author said the only unproductive thing about her workstation was constantly explaining why she was "breathing like that" on the phone. She also felt compelled to tell clients what she was doing: "Do you know I'm actually walking while I'm writing this?" It was the kind of wry article you'd expect from the New Yorker.

On the serious side, research shows that sitting is one of the worst things for the human body, and the damage is not mitigated by spurts of vigorous exercise at the gym.  Several hours a day of gentle, natural movement (boring old walking) is much better than overdoing it on fancy exercise machines. The problem is all that walking takes time.  Hence, the treadmill workstation invention.

There are all kinds of electronic walking gadgets to "help you reach your fitness goals," as the advertisements put it.  One of these is the Fitbit, a device not much bigger that a quarter that you carry around in your pocket or clipped to your bra.

John and I both have Fitbits and they track our steps, distance walked, calories burned, etc.  When you set up a Fitbit account on the computer or smartphone, it creates a personal fitness log and syncs wirelessly, which is neat. You can also compete with the "community" of Fitbit users, or just the ones in your own household.

John started walking (almost) daily six months ago, and he gets kudos for sticking with it.  It isn't easy to come home from work and then head out for a long walk in the wind and rain.  Since he's on his feet quite a bit anyway, he sometimes logs (and boasts about) nearly 20,000 steps a day.  To put that in perspective, an average active day for me is 6,000 or 7,000 steps.  My goal is 10,000, but I'm still recovering from ankle problems so I'm working up to it slowly.  When I ride, the horse's steps are logged, giving me a nice bump up for the day.  (John says this is cheating, but I say riding is exercise for the human, too.)

Oh yes. My new Fitbit model is fancier than his.  Worn on a wristband at night, it tracks your sleep pattern, or for the sleep challenged, the lack of.  Basically it does this by tracking your movements-- how much you thrash your arms around and how many times you get up.   The first night I wore it to bed, Fitbit claimed I slept 6 hrs. 43 minutes and woke up 27 times. Really? Can you even call that sleep if you're waking up every 14 minutes?

Well, I knew it hadn't been one of my better nights, but seeing the facts on the computer screen only made me feel worse. I decided maybe I'd just set the sleep log wrong, and Fitbit thought I was walking around all night.  It was too depressing to be true. From there on, things improved. This morning Fitbit says I "woke up" only 12 times and slept 6 hrs. 58 minutes.  And I feel pretty refreshed today!  That's more like it.

June

The Book of Hours

Medieval folks, hard at work in June

Sometimes up here in the left-hand corner of the country, we'll have a stretch of glorious weather going while everyone is getting hammered. It looks like the Midwest is in for a soaking this weekend, but I hope rain will be the the worst of it for our family and friends.

May just flew by. June is often a disappointing weather month in western Washington.  It feels like it should finally be summer, then "June gloom" sets in-- not so much rain, but cloudy and cool.  We're off to a brighter start this time.  The sun is out this morning and the garden is glowing green, pink and purple (it's iris and peony time.) I'm headed outside soon for an afternoon of weed pulling.

I've never met a garden hose I liked, but as they say, hope springs eternal.  I bought a new "anti-kink" (ha ha) contender at Home Depot. First order of business is wrestling the thing out of the coil it's been in since leaving China, so the relationship won't get off to a good start.

A steak is defrosting for the grill tonight.  Hey, we take advantage of a single summer-ish day around here-- who knows when you'll get another one in June?

Time flies

Maya, at 8 months

Nova, at 8 months

Here's a poem for Amanda this morning.

Happiness

This was when my daughters were just children
playing on the rocky shore of the lake,

their hair in braids, their bright-colored jackets
tied around their waists. It was afternoon,

the shadows falling away, their faces
glowing with light. Whatever we said then

(and it must have been happy; it must have
been hopeful) is lost as I am now lost

from that life I lived. This was when nothing
that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted

was happiness, pure happiness, simple
as strawberries and cream in a saucer,

as curtains floating from a window sill,
as small pairs of shoes arranged in a row. 

by Joyce Sutphen

Museum of History and Industry

MOHAI Sophie Fry Bass Library

I still work at the MOHAI library one afternoon a week. The library collection and staff moved to Georgetown last year, and I've only been to the new museum once since it opened in January. They did a great job on the new museum and we should go more often, but the South Lake Union area has endless construction and parking is hard.

On the other hand, the new MOHAI Resource Center is just a 10 minute drive and my work there is exactly the same. I do most of the research at home on my laptop, anyway.  The ancient volunteer's computer at the library is usually busy, plus I'm attached to the exasperating Microsoft technology I learned in the 1990's.

The first two years at MOHAI I worked on collections dating from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. I lost count of just how many, but we wrote at least 15 new finding aids.  The photos, clippings, souvenirs, etc. had been tucked away at the museum since 1963, and other things trickled in over the years when someone cleaned out Auntie's closet and decided to donate her scrapbooks.

Anyway, this was part of MOHAI's preparation for the 50th anniversary of the World's Fair in 2012, and the research requests the library anticipated.  It was fun to be a small part of it and the anniversary was a big deal in Seattle.  After all that work it was gratifying to see random bits and pieces of those finding aids showing up in magazines and newspaper articles.

Since then, I'm on to more diverse subjects.  Other volunteers come and go, but I love each new project the librarian gives me.  It's detailed work, and I like taking my time to get it right. After all, those finding aids will still be "out there" long after I'm gone.  The best part of the research is I learn all sorts esoteric things about NW history. Here's a few examples that give an idea of the variety of collections in MOHAI's archive. 

This glamorous lady was Boeing's first female engineer.  Bessie Hall Dempsey started out as a dancer and vaudeville performer.

Model Donna Rydberg epitomized high fashion in the 1960's, and John Easton was milliner to Seattle's society set.

The elegant sloop Sir Tom was built in Seattle by the Blanchard Boat Company, and it was once the fastest racing sailboat on the west coast.  Handcrafted Blanchard boats are still prized in the Northwest.

In 1928, crews laid a telephone cable between Alki and Bainbridge Island.  In 1 hour 36 minutes, the crew laid 16,010 feet of cable. Since the surveyed distance between the two points is approximately 16,000 feet, this indicated a nearly perfect submarine cable lay.

My last project was a collection of photos and records from the historic Malmo Plant Nursery. Yesterday, I started on a collection of photographs from the once famous (but now defunct) Rhodes Department store in downtown Seattle.  And so on...

Here's links to some of my finding aids published on Northwest Digital Archives:

The Guide to the Mark Dempsey Collection on Bessie Hall Dempsey

The Guide to the Donna Rydberg Fashion Modeling Album

The Guide to the Norman C. Blanchard Family Photographs

The Guide to the William R. Bainbridge Collection on Submarine Cable Laying

Wet

Here's the dripping view from our bedroom window this morning...

"What do you call three straight days of rain in Seattle?" 

Answer: "A holiday weekend."

2013 was the 9th time in the past 12 years that it rained at some point during Memorial Day weekend.  With each wet day the garden gets wilder and my outside work piles up, but that's nothing compared to what's going to happen when the sun finally comes out and growth goes into overtime. 

A new thicket of bamboo sprung up in the middle of the lawn while we were away. Some of the culms were almost 4 inches wide, and I could barely get the lopper around them.  If this keeps up, I'll have to start using the "bamboo saw" John gave me for Christmas.  Our neighbor, who picks up the mail for us, had a wary look in her eye when she asked me what on earth that was on the lawn.  I don't blame her.  Bamboo has a mind of its own this time of year that makes it seem more like a wild animal than a plant. 

John managed to get a mow in yesterday afternoon between showers, but he wasn't happy after pushing the mower through thick, wet grass. By the middle of next week, there's some hope we'll be back into the 70's. In the meantime, the NW radar map says it all.