Stacy thought she'd celebrate the new year by doing the polar bear plunge thing. Except we live on the Oregon Coast, so it's cold and rainy and windy but not snowy or icy. It was held in the bay. The air temp was 41°F. The water temp was around 47°F. She, and a bunch of other folk, ran from the beach into the water. The seals stopped "sunning" themselves on the spit across the bay and swam over to see what the primates were up to. She's a fresh water gal, never been in saltwater before. When she dunked herself her mouth was open. Saltwater is grody. She had such a great time she went back in for a second round. Two friends did it with her. I and a husband of one of the others guarded the warm clothes and took lots of pics. It was an official kinda thing put on by the rec center. Over 400 people attended.
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Coast Guard helicopter out of Depoe Bay responding to emergencies up and down the coast. Happens frequently on weekends and holidays. Get a great view of it from the bedroom window.
There's another bar crossing a little further south, the Yaquina Bay Bar in Newport, that gets a bit dicey.
You can also go north up the coast. Coast Guard in Astoria. This rescue is in the Columbia River. This isn't the ocean. This is a river.
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Finished The Devil by Name by Keith Rosson.
I finished the first part of this duology, Fever House, and had been eagerly awaiting this second part. Got it and finished it. Keith Rosson writes like fire. When reading, I usually just want to see the what happens next so I end up skimming some pages. When reading *this* book, I still just wanted to see what happens next, but I couldn't skim because he writes so gosh darned well. The jerk.
And, kinda nifty, Stacy and I got into the acknowledgments for this one.
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The PNW is a pretty funky place to live. The Oregon Coast doubly so.
There's the Oregon Coast Range which butts right up against the Pacific Ocean. It frequently hails. It frequently rains when it's sunny. This leads to oodles of rainbows. Moss and molds abound. Deciduous trees are never bare and brown. If there aren't leaves on them there's moss. Lots of moss.
Fungi also abound. Mushrooms grow everywhere.
The temperature generally stays between forty and seventy degrees fahrenheit. It rarely snows. When it does it doesn't stick around long. It's a wet cold. This makes it feel much colder than it is. We're used to the dry colds back home. The moisture means hair is flat.
There's a lot of salt in the air. Every couple of months we need to wash the house down to get the salt (and keep the moss) off. If cars are left outside surface rust happens very quickly. Keeping them in a garage seems to ameliorate this issue.
There doesn't seem to be a level place in the joint. Hills up the wazoo. It's a good thing it rarely gets cold enough for water to freeze because with all the water we get around here and all the hills we have, driving or biking or walking would be difficult.
It really does rain a lot. Heavy rains abound. Winds blow and gust hard, well into the double digits. When the winds blow and the rain thunders down...it's some nice moody weather. There are all kinds of lights rains, too. There is little lightning and thunder.
All this is mostly true for the first 1/4 to 1/2 mile of land from the ocean. While much of it rings true for the rest of the Coastal Range as well, there are differences. For instance, it can get much warmer there in the summer and much snowier in the winter.
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A couple few months ago I had a revelation. I was talking with my wife. I told her the world was a horrible place and I was going to be... and then there was a mental blur, a shift, a kind of visual sound? What I was going to say was "sad for the rest of my life." Jiminy Cricket, what a horrible way to choose to live!
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Ain't no party like banana slug party cuz banana slug party don't stop.
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Part of Walter Mondale's posthumous eulogy delivered at Carter's state funeral, read by Ted Mondale:
Toward the end of our time in the White House, the President and I were talking about how we might describe what we tried to do. We came up with this sentence which to me remains an important summary of what we were trying to do. "We told the truth, we obeyed the law and we kept the peace."
Carter and Mondale are generally considered to be good men (an example of that, and, interestingly enough, they post about MLK a bit later). That's the issue. Telling the truth? Fine and good. Obey the law and keep the peace? Not good.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Letter from a Birmingham Jail had this to say about good men keeping the peace.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice
The definition of a good person has to change. Slavery was the law. Women not allowed to vote was the law. Laws are too easily used to hold people down and keeping the peace means keeping the laws.
There's a quote from a piece title, The Normal Ones, by A.R. Moxon that rolls around in my head when I'm thinking about this.
It was normal to be white. It was normal to be a Christian. It was normal to be a man with a job, and it was normal to be a woman who was a man's property. It was normal for children to be viewed as property of the parents, which (see previous point) meant the property of the man. It was normal to be straight and cis. It was normal to be able-bodied and employed. More importantly, though, these were the only normal things to be. To not be those things was to be abnormal, and to be abnormal was to be at the mercy of The Normal Ones.
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I'm amazed by this fact: my little town of 10,000 people gets, from taxes on stays at hotels and short-term domicile rentals (called the transient room tax, or transient lodging tax), $1,000,000.00 per month.
One million dollars. Per month. So many people come here for vacation that just the tax on the rentals they use nets the city one million dollars per month.
On the busiest times of year, this little town of 10,000 people has 20,000 tourists staying in it.
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Isaac Asimov's Profession. (Read here. Archived here.)
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This is what living 150 meters from the Pacific Ocean does to everything you own.
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Snow depth across America, not just the Ice Age Trail.
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Yesterday morning we woke up early (or, more correctly, I woke up early and Stacy woke up at her regular time), grabbed some donuts from Depoe Baykery (love the name!), and we went to Depoe Bay to look for some whales.
It should be noted that prime whale watching time is mid-December to mid-January and April through May so we were a little late to the party and looked for whales on their way to Baja who were similarly delayed (though probably not because they'd picked up pastries at the best bakery in the area).
No luck. Though we did see the Coast Guard hanging around, running some practice sessions towing a boat through the narrow passage to the bay.
It's cool watching them practice this. The channel they have to navigate is shallow and narrow. Oftentimes they need to line everything up then wait for the correct set of waves to get through safely. Check out this video of what it looks like from the boat being towed.
It's also neat to note the number of birds chilling on the water. They're just bobbing along, riding the swells, waiting for breakfast to swim on by.
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The hardest thing about working in a public library? The smells.
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caveat lector