Rubber Ducky, you're the one

After yet another week of relentlessly bad news, here's a smile.  The world's largest rubber duck at the Tall Ships Festival in Tacoma.  

Thanks for the memories

Going, going, gone...

Dad helped us build the gazebo when we first moved here, way back in the early 1980's.  We sat around the kitchen table and sketched out a design, then he went to work with salvaged cedar shakes and a few boards from the lumber yard. He is a talented, resourceful carpenter and we built it on a shoestring.

I was still working as a minimum wage florist and thinking about applying to graduate school.  Amanda was about seven. She had just recovered from some mystery virus that baffled the doctor and upset the family all winter.  Sunshine finally returned and the outdoor spring project cheered everyone up.

The old cedar shakes kept out the rain for over 30 years.  But time takes its toll. The floor eventually rotted, the foundation tipped and water dripped though the roof.  It was pretty much beyond repair and finally time to say goodbye. Our new young carpenter Troy had it dismantled and hauled off in a couple of hours. 

Letting go of things with great sentimental value can be hard.  At first, all you notice is the hole, like having a tooth pulled. Then the mind opens to possibilities, like a new garden house in a different part of the yard. I'm already looking at plans on the Internet and talking to Troy. 

But for now, Adios Gazebo.  Thanks for all the memories:

1. You were a fine playhouse for Amanda, and much later for Nova and Maya.
2. You were the place I hid out and studied for the GRE exam the summer of 1984.
3. You were the place I practiced a presentation out loud for my first professional job.
4. You were always the envy of our garden party guests. 
5. You were the sweetest spot for countless summer afternoon glasses of wine.
6. You kept my random garden junk dry over the winter. (I'll miss that.)
7. I never got tired of looking at you in the snow.
8. You listened to the first pitiful plinking on my new ukulele.
9. Most of all, you were the epitome of Wabi-Sabi beauty.

Ride em' cowgirl

Wordless Wednesday

"Flowering Roses"

Peter Tom Peterson

A Seattle icon

Those are some cool Space Needle construction photos from a Seattle World's Fair collection I worked on at MOHAI a few years ago.  The tower was constructed in just 400 days for only $4 million.  It opened in 1962, and at the time, it was the tallest structure west of the Mississippi. 

I saw on the news this morning that the Space Needle is about to undergo a $100 million renovation, the third in its 55-year history. Some of the highlights include a fancy new restaurant with a rotating glass floor and glass barriers to replace the wire safety “caging” on the outer open-air observation deck.

Before

 After

I can't remember the last time we were up the Space Needle.  It's one of those things locals never think of doing unless they have out-of-state visitors.  And pricey now-- almost $30 just to ride the elevator!

Oh, the good old days...

Red Rose Day

The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart

All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman,
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image
that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water,
re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that
blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

W.B Yeats

June 12th is Red Rose Day. I took that luscious-looking picture way back in July 2011.  Browsing through old photos, I see there's almost 16,000 pictures on my MacBook Pro, all obsessively organized by month and year.  Once a librarian, always a librarian. 

On Mac computers, Photos (once called iPhotos) is the library where you store and edit photographs. Actually, Photos does much more than that, including all the organization if you let it, which most people prefer.  I resisted using Photos for a long time, but the Great Apple has a way of bringing you over to their side, like it or not.

For a small monthly fee, you can keep an enormous collection on the iCloud and access the whole mess anywhere on your iPhone or iPad.  It's tedious having a phone shoved under you nose to look at someone's tiny pictures. I'm guilty of this, too. Imagine having 16,000 at your fingertips to torture your friends?

But I've come around to Photos and appreciate the slick new features.  For example, you can instantly search across your entire photo collection with simple keywords, like "flower."  Lo and behold, up pop the thousands of garden and flower pictures I've taken since 2004.

Did I really do all that work? Our garden is still very beautiful, but at the beginning of the century it was almost surreal. Guess I still had the energy for perfection back then.