Jaci Dawn

Some guy flipped me off today. It was really stupid. Of him, not me. I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing. The problem was that he wanted to turn left across traffic that had the right of way and instead of waiting for a proper opening, he just turned. And I was in front of him, blocking his way. So he flipped me off.It wasn’t like I could really move any direction but forward given the light was green – for me, not him.

I kept going. So did the two cars behind me. I don’t think the guy who was doing the left turn thing was getting much sympathy – or that his bullying tactic was working for him.

Normally, I don’t tempt fate. Someone wants to be an idiot, I give him plenty of room. But turning across lanes of traffic when it’s obvious that there are cars there really crosses the line. And then flipping the oncoming cars off? Moron.

Reminds me of the time when I was driving down a street in Oregon City that has no stop signs. All the cross streets have stop signs. The woman on the cross street decided to go as I came into the intersection. She had to slam on her brakes because guess what? *I* was there. And she flipped me off.

Hello? *I* did not have the stop sign – she did. And she knew it because she stopped for it and watched the traffic in front of me go by. But apparently, I was at fault for being on the road when she wanted to go.

Go figure.

I’ve made some stupid moves while driving but I never flipped the other driver off when it was clearly MY fault for being inattentive or stupid or whatever excuse I chose to use. I wanted to crawl under the dashboard and turn very red… OOOPS. Near fatal faux pas! Thank you God for letting me live to NEVER do THAT again!

So here is a list of my favorite pet peeves while driving (in no particular order):

People who decide to merge left from the right-hand off ramp where I-205 merges into I-5 Northbound (you know who you are: get into the left-hand merge lane and merge proper, OK? You aren’t supposed to merge from the off-ramp lane that goes to Sherwood).

People who speed up when they see merging traffic.

Merging traffic that expects the people on the freeway to stop or slow down for them.

Changing lanes without using a turn signal.

Stopping and letting cross traffic turn left in front of you when there is oncoming traffic. Who died and made you the crossing guard? And where you gonna go when the guy you just waved through is T-boned?

Driving 5 miles under the speed limit on the freeway. Take a back road if you can’t find the gas pedal. Please.

Leaving a gap of a quarter mile or more between yourself and the car in front of you when traffic is moving slowly. It’s the 2-second rule. If you can’t figure out the 2-second rule, do a car length for every ten miles per hour. It doesn’t add up to a quarter mile at 40 MPH. It’s less than 40 feet.

Tail-gating at any speed but especially in 1) school zones and 2) construction zones. The sign just said traffic fines double. I’m NOT going to pay a double fine just because you’re on my bumper, trying to go faster than the posted speed limit. ESPECIALLY in a school zone.

Driving five miles under the speed limit in the fast lane. Or driving exactly the speed limit in the fast lane. Come on, even the police don’t drive exactly the speed limit in the fast lane. Get over.

Flashing your turn signal to try to get someone driving slower than you to move out of the fast lane, even though 1) they are driving over the speed limit, too, and 2) there’s traffic in the slower lanes and they can’t move over.

Truck drivers going 45 mph who decide to pass other truck drivers going over mountain passes and who just pull over into the fast lane in front of cars going 70. Hello? Anyone look in their rearview/sideview mirrors lately?

Tailgaters in the rain.

Tailgaters in the snow.

People who stop when there is NOT a stop sign. This happens all the time turning off of 99E onto 14th Street in Oregon City. The cross street has a stop sign, but 14th Street traffic has no stop sign. But people stop there all the time and wave traffic.

Anyone who waves traffic across. it’s one thing to stop for yield traffic or merge traffic when it’s slow, but to wave someone across lanes of traffic? And then they get T-boned and you go your merry way?

That’s it for now. I’m sure I can think of more irritating scenarios. And I bet you can add some, too.

We had a beautiful and very brief sunset tonight.

I snapped two hurried photos. I turned around and the sunset was gone that quickly: all too brief, all too beautiful, all too fragile.

Like life.

Childhood.

Motherhood years.

You blink and it’s in the past.

But it was beautiful while it passed by.

I like how those sentences build on each other.

Good Night – hope you had a beautiful sunset today, too.

I was on my way home tonight from work when I fell in behind a pickup truck pulling a walled trailer. It was a brown trailer with six-foot walls and open on top, a gate in the back that was latched and ratcheted shut, full size wheels & tires. Black plastic bags full of something were stacked in the bed of the trailer and a worn blue tarp was tied loosely over the top of the black plastic. It flapped and fluttered in the current of air caused by driving.

It was the objects in the black plastic that caught my eye: they were very humanoid: head and torso, stacked on top of each other right up to the top of the trailer walls. I got the Heebie Jeebies just following the rig and was quite relieved when I passed it and left it in my dust (so to speak). All I could think of was the Pea Pod People.

I came home and all was well. Took the dog out to play and came back in, started doing dishes.

And I couldhear Katie Couric’s voice in the background: “…Invasion of the Body Snatchers…”

YIKES! First the truck and trailer and now it’s on the news?! Talk about Heebie-Jeebies!

Sadly, the news was really about Kevin McCarthy who starred in the 1956 version of Invasion. He died today. He was 96.

At least, that’s what they’re telling us. I’m not so sure after my commute and the eerir timing of the news break. I feel likerunning out into the street and yelling:

“Can’t you see, everyone?! They’re here already! You’re next!”

‘Cause I’m telling you: that trailer had bodies in black plastic wrapped up tight…

In light of the fact that he currently has his head wedged under my chair so I can’t roll it sideways or forward without running over some part of his face, I thought I’d share some Harvey photos from our vacation with you.

Sacked out.

Dead to the world.

Completely, totally dog tired.

I just spent the better part of today organizing in my studio in preparation for a long winter of art & inspiration. I still need a storage cabinet for my drawings, but I have the exact measurements written down & will peruse the local thrift stores until I find the right thing. No worries: I know I’ll find it.

Back in August, as we wound up our vacation, my husband noted that I hadn’t picked up a lot of odd sticks and items for use in my studio. First off, we didn’t have that much room, but mostly – and this is what I told him – I had been busy taking photos of things too large to bring home that inspired me. Old cottonwoods with their wrinkled bark and lichens, the rocks, stumps and limbs of trees – these were all going into a special folder to upload onto my desktop on my computer just for Faerie Inspirations.

Every camp site provided me with ample fodder:

How about a rectangle boulder stuck in the roots of an old dead tree? I can picture that as the wall of a faerie house.

I just liked the lines and angles of this. in my mind, the two sticks that are leaning against the stump become wizard’s staffs and the limb is a two-headed dragon. Or something. Just thinking out loud here.

There is just something magical about this old cottonwood on Pike Creek. The fat lips where a branch used to be might be part of the magic, but I think it is the lines: the twists of the trunk and main branches, the orange lichen and the deeply grooved bark.

This was just fun. Don & I would sit out and watch the “howling dog” every night. It was better when there was a breeze – the “dog” seemed to come to life.

Jones’ Crossing offered up this fascinating standing tree. I can’t begin to guess at why the tree was hollow, but a beaver did quite a bit of work on the opening to the hollow. Isn’t that inspiring for a faerie home??

It was at our last camp on Prairie Farm that I found the most inspiration. The above stump was but one idea to come to me – I will just post the photos and let you decide for yourself if there’s inspiration to be had. I’m sure you’ll see a few strange woodland gnomes and elven homes and at least one “dragon”…

They grow up too fast. Zephaniah is two and a half now. Where did time go? He talks a mile a minute and I understand about half of it. Today he was a fish running in the water (apparently fish run, they don’t swim). Pretty funny considering he was running back and forth in the living room saying “fish! fish! fish!”

Sigh. And Javan, my little serious-faced boy is suddenly all smiles and laughs and giggles. I think he’s saying words, but they all sound like “ACK!” He points when he says ACK! so there must be some meaning to the word. Or several different meanings. Maybe it’s all in the accent.

And then there’s Eli… Eli opened his eyes and stayed awake the entire time I was visiting today. I love how babies get all cross-eyed trying to look at the person holding them.

I love my boys.

I probably need to get the desert out of my system, but I figure that my tag line with this blog entitles me to drag out the Alvord and Pike Creek experience as long as I want. Besides it is pretty boring on the home front.

Every morning, we’d get up and Pike Creek would be flowing at full capacity. By five or six o’clock in the evening, evaporation and the needs of the many plants that rely on the stream for sustenance will have taken their toll. I actually did a before/after of Pike Creek.

Morning

Evening

Morning (all the grass is in water)

Evening. No water at all around the grasses.

But it will be back in the AM.

I wish I could set up a bird blind and photograph birds every time I go camping. Once again, I am faced with the “I need a bigger/better/faster camera” as I seek to talk about something I saw. Birds, this time.

There are always birds and sometimes you never see them (like the mysterious warbler of the Cascades. I still don’t know what bird it is except that it is probably a drab little bird that can hide well but has a beautiful melody). Sometimes they just move too fast: a hummingbird that zeroes in on something red in camp and comes in to hover and investigate and just as quickly buzzes off. The hawk that nearly landed on the big rock by Don’s head before realizing there was a human being and two big dogs right there, so it did an acrobatic reversal before Don could get a good look at it.

We had plenty of bird visitors out on Pike Creek. There was a female black-headed grosbeak that was busy making short work of the few chokecherries left.

I could get close to her (grosbeaks are normally quite friendly) but she refused to pose. She was rather gluttonous instead.

We were visited by sage sparrows as well. Driving in to Fields Station one morning, we counted ravens, crows, turkey vultures and a number of unidentified hawks as well. The Western meadowlark is a favorite of ours: the radio station out of Winnemucca always opened business in the Spring to the song of the meadowlark. We also saw some Northern shrikes hunting grasshoppers. Those are striking birds in more ways than one (after I realized I just punned): pretty to look at and quick to kill small creatures that it impales on something sharp, like barbed wire.

Of course, we both were watching for Mountain bluebirds (the Nevada State Bird) and we saw several flocks in the juniper-and-pine forests of Fremont National Forest.

On the same drive in to Fields Station that we counted birds on, we noted a huge flock of something flying south along the Steens Mountain. At first we thought we were watching Canada geese, but upon closer examination, we determined we were following a large flock of white-faced ibis.

I took that from the car as we kept pace with the ibises. I always want to call them “black ibis” because they are large black birds with a little bit of white through their eyes. They’re pretty common on the marshes of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and in the grass by the Alvord Hot Springs.

One morning, Harvey and I took a walk down through the empty campsites to where the house-size boulders are all tumbled together. The creek takes a turn south at that point and the tree line follows the creek, so the boulders are shadeless and uninviting as a camp site. But they are unusual and if you climb onto them, it’s a wonderful view of the basin.

Shadows were still long but the sun was warm and I was enjoying the promise of a hot day. Besides, Don was back at camp trying to change a flat tire and I didn’t want to be anywhere near. But that’s a story in itself: a long drive to Burns to get a flat changed on the day we had planned on going hiking.

Standing among the rocks, I noticed a flock of black birds coming overhead. And another flock. And more.

It was a little disconcerting to see so many black birds (there were upwards of hundreds) flying over the sagebrush toward me and settling into the cottonwoods around me. I had a momentary flash that I was Tippi Hedron and someone was watching me, yelling “DON’T OPEN THE DOOR!”.

Alfred Hitchcock aside, it was just a huge flock of mixed blackbirds (Yellow-headed, Brewer’s, and Brown-headed cowbirds) chasing grasshoppers.

There are some elusive birds out in the Alvord country. Further up the creek, we have seen green-tailed Towhees and Don nearly always finds his favorite: the Indigo bunting. Small wonder that we should encounter a hiker with large binoculars who claimed he was a bird-watcher! (These guys always mystify us: they set out in the afternoon of a hot day, hiking in the full sun, and making for the steep reaches of the canyon. The birds are resting like all other wise creatures. If you want to see birds – or any other creature worth seeing – you get up before the sun and hike in the cool of the day when the rattlers are still snoozing. But that’s just us…)

Possibly my favorite encounter came early one morning on a camping trip not so many years distant: we were awakened by sounds in the cottonwoods overhead and a who-who WHO who-who WHO round of calls. A pair of Flammulated owls settled down to peer in the car windows at us, turning their heads and exchanging comments about those crazy humans parked in their favorite cottontail hunting grounds.

I asked Don if he thought we would ever see the owls again. We heard a pair of Great-horned owls at another campsite, but I wanted to see or hear our Flammulated ones again. Don was doubtful that we’d see the owls, but I held out some hope anyway. And in the wee hours of our last night above the Alvord desert we were awakened by the exchange of who-who WHO? who-who WHO? as a pair of Flammulated owls settled into the cottonwoods above it.

I rolled over and smiled, content that God was still out there, watching over us and granting us small gifts. I think maybe He comes dressed like a Flammulated owl.